Global Rhetoric, Local Policy: Teacher Training Reform in Israeli Education

Abstract

The focus of this article on teacher education reform in Israel is on educational reform documents, which have been subjected to a discourse analysis applying methods from poetics and intellectual history. It was possible to identify specific items of the international teacher education repertoire used to legitimate a local policy. For instance, when the Latin letters "B.Ed. " are inserted in the Hebrew tex4t it legitimizes the Boger hora'a (literally "teaching graduate") degree by assimilating it to the transnational degree of "B.Ed." The analysis shows how global reform rhetoric has been used to negotiate a new construct somewhere between the "ideal model" of teacher professionalization imported from the pacesetting countries (the United States and Great Britain) and the local situation.