教师教育东西方论坛 Northeast Normal University (东北师范大学), Changchun, Province de Jilin, Chine. Three highly stimulating days at the inaugural Global East-West Forum on Teacher Education, convened by the Global Teacher Development Academy and a research consortium built upon longstanding scholarly collaborations across eleven countries: Brazil, Canada, China, Finland, France, India, Japan, Russia, South Africa, South Korea, and the United Kingdom.
The Forum addressed shared professional, political, and epistemic challenges emerging from collaborative research on the teaching profession: attractiveness, retention, professional development, curriculum design, and digital transformation. Exchanges among researchers, policymakers, and practitioners proved remarkably generative—resonances and discontinuities swiftly unsettling initial geopolitical framings. Rather than viewing this as problematic, participants embraced the productive destabilisation, interrogating received East-West categories and raising the critical question: what of the Global South(s)?
This reflexive stance calls for renewed inquiry and joint research undertakings to which participants collectively committed, grounded in a resolutely scientific perspective. Such work may legitimately inform policy without conflating scholarly inquiry with the operational mandates of intergovernmental organisations.
I welcome this initiative and the platform it establishes for sustained scientific cooperation—much of it already underway. In times when dialogue across borders faces mounting pressures, education research remains a vital space for building bridges. Supporting such endeavours appears not merely valuable, but necessary.