This paper introduces the symposium and its methodology. It locate the symposium in relation to global transitions that are shifting national education and training systems around the world as a consequence of the global medium provided by contemporary policy discourses. As nation-states drive re-regulatory education reform agenda, these changes are reconfiguring the established purposes of education and the work of educators. Yet the direction of change is unpredictable in part because the idea of ‘professionalism’ and its governable and ungovernable effects have become ambiguous. I outline sociological understandings that use the concept of ‘boundary’ to understand teacher professionalism and the politics of professionalization. Using a methodology focused by ‘hotspots of change’ where globalizing processes and national education trajectories intersect, I highlight forms of educational boundary work that make educational spaces, work and identities. The significance of boundaries is associated with globalisation inside the nation state, educators’ social and symbolic boundary work, and the way their educational ‘boundarying’ is linked to the politics of professionalisation. Tracking unfinished global transitions across educational spaces in different national territories reveals education as a boundary zone where educators are actively reboundarying educational spaces and patterns of collective action.