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The aim of this article is to examine the development and implementation of teacher competence frameworks in Hungary. Supported by European structural funds, Hungary introduced a teacher competence framework for initial teacher education in 2006 and another for the career promotion and appraisal of teachers in 2013. Employing the process tracing method, the article follows the evolution of teacher competence frameworks over time, based on a document analysis and expert interviews with policy officials and teacher educators. Findings show that the Hungarian teacher competence frameworks evolved as an outcome of a broader Europeanisation process in teacher education, on the one hand, and of internal political priorities, on the other. Strong political commitment was often linked to weak implementation capacities, so that dissatisfaction was created on the side of teachers. Depending on the way local actors use these frameworks, some perceive it as a way of limiting teacher autonomy, whilst others feel it promotes teacher professionalism.

Within the broader landscape of the European Higher Education Area, teacher education receives increasing significance as an academic field that contributes to the quality of the teaching labour force and consequentlyimpacts student learning. This paper aims to explore the European Teacher Education Area (ETEA) by analysing to what extent and how mechanisms, processes, and key agents of Europeanisation, internal or external to the European Union (EU), influence the transformation of teacher education policies and practices in Europe. Transformation is understood in the context of Europeanisation, and emphasis of the analysis is placed on the process rather than the content of transforming teacher education in Europe. To this end, data have been collected through document review and expert interviews with European policy officials. As a result of  qualitative content analysis, the data have been clustered and analysed according to the following categories, which mutually reinforce each other: (1) policy coordination; (2) cross-sectoral instruments; (3) evidence-based management; (4) the Bologna process; (5) educational programmes; and (6) stakeholder pressure. Findingsprovide a conceptual framework for mapping the ETEA as a complex policy ecosystem that includes vertical and horizontal procedures of Europeanisation. The EU has developed extensive capacities to influence teacher education in Europe and increasingly involves other sectors, such as employment, in this process.

The status of teachers and the teaching profession is currently under pressure from the reform agendas of governments and international organisations. This article examines the perceptions of teacher unions about changes in teacher status under the influence of new public management and its dominant discourse of new professionalism. The analysis is underpinned by a conceptual framework that seeks to reveal the main challenges facing teachers and their unions in the context of new professionalism. The framework is applied deductively to data drawn from two surveys conducted by Education International in 2015 and in 2018. The findings revealed some worrisome trends that appeared consistently over time and influenced teacher status, including an increased accountability for teachers through external control, a lack of government efforts to improve teacher professionalism, the expansion of privatisation policies, and a lack of teacher union engagement. This restructuring of the teaching profession implies the need for teacher union renewal in mission and action.

In this article, we provide a theoretical conceptual analysis of FridaysForFuture (FFF) and of its effort in promoting the governance of socioeconomic transition toward sustainable development. FFF is a social movement that has received outstanding public recognition and visibility across the world in the last 2 years and is of great interest to educational research because it is largely composed of youngsters and appears to play a paideutic role in societal innovation. There is a growing but still limited body of investigation of FFF’s structures, genealogy, and behavior. The same goes for its theoretical and ethical background and principles. Its efforts to promote social change by going beyond individual agency toward collective agency deserve greater attention from educational scientists. We argue that FFF is a complex, self-organizing, informal network, which we define as an enactive network for its ability to retrieve scientific knowledge and transform it into lived meaningful knowledge, and for its capacity to mobilize masses and influence public discourse under a specific ethical umbrella. We provide six macro categories to describe and explain FFF: 1) nested emergent network, 2) collective social agency and leadership, 3) political impact, 4) science-based learning and activism, 5) paideutic function, and 6) ethical (normative) stance. We stress the FFF capacity to recruit high-level scientific knowledge without direct support from schools, and embody strong ethical stances with specific references to the ethics of responsibility and care for the interaction between humanity and the natural world. Finally, we suggest that FFF can be interpreted as an enactive network with the ability to affect collective identity and empower collective agency by encouraging communities into a more scientific, evidence-based, and ethical public discourse.

Following the severe impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on education systems in Europe, the EU has been called upon to provide a concerted response to the crisis in a context where member states provided their own diverse responses. Against this background, the aim of this article is to uncover and critically examine the EU’s education policy discourse and promoted narratives since the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, and by doing so evaluate the EU’s response-ability for education recovery during the crisis. A conceptual framework has been devised to analyse the responsiveness of an international entity, such as the EU, based on organisational and neo-institutionalist theories. Data were collected through a combination of discourse analysis and computer-assisted content analysis, which was applied to official EU education policy documents published in 2020. The following categories emerged from the analysis process, indicating that the EU perceives education recovery as: “upskilling and reskilling”, “digital transformation” and “sustainable development”. The findings suggest a substantial continuation between the EU’s pre- and post-Covid-19 strategy in the education sector, and even an acceleration in the same direction, revealing a lack of real change in the EU’s response, which was focused predominantly on the economic and employability approach to education.

The purpose of the present focus issue is to provide insights on transformative teacher learning in an emerging European context, drawing on the work of researchers who participate in the European Doctorate in Teacher Education (EDiTE), which was developed by a consortium of five universities (Uni-

This paper aims to examine to what extent and how teacher education in Hungary reflects contemporary European policy and research developments with regard to the continuum of teacher education, meaning the overarching unity of initial teacher education, induction, and continuing professional development. First, the paper examines European policy documents to identify patterns and themes related to the continuum concept. Based on the specific analysis, a framework was developed to explore the continuum of teacher education and this was employed in the case of Hungary. Drawing from a content analysis of official documents and in-depth interviews with national policy experts and teacher educators as well as focus groups with teachers, the paper continues by analysing the development of teacher education in Hungary from the introduction of the Bologna reforms in 2005 to the restoration of undivided initial teacher education in 2012 and the implementation of a new system for the teacher career path in 2013. The findings indicate that while Hungary has adopted several structural elements related to the continuum which reflect European thinking, a lack of interconnections among the different phases of teacher education is apparent.