This title brings together contributions from around the world that analyse and reflect on the way curriculum is configuring and reconfiguring that world.

Educators, professionalism and politics offers ways of understanding how and with what consequences national systems of education and the work of education professionals are being reregulated in the context of contemporary global transitions. Globalization does not just create transnational organizations, relations and practices; it also transforms nation-states by creating more complex education spaces that impinge on the work of educators and the learning that they enable, globally, nationally and locally. This volume of the World Yearbook of Education focuses firmly on the educators themselves. It documents the way educators encounter and renegotiate ideas and practices that travel globally as they seek to enact their established professional projects. This framing recognises that educators’ spaces, work and identities are historically anchored in national institutional trajectories, but are both disturbed and renewed as globally mobile ideas and practices "touch down" within national systems of education. The chapters examine the effect of global transitions on educators and education, and offers new perspectives on educational work in different parts of the world today. They challenge bleak assessments of teacher de-professionalization and idealistic narratives about professional development. Chapters highlight the significance of educators’ occupational boundary work and the resources and networks they mobilize through their professional projects as they make and remake education in national spaces. The volume tracks: Re-regulatory trajectories evident in national education spaces and their impact on educators; The way educators renegotiate globally mobile ideas, practices and national institutional trajectories, as they mediate global formations emerging in the national space; and The kinds of mediations and resources that enable education professionals to engage with the politics of professionalization. This volume of The World Yearbook of Education will be of great interest to Education researchers, graduate students, teacher educators and education policy-makers. Terri Seddon is Professor of Education at Monash University, Australia Jenny Ozga is Professor of the Sociology of Education at Oxford University, UK John Levin is Bank of America Professor of Education Leadership and Director, California Community College Collaborative, University of California, USA

Many commentators feared that the Education Reform Act of 1988 sounded the death knell for teacher professionalism in Britain. More than a decade later, however, professionalism appears to have staged a miraculous recovery: David Blunkett says that 'it is back at the very heart of teaching'. But what kind of professionalism is this? In whose interest is its recovery. and what effects will it have? And how does this development relate to changes in edict countries and other professions? The Politics of Professionalism provides authoritative answers to these questions. It does so by setting the debates in their historical context and by drawing on detailed research findings on teachers' experience of work arid education, especially the curriculum, in the current era. In the process, this book makes a major contribution to our understanding of the politics, history and sociology of teaching and the other professions.

This book presents eight distinctive historical chapters that explore the complex relationship between politics, professionals and practitioners in a range of different educational contexts. It offers a timely contribution to current debates about the contested place and status of educational professionalism in modern society. It is grounded in a firm commitment to the value that a historical perspective might bring to current and recurrent educational concerns, of which educational professionalism remains key. With fresh examples from nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first century education, as well as a diversity of methodological approaches and sources, the book addresses a range of fundamental questions about educational professionalism. These include the wider politics of professionalism; issues of professional knowledge and expertise; what and who counts as professional within various power discourses; professional training, socialisation and accreditation; and professional identities, power, agency, autonomy regulation, accountability, and control. Overall, there is a sense from these chapters that there is something fractured and disconnected in current discourses around educational professionalism, but that there have been particular moments in the past when there was the promise of something different and possibly something more authentic. Moving beyond a narrow focus on schoolteachers as professional practitioners, to embrace a wider conceptualisation of educational professionalism within higher education, the churches, educational leadership, and quasi-professional and voluntary organisations, the book represents a rich and novel contribution to the field. The chapters in this book were originally published in various issues of History of Education and the British Journal of Religious Education.

This book suggests reforms to improve legal education and responds to concerns that law schools eschew the study of justice.

By reconsidering the nature of professional work, renowned scholar Douglas E. Mitchell argues for reconceptualizing educational practices and institutional structures in ways that facilitate and protect educator professional responsibility. This book explores ways educators and their political supporters can seize the social and political power necessary to accept professional responsibility for the design of their work environment. Chapters explore how unionization, ethics, public values, political power, school reform, and trust play an important role in the essence of professional responsibility in schools, arguing that we must use organization, management, and accountability mechanisms to encourage responsible civic participation and professional action in support of public education. This new text for graduate studies in teacher and leadership training frames a much needed analysis of where and how professional responsibility for public education is best incorporated into the work roles of teachers, administrators, and university scholars.

During the last 20 years, governments around the world have paid increasing attention to the recruitment, preparation, and retention of teachers. Teacher supply and teacher quality have become significant policy issues, taken up by policy-makers at the highest levels. This is because teachers are now seen by many governments as the ‘lynch-pin’ of educational, economic and social reform. This volume grew out of a recognition by the Editors of the growing significance of teacher education policy and a curiosity about international trends and differences. The book brings together nine papers from leading academics around the world: from the UK (England and Scotland), the USA, Australia, Singapore and Belgium, plus a joint paper comparing Namibia and the USA. Taken together, the papers reveal the complexities and contradictions of international trends. On the one hand, they demonstrate that there is indeed a common direction of travel along the lines encouraged by international bodies such as the OECD. At the same time however, the papers also reveal important differences among countries in terms of how they are addressing common aspirations as well as some apparent contradictions within the policies of individual nations. This book was based on the special issue of Teachers and Teaching.