Are we Turning our Backs on Teacher Preparation? Lessons from France's System of Teacher Training

Abstract

Not surprisingly, in an increasingly neo-liberal context of international competition for educational prestige, conversations about teaching and teacher preparation have taken hold across the globe. Further complicating these matters is that ideas about teaching, learning, and learning to teach cannot be understood or analyzed in a vacuum; that is, without first exploring the history, evolution, purposes of, and tensions within the system in which they live. In this way, the realities of social change and globalization ensure that debates about what it means to prepare teachers wellin any contextare complex and enduring. In this article, I illuminate some of those complexities specifically as they relate to a comparison of university-based systems of teacher preparation in France and the United States. The issue of what it means to prepare teachers well for an increasingly diverse and global society is a prominent focus of this discussion.