Towards professional entitlement
Over the last few years, along with our colleagues, we have been involved in range of teacher education projects in a number of parts of the world.
We are going to discuss three examples of programmes where we have been directly involved - South Africa, Albania and Northern Ireland. We also want to talk about Paraguay because we have had direct contact with World Links for Development Project, whose work we admire although we have not had direct field experience of this project.
But before looking at these projects let us just say something about teacher learning.
For several years now in the Research Group of International Development in Teacher Education Across Cultures and Societies (RITES) at the Open University, we've been researching the diverse but also common dimensions of what we term 'pedagogic settings'. Our view is that if we are able to agree on the enduring, essential features of teaching and learning environments, that might tell us something about the sort of 'professional toolkit' that's necessary if a common entitlement is to be provided for all teachers. We're using toolkit in a cultural rather than instrumental sense here. And in this context some of the ideas about learning that are becoming so influential today (ideas well represented in this conference) need to be applied to the challenge of teacher learning across the wide variety of contexts we know exist.
An unqualified teacher with a class of a 100 working in Sub Saharan Africa is as entitled to the same degree of conceptual elaboration as a teacher in Ohio or Cambridge or Oxford UK where we live. We will return to this later.
