Conclusions
Across the world we need to think about new forms of architecture for teacher development. This is not the first time in history that rapid changes in communications have had a significant impact on our ambitions for educational and social progress. The end of the nineteenth century saw the world coming to be united in a net of steel, telegraph wires and ideologies of progress. The end of the twentieth century has seen similar phenomena with even more implications for enhancing and enriching learning and teaching.
Let us summarise again, therefore, our three propositions:
- that the worldwide challenge of universal primary education (UPE) has a concomitant challenge to provide teachers and teacher education to make the experience of schooling meaningful and productive;
- that there is a need to build new, flexible, effective, school based forms of teacher education at a reach hitherto undreamt of;
- that to do this, emergent models of development that exploit new forms of technology need to be examined, in order that new practices of teacher education might be shared, experienced and evaluated globally.
We have looked in some detail at the building of new programmes, analysed the conditions of their success and explored the conditions under which identity, self esteem and dignity could characterise future directions for teacher reform.
Across the world, many internationally recognised institutions and groups drive the improvement of teacher education, attracting scholars and ideas from every part of the globe. Few of these are situated in the developing world. Few are driven by the real agendas of the poor and the dispossessed. We believe that a task for teacher education, in parallel with UPE, is to create a new and imaginative 'architecture' for discourse and debate that is truly international, drawing on wide ranging practices and scholarship, and one that embraces the challenge set out in this paper. The form of that architecture, together with the roles of individuals and communities in creatively working together in this, provides an agenda for the next stage of development.
