The difficult dynamic of teacher educators as policy actors: considerations for counter-conduct

The literature on initial teacher education highlights a crisis facing teacher educators, one which threatens our own epistemic legitimacy and relevance in educational discourses, as market-economy mandates and political surveillance intensify and dominate what it means to be and do teacher education. Given this macro-level concern, we, as teacher educators, explore and problematise the recent mandate that all initial teacher education programmes in Ireland must include a Global Citizenship Education (GCE) perspective. Drawing on a theoretical framework focusing on power relations and the possibility of counter-conduct, we focus on our everyday practices as teacher educators and how our responses offer an affective insight into our political role as policy actors in initial teacher education. In doing so, we identify three categories of responses and discuss these from individual and institutional perspectives, while offering relevant contemporary examples of how previous mandates were enacted. In each response, we consider the resultant form that GCE experiences may take as a result of our translations. In conclusion, we work towards and highlight the importance of creating dialogic affective spaces which must seek to continue and contribute to educational conversations rather than dominate discourse.