Losing our way? Challenging the direction of teacher education in Australia by reframing it around the Socially Just School

In this discursive and wide-ranging paper I want to do two things: first, to interrogate the conditions that led to, and continue to wreak havoc as a result of, the Global Financial Crisis (GFC), and that underpin current policy approaches to teacher education in Australia and other western countries; and second, to move in the direction of puncturing the status quo by proffering an alternative orientation to teacher education deriving from some of my own research that is informed by what I am calling the Socially Just School. My argument is that teacher education could benefit from moving away from the ideological conditions that have produced the GFC and instead be informed by an approach to schooling around notions of social justice.