Conclusion
EuroPAL took as its starting point the prominence of the notion of autonomy in foreign language teaching curricula and in EU educational policy, as well as the need to consider its relation to teacher education, which has also become a priority in the EU (cf. Lisbon process). An important feature is that the EuroPAL products mirror the cultural differences that each member of the EuroPAL team brought forward regarding the why and how of learner autonomy, thus accounting for the plurality of perspective acknowledged in the field of learner autonomy. With this in mind the EuroPAL products will hopefully meet educational needs within a large range of culturally diverse contexts.
One of our specific interests was teacher education practices that engage teachers in pedagogy for autonomy and encourage reflection on the complex set of conditions that make up their teaching context, so that they can identify those that will contribute to the implementation of pedagogy for autonomy and those aspects that will constrain its development. This in turn will help them find spaces for manoeuvre. In this project, an important teacher education premise was that effective teacher education that seeks to foster pedagogy for autonomy should concentrate on developing willingness and capacity for self-directed learning in the teacher and the learners. One of the difficulties that we faced was related to the fact that there is not much research on how teacher education practice can best promote both teacher and learner autonomy in a formal education context.
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