Editorial: excavating ‘meaningful differences’ in Asia-Pacific teacher education research

We bring to you a new logo printed on the cover of this issue. It was endorsed by the executive committee of the Australian Teacher Education Association (ATEA), the parent professional association for the Asia-Pacific Journal of Teacher Education (APJTE). Those who are familiar with the previous logo would have noticed that the same “waves” design is adopted in the new, contemporary emblem. Representing the Pacific Ocean, the waves have always symbolised the regional aspirations of ATEA and APJTE. They embody ATEA’s commitment to the enhancement of teaching professions in the broader Asia-Pacific region and the journal’s commitment to facilitating the cross-cultural dialogues, exchanges and co-operations about teacher education research in the region.

In the very first editorial of the 50^th anniversary volume, we traced the use of the term “Asia-Pacific” in the journal’s title (see Takayama et al., 2022). Until the 1995/6 adoption of Asia-Pacific as part of the journal’s title, the journal had been known as the South Pacific Journal of Teacher Education (SPJTE). The geographical expansion from South Pacific to Asia-Pacific in the title reflected the broader political discourse in Australia in the 1990s, wherein Australia’s relationship with its northern neighbour was increasingly recognised as critical for the country’s economic and geopolitical survival. Indeed, as we showed in the editorial, the journal’s name change had a lot to do with the economic interest of the journal, the association, and the publisher who was interested in reaching out to the Asian academic market. But there was also some genuine interest among ATEA membership in broadening the scholarly scope to Asia for cross-cultural dialogues, intellectual exchanges, and international co-operations. Just as with any geographical marker, hence, Asia-Pacific is an essentially contested term, reflecting divergent aspirations of different stakeholders within ATEA, the journal readership and the publisher. Our task as the journal editors is to make Asia-Pacific an intellectually meaningful concept for the association and the journal. As the first step towards this goal, we have been attempting to reflect Asia-Pacific more prominently in the content of the journal.

In the same commemorative editorial, however, we also acknowledged the challenges we were faced with in achieving the above goal. We disclosed the fact that the journal currently rejects a disproportionately large number of manuscripts submitted from non-English-speaking countries and regions, including Asia-Pacific. We were confronted with a glaring contradiction between our editorial aspiration and the consequence of our action. In an effort to provide some account for the contradiction, we attempted to clarify our editorial stance, explaining that many of the manuscripts submitted from Asia-Pacific were not necessarily the kind of manuscripts we were interested in publishing. As the editors of the journal, this is a very difficult conversation to have, as we are fully aware that what we value as “good scholarship” cannot possibly be universally accepted. After all, we are the product of years of academic training and socialisation within a limited cultural and intellectual space, and we acknowledge the fact that there exist intellectual traditions that remain relatively unknown to us due to language and cultural barriers.

One of the issues we consistently observe with many of the manuscripts submitted from Asia-Pacific to APJTE is that they are highly decontextualised, and this applies to both quantitative and qualitative studies. Typically, they report empirical studies, undertaken in different parts of Asia-Pacific, about the practices, beliefs, and perceptions of pre-service or in-service teachers about a given topic of interest (e.g., ICT usage, professional development, inclusive and multicultural education practices, and university-school partnership). What is troubling to us is that these studies are often written in a way to obscure, if not entirely erase, any meaningful contextual differences. They are so disconnected from the historical, cultural and institutional contexts of the place where the studies are undertaken that they can be read as if they were written about students, teachers and teacher educators in the U.S.A., UK or Australia. The only way that we could tell that these studies were situated in different cultural and national contexts and traditions is from the brief description of the schools and localities where the studies were carried out, the pseudonyms used for the research participants that suggest different cultural contexts, or the institutional affiliations of the authors.

The acontextual studies of teacher education observed among the APJTE manuscripts are part and parcel of the global policy discourse. International organisations (e.g., the World Bank and OECD) have been so successful in promoting the notion of “best practice,” which presumably “works” irrespective of the specific cultural, historical and institutional contexts. International large-scale quantitative studies have come to guide much of national policy discussion today, and a similarly decontextualised approach to education has been taken up by many education researchers, including those who contribute to APJTE. The consequence of this proliferation is the flat ontology of education. Here, “thick” differences in education, reflective of the specific historical, cultural and institutional context, are reduced to “thin” differences. The latter is constituted through metrics and indicators that are premised upon the universalised assumptions about what education is and for. Hence, while OECD’s PISA might show how different each country’s education might be, the difference as articulated here is severely constrained by the universalised assumptions about education within which a set of variables are set and given causalities are established. In our view, the ongoing decontextualization-cum-datafication of education has bred a false sense of universalism and consequently impoverished the quality of cross-cultural dialogue about what education stands for.

Hence, there is a need to bring the discussion of education back within the particularities where education assumes its specific meanings in the first place. That is to acknowledge that what it means to be educated in, say Australia, can meaningfully differ from what it means to be educated in China, the Netherlands or Papua New Guinea, albeit with some commonalities. We should also pay attention to the intra-national differences, as well; what it means to be educated in, say, a remote Aboriginal community in the Western part of New South Wales is likely to differ considerably from what it means to be educated in the multicultural hotbed of Greater Sydney. These meaningful differences only become foregrounded by understanding the broader context within which the practices and the institutions of education are deeply embedded. Even some of the basic words like “schools,” “teaching,” or “education” do not exactly convey the same thing, nor can they be unproblematically translated from one language to another without losing the significant socio-cultural and institutional meanings attached to them. Further, there is no global consensus on what counts as “best pedagogy,” either, with the constructivist approach to education, which is widely touted as “best practice,” being refuted by educational scholars (e.g., Komatsu et al., 2021). Different theories of education continue to be circulated and practiced despite the standardising pressures from the global policy discourse, and yet they are not sufficiently recognised by educational researchers. We must pay more attention to the deep meanings underpinning educational practices and institutions in the Asia-Pacific, and elsewhere, to acknowledge the tenacities of local and national traditions defining what counts as “good teaching” and what it means to be educated in the specific localities (see, for example, Hopmann, 2015).

To be clear, what is proposed here is not a call at all to embrace the radical particularistic position where it is assumed that different cultures and educations exist in complete separation from each other. We certainly recognise the homogenising impact of the global policy discourse on national and sub-national educational idiosyncrasies. But we distance ourselves from the global universalisation thesis, where it is assumed that the whole world embraces – or is in the gradual process of embracing - one particular way of being in the world, seeing the world and educating children and adults. We consider it as part of education researchers’ responsibilities to “excavate” the meaningful differences in educational practices and theory around the world that can be foregrounded upon a closer, fully contextualised investigation. Asia-Pacific is a home to diverse epistemological and ontological assumptions, historical trajectories, and political struggles which all impact on how education is conceptualised, what it means to teach, and what it means to be educated in the specific localities of the region (Thaman, 1997). And those “traditions” in different parts of Asia-Pacific are constantly evolving and interacting with each other across national and cultural boundaries (Thaman, 2019). It is this profound and dynamic sense of “differences” that we would like to bring to the surface and hence consider worth publishing in our journal.

The readers might consider that the kind of research proposed here would have to be philosophically- or socio-culturally-oriented interpretive studies. Those who undertake quantitative research, in particular, might feel discouraged by our message. But we think that there are certain ways in which quantitative research can be designed to bring to the fore how the meaningful contextual differences are translated into different views, beliefs and assumptions held by students, teachers and teacher educators. For this, quantitative data would have to be made sense in light of the specific cultural, institutional and historical context of the site of research or the country. See, for instance, how Komatsu and Rappleye (2017) engage in a secondary analysis of PISA data sets to develop an alternative theory of education that is characteristic of East Asia, or what they call “the type II learning,” bearing in mind that the reduction of education to learning may itself be part of a rather problematic “global consensus” about education (see Biesta, 2018). They show how the PISA data can be made sense of differently when reinterpreted through the culturally and historically informed lens of East Asian education. Furthermore, for quantitative research to be contextually meaningful, the variables would have to be carefully developed and selected so that the contextually specific, culturally nuanced enactments of what is to be observed can be sufficiently accounted for. An unthoughtful application of a set of globally circulated variables can render quantitative research grossly inattentive to the kind of meaningful differences we seek to foreground in APJTE.　Unfortunately, we have seen many quantitative studies submitted from the Asia-Pacific that fall into this trap. Having said all this, let us quickly add that we are generally apprehensive about quantitative research that reduces the complex act of teaching to a composite of variables.

While education research that excavates meaningful differences, as proposed here, can arguably be more difficult to achieve by quantitative researchers, this does not mean that any contextually informed qualitative studies will receive a free pass, either. Sometimes, such qualitative studies are so narrowly grounded in the local/national academic discourse and policy concerns, that the international relevance and significance of the studies remain unarticulated. Some of such studies appear to be an English translation of manuscripts originally prepared in a different language for domestic readers in a specific national context. Unfortunately, we editors are unfamiliar with the local research discourse and tradition and specific policy concerns that render these studies meaningful. While we acknowledge as problematic our limited understanding of different research traditions and policy discourses in different parts of Asia-Pacific, we also believe that contributors must engage with and dialogue with the broader international debates and research literature in order for their manuscripts to be accepted to APJTE.

To be absolutely clear, what we are calling for here is not an absorption into the international research discourse, where the specific “cases” of Asia-Pacific are forced into the widely accepted paradigm and way of framing. Rather, it is a call for a constructive engagement with the international research discourse, where the specific “cases” of Asia-Pacific are explored for generative tensions with and hence possible unlearning of what is generally taken for granted in the international research literature. We believe that this is one way in which we can make Asia-Pacific a powerful source of meaningful differences. That is, it enables Asia-Pacific teacher education research to particularise and peculiarise the global “norm,” pushing us to extend our imaginations beyond what is known. Foregrounding the different assumptions underpinning pedagogy in the Asia-Pacific, such research can help us raise a different set of questions about politics and ethics of education, too.

The present issue includes five different studies, which were undertaken in Australia, China, The Netherlands, and Vietnam. The topics examined range from student teachers’ motivations and ideals (Simonsz, Leeman and Veugelers), school-university partnership for pre-service teacher training (Tanti, Monteleone and Wong), support for secondary school year advisors (Eady, Joyner and Dean), parental involvement in online assessment tasks and its equity implications (Pu and Xu), and the use of observation for in-service teacher learning and development (O’Leary, Cui, Kiem, Dang, Nguyen, and Hoang). In light of the discussion developed thus far in this editorial, we invite the readers to ask the following questions: to what extent do these studies recognise the specific cultural, historical and institutional context of the study as a constitutive element – as opposed to just a background – of their research designs? To what extent do they help us understand the rich diversity of humanity and related diverse conceptualisations of what education is and what education is for around the world? What meaningful differences could the studies have presented to us had the research been conceptualised and designed differently?

This year marks the end of our three-year term as the APJTE editors. Earlier this year, we proposed a two-year extension of our term, and this has been approved by the ATEA executives. We are grateful for the continued trust placed upon us to lead this intellectual branch of ATEA and very much excited about what can be achieved in the next two years. With the introduction of the new emblem on the journal’s cover, we wanted to highlight what the continued use of the waves design symbolises for ATEA and then to seize this opportunity to reiterate our intellectual aspiration for APJTE. We sincerely hope that the messages contained in this editorial will be widely read by future contributors to the journal so that we can begin to publish many more articles from the Asia-Pacific that help us contribute to the pluriversity of education for which, we firmly believe, Asia-Pacific can act as a valuable intellectual resource.