Call for Papers: Teach For All and Global Teacher Education Reform

Education Policy Analysis Archives (EPAA) announces a call for papers for a special issue exploring Teach for All and Global Teacher Education Reform. The teacher education landscape is changing around the world, as global actors and discourses emerge in ways that are both novel and historically grounded. One such actor is Teach For All, the global organization that aims at redefining what it means to teach and to participate in the educational arena. Teach For All pursues this goal by serving as an umbrella network that provides strategic support to social entrepreneurs throughout the world that seek to adapt and implement the education reform ideals and organizational model of Teach For America. Since Teach For All was founded at the 2007 Clinton Global Initiative, 33 programs have appeared in countries as different as Argentina, Estonia, Germany, Pakistan and China, with varying levels of reach, impact, and integration/conflict with the established stakeholders. The degree of adaptation of the model has also varied extensively in response to differing local needs and policy contexts. This proposed Special Issue of EPAA/AAPE seeks to gain a deeper understanding of the workings of this specific type of teacher education reform by combining multiple theoretical frameworks and methodological approaches, and bringing together analyses of the global network as a whole alongside case studies of a few local programs.

Research on Teach For All and the programs residing under its umbrella is currently extremely scarce, with the exception of analyses of Teach For America, and to a lesser extent, Teach First (UK). However, the rapid expansion of the network, the considerable funding and support it is gathering both from public and private partners, and most importantly, the ways in which it is influencing public debate and policy around issues of teacher recruitment, retention and certification, the role of unions, learning assessment, and school policy demands a concerted effort at producing a critical mass of scholarship that will provide perspective, evidence and conceptual contributions to avoid a narrowing of the conversation. This special issue will be a central contribution towards these efforts, and will hopefully serve as a hub for scholars, policymakers, teachers and other stakeholders seeking to actively participate in the debate from an informed, thoughtful standpoint. Editors will consider both empirical and theoretical pieces, as well as a wide range of methodological approaches, including quantitative, qualitative and mixed methods. Editors will only consider papers written in English.

About the Journal: Celebrating its 22^nd year, EPAA is a peer-reviewed, open-access, international, multilingual, and multidisciplinary journal designed for researchers, practitioners, policy makers, and development analysts concerned with education policies. EPAA/AAPE accepts unpublished original manuscripts in English, Spanish and Portuguese without restriction as to conceptual and methodological perspectives, time or place.

Submission Information: All manuscripts should be submitted electronically through the EPAA website and follow the Journal’s submission guidelines: http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/. We will not consider manuscripts submitted for publication or published elsewhere.

Deadline: August 31, 2014

Publication date: March 2015

Early submissions are encouraged.

Guest Co-Editors: Daniel Friedrich, Teachers College, Columbia University (friedrich@tc.edu) and Rolf Straubhaar, University of California – Los Angeles (straubhaar@ucla.edu)