Institutional mergers are among the range of government-driven reforms of teacher education and, by extension, the teaching force. Such reforms inevitably provide positive outcomes for some and challenges for others. In this paper the authors focus on the anticipations, experiences and reflections of a group of teacher educators during a period…

Considerable problems have arisen in New Zealand universities as a consequence of the conflict between the statutory role of the university as the "critic and conscience of society" and the dominant intellectual orthodoxy of cultural essentialism. A number of examples are used to show the extent to which culturalist ideological…