The Teacher and The State: Understanding How Global Initiatives Can Fail Teachers

Dominant global policy discourses rely on overly generalized assumptions about “the teacher”, obscuring the historical, cultural, and political specificity that structures teaching across national settings. The Teacher and The State: Understanding How Global Initiatives Can Fail Teachers rethinks the relationship between teachers, the state, and globalization. The detailed analysis of teaching as a mass profession shows how it is shaped by interactions between discourses on the global stage and the forces within national education fields. This work builds on existing literature but presents a direct theoretical challenge to re-imagine how we can understand the teacher.

Rather than taking for granted what a teacher is, the authors reflect on how the teacher is imagined, foregrounding the historical, linguistic, and social constructions that underpin educational research and reform. Through this lens, the book interrogates key concepts such as globalization, teacher agency, mass schooling, and digitalization, showing how global scripts often fail to capture the plurality of teachers’ roles and the lived realities of their work. Addressing the profound transformations brought about by digitalization, AI, and shifting global agendas, chapters argue that these developments intensify longstanding tensions around autonomy, professionalism, and the purposes of schooling.

Combining theoretical reflection with empirically grounded insight, The Teacher and The State develops a nuanced framework for understanding how global initiatives are translated, resisted, and reshaped within national education fields. This is an essential volume for anyone seeking to understand why universal reform models so often fail teachers.

Jo B. Helgetun is a researcher with the SHIFT research unit at the Université libre de Bruxelles, Belgium.

Gerald K. LeTendre is the Harry Lawrence Batschelet II Chair of Educational Administration at The Pennsylvania State University, USA.

Thibault Coppe is Professor of Educational Sciences and head of the SHIFT research unit at the Université libre de Bruxelles, Belgium.