The capacity to successfully, positively engage with the cognitive capacities of critical thinking has become the benchmark of employability for many diverse industries across the globe and is considered critical for the development of informed, decisive global citizenship. Despite this, education systems in several countries have developed policies and practices that limit the opportunities for students to authentically participate in the discussions, debates, and evaluative thinking that serve to develop the skill set and mindset of critical thinkers. This writing examines the status of critical thinking in four different contexts across the globe as reflected in educational policies and academic experiences as a preface to investigating actual classroom practices and possible impacts the support of critical thinking skills may have on the potential development of the global citizens of the future. Each vignette reflects the contextualized difficulties that are presented by social and cultural concerns and traditions of making meaning. These stories of education also illustrate the various ways in which the skills and capacities of critical thinking are interpreted in different contexts and address the negative nuances with which thinking critically has become associated. Finally, a pedagogical model of teaching, which may support student development of the skill set of critical thinking within the boundaries of social and cultural mindsets, has been developed.

Over the past 20 years the teaching profession has embraced the notion of the teacher as ‘reflective practitioner’. This has led to an increased emphasis on teacher action research and teachers reflecting‐in‐action with resultant increased respect for ‘teaching craft knowledge’, and more recently incentives by research funding bodies to enhance researcher/classroom teacher partnerships. In pre‐service teacher education programs students are encouraged to reflect on their teaching experiences and to consider what they can do to improve their performance. However in practice many of these metacognitive rambles are token observations focused on minor technical aspects of their teaching. At the University of Newcastle in Australia convenors of three program have worked together to continually update the reflective practices of the students involved in practical teaching experiences. This article presents developing strategies to assist student teachers better manage their role as reflective practitioners. Reflecting upon our reflection raised questions crucial to the training of pre‐service teachers including; What are the key skills of a beginning teacher’s practical experience? Does the traditional teacher trainee program do enough to prepare the pre‐service teacher for practical experience? What is the role of critical reflection in pre‐service practical experience? Is reflection on the complexity of the teaching experience possible?

This paper used the data collected from reflective diaries, semi-structured interviews and surveys to identify and examine common themes identified in the roles required and/or perceived for teacher educators by both teachers and teacher educators. Collaboration, discussion and critique enabled personal reflection as teacher educators worked as partners to schools in a state-sponsored teaching and learning skills project. We have termed the collaboration in such an interactive project as one of ‘dancing in the ditches’, often requiring both groups to get out of their comfortable spaces and engage with each other in constantly moving situations. The teacher educators were required to be change agents at the interface of theory and practice and their experiences reflected individual journeys, but their reflections have ongoing implications for clarifying and professionalising the role of teacher educators.

In an era of international multimedia exposure and a global economy, there is no question that global education (GE) must be part of the school curriculum. Effective delivery of GE is reliant on adequate teacher preparation. A group of teacher educators at one University sought to raise the profile of GE with pre-service teachers through the integration of global perspectives in various courses. This paper explores pre-service teacher perceptions of the importance of GE and their learning as a result of this emphasis. Additionally, pre-service teacher preferences for further learning about GE are examined. It is apparent that pre-service teachers are interested in GE, especially in terms of how they can incorporate it in their teaching and, with exposure over a number of semesters student understandings develop, creating better prepared teachers of GE. Not surprisingly, these students were primarily focused on their future classroom practices rather than their role in the world more generally. Additionally, it was clearly evident that unique GE approaches were linked to specific teaching disciplines, an indication that GE continues to be a difficult concept to incorporate without explicit guidance for integration, something not always easy in a university setting

Children's locational knowledge is often used to clarify underlying conceptual understandings of the world in which they live. Although there has been some exploration of how European children view their world there is little recent research on Scandinavian children's knowledge and associated perceptions of the wider world, or about Australian children's views. Coming from opposite parts of the globe it could be expected that children from Sweden and Australia would view the world in a very different manner. This study compared children's knowledge of countries in the world from comparable schools in both nations and found the expected influence of local geographic knowledge and social and economic place in the world on their skills and knowledge. They were influenced by their national space. However, media and popular culture also impacted on their views on the world and this impact was quite similar between the two nations.