Abstract

The intensified political focus on teachers internationally – often centred on specific notions of ‘quality teaching’ and ‘teacher effectiveness’ – over the last decades has been accompanied by a surge in the research literature dedicated to the teaching professions in the context of globalization. Forming part of the five-year TeachersCareers project based at Université Catholique de Louvain, the literature review introduced in this paper maps this emerging scholarly field and identifies the multiple strands that help to constitute it.

The review is ‘configuring’ – as opposed to ‘aggregative’ – in the sense that it seeks to configure, or arrange, the existing literatures and their findings. A main challenge in this respect therefore concerns the identification of groups of relevant titles, as a basis for identifying key themes and major schools of thought and their variations, including minority views and dissent. Moreover, the review aspires to be systematic in following a series of distinctive stages in terms of delimiting the scope of the review, defining inclusion criteria, designing search strategies, screening for relevance, and in the coding and mapping of the relevant literature. In doing so, the review combines hand search of identified key contributions to the literature with searches in the Scopus and ERIC electronic databases. Guided by the question how the ‘teacher problem’ is represented in peer-reviewed literature since 2000, the review outlines and discusses the main strands of the literature, as defined by the strands’ distinctive conceptions of globalisation, the nature of policy and governance, and teachers as social and professional groups with certain roles in education and societies.