In this paper we discuss our attempts to establish and organise an international teacher education research collective (ITERC). We outline the early steps we have taken and propose some resources in this paper to think through the work that we might do in the future as the collective expands and understands its purposes (which given the emergent character of the collective are still in the process unfolding) in more detail. We will speculate here on what it might mean to think ‘internationally’ about teacher education and then consider whether and how a collective has formed in relation to this work. We draw on the well-known proposals of Marcus (1995) on multi-sited ethnography that seeks to trouble the assumptions that are made in positivist versions of comparative research- “… in multi-sited ethnography, comparison emerges from putting questions to an emergent object of study whose contours, sites, and relationships are not known beforehand, but are themselves a contribution of making an account that has different, complexly connected real-world sites of investigation. The object of study is ultimately mobile and multiply situated, so any ethnography of such an object will have a comparative dimension that is integral to it, in the form of juxtapositions of phenomena that conventionally have appeared to be (or conceptually have been kept) "worlds apart."” (Marcus, 1995, p. 102). What we are attempting, perhaps, with ITERC is to begin projects that have an emergent character and do not take for granted the accepted categories of existence that teacher education relies on in each of our sites. Even though we have only been ITERC for approximately 12 months what appears to be emerging is a degree of similarity across our sites. We seem to be witnessing the power and success of the Global Education Reform Movement (Sahlberg, 2014), though how this set of ideas work out in practice seems to differ in different governance settings. It will be important to document the contours of convergence and divergence (Stengers, 2005) of the practices in teacher education in discrete spatio-temporal, though conceptually connected sites- this will we think reveal how powerful concepts travel and are taken up, disputed, inflected, and so on.

We add to this work with anthropologist Tim Ingold’s (2016) ideas that assist with spatio-temporal-epistemological-political problems, namely: 1. alongly knowledge building and 2. epistemological wayfaring. Ingold (2016) allows us to consider a processual approach to knowledge making that can bring in questions about ethics and politics and this links well with Stengers (2005) invocation to ‘slow down’ a rush to judgement about those entities we seek to understand and perhaps problematise. Both Ingold and Stengers invite us to connect knowledge making with ‘worlding’ and the associated ethical and political dimensions that this moves forces into the picture. How the ethics and politics of teacher education are in relation to what are named as knowledge making practices will be of ongoing interests. It is important to note that we already have three sub-groups that have emerged in ITERC with interests in 1. ethics and politics, 2. knowledge, 3. professionalism.  We discuss the ways that these have emerged and what this might mean for the future of the group in the paper.

With respect to methods, we discuss two connected problems; 1. Enacting solidarity, collectivity and autogestion, 2. Emerging goals, purposes and manifestos. In the majority of cases scholars come to ITERC either from tenured positions in universities in the Global North or as higher degree research students in those same universities. What has brought us together thus far is an interest in understanding and finding ways to contest the convergence of neoliberal and neo-conservative policies in (teacher) education (see Clarke, 2021) that threaten the scholarly possibilities of our work. So far we have discussed working collectively and in solidarity but we are mindful of the critiques of solidarity where the rhetoric is mobilised yet little real change is made possible in the world as a result (see Gaztambide-Fernández, Brant, & Desai, 2022). It seems clear that increasingly educators have little say over what matters in education and it will be important to have a collective resource to support the reclaiming of our part in making educational sense. Yet, it is also important we think to keep the concept of collective solidarity open to emerging debates and also to concern ourselves with the dynamics of centre- periphery relations (Connell, 2007) in teacher education and how to date ITERC has concerned itself little with the power dynamics at play in the global production of knowledge (except perhaps to worry about our peripheralization within the Global North) and related effects.

In this paper we draw out some of the emerging concepts that a new international teacher education research collective has made possible to think about. We present the paper as a way to engage other scholars in this work and to try out some of the current thinking we have with regard to how the collective might further develop- our tentative goal with this paper is to for it to support work in figuring out how to enact autogestion in teacher education (research).

Clarke, M. (2021). Education and the Fantasies of Neoliberalism: Policy, Politics and Psychoanalysis. Routledge. Ingold, T. (2016). Lines: a brief history. Routledge. Gaztambide-Fernández, R., Brant, J. & Desai, C. (2022). Toward a pedagogy of solidarity, Curriculum Inquiry, 52(3), 251-265. Marcus, G. E. (1995). Ethnography in/of the World System: The Emergence of Multi-Sited Ethnography. Annual Review of Anthropology, 24, 95–117. Sahlberg, P. 2014. Finnish lessons 2.0: What can the world learn from educational change in Finland? Columbia, NY: Teachers College Press. Stengers, I. (2005). Introductory notes on an ecology of practices. Cultural studies review, 11(1), 183-196.