Over a period of three years a number of International and African based institutions collaborated to design and create a set of Open Educational Resources (OERs) to support school based teacher education as part of the TESSA project. Writing the materials drew on case studies, experiences and existing resources from across the region using a highly structured template. These TESSA OERs were then adapted to be appropriate for each user setting and practices. It is this process -supporting the user community to harness and integrate OERs for their own systems and cultures, which is the focus of this article. The authors draw on a range of data to make explicit the kinds of knowledge, skills and support employed in the adaptation process and in particular the role of the structured template in supporting this process, and the problems encountered. The article suggests that OERs will only fulfil their promise if more attention is accorded to issues of user access and skills as well as the form of the OERs, their purpose and underlying pedagogy. Finally the paper offers suggestions for guidance to support other users in adapting OERs for their own context whilst maintaining the quality of the OERs and working towards self-sustaining communities of users.

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Her PhD developed a model of professional capability for women teachers in rural Sub-Saharan African schools. From 2006-2013, she was a researcher on the Teacher Education in Sub-Saharan Africa (TESSA) programme, which creates and supports the use of open educational resources for teachers and teacher educators. She is currently working across a range of education and international development projects and her research is focusing on social justice in rural and remote schools and colleges.

This paper focuses on how people learn to become teachers. It draws on the experiences of student-teachers and tutors at a College of Education in the south of Ghana, who engaged with an iterative data-generation process over one academic year. While increasing attention is given to the learning experiences of children in Sub-Saharan Africa, teachers' learning experiences remain under-explored, underdocumented and under-theorised. It makes an original contribution to the study of preservice teacher education by combining a sociocultural lens on learning and becoming with an analytical framework based on the capability approach. This illustrates how student-teachers' freedom to learn is facilitated and constrained by structured and social contexts within a pre-service programme. The paper shows how understanding different perspectives on valued 'beings and doings' of teaching can help re-interpret and re-imagine processes for 'becoming' a teacher, which has practical application at policy and institution level.

Open educational resources (OER) continue to support the needs of educators and learners globally. However, it is clear that to maximise their potential more focus is needed on reuse and repurposing. Accordingly, adapting OER for local contexts remains one of the greatest challenges of the open education movement, with little written about how to support communities of users to adapt materials. This paper emerges from the ongoing debate around education quality in low income countries (LICs), taking as its focus two OER projects led by the Open University -TESSA and TESS-India. These projects have collaboratively developed core banks of OER for teacher education that respond to regional and national priorities and pedagogies. In this paper we explore how the projects have supported localisation of the OER and how processes of OER localisation can contribute to more equal knowledge partnerships in the pursuit of education quality.