Worldly Critical Theorizing in Euro-American Centered Teacher Education? Preparing Bilingual Teacher-Researcher Theorists for the Twenty-First Century

Abstract

Can Australian teacher education programs which continue to invest heavily in Euro-American theories produce educators for the twenty-first century, one which is increasingly Asia-centred and China-focused? It is possible to undertake an extensive critique of Australia’s Euro-American centred teacher education programs without privilege, and thereby reproducing this agenda. Moving beyond the limitations of this negative moment, this chapter presents a positive move in critique through a meta-analysis of the educational principles and pedagogies for preparing bilingual teacher-researcher theorists for making worldly linguistic connectivities and critical theorizing. The focus is on doing so here and now; not deferring it into the distant future. The review of the research literature, that is the historical developments in this field, indicates that despite assertions to the contrary, there is little evidence of the joining together of Western and non-Western critical theorizing in Australian teacher education. For this reason the methodology of educational research for critique is employed in this meta-analysis of the educational principles and pedagogies of Research Oriented School-based Eurasian Teacher Education (ROSETE) Partnership. The educational principles proposed in this chapter include intellectual equality, declassifying the theory/data divide that privileges Euro-American critical theorizing over the rest; the presupposition of intellectual e/quality, and the verification of intellectual equality. Pedagogies for worldly linguistic connectivities and critical theorizing concern what teacher-researchers from China can do, can say, and can be in Australia.

This research reported here has been supported by funding from the Australian Research Council’s Discovery Project (DP0988108)

1 Introduction

Despite Australian universities having policies for internationalising education, there continue to be pedagogical difficulties and uncertainties with this agenda. In its glossy marketing brochure, one Australian university declared that when developing its teacher education programs, it “undertook extensive research into the changing environment not only in Australia, but also Europe and North America, to produce the best educators of today and the future” (University of Western Education 2012, p. 5).¹ Apparently there is little interest in using non-Western critical thereotical resources to see what new questions these might stimulate.

When he drew on concepts from his South Asian intellectual heritage, Nobel Laureate, human development scholar, Amartya Sen (2009) felt his book, The Idea of Justice, vulnerable to the misfortunes of writing for readers such as Australia’s best educators who are schooled in Euro-American theories. Accordingly, Amartya Sen slipped in a qualification that revealed his consciousness of the reluctance among just such Australian educators to engage with anything but Euro-American theoretical tools. Sen (2009, pp. xiii–xiv) wrote, ‘one of the unusual – some will probably say eccentric – features of this book compared with others writing on the theory of justice is the extensive use that I have made of ideas from non-Western societies.’ Not only does Sen use thereotical ideas from ‘non-Western societies,’ but in doing so suggests the possibilities of there being ‘non-Western languages and theories.’

Sen’s presumption of a separation between Western, Southern or Eastern theorizing falls prey to the charge of creating binaries. Those with the power and privilege of Western intellectual hegemony would dare him to speak of an inseparable, multiple, overlapping hybridity. It may be the case that national cultural – economic boundaries are becoming fuzzier and permeable due to transnational flows of people and ideas. However, there is no evidence that this has generated significant flows of non-Western languages and critical theoretical tools via non –Western students into Australian teacher education at the University of Western Education, or Australia more generally (for an exception see Singh 2009). Australian teacher education privileges and reproduces the global hegemony of Euro-American theories and values Euro-American methods of knowledge production, while marginalising alternative funds of critical theories, how they might be accessed, and how these might be critiqued.

My research is working to redistribute the sense and sensibilities of Australian teacher education. The unidirectional theoretical currents in this field have informed my interventionist critiques of Australia’s privileging of Euro-American theories. This has led me to develop approaches to the education of bilingual teacher-researchers that create opportunities for them to use their linguistic repertoire to engage in critically theorizing Australian education (Singh 2010). My research focuses on what can be achieved by making the internationalisation of Australian teacher education a two-way learning process that begins by ignoring intellectual inequality (Singh 2009). This means ignoring various claims to inequality. These claims include the belief that non-Western students are incapable of critique; that criticality exists solely in the West, and that non-Western students can only learn critique from Western sources. Two-way learning calls for international students from China (and other students proficient in Han Chinese) to critically examine the diverse array of critical assets in twenty-first century China. These include contemporary, traditional, foreign and local (Ryan 2011). ‘This means bringing this intellectual capital to bear in the production and flow of research-based knowledge as much as the dialogic education of transnational educational researchers’ (Singh 2009, p. 187). Overall, this research addresses the recognised need Australian teacher education has for new paradigms and mindsets for critical theorizing.

This chapter develops a critique that argues for Anglo-Australian teacher education to extend beyond the Euro-American theories it currently privileges to make non-Western language and theoretical assets count as valid knowledge in teacher education research, research education and teacher education programs. The research question addressed in this chapter is what educational principles and pedagogies might inform the work of teacher educators in Australia interested in creating conditions permitting what I call worldly ² critical theorizing in Australian teacher education.³ To explore this question further, it is necessary to clarify several key terms, none of which have uncontested unitary definitions.

First, the idea of worldly critical theorizing keeps open the problem of defining a bounded category of ‘participants’. For our purposes here the participants in these worldly critical theorizing are those whose theoretical assets have had no part in Australia’s Euro-American teacher education, but who claim that these tools do count. In Rancière’s (2007) terms, worldly critical theorizing can be thought of as ‘the continual renewal of the [intellectual] actors and of the forms of their [theoretical] actions, the ever-open possibility of the fresh emergence of [new parties]’ (p. 61). Thus, the concept worldly critical theorizing creates the expectation that teacher-researchers will engage in the multidirectional exchange of critical theoretical tools. This situates the internationalisation of Australia’s Euro-American teacher education in relation to the boundaries and terrain that both inhibit and inspire the redistribution of the sense and sensibilities for internationalising teacher education.

Second, the internationalisation of Australian teacher education is defined as extending and deepening the capabilities of bilingual teacher-researchers from non-Western countries to use theoretical tools from their homelands in their studies of Australian teaching and learning⁴ (Juffs 1996; Pinker 1989). This moves beyond advocacy for deferring the realisation of equality into the future. The educational starting point begins with recognising that international students can access ideas that may be given a theoretical sense for use in scholarly arguments as analytical tools. Here the educational investment is in creating intellectual contexts for the transnational exchange and understanding of worldly theoretical tools. This definition includes worldly theoretical tools – metaphors, conceptual categories and images (Turner 2010) – and positions worldly critical theorizing as a normal feature of Australian teacher education.

Third, for the purposes of this study educational principles and pedagogies are conceived of as a matter of informed professional reasoning about the many uncertainties associated with planning, enacting, monitoring and reflecting on the challenging opportunities for internationalising Australian teacher education through worldly critical theorizing. Conceiving of educational principles and pedagogies in this way resonates with Ranciere’s (1991) lessons concerning the uncertainties experienced by a French teacher who had to teach Flemish students although neither party knew the other’s language or potential theoretical assets. The lesson being that while monolingual Anglophone teacher educators in Australia may not know the languages or have knowledge of the theoretical assets of their non-Western students, beginning with the assumption of intellectual e/quality provides a useful starting point for engaging these teacher-researchers in using non-Western theoretical tools⁵ in their analyses of evidence of Australian teaching and learning (Singh 2010).

The study reported in this chapter is part of an Australian Research Council Project investigating the potential for new approaches to Australian teacher education that prepare bilingual teacher-researchers for worldly critical theorizing. It focuses on the intellectual uses of non-Western theoretical tools by international students from China for analysing Australian teaching and education. They can position themselves as bilingual, intellectual agents engaged in the progressive internationalisation of Australian teacher education, while securing their participation in the world’s multilingual knowledge societies. The power of involving worldly critical theorizing in initial teacher education resides in engaging the intellectual assets of these students and turning these into analytical tools – concepts, metaphors and diagrams – for their studies of Australian students’ learning. This research is testing the potency of the argument that intellectual equality in teacher education begins with the assumption that students from continental Asia – specifically in this study international students from China – are capable of scholarly argumentation and, that non-Western intellectual assets provide them with the theoretical tools for doing so. Informed by Rancière’s (1991) argument this research has taken intellectual equality as a point of departure for the education of these student teacher-researchers, rather than an end or goal.

The aims of this chapter are twofold. First, to report on the development of a novel analytical framework for crafting educational principles to inform worldly critical theorizing for the internationalisation of Anglo-Australian teacher education, as a basis for further developments in East/West, South/North, East/South theoretical interactions. Second, to identify key analytical concepts that can inform pedagogies for research-oriented, school-based Eurasian teacher education so as to makes intellectual use of the worldly critical theoretical tools possessed or accessible by students.

2 Redistributing the Sense and Sensibilities of Critical Educational Theorizing

The Euro-American theory that is privileged in Australian teacher education now contends with issues concerning the place of worldly critical theorizing in preparing teacher-researchers for the twenty-first century, which sees the revitalisation of China as a leading global player. Australia’s carefully crafted teacher education programs are well-bounded by nation-centred regulatory mechanisms (Marginson 2002). They are largely dependent on Euro-American theories of education as mediating epistemic tools. The increasing ethno-linguistic diversity among students is not evident in the ethno-demographic features of the teaching workforce which has remained stable. However, labour shortages and mismatches are leading to gradual changes in the ethno-linguistic profile of teacher educators.

Preparing bilingual teacher-researchers for worldly critical theorizing is not without problems. In part, this is due to the vague and contradictory agenda for internationalising higher education (Adams 2004; Major 2005). More than this, a driving premise for the internationalisation of teacher education in Australia is that this means bringing Western, Anglophone knowledge to the intellectual life of the world (Kettle 2005; Scheyvens et al. 2003; Skyrme 2007). In this context, progressing Australia’s national priority for increased research-based worldly critical theorizing with Asia invites contempt from cosmopolitan teacher educators in Australia (Andrews 2007; Arkoudis 2007; Bullen and Kenway 2003; Hasrati; 2005; Kim 2007; McClure 2007). A key problem for Australia is that its nationally regulated, nation-centred teacher education system is ill-equipped to engage in worldly critical theorizing. Moreover, there are few research education programs that provide teacher-researchers with long-term, large scale rationale for serious-minded engagement with international students from Asia in enabling such worldly critical theorizing.

The premise that the internationalisation of teacher education in Australia means bringing Euro-American, Anglophone knowledge to the intellectual life of the world is contested (Singh and Han 2010). Approaches to the internationalisation of teacher education in Australia that reproduce Asian academic dependency (Alatas 2006) are being contested by Anglophone and bilingual teacher educators through pedagogies for the production of knowledge through worldly theoretical interactions (Singh 2009, 2011). For instance, in the face of the nationalised regulation, Arber (2009), a Jewish-Australian teacher educator, argues the internationalisation of Australian teacher education “require[s] new cross-cultural and linguistic skills and knowledges [that] bring into play new cross-national, intercultural and cross-racial complexities” (p. 175). For this, the most basic Australian notions of teacher education are being challenged. Minimally, this means building the capabilities of teacher-researchers in Australia to make an original contribution to knowledge through worldly critical theorizing that engage Western and Eastern, Northern and Southern languages and theories. In Australia bilingual teacher educators such as Takayama (2011) invite student-teachers from the “non-Western, non-English-speaking ‘peripheries’ to challenge the unquestioned ‘universality’ of knowledge produced in the Western academic centres so the process of academic knowledge production and circulation can be altered” (pp. 2–3).

Thus, an alternative premise explored in this chapter is that the internationalisation of teacher education in Australia – as elsewhere – entails bringing knowledge to life through East/West, South/North, East/South theoretical interactions.⁶ There are, of course, a range of socio-political factors, structural constraints and motivational problems affecting the portability of theoretical ideas from one national field of production to another. This applies as much to the flow of Bourdieu’s (1999) ideas from France to the USA and Australia as it does to the flow of theoretical tools from China to Australia (Singh and Huang 2013). Various studies have explored whether and how teachers use the knowledge students can access through their intellectual community in order to improve their academic achievements. For example, differences between teachers and students in terms of their ethnicity and class meant that teachers lacked the professional capabilities for linking academic knowledge with students’ funds of community knowledge (Martin-Jones and Saxena 2003). This lack of professional expertise is reflected in cases where bilingual teacher-aides are employed to use their students’ home language to access funds of community knowledge to improve the students’ reading. Further, Monzó and Rueda (2003) ascertained that teachers’ ethno-linguistic commitment to their own language and knowledge militated against the students’ learning a second language, and the teachers developing pedagogies for using languages othered by English. Moreover, in each case, where such community knowledge was engaged, the focus tended to be at the level of data about the community rather than the community’s theoretical tools.

Why focus on international students from China? There are several reasons for selecting international students from China studying in Australia to be teacher-researchers as participants in this research program. First, studying Australian teacher education’s intellectual engagement and theoretical interactions with China is integral to Australia’s national research priority which aims to better understanding Asia in a China-focused world. These investigations inform improvements in the educational principles and pedagogies Australian teacher education can employ for worldly critical theorizing with non-White, non-Western.

Second, compared with other OECD countries, a “relatively low proportion of Australia’s higher degree [research] students are international students” (Bradley 2008, p. 12). The majority of these students are from Asia. In 2007, there were 1,011 students from Asia studying for higher research degrees at either the Masters or Doctoral levels. Of these students, there were 326 research students from China (AEI 2007). In 2010, 152,826 (27.2 %) of Australia’s international students (n = 561, 269) were from China, tripling the figure of 48,088 8 years previous (AEI 2010). However, most “international students are concentrated in a narrow range of subject fields, [specifically] 67 % of the Chinese student cohort of 58,588 students [in 2007 were] undertaking degrees [in management and commerce disciplines, while] only 3.6 % [of international students were] undertaking a research higher degree” (Bradley 2008, pp. 12, 92, 93). To date, the 40 Chinese students who have participated in the study reported in this chapter are all researching teacher professional learning and strategies for improving students’ learning.

Claims on Kant’s Germanic cosmopolitanism promise a future in which rising generations of teachers may yet experience a more liberal and moral Australian teacher education (Marginson and Sawir 2011). This distant future is inspired by multicultural hybridized people, with multiple cross-border personal affiliations – globally mobile ever-becoming people. However, Marginson and Sawir (2011, pp. 54–55) recall that cosmopolitan theorizing tends to be “culturally essentialist and Western-centric, [a] cosmopolitanism ill equipped to accommodate a plurality of positions.” This cosmopolitanism is ill equipped to accommodate a plurality of worldly critical theorizing that any presupposition of intellectual equality in non-Western thought would verify. Thus, it is “unable to provide a medium for an open dialogue between differing traditions” (Marginson and Sawir 2011, p. 55), that is differing non-Western traditions of cosmopolitan theorizing.

Marginson and Sawir (2011) provide no evidence from Australian teacher education of any steering towards relational cosmopolitan theorizing, towards Western and non-Western theoretical connectivity. There is no evidence of robust capabilities for adapting and reinterpreting foreign imports of non-Western theorises of cosmopolitanism. Cosmopolitanism is not a means by which Australian and global educational cultures are mediated, where theoretical dialogues between the West and the non-West are being initiated, where trans-boundary issues of theory production are being resolved by those who claim to see above the Euro-American theoretical parapets.

Others are working within a markedly different framework, one based on the presupposition and verification of intellectual equality, here and now (see for example Grant 2010). This means working with non-Western students already present in Australia’s Euro-American centred teacher education programs on pedagogically driven worldly linguistic connectivities and theoretical interactions. Here the work of teacher educators is forming bilingual teacher-researcher theorists capable of producing empirically informed research-based knowledge that mediates Western and non-Western linguistic and theoretical contact zones. Their research education program and pedagogies enable non-Western and Western student-teachers to enter into direct theoretical and linguistic relations with the different Western perspectives available in English in the context of Australian teacher education to undertake their own formation as bilingual teacher-researcher theorists.

Studies of the interplay of educational principles and pedagogies for engaging worldly critical theorising are well-overdue. To investigate this phenomenon, this chapter reports key findings from a case study of Chinese teacher-researchers using Chinese – and Euro-American – theoretical assets to extend and deepen their capabilities for scholarly argumentation through critical theorising. This chapter is part of a larger body of work that engages in a critical examination of the complexities of internationalising Anglophone, Euro-American centred teacher education through engaging in East/West, South/North linguistic and theoretical interactions. The next section explains the developmental, interventionist process of educational research for critique used to generate educational principles and pedagogies for internationalising Australian teacher education through theoretical engagement with student teacher-researchers from China.

3 Educational Research for Critique

This chapter reports on a longitudinal, large scale research project which is investigating the prospects for worldly linguistic connectivities and critical theorising in Australian teacher education (Singh 2005; Singh et al. 2007; Singh and Shrestha 2008). Specifically, this research has focused on building the communal capacity of Australian teacher education for having Chinese teacher-researchers advancing claims of intellectual equality through their linguistic repertoire and capabilities for critical theorising. This has meant developing educational principles and pedagogies for deepening and extending the capabilities of Chinese bilingual teacher-researchers to engage in scholarly argumentation through critical theorising (Singh 2009; Singh 2010; Singh and Han 2010). This has involved studying bilingual teacher-researchers’ uses of their linguistic repertoire to elaborate on diverse concepts, metaphors and images as critical theoretical tools so as to make original contributions to knowledge about education, teaching and learning in Australia (Singh 2011; Singh and Cui 2011; Singh and Meng 2011). This research is theoretically ambitious and empirically rigorous in its employment of observational and analytic methodologies as part of a developmental, interventionist research process, namely educational research for critique (Singh and Huang 2013). Methodologically, the aim is to create a richer, more robust intellectual enterprise in critical theorising, better able to prepare twenty-first century teacher-researchers for worldly linguistic and theoretical interactions – East/West, South/North, East/South.

This study addresses the difficult problem of making a difference in the educational principles and pedagogies for worldly critical theorising in Australian teacher education. The method of educational research for critique presupposes that researching the internationalisation of Australian teacher education should be an interactive undertaking, constructed through intellectual encounters and knowledge exchange between Australia’s teacher education researchers and bilingual teacher-researcher theorists from China. This method is oriented to making pedagogical changes and curriculum innovations often with the benefit of insightful, challenging critiques (and some quiet resistance and some outright contempt). Educational research for critique works against the non-interventionist bias in much critical sociology of education in Australian teacher education. Of course, this method does allow for the use of case study procedures, ethnographic techniques and action research.

Among the multiple change mechanisms employed in this study are a longitudinal tripartite partnership which has woven multiple strands into a mutually beneficial collaboration to explore and meet complementary needs. Since 2006, the New South Wales Department of Education and Communities (Western Sydney Region), the Ningbo Municipal Education Bureau (China), and the University of Western Sydney (Centre for Educational Research) have developed this community capacity building partnership. The Research Oriented, School Engaged Teacher Education (ROSETE) Partnership⁷ has generated new ways of working based on joint commitment to training volunteers as teacher-researchers to make Chinese learnable for second language learners.

Educational research for critique has its theoretical underpinnings in democratic research dialogue (Toulmin and Gustavsen 1996), development work-team research (Engestrom 2000) and co-operative action-oriented inquiry (Heron and Reason 2006). Methodologically, this project is engaged in an on-going developmental, cooperative research process between Australian teacher educators and teacher-researchers from China. Together, the team made changes in our (weekly) research training workshops whereby the beginning teacher-researchers and researcher educators learnt to engage Chinese theoretical tools in analysing evidence of Australian students’ learning. Over time these expanded to provide a basis for reconceptualising the principles and pedagogies for Australian teacher education that engages worldly critical theorising.

Studies in the field of internationalising Australian education using the method of educational research for critique are limited. However, this method was used because it enables collaborative, worldly critical theorising. This made it possible to engage bilingual teacher-researchers from China in making scholarly uses of Chinese theoretical tools in their Australian education through developing their capabilities for worldly theoretical interactions. The use of this research method meant that it has been possible to enhance the Chinese beginning teacher-researchers’ intellectual agency for engaging in worldly critical theorising so that they could pursue educational goals, research objectives and career aspirations that are socially valued and they have reason to value and advance (Sen 2006). It was assumed that as active research agents rather than passive learners these student-teachers could engage the critical theoretical knowledge available in their intellectual communities. The aim was to avoid the tendency to mine these communities for data, and instead to have them engage and elaborate critical theoretical tools of their homeland.

Engaging in research ‘with’ research higher degree students is a major challenge for Australian teacher education. However, a key aspect of data/theory generation in this study is that these bilingual teacher-researchers are co-researchers and co-authors. Rather than doing research ‘on’ these teacher-researchers, this research benefitted from their concepts for engaging in worldly critical theorising. The investigating teacher educators cooperate as part of the research team with these teacher-researchers to document their developing capabilities for participating in scholarly argumentation using critical theoretical tools from China. In addition teacher-researchers (n = 56) and teacher educators (n = 53) at five Australian universities were interviewed, while another 13 students participated in focus groups about their research education. Also as part of this study theses (n = 17) by Chinese research students were analysed; these had been submitted to seven of Australian universities (excluding the University of Western Education) in the field of education between 1998 and 2011. They were retrieved from the publicly accessible Australasian Digital Theses Database. Further, a purposive sample (n = 159) of Australian teacher educators and international research students completed a questionnaire modelled on the Strategy Inventory for Language Learning (Oxford and Burry-Smith 1995).

To frame the design, development and refinement of data collection instruments for this study, Lefebvre’s (1991) key ideas of perception, experience and conception were substantially reworked. Perception focuses on the teacher-researchers’ and teacher educators’ presuppositions and advocacy about the dialectical interaction between the routines of their daily realities, and their deciphering of projected career trajectories, labour migration routes and knowledge networks. Experience refers to the participants’ use and inhabiting of the complex and distinctive layers of their scholarly life. Conception refers to intellectually worked out categories, metaphors and images, such as symbols and schematics (Turner 2010) that were spoken and/or written about by the teacher-researchers and teacher educators. Conception is the dominant focus of research-based knowledge production in modern societies, whether it is China or Australia. It was assumed that taken together, the participants’ concepts may not constitute a coherent whole, but depending upon circumstances, would be sufficiently interconnected for the participants to move from consideration of one to another without confusion. Thus, an individual’s perceptions may or may not be logical and cohesively conceptualised, and thus not critiqued on these grounds.

This research has provided accounts of alternative ways of engaging in worldly critical theorising in Australian teacher education by making scholarly uses of Chinese theoretical tools – categories, metaphors and images. For instance, Meng (2011) has analysed evidence of the possibilities for teacher-researchers from China to use their intellectual assets for critically theorising their evidence of Australian education, and explored what might be achieved if Australian teacher education operated under a presupposition of intellectual e/quality.

The next two sections of this chapter reports the outcomes of a meta-analysis of findings to date from this research. It seeks to answer the question: what educational principles and pedagogies might promote worldly theoretical interactions in Australian teacher education.

4 Intellectual E/quality as a Key Principle for Australian Teacher Education

The meta-analysis presented in this section focuses on the concept of intellectual equality as a key educational principle for the redistribution of the sense and sensibilities of Australian teacher education. It elaborates on the goals for Australian teacher education of declassifying data/theory divides; taking as the educational starting point the presupposition of intellectual equality, and making a key educational task the verification of intellectual equality.

4.1 Teacher Education Goal: Declassifying the Theory/Data Divide

By putting intellectual equality at the beginning, a goal for Australian teacher education is to enable teacher-researchers from non-Western countries to escape from their marginalised intellectual status as data sources. To do so they must prove that they belong to, and can use critical theoretical tools from non-Western countries for analytical purposes. That is to say the goal of preparing bilingual teacher-researcher theorists for worldly theoretic-linguistic interactions is to declassify the theory/data divide between the West and the East. This involves working with them to critique taken-for-granted presumptions of intellectual inequality that position Europe and North America as the rightful source of theory and non-Western countries as sites for data mining.

Declassification means that the circumstances of non-Western teacher-researchers’ lives do not necessarily stop them from scholarly argumentation or critical theorising. That they are from China does not stop them from using the critical theoretical tools from their homelands for engaging in scholarly disputation – having these concepts subjected to international critique. Declassification means that differences in educational cultures and intellectual assets are not regarded as depriving teacher-researchers from China of the capabilities required for critical theorising. To realise the goal of declassifying theory/data divide – West as the source of critical theory, and the non-West as resource for data mining (Alatas 2006; Chen 2010; Connell 2007) – means putting teacher-researchers from Australia’s neighbouring region on the road to the worldly critical theorizing. This means they must generate evidence and theoretically informed arguments. Scholarly arguments in teacher education are grounded in values that lay claim to intellectual equality. This means making non-Western critical theorizing count. Participation in international scholarly debates is necessary to having non-Western ideas subjected to critique, as much as persuading others that they too value and engage in worldly critical theorizing.

4.2 Teacher Education Starting Point: Presupposition of Intellectual e/quality

Here the goal of internationalising Australian teacher education is to declassify the divide between Western critical theory and the non-West as data mining sites through worldly critical theorising. Therefore, then a useful starting point is the presupposition that teacher-researchers from China have the linguistic repertoire and argumentative capabilities, and that China have critical theoretical assets for contributing to this undertaking. What then is meant by this idea of “presupposition of intellectual equality”?

First, it is important to note what is not meant by this concept. The concept of “intellectual equality” does not involve proving that all students are of equal intelligence. Thus, intellectual equality has nothing to do with presuming that students from China are able to achieve the same test results as those from Western, Anglophone nations. The “presupposition of intellectual equality” assumes that within China – and every other non-Western country – there are present critical theoretical tools (categories, metaphors and diagrams), and that people there possess the capabilities for using these in scholarly arguments.⁸

The presupposition is that non-Western countries have critical theoretical tools – and their peoples have the capabilities for critique. Given the research literature on international students from Asia, this might be thought as rather a romantic notion (Chan et al. 2011; Tian and Low 2011). Australian universities “insist that critical thinking is a requirement of quality academic work while academics bemoan the lack of a critical approach to study by international students in general, and Asian students in particular” (Egege and Kutieleh 2004, p. 75).

However, evidence from Africa for instance (Akiwowo 1990; Horton 1971; Lawuyi and Taiwo 1990; Makinde 1990) shows that non-Western intellectuals do elaborate and use critical theoretical tools for engaging in scholarly disputation. Studies such as these indicate that non-Western countries are bereft of critical theoretical assets or argumentative capabilities, or that such intellectual assets and capabilities are the preserve of Western countries (also see Alatas 2006; Chen 2010; Sen 2006). On the contrary, the evidence indicates that functionally similar critical theoretical tools and argumentative capabilities are put into practice in Western and non-Western educational cultures and intellectual communities.

4.3 Teacher Education Task: Verification of Intellectual Equality

Now we have two key educational principles. First, the goal of internationalising Australian teacher education is to declassify the divide between Western critical theory and the non-West as data mining sites through worldly critical theorising. Second, the starting point for internationalising Australian teacher education is the presupposition that non-Western teacher-researchers have the linguistic repertoire and argumentative capabilities, and that non-Western countries have critical theoretical assets for contributing to this undertaking. Together these principles pose an important educational problem for the internationalisation of Australian teacher education. How might Australian teacher educators verify the presuppositions:

• 1. That non-Western countries have critical theoretical assets;

• 2. That teacher-researchers from these countries have the argumentative capabilities to use these to create worldly critical theorising, and

• 3. That this will extend and deepen their contributions to knowledge and the internationalisation of Australian teacher education?

As with the concept of presupposition of intellectual equality it is important to note what verification of intellectual equality does not mean. Verification is not a matter of checking whether there is any truth to the concept of intellectual equality in any abstract sense. That is to say, the point is not to prove, using some intelligence test for instance, that students from non-Western countries are as equally intelligent as those students from Western countries. In contrast, the verification of intellectual equality means:

• 1. Ratifying the presence in non-Western countries of critical theoretical assets and capabilities for scholarly argumentation

• 2. Testing ways of using non-Western critical theoretical tools to enhance the internationalisation of Australian teacher education and the learning of teacher-researchers.

• 3. Seeing what teacher-researchers from non-Western countries can achieve based on the presupposition of intellectual equality.

The teacher-researchers from China work with their Australian teacher educators to co-produce evidence of these critical theoretical assets and argumentative capabilities. Together, they develop ways of representing these worldly critical theorising in Australian teacher education curriculum, through assessment instruments, pedagogical relations and research reports. A key verification task is public demonstrations of the ways that Australian teacher education is engaging non-Western languages and critical theorising (for example through symposiums and publications), and how these are associated with language learning and knowledge production in teacher education.⁹

The verification of intellectual equality¹⁰ also interrupts what is taken for granted as being sensible in Australian teacher education; namely the presumed absence of value of non-Western theoretical tools. Verification of intellectual equality is directed towards seeing what teacher-researchers from non-Western countries can achieve by working with non-Western critical theoretical assets and argumentative capabilities. Educational and teaching practices are directed towards developing non-Western teacher-researchers’ awareness of the critical assets from their homeland that can be converted in critical theoretical tools. Given their Western oriented education in China, for many teacher-researchers from China this involves Australian teacher educators making known to them what intellectuals from their homeland can do, say and be through creating critical theoretical resources that are comparable to those in Australian teacher education. In addition to Chinese Marxism (Knight 2006), Chinese feminism (Xu 2009), Chinese environmentalism (Xie 2011), Tao Xingzhi (Yao 2002) and the art of Chinese-Australian immigrants are useful examples in this regard.

5 Pedagogies for Worldly Theoretical Interactions in Australian Teacher Education

The challenge for teacher educators in Australia is to create pedagogical conditions for teacher-researchers from non-Western countries to verify the presupposition of intellectual equality. The meta-analysis presented in this focuses on pedagogies for worldly linguistic connectivities and critical theorising in Australian teacher education. This section provides an analysis of pedagogies¹¹ of intellectual equality in terms of what teacher-researchers from non-Western countries can do, can say and can be in Australia using non-Western critical theoretical assets (Singh and Meng 2011). In the words of Rancière (2009, p. 13), the efforts of the ROSETE Partnership in this regard involve interrupting ‘the relations between saying, seeing and doing [which] themselves belong to the structure of domination and subjection.’ This research has established that innovations in pedagogies for effecting worldly critical theorising in Australian teacher education might usefully address six key concepts. These relate to three key questions: What teacher-researchers from China can do, can say and can be in Australia? The answers to these questions identify key concepts for engaging worldly critical theorising using the critical theoretical assets and augmentative capabilities represented in the ROSETE Partnership.

5.1 What Teacher-Researchers from China Can do in Australia

Regarding what teacher-researchers from China can do in Australia the meta-analysis here focuses on their bilingual capabilities and capacity for double knowing.

5.1.1 Bilingual Capabilities

The status of English as an international language is such that Australian teacher education for international students from Asia privileges an English-only mode of learning (Edwards and Dewaele 2007). The result is that their knowledge in (and of) their first language is reduced to marginalia. Welch et al. (2005) argue that this stunts the growth of Australia’s bilingual (or multilingual) capabilities desired in the trans-national labour market. However, bilingualism (and multilingualism) has entered Australian teacher education, albeit without little value and valuing. Its every day presence is audible among the hundreds of thousands of international, immigrant and refugee students on Australian campuses. From Sweden (Airey and Linder 2008) to South Africa (Benson and Plüddemann 2010) education for bi- or multilingual literacy is the norm in many universities around the world. Libraries are responding to students’ multilingual capabilities with electronic databases which can be searched using a range of languages (Zhuo et al. 2007). International and local students are able to position themselves as successful through their bilingual capabilities when their teacher education programs position bilingualism as educationally valued and valuable (Bartlett 2007).

The ROSETE Partnership through its Western Sydney-Ningbo Volunteers has raised the prospects for measuring the internationalisation of Australian universities by creating what I call a bilingual capability metric. For instance, demonstration of bilingual research literacy¹² might now be used in reviewing theses in teacher education as one way of internationalising Australian research education and teacher education. Tactically, the pedagogical actions of the teacher educators in the ROSETE Partnership involve the bilingual making and remaking of research literacy. This takes place in what I have termed a theoretical contact zone along the transgressive transnational intellectual frontiers between Australia and China, between Chinese and Australian students, and across immediate and extended intellectual localities. The trajectories of international teacher-researchers in this particular Australian teacher education program are shaped in part through the recognition and acknowledgment of the Western Sydney-Ningbo Volunteers’ bilingual capabilities. The ROSETE Partnership is making bilingualism (and multilingualism) and, Euro-American and Chinese critical theoretical tools (among others) integral to the internationalisation of Australian teacher education, here and now. Intellectual engagement with these international teacher-researchers is directed by the value and valuing of their linguistic capabilities¹³ and critical theoretical assets (Singh and Cui 2011 ¹⁴).

The ROSETE Partnership has advanced an understanding of these bilingual teacher-researcher theorists as users of a linguistic repertoire which establishes their pedagogical contributions to worldly critical theorising. Pedagogically, this ROSETE Partnership has worked to increase the frequency and diversity of their combined uses of Chinese and English to deepen their capabilities for scholarly argumentation and extend their capabilities for making an original contribution to knowledge using critical theoretical assets from China.¹⁵ The critical theoretical assets available to these bilingual students has benefitted from the ROSETE Partnership’s learning environment and pedagogies that are supportive of multilingual communicative activities.

5.1.2 Double Knowing

The concept of “double knowing” (Singh 2005; Singh and Shrestha 2008) explicitly recognises that the teacher-researchers from China studying in Australia’s ROSETE Partnership are situated in the intellectual traditions of at least two educational cultures. Double knowing focuses on these teacher-researchers actively taking up and contributing to critical theorising from various sources so they can test and validate it through scholarly argumentation. Pedagogically, double knowing favours critical, collaborative, reciprocal interactions around multiple sources of critical theorising. All these teacher-researchers are understood as existing in intellectual nodes with connections into differing networks of criticality. Links are added to their interlocking chains of critical theorising through the ROSETE Partnership. Double knowing refers to the oscillation between multiple sources of critical theorising, where one may transgress across the other. It provides a scaffold that enables these teacher-researchers to relate what they are learning to what is known in China and in their first language.

Having these students use the idea of double knowing to search for tools of criticality from China takes us all beyond a nation-centred approach to teacher education. This provokes thinking beyond either China or Australia in producing worldly critical theorising. Tange and Kastberg (2011) have elaborated on this concept of “double knowing” in the following terms:

the key to successful international learning is to establish relations between the new information that students encounter at their host university and the insight they have obtained previously in other educational settings. In this manner, one can transform students’ indigenous knowledge from a possible barrier to the transmission of Eurocentric wisdom into alternative insights that can be identified and harvested in the classroom. Such inclusiveness works to the benefit of individual learners, who are no longer requested to marginalise earlier acquired theoretical and methodological knowledge when they arrive at a new university. But also international classes may profit from an awareness of these alternative perspectives, which can provide the cosmopolitan orientation … (pp. 3–4, italics added).

Double knowing recognises that teacher-researchers from Asia (and teacher educators) studying and working in Australia have the linguistic and scholarly capabilities to blend critical theoretical constructs from the East or the South with those from the West or the North to further critical theorising. Thereby, they extend the range of participants and resources of criticality that can be brought to bear in Australian teacher education. It is in this context that Takayama (2011) invites non-Western educators

who were trained in Anglo-American centres [to] play a critical role in the project of ‘academic decolonization’ because they are equipped with ‘double knowing’ capacities – being able to access and produce knowledge in multiple languages and national contexts. (p. 4, italics added)

Collective, intellectual engagement in worldly critical theorizing – theoretical interactions among East/West, South/North, East/South –is a necessary step to move Australian teacher education beyond taken-for-granted concepts of “nation”, “culture”, and “difference.” Many teacher educators in Australia are bi-lingual and thus have the potential to be a source of worldly critical theorising. They have the capabilities and resources for opening up Australian teacher education to multitudinous ways of critical theorizing: “As someone who is equipped with ‘double knowing’ capacities, I recognise it as my responsibility to initiate a dialogue” (Takayama 2011, p. 16).

Non-Western international students’ experiential and scholastic knowledge; their knowledge producing capabilities and their knowledge networks are part of the structuring of pedagogies for the ROSETE Partnership.¹⁶ The Western Sydney-Ningbo Volunteers are redistributing the sense and sensibilities that define criticality in Australian teacher education, by directly engage their critical theoretical assets through their multilingual networks. By promoting pedagogies of intellectual equality, their multiple sources of critical theoretical assets are rendered visible among the Australian teacher educators who provide their research education, mark their theses, listen to their conference presentations, and review their journal articles.

5.2 What Teacher-Researchers from China Can Say in Australia

The meta-analysis here focuses on a second key question. If Australia is regarded as a theoretical contact zone and a site for engaging in honourable critiques what teacher-researchers from China can say?

5.2.1 Theoretical Contact Zones

Australian teacher education programs are traversed by a diversity of students – local and international; migrant, refugee and Indigenous students, multilingual, bilingual and monolingual, students from the East and the West, the North and the South. The global/national/local determinations of Australian teacher education are tied into low-cost international transport and communication networks. Australian teacher education provides points of intellectual connectivity, and transnational settings for the production of knowledge – theoretical contact zones. Australia’s ROSETE Partnership does not exist as a single, unified theoretical whole. Nor does it work to bring Euro-American theories into contact with totally distinct, unified Chinese theoretical assets. Rather, this Partnership is a theoretical contact zone for fragmented, multiple, contested and contradictory theoretical assets, Western and non-Western alike. This Partnership incites teacher-researchers’ theoretical transgressions and the multiplication of theoretical contacts in the face of nation-centred blockages and policing (both Chinese and Australian¹⁷). The ROSETE Partnership is a site for producing worldly theoretical interactions and theoretically interdependent agents. The latter entails the formation of bilingual teacher-researcher theorists – the new transnational knowledge workers, internationally minded citizens and worldly critical theorists.

The concept of a theoretical contact zone suggests continuing intellectual encounters in which students from geographically and historically separated countries come into contact with each other and participate in a teacher education program that sanctions ongoing intellectual relations. However, my concept of theoretical contact zone ¹⁸ which I use to describe the internationalisation of Australian teacher education is not without problems. Whether it resonates with Australian campuses and programs in Asia is open to further investigation. It is not taken as self-evident that on-campus teacher education programs in Australia have pedagogies for affecting the intellectual co-presence of local and international students.

The concept of theoretical contact zone assumes an Australian teacher education program where much that is necessary to forming transnational communities relies on the co-presence of students to bring forth intellectual engagement with different educational cultures, multilingual diversity and the debates forming, informing and transforming worldly theoretical interactions. A theoretical contact zone speaks to a shared social, spatial and historical learning environment that “directly challenges the way these different but related peoples [are] identified” (Clifford 1997, p. 132). The ROSETE Partnership has been constituted relationally as a theoretical contact zone via the displaced presence and disputed existence of ‘Chinese’ theoretical tools.

5.2.2 Honourable Critiques

The ROSETE Partnership extends and deepens the teacher-researchers’ disposition to engage in honourable critiques through reasoning with counter-evidence, answering rebuttals made by others and engaging in critical self-examination of knowledge claims (Singh and Han 2010). The Partnership draws on contemporary and classical studies of China’s intellectual assets in argumentation ¹⁹ (Graham 1986; Liu 1996; Peterson 1979). Chinese scholarly disputation is presided over by a community with rules or conventions governing argumentation and involving protagonists advancing theses defended by adequate and acceptable reasons, inferences and evidence, and their evaluation by antagonists (Graham 1986; Liu 1996). As is now standard practice internationally (Andrews 2007; Clark 2006), the bilingual teacher-researchers in the ROSETE Partnership engage in scholarly debate via seminar presentations, the external examination of their theses, and the blind peer review process involved in producing publications.

Thus, the idea of worldly critical theorizing in the Partnership is not an endorsement of epistemological relativism. In contrast, the idea of worldly critical theorizing is meant to open up possibilities for an appreciation of functional similarities in theoretical tools from North to South, East to West, East to South (see Horton 1971), and whose inclusion in the research products of this Partnership makes them available for critique. As in India (Sen 2006), this use of critical theoretical tools from China makes this knowledge available for international critical scrutiny. For example, this involves exploring the warrant for heterogeneity and open mindedness in critical theorizing through critiques of instances of ethno-cultural scholarly separatism, intellectual insularity or nation-centred theoretical parochialism. Likewise, there are critiques of educational theorizing in Australian which constructs Chinese education and students as curatorial objects, burdens or exotica. Similarly, scholarly disputation over Chinese intellectual assets is directed at the critical analysis of reproducing ‘China/other’ dichotomies.

Honour is a key stake in the critiques produced by the teacher-researchers in the ROSETE Partnership. They learn that honourable critiques are necessary to test their knowledge claims. They are introduced to the concept nif which is a three dimensional concept used by the Tamazight speaking Kabyles’ (Berbers) of northern Algeria. While Bourdieu (1977) used it as data in his study, I use it to illustrate to the teacher-researchers how non-Western terms might be given life as critical theoretical tools. As defined below, nif is used for exploring the idea of honourable critique First, nif recognises that an Australian teacher-educator who engages critically with the concepts developed by a Chinese teacher-researcher, and vice versa, confers recognition of a mutuality of intellectual equality. In its ideal form nif presupposes that participants in critique are intellectual equals:

To make someone a challenge is to credit him [sic] with the dignity of a man [sic] of honour, since the challenge, as such, requires a riposte and therefore is addressed to a man deemed capable of playing the game of honour, and of playing it well. (Bourdieu 1977, p. 11)

Second, nif also means that a Chinese teacher-researcher who engages in a critique with an Australian teacher-educator, and vice versa, who is not capable of engaging in such a worldly critical theorizing may bring discredit to the person who does so: “he [sic] who challenges a man [sic] incapable of taking up the challenge, that is, incapable of pursuing the exchange, dishonours himself [sic]” (Bourdieu 1977, p. 11). Third, nif means that only a critique from an equal deserves direct intellectual engagement. That is to say, only a critique “coming from an equal in honour deserves to be taken up … for there to be a challenge, the man [sic] who receives it must consider the man who makes it worthy of making it” (Bourdieu 1977, p. 12).

The critical self-examination of knowledge claims is integral to the ROSETE Partnership’s efforts to extend and deepen the teacher-researchers’ disposition as honourable critics. This means critically examining how their own knowledge claims may be embedded in dominating power relations within Australia as much as their own homeland.²⁰ Here it is important to guard against the dangers of, and to critique reverse orientalism with its agenda of intellectual separatism, theoretical provincialism and scholarly exclusivism (Said 1993), and the unacknowledged misappropriation of knowledge through the process of transnational exchange (Nanda 2005). Given this, the ROSETE teacher-researchers learn to test what they constitute as research-based knowledge claims, the limitations and delimitations of these claims, as well as establishing the robustness of the tests used in such validation exercises.

5.3 What Teacher-Researchers from China Can be in Australia

Now we turn to the final question which provides the focus for this meta-analysis. What teacher-researchers from China can be in Australia? The answers to this question are found in the concepts of cross-linguistic bridgeheads and teacher-researcher theorists. These concepts are integral to extending and deepening the capabilities for critique represented in the ROSETE Partnership for engaging worldly critical theorizing.

5.3.1 Cross Socio-Linguistic Bridgeheads

Worldly critical theorizing in the ROSETE Partnership explicitly focuses on, and engages China’s and Australia’s educational cultures; their theoretical assets and research processes, and the taken-for-granted presumption of absolute differences between the English and Chinese languages (Singh and Han 2010). For instance, both Chinese and Australian teacher-researchers use idioms and maxims to enchant and empower their scholarly critiques, providing them with a repertoire of condensed and abstract metaphors. Similar to, but quite unlike English-language proverbs, chengyu (Mah 2002) are part of the critical assets these bilingual teacher-researcher theorists are encouraged to use for critical theorizing in their studies of Australian education, teaching and learning.

Thus, in Australia these bilingual teacher-researchers from China can be cross socio-linguistic bridgeheads by using metaphors, concepts and images from China as critical tools in their theoretical analysis of evidence.

These bilingual teacher-researcher theorists are asked to provide an explanation of the meanings and socio-historical context of these metaphors, concepts and images, and to show how they can be used to critically analyse evidence of education, teaching and learning in Australia. At the early stage of acquiring this capability for theoretical interdependence, the ROSETE teacher-researchers learn to use metaphors such as chengyu as critical theoretical tools to analyse evidence they generate in and about Australian education. This use of chengyu as tools in worldly critical theorizing also provides a vivid picture of China’s intellectual culture(s) of critique through its literary and philosophical heritage. However, contemporary metaphors are also encouraged.

To enable worldly critical theorizing it is the functional similarities in the resources used for critique which provide the cross socio-linguistic bridgeheads. At least during the early stage of acquiring the capabilities for worldly critical theorizing their search for, and use of cross socio-linguistic bridgeheads is “an essential process in … learning something new [as it involves establishing] a relation between a new proposition or task and what already exists in the mind” (Ringbom 2007, p. 5). That is, the challenge for the ROSETE teacher-researchers is to find a metaphor, concept or image in the Han Chinese which serves a similar function to words of critique in English. Thus, in addition to chengyu, these cross socio-linguistic bridgeheads also include cognate similarities in both form and meaning of Chinese and English. These cross socio-linguistic bridgeheads include the potentially shared vocabulary that exists in the two languages that have been created through loanwords (English into Chinese, Chinese into English) as well as sound correspondences, high-frequency words and syntactic structures (Ringbom and Jarvis 2009).

With regard to the conditions required for the international circulation of Chinese theoretical ideas in and through this particular Australian teacher education, it has been important to address the “questions of translatability” (Nice 1977a, p. vii). For Nice (1977a, p. vii) “questions of translatability” arises in part because of the “loss entailed in extracting a text from its context.” The problem is that these taken-for-granted nation-based assumptions and arguments structure the field of knowledge production, and “when these bearings are removed the text becomes open to misreading” (Nice 1977a, p. viii). The necessary conditions for the success of translations depend on establishing plausible bridgeheads that assume similarities in linguistic functions, especially overlaps in principles, concepts, the use of metaphors and their applications. With regard to Reproduction in education, society and culture (Bourdieu and Passeron 1990), Nice (1977b, p. xxvi) faced the “translator’s quandary” of a simple Parisian French word méconnaissance (misrecognition) having to be translated in a way which gives it a “specific scientific sense.”

In the case of the international circulation of Chinese theoretical ideas in Australian educational research in English, cross-linguistic bridgeheads are important in addressing the question of the translatability of knowledge. Being bilingual (Pavlenko 2003), these teacher-researchers can make themselves into intellectual mediators in worldly theoretical interactions. They learn to affect a scholarly sensibility by the recurrent use of a key Chinese concept throughout their thesis, providing necessary contextual details to ensure Anglophone readers’ familiarity with it as an analytical concept. For English readers to appreciate Chinese theoretical ideas, the cardinal points in the intellectual context or field of knowledge production needs to be explained.²¹

5.3.2 Bilingual Teacher-Researcher Theorists

The ROSETE Partnership engages teacher-researchers from China in quasi-ethnographic projects to study how they can make Han Chinese learnable for those Australian students for whom it is a second language. The pedagogical orientation is to develop these students’ capabilities for using Chinese categories, metaphors and images as theoretical tools for data analysis and to promote cross-national learning among teacher-researchers. The students develop a collective written knowledge of these matters, in part because such knowledge is necessary for them to extend and deepen their transnational intellectual and career trajectories. Such knowledge is an important source of lessons and insights for all teacher-researchers studying in Australian teacher education programs. Inherent in the Western Sydney Ningbo Volunteer Program’s re-working of ethnographic practices to enable worldly critical theorizing is the pedagogical engagement of these students as media of Australia/China intellectual connectedness. Pedagogically, this involves the shift in the focus of Australian teacher educators and the teacher-researchers themselves to presupposing and verifying worldly critical theorizing, and making explicit representations of Australian students’ learning using Chinese theoretical tools. This shift also aids Australian teacher educators to better understand the representations of Australian education held by these Chinese teacher-researchers.

6 Conclusion

There are Australian teacher education programs which continue to invest heavily in Euro-American research and theories to produce educators. In marked contrast, this chapter has presented a meta-analysis of a large-scale, longitudinal study of the Research Oriented School Engaged Teacher Education (ROSETE) Partnership that is preparing teacher-researchers in Australia for the twenty-first century, one which is presently Asia-centred and China-focused. Funded by the Australian Research Council the focus of this investigation is on developing new principles and pedagogies for preparing bilingual teacher-researcher theorists for worldly linguistic connectivities and critical theorizing. As a developmental, interventionist study through the endeavours of these bilingual teacher-researcher theorists is making small but nonetheless significant presence for worldly linguistic connectivities and critical theorizing in Australian teacher education, here and now.

The review of the research literature sought to establish the intellectual context for worldly linguistic connectivities and critical theorizing currently in Australian teacher education. Despite claims on cosmopolitanism (Marginson and Sawir 2011), there is little evidence of the joining together of Western and non-Western critical theorizing. The prospects for redistributing the sense and sensibilities of Australian teacher education’s extensive investment in Euro-American critical theories are challenging. For this reason educational research for critique is being employed in this study of the Research oriented School Engaged Teacher Education (ROSETE) Partnership (Singh and Huang 2013).

The meta-analysis of the ROSETE Partnership’s educational principles focused on the concept of intellectual equality as a key tool of critique being used to effect the redistribution of the sense and sensibilities of Australia’s Euro-American centred teacher education. The ROSETE Partnership’s educational principles take the goal of twenty-first century Australian teacher education to be declassifying the theory/data divide that privileges Euro-American critical theorizing over the rest; to take as its educational starting point the presupposition of intellectual equality, and to make its key educational task as the verification of intellectual equality. The meta-analysis of the ROSETE Partnership’s pedagogies for worldly linguistic connectivities and critical theorizing focused on three themes. First, what teacher-researchers from China can do in Australia using their bilingual research literacy and their capabilities for double knowing. Second, what they can say in Australia to form theoretical contact zones and make honourable critiques. Third, what they can be in Australia in terms of cross socio-linguistic bridgeheads and bilingual teacher-researcher theorists. Of course, this conceptual framework provided by these educational principles and pedagogies are not meant to be taken as a fixed or frozen artefact. As a dynamic diagnostic tool to inform further research in teacher education they provide a focus for critique.

Even in the twenty-first century there are Australian teacher education programs which have invested almost exclusively in Euro-American theories to produce the rising generation of educators. However, it is not at all clear how such programs provide for any serious-minded intellectual engagement that prepares educators in Australia for an Asian-centred, China-focused twenty-first century. What misfortunes await Australian educators schooled in Euro-American theories? Will they regard it as unusual – even eccentric – when international, immigrant and refugee teacher-researchers from Asia decide to make extensive use of critical theoretical tools from non-Western intellectual cultures? Will their theses and assignments be failed on the grounds of creating binaries, when they should be writing about Australian teacher education’s self-proclaimed but largely imagined hybridity?

That Australia has a nationally regulated teacher education system does not mean it is pointed in a single predetermined direction, that of privileging Euro-American critical theories. Moreover, innovative educational principles, programs and pedagogies for worldly linguistic connectivities and critical theorizing are unlikely to be provided system support or time. Educational critics know this. The concepts presented in this chapter have application beyond Australian teacher education and in particular the preparation of bilingual teacher-researchers for the twenty-first century. These concepts are likely to be relevant to other Western Anglophone teacher education programs where the preparation of teachers for the twenty-first century means intellectual engagement with the East and the South as a basis for worldly linguistic connectivities and critical theorizing. Preparing teachers for the twenty-first century necessitates bringing forward and making anew worthwhile traditions of Australian teacher education by gleaning what might be salvaged from a multiplicity of Euro-American critical theories and rearticulating it through worldly critical theorizing.