International Teacher Education: Liberal Cosmopolitanism Revisited or Postmodern Trans-Nationalism.

International teacher education is very topical. A recent article by Roberts (2007) in Teacher Education Quarterly concluded thus: Teacher educators face difficulties in creating structures and activities and finding the time, energy, and financial resources to promote deep level of understanding for world dilemmas and events. To this extent the seriousness of internationalizing curriculum deserves attention on equal footing with other program elements of teacher education for continual refinement, evaluation of goals, and ongoing modification of procedures. Accordingly the sustained successes of internationalizing teacher education are on the vision of associated faculty. (pp. 23-24) But what constitutes a deep level of understanding for world dilemmas and events for students of international teacher education, and how is its attainment as outcome dependent on the vision of associated faculty? This article attempts to grapple with this question. Starting from an historical characterization of three periods of teacher education research and policy in North America over the last sixty years, I show how faculty vision of international teacher education has been influenced by different and contrasting conceptions of internationalization as result of the changing macro-political context surrounding teacher education. This last sixty years have seen three periods of teacher education research and policy in North America. Over that time, teacher education has moved from an initial emphasis on training and direct instruction through focus on learning to teach to today's emphasis on policy and outcomes. The governance of teacher education has also changed through these periods from benign government control in the 1960s through institutional governance in the 1980s and early 1990s to the current state of professional self-regulation in policy context of de-regulation. I will show how professional self-regulation--whether through accreditation agencies like NCATE or TEAC in the States, or the British Columbia (BC) or Ontario Colleges of Teachers in Canada--is product of the current neo-liberalist policy emphasis on accountability. In addition, I characterize how the current policy context has fundamentally altered the role of universities in society. Neo-liberalist forces undermine the development of the nation state for which universities previously under liberalism played central role. The nation state has been supplanted by supranational entities fostering cross-border standardization. The university's role in society has been transformed into one supporting economic development and global competitiveness, role that is at odds with the four-century-old relationship between the nation state and the university that supported professional responsibility and self-governance as form of delegated authority to bodies possessing expertise. This, then, is the policy context in which the work of teacher education is now situated and to which it must respond. The important question is how? International teacher education is one avenue that has been vigorously explored. But what exactly is international teacher education in the current policy context? I explore three different conceptions. My thesis is that the heavy neo-liberal emphasis on economics is denying us all the benefits of cultural and political globalization in international teacher education. Three Periods of Teacher Education Research and Policy (2) Phase 1 (1960-1980): Teacher Education as Training under Government Control During this period, teacher education was largely viewed as training, teaching was assumed to be content transmission, and researchers presumed an unproblematic connection both between teaching and learning, and between training and teacher behavior. The governance of teacher education was largely in the hands of benign governments that consulted with professionals and the body politic to make policy changes affecting the practice of teacher education. …

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