Cross-Continental Exploration of Concerns, Opportunities, and Realities of Teacher Education

Continuing Reid and O’Donoghue’s (2004) more than a decade old concerns about teacher preparation, the following draws on the authors’ experiences in the United States, Germany, and Australia concerning the preparation and engagement of pre-service and in-service teachers. Across the contexts of Germany, the United States, and Australia, the authors of this piecework realized that each of the particularized contexts overlapped and were not simply local concerns. That is, a glocal (locally situated and globally common) phenomenon is discovered where the hyper-localized concern was a contextually relevant concern for the global counterparts in their localized context. With acknowledgment that “all experience is local…[and] the localness of experience is a constant” (Meyrowitz 2005, p. 21). That recognition, however, is contextualized with the understanding that “…we now increasingly share information with and about people who live in local-ities different from our own [and] we more...