Navigating Teacher Education in Complex and Uncertain Times: Connecting Communities of Practice in a Borderless World

Carmen I. Mercado draws on four decades of seminal research and theory on how American children, who come from homes where languages other than English are spoken, learn to read and to write in school to reveal aspects of locally-responsive planning and adaptations that should be central to any teacher education program that hopes to serve its unique, local population base responsibly. Mercado uses a range of theoretical lenses particularly those surrounding critical theory, the approach designed to deconstruct power relationships in society, to capture and explain the complexities of the teaching-learning process making visible institutional, social and political influences clear. She explores an extensive collection of tools and resources for teaching to explore how educators can inform their thinking and shape their own practices to broaden access to people and resources, and to influence classroom instruction as school populations becomes increasingly diverse on a global scale through immigration. Mercado also shows how self-study has been a key aspect of her program’s evolution, suggesting that teacher education should be informed by teacher educators’ own investigations into their own programs and processes; that each teacher educator ought to be an active reinventor of her own program, based on reflection on current data. Mercado sensitively draws together the technical and emotional dimensions of learning to teach, acknowledging that critical theory can bring up deep, often uncomfortable feelings of anger, guilt, resentment, and other responses to unfair conditions. However, since schools are designed as places of opportunity, facing these responses is essential at a time with the feelings of antagonism that characterize the present-day world and its conflictual social groups. Mercado offers the opportunity to address these facets of educational process in compelling, informed ways.

Carmen I. Mercado is Professor Emeritus at Hunter College, City University of New York, USA.

Marie Brennan is Professor of Education at Victoria University, Australia, and a former Dean of Education at the University of South Australia. She is currently leading the final year of a major Australian Research Council grant (LP100200499) Renewing the teaching profession in regional areas through community partnerships and participating in the Australian study of the Work of Teacher Educators (WOTE).

Joce Nuttall is Amo Matua | Executive Dean in the Faculty of Education and Professor at the University of Canterbury, Aotearoa New Zealand.

Peter Smagorinsky is Distinguished Research Professor Emeritus at the University of Georgia, USA, and serves as Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the University of Guadalajara, Mexico. He has won a number of internationally recognised awards, including, the National Council of Teachers of English Distinguished Service Award in 2017, the International Federation for the Teaching of English Award in 2018, Distinguished Scholar at the National Conference on Research in Language and Literacy in 2018 and the Horace Mann League Outstanding Public Educator Award in 2020.

Janet Orchard is a Senior Teaching Fellow in the Graduate School of Education at the University of Bristol, UK.