Kritische Fremdsprachenlehrer*innenbildung: Internationale Kontextualisierung, konzeptuelle Systematisierung und Desiderate

<rc:p>While international research has been engaging with concepts of critical language teacher education for at least twenty years, research in the German educational context has begun only very recently to establish a nexus between the professional development of teachers and more critical approaches to foreign language (teacher) education. As we will demonstrate, it is by no means clear what is actually meant by the semantically fluid terms such as ‘critical’ or ‘criticality’. Therefore, this article commences with taking stock of how critical language teacher education is conceptualised in international research while offering a systematic understanding of ‘the critical’ in these conceptualisations. Against the background of this systematisation, the article revisits the various contributions to this issue for their unique ways of grappling with and substantiating multi-voiced understandings of ‘the critical’. As will become evident, any understanding of ‘the critical’ is necessarily shaped by a given context. This article therefore explores how the specific characteristics of German-speaking contexts of foreign language teacher education may inform attempts to establish a nexus with ‘the critical’, and in what ways such endeavours are already productive in some teacher education settings. Lastly, this article suggests implications and desiderata for further research and practice.</rc:p>