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More of the same, less of the other? Policy mobility in teacher education and the making of teachers across a global field

Looking beyond national borders for inspiration in education is nothing new, yet global trends in educational reform are now more prominent than ever. In this keynote, I explore how and why certain policy ideas travel so easily across time and space, with a particular focus on teacher education. Often seen as the critical first link in the quality of an education system, teacher education is a field where much is believed to be gained from successful reforms, nurturing a keen openness to what happens elsewhere. To understand these dynamics, I intend to draw on my own professional biography, with chapters in England and Flanders, as an analytical lens. I will show what some of England’s finest educational products look like in Flemish education, including Teach First, the work of the Education Endowment Foundation, and broader discourses around evidence-based teaching and teacher education. This is not intended as a critique of the English education system. Rather, the goal is to work with these examples to understand why certain policy ideas prove so attractive and manage to present themselves as necessary at specific moments. Situating the examples within a broader international context, I will also show how teacher education reforms globally increasingly tend to gravitate towards a particular kind of teacher and a particular view of teaching – one centered on the doing of teaching and on teaching as effective intervention. In response, I suggest that in teacher education we might sometimes look a little less at the other, and a little more at ourselves, at what we value, and why.