As part of the Teacher Education Work Theme of the Armenian Academic City project, this paper critically explores policy borrowing in the Armenian educational context. Teacher quality, and assumptions about contingent teacher knowledge, pedagogical strategies and competences required to secure quality in (teacher) education are increasingly reliant on globalised metrics to inform policy and practice. The effects of global education policy borrowing and lending, as well as international assessments of students’ academic outcomes (e.g., PISA, TIMSS) have led to view teachers as technicians (Winch, 2017). Macro-economic measures of teacher quality focused on cost benefit analyses, are exploited to support claims to authority about ‘what works’ in teacher education and therefore what pedagogical techniques can be exported/imported across international contexts. Some question the authority of such econometrics to evaluate teacher quality, arguing that insights from educational research, teacher and teacher education research are excluded from the production of nuanced and responsive professional knowledge (Tatto, 2021). In Armenia, recent reforms to teacher education have identified the 'teacher as a researcher' concept as the highest level of teacher standard. A qualitative exploratory methodology is employed, using analysis of data from desk review and stakeholder interviews to explore gaps in understanding as well as misunderstandings of teacher education quality. To resist a pejorative and uncritical analysis, policy borrowing is not positioned as an inherently good/bad thing. As Burdett and O’Donnell suggest (2016, p. 113) “few would argue that the intermingling of ideas from different education systems” does not have a role to play. We report our findings from our initial stakeholder consultation, analysing data from academics in three universities with pedagogical programmes, teachers and school leaders, parents and various NGOs working in the education sector across Armenia. Our findings illustrate the imperatives for utilising teacher education research could be utilised to address the challenges of policy borrowing; for example, sustaining cultural responsiveness and the localised production of professional knowledge and understanding. Our original contribution is in problematising the philosophical framing of policy ‘borrowing’ through the lens of refraction (Goodson and Lindbald, 2011) to argue that teacher education research has an important role to play in the refraction of ‘borrowed’ ideas. Our findings show that without refraction the sustained production of professional learning and knowledge is put at risk as the notion of ‘international best practice’ dominates the reform discourse and the lack of quality research fails to adapt or localise international policies.

Burdett, N. and O’Donnell, S. (2016) ‘Lost in translation? The challenges of educational policy borrowing.’ In Educational Research 58(2), pp. 113–120 Goodson, I. and Lindblad, S. (eds) (2011) Professional Knowledge and Educational Restructuring in Europe. Rotterdam: Sense Tatto, M. (2021) ‘Developing teachers’ research capacity: the essential role of teacher education.’ In Teaching Education 32(1), pp. 27–46. Winch, C. (2017) Teachers’ know-how: a philosophical investigation. Wiley