Conference Agenda

International organizations (Akiba & LeTendre, 2017) and national governments (Akiba, 2013) routinely identify teachers as the solution to educational problems. Most recently, the Santiago Consensus –World Summit on Teachers, August 2025 -- advocated that teachers, worldwide, must be prepared to tackle multiple crises, e.g. “sustainable development, gender equality, global citizenship and human rights,” and that this will require teachers to strengthen their “digital and AI competencies.”

Running throughout this document (and similar works, see (OECD, 2024; United Nations Educational, 2024) is a vision of the teaching profession as a global solution to the educational “poly-crisis.” As a mass profession (LeTendre et al., 2025), the national teaching force is ideally suited to provide local responses to global issues (LeTendre & Wiseman, 2015). Yet, teachers remain marginalized from both academic research and policy production (Tatto & Menter, 2019). In this session we focus on the construction of a “global teacher” via policy mechanisms, arguing that such a frame is flawed. Drawing on our work on teachers, the state and transnational policy making (LeTendre et al., 2026; LeTendre et al., 2025) we explore other imaginaries of teachers (Helgetun & Coppe, 2026; Helgetun & Dumay, 2020), and address how problems of langage, two-level games, and digitalization at the global level disrupt the meaningful incorporation of local knowledge and practice in policy considerations.

Speaker 1: LeTendre will summarize the evidence on how the role of teacher that has developed within national cultural contexts across multiple periods of globalization. Using the Teach for All movement in Japan as a central example, this presentation highlights how national differences affected the diffusion of New Public Management style reforms. The presentation identifies cultural logics of teaching (e.g. responsibility for social and emotional well-being, moral development, critical relationship to the state (Beamte, fonctionnaire, 公務員) that are problematic to “advancing global cooperation and solidarity”(Santiago Consensus, 2025). The paper looks at how older imaginaries of Japanese teachers conflict with imaginaries promoted by multilateral agencies and INGOs.

Speaker 2: Helgetun will summarize the evidence on how misconceptions of globalization, problems of langage, and insights into two-level game theory can help us recast our understanding of how teachers are misconstrued in international policy discourses. Focusing on examples from Norway, France and England, this presentation develops a theoretical model that situates local dynamics within national educational fields and identifies key constructs (pedagogy, didactics, curriculum) that drive important differences often ignored in global levels Drawing on the concept of an imaginary of the teacher (Helgetun & Coppe, 2026), this paper shows how conceptualising the teacher as an imagined social construct that differs between contexts has significant implications for global teacher policy and education discourse.

Speaker 3: Antonia Wuff, Director of Research, Policy and Advocacy, Education International, will reflect on role of international teacher union efforts, and how union mobilization can provide better insights for global policy discussions around the professional development of teacher, including how the rapid expansion of AI around the world has multiplied the “poly-crisis” teachers must contend with.

Speaker 4: Dr. Soo-yong Byun will respond to the three presentations and will reflect on how the current crises facing Korean education and political tensions over the nature of public school is affecting how the teacher profession is evolving.