Preparing for quality: The alignment of the professional knowledge domain across global, national and local institutional policies

This paper aims at describing the alignment of professional knowledge existent in global, national and local institutional policies in Indonesian context. Professional knowledge is an important domain characterising an ideal teacher. This domain aims at ensuring prospective English Foreign Language (EFL) teachers to understand learner characteristics and to have pedagogical knowledge to act on those understandings in diverse contexts. It captures the elements of understanding students and how they learn. This paper is the result of a Carspecken critical ethnography study. Globalization theory by Appadurai is applied in this study to explain the presence of the homogeneity of the professional knowledge domain across policies. Following Appadurai [1] this study argues a strong degree of homogeneity across global education policy, Indonesian national teacher education policy and local institutional policy in Central Java, identifying an alignment across the policy documents on what constitutes quality prospective EFL teachers. Evidence of homogeneity suggests accepted values across borders from global to national to local contexts. Therefore, this paper provides meaningful insights towards the discussion of professional knowledge that influences the formation of quality EFL teachers not only locally and nationally but also in the broader context of teacher preparation globally.