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This paper describes an EU-funded project under the Training and Mobility of Researchers (TMR) Programme, with a particular emphasis on the Oxford-based part. Involving six European universities, the overarching investigation was concerned with the tensions between standardization and tradition in education. In Oxford the focus was on aspects of EU education and training policy in four Member States: the United Kingdom, German, Sweden, and France. The paper describes the research undertaken and its outcomes, using the project as an example of EU funding programmes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a brief analysis of teacher education in five European countries: Italy, Germany, England, Sweden and Finland. In the post-industrial world, the sense of teaching has profoundly changed, influenced by a rapidly evolving socio-economic context. The responses given by each country are different, but two tendencies emerge: on the one hand, the English model, which seeks to make a teacher a faithful executor with regard to centrally decided learning objectives; on the other, the Nordic model that conceives the teacher as a ‘fully-fledged’ professional. From the point of view of the sustainability and of the safeguard of the educative mission of the school, the second model, though with all the difficulties that its efficacious realisation entails, presents some advantages when compared to the first. The article concludes with some considerations on the need to conceive the reform of teacher education from a systemic point of view, in the context of a global change of national school systems, where the autonomy of the single schools plays a role of paramount importance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Comparing educational experience, culture and academic practice within Europe can often be an interesting and rewarding exercise. The observations in this article are based on the author's experience of six and half years' teaching at two universities in Bavaria, the completion of a doctorate at the Free University Berlin, two degrees at the University of Edinburgh (one in history, the other in social sciences), and, most recently, two years' teaching in the Politics and Contemporary History Subject Group at the University of Salford in the United Kingdom. The aim is to reflect on the experience of teaching in two different European academic systems, with a view to making some comparisons as well as observations on the changes which have taken place in the UK higher education system over the last two decades.European Political Science (2007) 6, 322–331. doi:10.1057/palgrave.eps.2210146 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]