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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”.

This scholarly work analyzes the previous 17 chapters in the International Teacher Education: Promising Pedagogies (Part C) volume. The purpose of the analysis is to distill the essence of what constitutes promising international teacher education pedagogies and how those pedagogies can best be shared. The chapters are reviewed according to the sections in which they appeared: pedagogies of working with multimodalities; pedagogies of partnerships and communities; pedagogies of teacher assessment; and vehicles for teacher education research, and dissemination. Key knowledge contributions from each chapter are emphasized. Similarities between the featured pedagogies are also highlighted. Finally, overarching themes are pinpointed.

Teacher education pedagogies face the complex challenge of attending to standards of professionalism while being sensitive to the local changing needs of professional learning. Encounters between these two aspects of professional work are manifested, for example, through the relations between innovative, “against the grain” pedagogies and standardized criteria and accountability to policy issues and measurement. This chapter characterizes various “contact zones” across participants, contexts and contents, called for by the four categories of pedagogies (working with multimodalities, partnerships and community learning, teacher assessment, and vehicles for dissemination) that comprise this volume of International Teacher Education: Promising Pedagogies (Part C). The four categories of pedagogies join five earlier categories of pedagogies (teacher leadership, diversity, family, social justice, and technology), which are found in International Teacher Education: Promising Pedagogies (Part B). These go in with yet another five categories of pedagogies (teacher selection, reflection, narrative knowing, teacher identity and mediation and mentoring), which are found in International Teacher Education: Promising Pedagogies (Part A).

Beginning with a brief overview of education in Australia from both an Aboriginal perspective and that which developed after the arrival of European settlers, this chapter asserts the significance of faith communities in shaping school and teacher education in ways which express their worldviews and moral purpose. Reflecting a Catholic understanding and focusing upon the principles of Catholic Social Teaching, teacher education programs at Australian Catholic University incorporate a holistic approach through their course structures, core curriculum and community engagement experiences. These come together as a pedagogy of promise within community engagement based teacher education. The rationale, examples and model discussed here are presented in ways which show the transformative power of this person- and value-centered pedagogy.

Set in the Indian context, this chapter speaks of the wider concern expressed in teacher education more generally, that of increasing the efficacy of preservice teacher education for social justice. In India, equity in education has been a central concern within the striving for social justice since independence in 1947. Schools now include vast numbers of culturally diverse students, who were once excluded. However, notions of “standardization” and “homogenization” that tend to ignore their diverse voice, make transaction in the classroom an alienating experience for them. These normative ideas are challenged by emerging multicultural and critical perspectives in education which recognize linguistic and cognitive diversity and the need to create spaces for learners’ self-expression by nurturing their cultural identities in school. My chapter analyzes the effect of the collision of these two perspectives on an in-service ESL teacher and the culturally diverse learners she teaches. It then examines in what ways this pedagogy is promising for preservice teacher education that seeks to promote teaching for social justice.

Interest in narrative pedagogies is growing. However, few studies have been conducted outside Western contexts. There remains a paucity of narrative research published by Japanese scholars, despite a pervasive culture of “teacher to teacher conversations,” storytelling, reflection, and action research by teachers in Japan. Thus, this research fills an important gap in the literature. It provides exemplars from preservice teacher education, higher education, and high school, as these educational milieus reflect the notion of “traveling stories” (Olson & Craig, 2009). We describe how this narrative pedagogy is interpreted from an insider’s point of view, through the voices of teacher education students, teachers, and teacher educators. In this process, students and teachers become curriculum-makers (Clandinin & Connelly, 1988; Craig & Ross, 2008), co-constructing knowledge, and reshaping teacher knowledge and identity. Narrative teacher education pedagogies resonate with Japanese teachers and play an important role in curriculum, teaching, and learning in Japan within our increasingly interconnected world. Furthermore, narrative relates favorably to many Japanese cultural practices, including kankei (interrelationships), kizuna (bonds), and kizuki (with-it-ness). These are important, integral, and tacit elements of Japanese teachers’ practices because they embody the “mind and heart” of their personal practical sense of knowing. Furthermore, these practices involve placing other people’s needs ahead of our own – an essential skill for global citizens of the 21st century.

The theory-practice problem manifests itself in education generally and in teacher education specifically. The divide is evident in diverse literatures internationally. The theory-practice split, which is one of many expressions used to describe the phenomenon, cannot be apprehended in a material sense. Instead, it emerges as a perennial problem that educators live through the stories they tell of their lives. This chapter particularly captures the struggle over rigor versus relevance in teacher education. It offers five different categories of pedagogies (teacher leadership, diversity, family, social justice, and technology), which together comprise this volume, International Teacher Education: Promising Pedagogies (Part B). These five pedagogies join five earlier categories of pedagogies (teacher selection, reflection, narrative knowing, teacher identity, and mediation and mentoring), which are found in International Teacher Education: Promising Pedagogies (Part A), and a new lineup of promising teacher education pedagogies that will appear in International Teacher Education: Promising Pedagogies (Part C). In all cases, the featured international pedagogies are not recipes to follow. Rather, they are contextualized artifacts that produce a synergy between teaching and learning and show promise where international transferability is concerned.

Hollie (2011) maintains that pedagogy is the most frequently overlooked facet of culturally responsive teaching. This chapter puts forward a promising pedagogy for working with diverse learners, particularly those from ethnic minorities. It opens by providing a brief background to the New Zealand context in which my research has been conducted, before moving on to identifying key UNESCO principles relating to cultural and linguistic diversity, and examining key tensions and challenges that impact on the development of relevant pedagogies for diversity in different international contexts. Relevant pedagogies identified in the international literature are then summarized. Next, examples from case study data on teachers in New Zealand schools are presented. These data highlight four key aspects of a promising pedagogy: knowing, doing, being, and belonging. Consideration of how these aspects influence the pedagogical objective of becoming suggests that, while generating relevant practices (doing) is more effective in combination with theoretical input (knowing), this is insufficient without concurrently engendering a sense of being with and belonging in diverse communities of learners. The final model for a promising pedagogy is therefore more than just a simple, linear process, but the components doing, knowing, being, and belonging are viewed as part of a dynamic, interactive, and cyclical model.

Part A of the three-book series on International Teacher Education: Promising Pedagogies focused on pedagogies of teacher selection, reflection, narrative ways of knowing, identity, and mentoring/mediation, while Part B of the three-volume set centered on pedagogies of preservice teacher leadership, diversity, parents/family, social justice, and technology. In this book, Part C of the trilogy, pedagogies of multimodalities, partnerships/communities, and teacher assessment are presented, along with vehicles for teacher education research and dissemination. To end the trilogy of books, ideas having to with traveling stories (Olson & Craig, 2009), the theory-practice split, and the praxical nature of pedagogies are summarized. Sustainability, hope, and the future are also discussed. A Traveling Pedagogies figure, with input from all of the chapters in the three-volume set, is presented to conclude the International Teacher Education: Promising Pedagogies series.