Section archive - Teacher Educators

This study examined the recruitment and appointment of university-based teacher educators in Aotearoa New Zealand. The findings revealed three institutionally reified and identifiable constructions of the teacher educator type of academic worker: the professional expert, the dually qualified teacher educator and the ‘traditional academic’ type of teacher educator. This study argues that the present recruitment and appointment processes are taking a bifurcated approach in the employment of education faculty, recruiting mostly professional experts or traditional academics to positions within university-based ITE. By taking such an approach, these institutional constructions are supporting several persistent and arguably troubling binaries shaping understandings of ITE in the university setting including theory/practice, research/teaching and academic/professional.

This article reports the main findings of the Work of Teacher Education project that studied the labour of 13 higher education-based teacher educators in England and Scotland over the course of a year. The article concludes by arguing that a new conceptualisation of the work of teacher educators as academic work is essential for the discipline and higher education institutions as a whole.

This study focuses on the learning outcomes and professional development goals formulated by teacher educators who took part a professional development programme while putting together their registration portfolio. Findings were compared with those of a study on the first cohort in 2002, without the support of a professional development programme. The authors conclude that research shows that important aspects of the professional development of teacher educators are a clear frame of reference, attention for the important roles of teacher of teachers and teacher–researcher, inquiry-driven learning in a diverse community of teacher educators, interaction with practice, and inquiry into one’s own practice.

This article examines the teacher educator’s role in promoting resilience within new teachers in the light of tensions between what is healthy and sustainable for individual teachers vs. the institutions in which they work. The article concludes with specific recommendations for those in the international teacher education community. These recommendations include innovating university school partnerships to directly link individual and institutional well-being; structured opportunities for ‘mindfulness-based’ training; providing opportunities for candidates to analyse ‘cases’ of teaching from a macro-micro perspective; and learning how to take a professional stance.