Our proposal emerges from critical reflection on the challenges and opportunities associated with the Erasmus+ TAP-TSproject, and from ongoing work by a number of the co-authors into the need for research that tackles the challenges, opportunities, and potential issues raised by the Erasmus+ Teacher Academy initiative – including significant policy implications for future European teacher education (Galvin et al 2024; Sorensen and Graf, forthcoming).

The Erasmus+ Teacher Academy Project on Teaching Sustainability (TAP-TS) is one of 11 inaugural Erasmus+ Teacher Academies. TAP-TS aims to strengthen capacity for sustainability education among European primary and secondary teachers and teacher educators by facilitating participation in international teacher development courses based on project Learning & Teaching Packages (LTPs). These LTPs are sets of novel OERs which build towards critical and reflective learner-engagements that foster values, agency, and informed sustainable life-choices.

At the core of TAP-TS is the idea of enhancing teacher agency through critical & agentic reflection (c.f. Leijen et al 2020; Papenfuss et al 2019; Lunt 2020). In terms of underpinning principles, all TAP-TS partnership engagements (co-production, piloting and use of LTPs) rest on a vision of professional learning based in a model that is ‘deeply reflective’ (Cavadas et al 2023; Goodwin et al 2023) and ‘values-led’ (Purdy et al 2023). Mutual trust (Hora and Millar 2023) is central to this.

The TAP-TS consortium is diverse in nature and capacity. The partnership connects members from different stages within the European teacher education system (primary and secondary), a ministry agency specialising in supporting teacher continuing development, a leading media house in online education, two secondary schools (which are full and active partners), a civil society organisation specialising in eco-social education, and a quality and monitoring centre with expertise in both education and business spheres. We come from ten European countries, covering almost the full geographically span of the EU.

Assembling, aligning and maintaining this partnership has been an extraordinarily experience.

Within the limits of the presentation, we address:

• The nature and scope of the TAP-TS partnership, its defining characteristics and the thinking behind the selection and recruitment of members. This includes the various continuities resulting from bringing in people who had previously worked together and dealing with the challenges of overlap and ‘gaps’ in our collective;
• Deepening partnership unity and trust – including the formal role here of the TAP-TS Project Advisory Group (PAG) and our Futures Group (FG), as well as the less formal role played by an open & inclusive project ethic and always incorporating elements of sociability and relationship-building into our events and activities;
• The modalities of TAP-TS engagement – including the very considerable efforts involved in making sure that we made good use of the in-partnership expertise in designing, developing, and testing project LTPs to ensure they provided quality OER experiences. Thus, we outline both the TAP-TS Roadmap – which provided the design architecture that informed and guided the LTP and event-specification work – and the TAP-TS MaRIA framework which we are currently developing to guide critically reflective, Follow-Up activity when using TAP-TS LTPs. 

The theoretical framework we use to explore the core conditions and detail of our partnership practices is described in some detail below. This is rooted in understandings of social learning which recognise the complexity and particularities of our distinct organisational contexts (Wenger-Trayner et. al., 2023) and the characteristics of strong  partnerships as socio-cultural exercises involving learning through boundary-crossing between social worlds (Greenhow et al 2023).The wider issue of Teacher Academy purposing as an exercise in neo-liberal public management practice is addressed through concepts in critical theory drawn from Lynch (2021) and Habermas (2021).    

TAP-TS is best understood as fundamentally a transdisciplinary and inter-sectoral partnership. This reflects in the constellation of project partners drawn from distinct institutional and national contexts; in the diverse educational themes addressed by the project (sustainability and digitality, critical media literacy, entrepreneurship, environment, decoloniality, inclusion etc.); and in our use of fully digital, hybrid and face to face educational event formats. Theorising the nature and detail of this transdisciplinary and inter-sectoral partnership is, not surprisingly, challenging. To do so, we have borrowed from insights provided by Greenhow et al (2023) on partnerships as socio-cultural exercises that require learning through boundary-crossing between social worlds; and on how this activity might be analysed (and better understood) by approaching it through learning context theory with an emphasis on agentic engagement drawing from Reeve and Shin (2020) and on the particularities of our distinct organisational contexts, the significance of which has been well described by Wenger-Trayner et al (2023). This allowed us to start from the ideational phase of the Teacher Academy and consider the thinking behind the recruitment of project partners, and then discuss how we came to place the construction of social learning engagement and community of practice at the centre of our work. Within the presentation we offer several examples of partnership-enhancement such as how we successfully shared ideas across what might otherwise have been sectoral boundaries as the project partners grew in trust and mutual understanding of the tasks involved. For instance, our Roadmap – once agreed and in place – assisted considerably in the co-construct of TAP-TS pedagogical engagements, the co-creation of teaching and learning materials, and building innovation and engagement around our common interest in educating for sustainability. Similarly, the constant in-project presence of our Project Advisory Group – an unusual use of such a resource – catalysed timely and helpful discussions about project direction In the presentation we propose to share other examples illustrating how the partnership evolved, sometimes unexpected, through trust and respectful inter-sectoral dialogue. As regards the wider potential and possible implications of the ERASMUS+ Teacher Academy initiative, we propose to draw from Cairney (2021) to examine how the initiative offers research opportunities to gain insight into policy for how European teachers can approach and develop their teaching in emerging areas such as technological empowerment, sustainable learning, entrepreneurship, playful learning. And on Lynch (2021) and Habermas (2021) to suggest some of the potential hazards that may arise.

We hope to contribute to a conversation among the European teacher education community around the potential and the problematics associated with the ERASMUS+ Teacher Academy initiative. The proposed presentation emphasizes particularly the nature of partnership as experienced by one Academy - and will discuss both the affordances and challenges of this in an open and constructive manner. Less evident but necessary to note here also are the deep connections of the action to the wider European Commission European Education Area (EEA) to 2025 agenda. The Academies are set firmly within this wider policy work and reflect particularly the five designated EEA focus topics: improving quality and equity in education and training; teachers, trainers, and school leaders; digital education; green education; and the EEA in the world. Noting this is important for a better understanding of the increasing level of EC actions and not-insignificant funding represented by the Academies. As an action, the Teacher Academies can be seen as an unprecedented level of strategic, policy-led intervention into teacher education and training activities and practices across Europe, designed to foster greater collaboration among European Union Member States in building more resilient and inclusive national education and training systems. As noted in the call for this sub-theme, the Erasmus+ Teacher Academies initiative has all the hallmarks of a ‘knowledge economy’ project:we propose it is possible to some degree at least to hollow-out and subvert this in favour of a more professionalising agenda that reflects the will, interests, and professional values of those within the Academies, now and into the future. All of the co-authors are involved in researching and/or implementing the EU Erasmus+ Teacher Academies initiative.

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