(Re)thinking teacher education curricula: Towards equitable pedagogical practice in TESOL

There has been an increasing trend of educationists questioning on the traditional modes of teaching and learning. This has been further heightened by the devastating impact of COVID-19 pandemic in the education sector, which calls for broader reforms in education policies and their curricula, both in the developed and the developing world. In leading the changes, teachers play critical roles and for that, they require more resources, access, and skills. The understanding of what the existing traditional initial teacher education curricula lack, and how they can be enhanced for crisis-readiness is essential. Against this backdrop, this paper, drawing on the data obtained from the review of Teaching English to the Speaker of other Languages (TESOL) in-service teacher education (TE) curricula of South Korea and Nepal, explores the needs of teachers to prepare for the crisis-induced disruptions in educational provision, to maintain the quality and equity of education. We present the common core of TESOL TE programmes in these two contexts, and then discuss actions needed by (re)thinking and (re)designing the educational systems and pedagogical practices for consideration by policymakers, teachers, language teacher educators, programme writers, and material developers. Implications are drawn for future reforms in pedagogy to enable the current and future teachers to develop crisis-readiness as well as address learners' equity issues emerging in diverse contextualized forms. Copyright © 2022 RPIC.