Intercultural Competence in the Work of Teachers

To successfully do their work, teacher educators need to put critical and ethical questions at the centre of their work. They need to challenge pre-service teachers to take a reflective and critical perspective on local curriculum, on school practice and policy, and on social justice issues in schools of increasing diversity. This requires a teacher educator to detach from their roles and become reflective researchers of their own practice. The chapter hopes to contribute to the emerging research literature of new critical perspectives on the relationship between teacher educators’ professional development and their practice. Teacher educators’ learning is essentially a social practice and lies in the interplay between social competence and personal experience, and as such is a dynamic, two-way relationship between people and the social learning systems in which they participate. Teacher educators want to see the development of critical and transformative learning in their pre-service teachers, as the key to enabling future transformative learning in school classrooms.