Globalisation women's work and teacher education: A cross-national analysis

Abstract

This article examines how broader international transitions and changes in teacher education are manifested locally, as lived experience, in female teacher educators' working lives.Using cross-national data from Britain and Canada, it illustrates how broad international changes are redefining - particularly through the social regulation of gender conflicts in the workplace - the terms and conditions upon which women are expected to function as 'workers' in the changing contexts of teacher education. Particular attention is paid to intensified research cultures, assessments of professionalism and fiscal restraints. Teacher education is seen as a key example where tensions surrounding female workers are often complex and contradictory, and where reforms have been implemented cross-nationally in a profession which maintains very specific historical and local patterns of work.Key theoretical questions include: how might women's accounts of work in changing teacher education contexts reveal something about the nature of the relationship between women and the institutional processes through which they may be constructed as gendered workers in a globalizing/marketising academy? What are the differential or local effects of larger shifts and transitions in teacher education internationally? How might we begin to theorise differently about women's work in the 'social work' professions as a response to larger cross-national neo-liberal restructuring trends, and what might this mean for a feminist sociology of female work?. © 2002, Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.