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Session code: 2-3-A203

Title: Is Culture paramount? Considerations on Teacher education reforms in England and France.

Contributer/s: REGIS MALET

Abstract : Within Europe, school remains one of the institutions over which nation-states still retain a degree of decision making. It is all the more important in a context of globalisation, sometimes associated with devolution as in the UK. In both England and France, education has been a massive engine of integration and a key part of the "nation building" process ensuring as it did the transmission of a distinctive nation's cultural heritage which contributed to creating a cohesion and a sense of community among its people (Green, 2002).

Yet, even in countries with strong national identities and cultural traditions, cross-national convergence in educational policy and a standardisation agenda have been stimulated by supranational organisations acting in the field of education (Arnove, 1999). This prompted some to consider the European space as a unique laboratory to investigate different ways of addressing a common concern for ensuring quality teacher education in order to respond to the needs and challenges of today's society (Calderhead, 1997).

We will focus in this paper on the complexity of the interplay between the global and the local in matters of educational policy, more specifically with regards to initial teacher education in Europe, where despite a convergence in the nature of the challenges in this domain, solutions nevertheless remain specific and in keeping with the cultural tradition of education of the host country (Gauthier, 2002). In this context of change and reconfiguration in global, national and local interrelationships, we will consider how a common agenda is mediated by local and national history and politics in two European countries: England and France.