International teacher education: Promising pedagogies concluding chapter (Part A)

In this chapter, Cheryl Craig and Lily Orland-Barak, editors of International Teacher Education: Promising Pedagogies (Part A), expound on the traveling pedagogies theme as well as the theory-practice chasm, and conclude the edited volume with a model capturing the nature of fruitful, contextualized international pedagogies. Throughout the discussion, they highlight connections between and among potentially promising pedagogical approaches documented by the contributing authors whose countries of origins differ. As authors of this chapter and editors of this book, they claim that promising pedagogies have the potential to "travel" to other locales if their conditions of enactment are locally grounded, deliberated, and elaborated. This contextualization adds to the fluidity of knowledge mobilization to contexts different from the original one. Furthermore, all of the pedagogies have a praxical character to them, which means they strive to achieve a dialectical relationship between theory and practice. At the same time, they address local complexities in a reflective, deliberative, and evidence-based manner while acknowledging connections/contradictions in discourses and daunting policy issues/constraints/agendas. Against this "messy" backdrop, a model for traveling international pedagogies is proposed. The model balances a plethora of complexities, on the one hand, with the seemingly universal demand for uniformity, on the other hand. Through ongoing local, national, and international deliberation and negotiation, quality international pedagogies of potential use and value become readied for "travel".