Calls to action for teacher education research and practice: voices from the field

Abstract

This issue marks the second in our special series commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Asia-Pacific Journal of Teacher Education (APJTE). As expressed in our first issue, a number of initiatives are underway to harness the history of the journal – its editors, leading articles that were deemed to make a difference in the field as well as the topics and debates that have headlined different periods in the journal. APJTE is the journal of the Australian Teacher Education Association (ATEA) and as noted in our previous editorial (Takayama, Kettle, Heimans & Biesta, 2022), the association and APJTE have always been internationalist in their orientation; indeed, the association was originally titled the South Pacific Association of Teacher Education before changing to ATEA in 1988. In this issue, our focus turns to calls for action in teacher education research and practice from scholars who represent the diversity of voices characterising the field. The scholars initially presented their ideas at the 2021 ATEA conference and were subsequently invited to expand on them in this celebratory anniversary issue. We have invoked the metaphor of calls and voices to foreground the meaning and urgency of the arguments in the papers. In everyday life, we are familiar with the concept of calls – the call to prayer, bird calls, a clarion call – where the function is to communicate important meaning appropriately and in context. For example, we might understand the respective calls listed above as follows: a gracious invocation to pause and listen, the delineation of territory and the drive for survival and sustainability, and an emphatic request for something to happen. In all three instances, the people and birds issuing the calls are imbued with the authority and capabilities to make their messages meaningful and relevant. In the same way, we argue that the people issuing calls for action in teacher education research and practice in this APJTE publication have the authority and expertise afforded by experience, roles, insights, and longevity of engagement in the field. They offer meaningful and important conceptualisations of teaching, teachers, and teacher education. As such, they delineate the field as it currently stands and foreground the areas that need urgently redressing to ensure our ongoing legitimacy and relevance. In addition, they offer possibilities and strategies for new directions in teacher education, ones that entail change and a level of adaptation to the prevailing conditions, particularly economic and political agendas, and articulate new forms of engagement with communities, students, families, and practitioners. Like all calls to action and the ensuing politics and power relations, our authors remind us that these possibilities open up new conceptual, political, and relational territory but are best ventured into together – as a field, guided by an association such as ATEA. We therefore consider the papers presented in this issue to be compulsory reading for anyone interested in teacher education and invite you to pause and listen to the scholarly voices of the authors. ASIA-PACIFIC JOURNAL OF TEACHER EDUCATION 2022, VOL. 50, NO. 2, 115–117 https://doi.org/10.1080/1359866X.2022.2048464