Teacher education is increasingly an explicit focus for governmental as well as public concern, nationally and internationally. Rather than a new problem, however, it can be argued that registers of ‘crisis’ and the like have been endemic since the very advent of formal teacher education. They have manifested themselves recurrently throughout its history, and indeed may be seen as a (post)structural feature of the field. This is because teacher education is predicated upon the complex and contradictory enterprise of public schooling, which is itself inherently an “impossible project” (Green 2010). Among other things, this makes for constant reform imperatives and initiatives, as a range of stakeholders endeavours to manage the field’s instability and intractability. Such tensions have exacerbated in recent times, with new global frames of reference. This is the context for our focus here on contemporary struggles over the nature and purpose of teacher education, world-wide. We argue that teacher education is “a practice producing subjects” (Green & Reid 2008), an organised social practice fundamentally concerned with the (re)production of distinctive forms of social identity: the professional Teacher. Notions of practice and subjectivity, knowledge and power, discourse and (im)possibility, are central. Struggles over teacher education are examined as struggles over its very ‘soul’ (Zeichner 2014). – as much a matter of character and standing as of ontology. The paper works from a critical commitment to practice theory and philosophy as a key resource in (re)claiming the agenda, as a necessary move in reconceptualising and re-positioning teacher education for the future. Attentive to international developments and debates, it builds on a critical engagement with the teacher education scene in Australia, constructed as both part of and distinctive with regard to the European colonial project – a project that continues to be made in globalising times.

Green, B. (2010). The (im)possibility of the project. The Australian Educational Researcher, 37(3), 1-17. Green, B., Reid, J. (2008). Methods in our madness? Poststructuralism, pedagogy and teacher education. In A.M. Phelan, J.S. Sumsion (eds.). Critical readings in teacher education: provoking absences (pp. 17-32). Rotterdam: Sense Publishers. Zeichner, K, (2014). The struggle for the soul of teaching and teacher education in the USA, Journal of Education for Teaching: International research and pedagogy, 40(5), 551-568.