Teacher Education and Education reform processes in Australia tend to closely shadow those of the United States and England (see Zeichner, 2014, Mayer, 2014, Gilroy, 2014). While there is some evidence of one-off policy initiatives borrowed from other countries, the last decade has seen an ever-increasingly rapid policy ‘catch-up’ as Australia follows the same reform steps as our English and American ‘cousins’ (Gilroy, 2014, p.624) or counterparts. To achieve this near parity, Australia has experienced a large scale sweep of national reform which has been applied to almost all aspects of schooling, teaching and teacher education. Such reforms include: the development of the Australian curriculum; a high stakes national testing in the areas of Literacy and Numeracy; a nationalized teacher education accreditation and the establishment of the Australian Teaching Professional Standards. Like other countries, these competitive market reforms have been heralded as the best ways to improve the education of all students and are justified as a response to what is claimed as under-prepared teachers and a ‘failing’ teacher education system (Paine, 2013). The language of ‘teacher training’ has appeared throughout the media and now adopted by school leaders and politicians and there is a steady stream of criticism of university based teacher education programs leading to an increase in a call for more school-based and school-led teacher preparation models. Despite this neoliberal reform agenda there has also been the emergence of a number of research-led innovations both nationally and internationally, that have offered new and generative responses to the debates on teacher education. This paper will provide both a balance of the critique of the reform agendas currently experienced in Australia and a discussion of the ways that Australian teacher education researchers are attempting to use international ‘shadowing’ to alter the current reform trajectory and create new alternative pathways.

Gilroy, P. (2014). Policy interventions in teacher education: sharing the English experience. Journal of Education for Teaching, 40(5), 622-632. Mayer, D. (2014). Forty years of teacher education in Australia: 1974–2014. Journal of Education for Teaching, 40(5), 461-473. Paine, L. (2013). Exploring the Interaction of Global and Local in Teacher Education: Circulating Notions of What Preparing a Good Teacher Entails. Preparing Teachers for the 21st Century, 119. Zeichner, K. (2014). The struggle for the soul of teaching and teacher education in the USA. Journal of Education for Teaching, 40(5), 551-568.