Producing the global graduate: academic labour and imagined futures in critical times

Abstract

ABSTRACT The contemporary university works to produce an imagined global graduate who can demonstrate competencies such as mobility, intercultural awareness and global citizenship. In Australia and New Zealand, teacher education academics are charged with the production of graduates who can display and transmit such competencies, but the labour and lived experience of these academics stands in contrast to the unrestricted imaginary of those graduates. They are increasingly subject to an institutional focus on performance against time-related outcomes and productivities as well as by affective complexities exacerbated by institutional responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. This paper draws on a research project that seeks to understand teacher education academics’ experiences and understandings of teaching and producing the global graduate during critical times. It considers some of the findings of this project to explore the temporal and affective complexities inherent in the production of the global graduate within teacher education. We seek to build a mosaic of the textures of time and affect within the experience of teacher education academics at a critical time for the academy, while recognising that it remains an incomplete mosaic, one that points to the disjunctures and disjointures of that experience.