Pages: 22

Teachers and the teaching profession have been a recurring focus of the World Yearbooks of Education (WYBE) since the inception of the series in 1965. Even before being named WYBE, the Yearbook of Education 1963, edited by George F. Bereday, was devoted to “the education and training of teachers,” accompanied by an observation that has been invoked so often since, “the strength of an educational system must depend largely on the quality of its teachers.” Several approaches have subsequently been adopted for the study of teachers in the series, reflecting the problems and research interests of different periods: the attractiveness of the profession and teacher shortages in the face of profound demographic changes during the period of educational expansion in the 1960s (International WYBE 1963), the training and professional development of teachers in the context of rapid technological innovations (WYBE 1980), and teacher education from a governing and cultural perspective (WYBE 2002). More recently, WYBE 2013 was concerned with the politics of (de)professionalization and the renegotiation of the boundaries of teachers' work within local, national, and global spaces, reflecting the growing interest in the dynamics of globalization.

Pages: 86

No chapter abstract available.

Pages: 31

At the turn of the millennium, a new wave of reforms placed teachers at the forefront of efforts to improve educational outcomes. Teachers' evaluation policies, increasingly linked to learning achievement data, gained unprecedented visibility. Since this critical turn, such policies have evolved significantly. Their contested nature has led countries to experiment with different teacher appraisal approaches, yet evidence of the trajectories of such reforms remains limited. Drawing on up to six cycles of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development's Program for International Student Assessment dataset, we explore the dynamic nature of teacher evaluation reforms, aiming to map and compare appraisal methods both within and across countries. One of the main contributions of our study is examining the explanatory force of national institutions that mediate the enactment of these methods. Our findings indicate that teacher evaluations have expanded to include a more diverse array of methods, thereby reducing the centrality of achievement data. Our results also suggest some patterns relative to the influence of domestic factors. While teacher regulatory regimes demonstrate considerable explanatory power, the impact of partisan politics is more limited and uneven. Finally, our results point to the potentially disruptive impact of COVID-19, though the permanence of these policy changes remains uncertain.

Pages: 18

This chapter examines the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development's (OECD) “turn to happiness” policies aimed at teacher' well-being, and the development of social and emotional skills in students. We ask: what does this mean for teachers? Theoretically, we draw on Archer's morphogenetic approach to explore the new kind of “agency work” teachers are being asked to do. Four lines of analysis are pursued: a diagnosis of the current malaise in education; a close examination of a suite of happiness policies; the growing industry in happiness products; and the prominent place of psychology and Benthamite utilitarianism in guiding the happiness turn. We argue despite the underlying causes of the current malaise around student productivity and teacher commitment (to which happiness is the antidote), the focus on student personality and assumptions about its malleability in the hands of teachers, continues to align OECD happiness policies with neoliberal tenets focused on self-regulation and control to be productive in the economy and society. However, the deep contradiction here is that one of the causes of the decline in mental health and well-being, neoliberal policies, continues to be offered as the solution.

Pages: 14

This chapter identifies and discusses fundamental issues relevant to the capacity of teacher organizations' capacities to represent “teacher voice” in order to influence educational policy discourses, particularly at the global level. Drawing on relevant literature and a career-long research trajectory that has focused on various dimensions of teacher organization (union) activity, the chapter discusses how power relations inherent to educational governance at various system levels (local, state, national, and global) shape teacher organizations' ability to advocate for teachers; how the heterogeneity of teachers' work contexts constrains the potential of cross-level policy decision-making; and a “democratic deficit” that characterizes relations between the umbrella organization representing teacher unions worldwide and its affiliate members.

Pages: 21

The role of both media and policy discourses in producing understandings of teachers in the public space has been the subject of considerable research interest. The discursive interaction between media and policy texts, however, is an underexplored issue in research. This is an important issue to address because teachers are subject to complex demands from policymakers which are reworked through media discourse, with a potential impact on teachers' professional lives and identities. This chapter seeks to chart the recent research on representations of teachers in the public space. We extend current research by providing two case studies – one focused on Australia and the other on England – which explore the interplay between policy and media discourses in shaping and reproducing public expectations of teachers, with a specific focus on constructions of teacher supply between 2018 and 2022. Findings suggest a complex, rather than linear relationship between policy and media texts. National context is found to play a significant mediating role in how teachers are constructed within the media, thereby countering a total dominance of globalizing educational discourses.

Pages: 68

No chapter abstract available.

Pages: 18

Since the 1990s, most education systems have been challenged to significantly grow their teaching forces, many of them in response to international objectives and commitments to increase access to quality and equitable K-12 education. The resulting teacher shortages have been a central concern worldwide, especially in resource-constrained countries faced with high social demand for education and multiple crises. Many of them resorted to massively recruiting teachers on contract basis in the public sector. Contract-based teacher hiring as a widely used public policy response to teacher demand/shortage is the primary focus of this chapter. We focus on low- and middle-income countries given the magnitude and urgency associated with various considerations of teacher shortage and contract-based hiring in these countries. Embracing a system-level perspective, we first discuss these considerations. We then unpack contract-based teacher hiring as a response to shortage, with attention to variations across countries and contexts. We devote the third section of the chapter to broader implications of teacher shortages and contract-based hiring as a policy solution. Drawing on existing literature, we discuss how this decidedly inadequate response to an urgent challenge has yielded mixed results. We conclude with suggestions for future research and next steps for the field.

Pages: 14

The topic of second-career teachers (SCTs) has gained significant attention among educational researchers and policymakers in recent years. This chapter delves into discussions surrounding the expanded presence of SCTs and the associated challenges. In doing so, the chapter is framed around four main topics of discussion. First, it offers an international perspective on the expanded presence of SCTs and discusses the difficulty of defining this specific population of teachers. Second, the chapter reflects upon two paradoxes associated with this expansion: on the one hand, the effort aiming at tackling teacher shortages by massively recruiting a population of teachers who suffer from a dramatically high attrition rate; on the other hand, the opening of schools' doors to “unqualified/quickly qualified” teachers while also strengthening the teacher quality, education, and professional development narrative. Third, this chapter describes how the growth in the proportion of SCTs and the associated challenges contribute to redefining and shaking up the foundations of the contours of the teaching profession. Fourth, it provides reflections on addressing these paradoxes by drawing upon what we can learn from a comparative view of teacher-related policies and scholarship on SCTs.

Pages: 17

The teaching workforce in India at 9.5 million is among the largest in the world and is highly segmented and differentiated. Fifty percent work in the state system and about 40% in private sector schools with starkly different employment terms. Marked interstate differences between government and private and gender, social category, and age profiles of teachers show the impact of differential development, state policy, and private sector practices toward teacher recruitment. We begin with presenting the diversity in the teaching workforce by profiling them by gender, social category, employment terms, and the type of school and region in which they work. We contextualize the features of the workforce and the teaching profession in India in the region's culture and history, politics, and economy, specifically discussing cultural mores that lead to the profession being aspirational and having social respectability while growing influences of state policy and market are leading to the profession being devalued, offering poor service conditions and pay, and overall becoming feminized. We note the complexities arising in the sector on account of the contradictions in these intersecting fields and their impact on the profession, aspiration to become a teacher, and the workforce.

Pages: 17

This chapter critically examines global policy trends and their impact on teacher professionalism, including teachers' recruitment, status, initial education, and careers. The thesis of this chapter is that while pathways to teacher professionalism diverge from one context to another depending on socioeconomic conditions, cultural traditions, and political forces, globalization has been very effective in producing a certain degree of policy convergence and divergence across systems. The chapter begins by describing the evolution of teacher policy in Western countries and its effects on education systems worldwide, including teachers. As this chapter section shows, these innovations have quickly spread globally to the point that comparing education systems across all continents along standard features is possible. Next, this chapter examines how teacher policy has evolved in two influential countries, England and the United States, to illustrate the challenges of policy convergence and divergence in education, focusing on teacher professionalism. After discussing teachers' recruitment, status, initial education, and careers, the chapter discusses the need for further exploration and investigation, underlining the importance of addressing evolving policy challenges for the teaching profession.

Pages: 68

No chapter abstract available.

Pages: 17

This chapter seeks to understand what digital platforms do to teacher professionality, or the combination of professional knowledge, discretion, and responsibility that enables a teacher to be (a) professional. Using the European Commission's teacher professional learning platform European School Education Platform as an indicative example, we explore how such platforms promote a projectified (i.e., project-focused) and platformed (i.e., largely occurring on digital platforms) version of teacher professionality and learning. Informed by recent thinking around “projectification,” or the ability of the project form to shape work practices, we argue that projectified teacher learning and professionality are now constituted through platform dynamics as a perpetual project-in-itself.

Pages: 16

Historically teacher education and the processes that regulate teachers' learning and work have been a primarily national affair. However, recent efforts by a range of domestic and international organizations have challenged this status quo. Teach For All (TFAll) is one such organization, which has utilized new globalized flows of capital, ideas, and individuals to help spread its model of teacher recruitment and training. Based largely on Teach For America, programs associated with TFAll now exist in more than 60 countries worldwide, with further expansion and scaling efforts underway. This chapter examines the transnational nature of this newer form of teacher learning and work, as implemented by TFAll and its constituents, by analyzing several key and underpinning professional and political scripts: (1) recruit the best teachers, (2) fast-track their learning, and (3) expect them to work relentlessly, while simultaneously seeking to (4) change broken systems through a set of (5) shareable solutions. In analyzing these five scripts, this chapter argues that TFAll has been extremely effective in advancing its goals of reshaping teacher recruitment and teaching globally, despite the potentially deleterious effects of doing so.

Pages: 17

“Leadership” has played an increasing role in globally diffusing educational reforms over the last two decades. Both accountability and decentralization movements assume that more active and informed leadership in schools will result in better student academic performance. This vision of leadership has roots in the cultural logic of US schools which divides administration from instruction and reinforces a view of teachers as de-professionalized workers. “Teacher leadership” was then promoted in order to integrate teachers into reform oversight and managing student performance. Beginning with a short history of the development of teacher leadership within the United States, I compare the logics of “teacher leadership” encoded in globalized reforms with older cultural logics (e.g., shidō in Japan). Using examples from Japan I will how recent teacher-focused policies have undermined aspects of teacher professional autonomy. I end by reflecting on recent leadership reforms promoted by international organizations such as the OECD, UNESCO, and The World Bank. I argue that new waves of globalized reform decontextualize the term “teacher leadership” transforming it into a “floating signifier” that can take on multiple meanings depending on the context and aims of reforms.

Pages: 16

This chapter explores the broad, global processes influencing teachers' work in general, and the socio-politics that characterize current conceptions of teachers' learning in particular. These socio-politics are manifest as competing neoliberal, managerial, and more professional oriented conceptions of teachers' learning. On the one hand, more managerial and neoliberal influences, respectively, seek to “micro-manage” teachers' activities while simultaneously fostering more economistic conceptions of teachers' work and learning. Such approaches contrast with more substantive, “profession”-oriented discourses supported within the teaching profession itself, and which help to cultivate more contextually responsive, long-term, and student-centered approaches to learning. The chapter elaborates specific instances of teachers' learning, within broader political and policy discourses that seek to influence education systems in both “Northern” and “Southern” contexts. An exploration of how teachers' learning is enacted in response to these discourses reveals a complex amalgam of competing influences that seek to foster teacher agency in relation to their learning, at the same time as they constrain the forms of teacher learning considered most valuable. These multifarious, complex, and contested discourses, on a global scale, clearly have had an impact upon teachers' learning within various locations as they have sought to respond to these broader influences.