Cross-Continental Exploration of Concerns, Opportunities, and Realities of Teacher Education

Cross-Continental Exploration of Concerns, Opportunities, and Realities of Teacher Education

Continuing Reid and O’Donoghue’s (2004) more than a decade old concerns about teacher preparation, the following draws on the authors’ experiences in the United States, Germany, and Australia concerning the preparation and engagement of pre-service and in-service teachers. Across the contexts of Germany, the United States, and Australia, the authors of this piecework realized that each of the particularized contexts overlapped and were not simply local concerns. That is, a glocal (locally situated and globally common) phenomenon is discovered where the hyper-localized concern was a contextually relevant concern for the global counterparts in their localized context. With acknowledgment that “all experience is local…[and] the localness of experience is a constant” (Meyrowitz 2005, p. 21). That recognition, however, is contextualized with the understanding that “…we now increasingly share information with and about people who live in local-ities different from our own [and] we more frequently intercept experiences and messages originally shaped for, and limited to, people in other places” (Meyrowitz 2005, p. 23). As Barrett and Kurzman (2004) suggested, “the similarity of demands, coordination of mobilization, and clustering of policy outcomes across countries with varying political and cultural conditions” are both locally real and globally relevant (pp. 487–488). The notion of glocality informing the work here aligned with Erickson (2002), in that “global phenomena more often than not could be studied in their local expressions…that cultural globalisation was always tantamount to glocalisation…[as] creative fusions of [the] local and non-local” (pp. 166–167). Arguments from this lens include the forces working against the preparation of teachers are multifaceted, locally significant, and globally consistent. Internal university resistances and the primary driving of market economies complicate the preparation of teachers. The glocalized analysis leads to end with a series of questions to serve as foils in combating the current landscape.