The Global Imperative for Teacher Education: Opportunities for Comparative and International Education

In the context of globalization, teacher education has to respond to the global imperative by helping pre-service teachers develop global consciousness and awareness (Apple, 2011; Zhao, 2010). This paper addresses this imperative by first identifying the spaces for global competencies in teacher education standards at the national, regional, state, and institutional levels. Next, we analyze two universities' attempts to internationalize teacher education programs and demonstrate how the lack of specificity in teacher education standards emerge as gaps in the curriculum and in pre-service teacher learning. We argue that re-fashioned comparative and international education courses could address these gaps by developing students' conceptual understandings of global processes and their impact on education. The ultimate purpose of such courses will be to challenge pre-service teachers' ethnocentric assumptions about education and to foster a planetary relational view necessary for the development of a more just modernity on the global scale.