Quality teaching in school education has increasingly become central policy topic of the European Union (EU) stressing quality and equity in education and training, while it is closely linked to high-quality competences for in service and future teachers (Sarakinioti & Tsatsaroni, 2015). In 2020 (European Commission, 2020), teacher education policy for quality and inclusive, digital and green education was planned to be supported by Erasmus+Teacher Academies. The 27 Teacher Academies competitively funded today offer a range of collaboration, capacity building, network and learning activities, modules and toolkits for teachers and student teachers (Galvin et al., 2024). The paper problematises the emerging mode of transnational governance of partnerships among schools, teacher education institutions, universities, NGOs, etc in the framework of Erasmus+Teachers Academies, questioning the changes it introduces in the broad field of Initial Teacher Education (ITE) in Europe. The analysis adopts a topological genealogy approach that focuses on governing practices unfolding through the spatial/temporal operation of continuity and change, repetition, and difference in the emerging relations of transnational European governance of Erasmus+Teachers Academies and their productive effects for ITE (Martin & Secor, 2014, Decuypere & Lewis, 2023). A starting point of the topological approach is that “the spatiotemporal scales are not considered as being nested in one another (e.g., past-present-future as linearly and chronologically unfolding; micro-meso-macro as differing in size and scope), but rather in ‘the agential enfolding of different scales through one another'” (Barad 2007, 245, in Decuypere & Lewis, 2023, 4). Bernstein’s theoretical idea that social space and time are demarcated by symbolic and material boundaries which, as ‘tacit metaphors’, define the inside/outside, now/then, near/far, us/them regulating the knowledge/ power and control relations in different sites of practice (2000: 206), informs the topological analysis of the 27 Academies. The analysis conceives of Teacher Academies as governmental space(s) in/ through/ as change for ITE (Decuypere & Lewis, 2023). The paper describes the processes of stabilization of Teacher Academies’ policy/pedagogic interventions- how they “are being produced, enacted, facilitated and sustained” and what kinds of instruments, infrastructures etc, they utilise (“relations in change”). Also, it discusses the productive effects and standardisations of these interventions in/on the field of ITE (“relations through changes”). Finally, it reflects on the entire educational-infrastructural assemblage of Erasmus+Teachers Academies, whether they are becoming a “prototype” in the field of European ITE and about their footprint on teachers/ teacher educators’ work and professionalism (ibid, Robertson & Sorensen, 2018).

Bernstein, B. (2000). Pedagogy, symbolic control and identity: Theory, research, critique. Revised edition. Rowman & Littlefield. Decuypere, M. & Lewis, S. (2023) Topological genealogy: a methodology to research transnational digital governance in/through/as change, Journal of Education Policy, 38:1, 23-45, DOI: 10.1080/02680939.2021.1995629 European Commission. (2020). COMMUNICATION FROM THE COMMISSION TO THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT, THE COUNCIL, THE EUROPEAN ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL COMMITTEE AND THE COMMITTEE OF THE REGIONS on achieving the European Education Area by 2025. COM(2020) 625 final Galvin, C., Madalinska-Michalak, J. & Revyakina, E. (2024). The European Union Erasmus+ Teacher Academies Action. Complementing and Supplementing European Teacher Education and Teacher Education Research? In V. Symeonidis, (2024) (Ed) Enhancing the Value of Teacher Education Research. Implications for Policy and Practice (170-197). Brill. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 Martin, L. & Secor. A. J. 2014. “Towards a Post-mathematical Topology.” Progress in Human Geography 38 (3): 420–438. doi:10.1177/0309132513508209. Robertson, S.L., & Sorensen, T. (2018). Global transformations of the state, governance and teachers’ labour: Putting Bernstein’s conceptual grammar to work. European Educational Research Journal, 17(4), 470-488. https://doi:10.1177/1474904117724573 Sarakinioti, A. & Tsatsaroni, A. (2015). European education policy initiatives and teacher education curriculum reforms in Greece. Education Inquiry (EDUI), 6(3): 259-288. http://dx.doi.org/10.3402/edui.v6.28421