Abstract
Across the world, the work of teacher educators in universities is subject to contradictory discourses of, on the one hand, globalisation and standardisation and, on the other, innovation in both teaching and research. This article is a critical account of a particular experience of an Australian teacher educator leading an international teaching practicum in South Africa. The account shows how multifarious tensions play out in the practice of a teacher educator working in transcultural spaces utilising ‘border pedagogy’.
Acknowledgements
Many thanks to Prof. Terri Seddon and members of the Social Innovation and Education research grouping at Monash University in Australia, whose critical collegial dialogue was very important in the early stages of developing this article. Thanks also to Craig Rowe and the Department of Community Engagement at Monash South Africa, without whose support and expertise the South Afrian practicum would never have happened.
Notes
1. The research that I draw on here was conducted with the approval of Monash University Human Research Ethics Committee (MUHREC). Approval was granted on 29 November 2009 (Project number CF10/2202–2010001246).
2. See also Bakhtin's (Citation1984) argument that in order to represent genuinely new knowledge or practices, one must seek to do more than articulate new ideas in the ‘wooden boxes’ of established genres.