This article takes stock of the complex scenario of the European education space in its past, present and future developments, which highlights the priorities of the modernisation, improvement and convergence of the goals for education and training systems in the knowledge and learning society. The critical case of teacher education is then analysed within the European Higher Education Area, with its characteristic display of national and cultural features and constraints, often jostling with European recommendations about the competences and preparation of quality European teachers. This results in changes and reforms at a diverse pace, or even with contradictory trends, in different national contexts. An approach for tackling some of these issues has been devised by the European project EMETT (European Master for European Teacher Training), involving an academic network of eight universities within its Lifelong Learning Programme. The outcomes and reflections of this project work are thus reported, concerning the development and implementation of a European teacher education curriculum for a joint Master's degree. The key European priorities of mobility and intercultural, multilingual competences in teacher education have been taken into account within the framework of an integrated, flexible curriculum that can best be described by a fractal metaphor dealing with complexity from an ecological perspective. Hora and Tempus the Watchmakers: a parable of European complexityNo man is an island -he is a holon. A Janus-faced entity who, looking inward, sees himself as a self-contained unique whole, looking outward as a dependent part. (Koestler, 1967, p. 56)[1]There once were two watchmakers named Hora and Tempus, who manufactured very fine watches. Both of them were highly regarded, and the telephones in their workshops rang frequently. New customers were constantly calling them. However, Hora prospered while Tempus became poorer and poorer until he finally lost his shop. What was the reason for this? The watches they made consisted of about 1,000 parts each. Tempus had so constructed his that if he had one partially assembled and had to put it down, it immediately fell to pieces and had to be reassembled from the start. The watches Hora handled were no less complex than those of Tempus, but he had designed them so that he could put together sub-assemblies of about 10 elements each. Ten of these sub-assemblies, again, could be put together into a larger sub-assembly, and a system of 10 of the latter constituted the whole watch. Hence, when Hora had to put down a partly assembled watch in order to answer the telephone, he lost only a small part of his work, and he assembled his watches in only a fraction of the time it took Tempus.From this parable, Nobel Prizewinner Herbert A. Simon (1962) concludes that complex systems will evolve from simple systems much more rapidly if there are stable intermediate forms by guest on March 31, 2015 eer.sagepub.com Downloaded from
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