The Professional Identity of Teacher Educators

Career on the cusp?

Ronnie Davey

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415536400
• eBook ISBN: 9781135068059
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The Professional Identity of Teacher Educators offers a contemporary study of teacher education in a period of huge international, institutional and professional change. The book explores the experiences, understandings, and beliefs that guide the professional practices of teacher educators, and paints a picture of a profession that offers huge rew

1 Introduction

A career on the cusp

I originally chose the subtitle for this book, Career on the cusp?, as an acknowledgement of teacher education as a career currently in flux – a flux that is fundamentally transforming the culture of how, and how well, teacher education is provided, and that is consequently generating something of an identity crisis for all those who work within that culture. But I have become increasingly aware, too, of other possible shades of meaning for the metaphor. The Neo-Liberal reformism that has dominated the politics of higher education in most Western countries over the last two decades has trailed in its wake institutional amalgamations, staff cutbacks and redundancies, cultures of compliance, and widespread experimentation with the historical structures of teacher education programmes worldwide. It has also impacted globally on teacher education pedagogies and modes of teaching delivery, shifting occupational roles and priorities, reviving arguments of what constitutes the core business of the academy, and increasing calls for a critical re-examination of the goals and purposes of teacher education.

However, it is not only the nature, location and delivery of teacher education that has been on the brink or ‘cusp’ of change. The international literature on teacher education also firmly positions the work of teacher educators on a different kind of ‘cusp’ – on the margins of academic life – mainly because of its continued strong affiliation with the teaching profession and its practice. Labaree (2005), for example, writing from a US perspective, characterises teacher education there as the ‘impossible job’ in a profession that has struggled with ‘bad luck’ in its history and ‘bad company’ in its occupational associations – the former as a result of the discipline’s late arrival as parvenu into the academy, and the latter in respect of its association with the ‘low status’ profession of teaching (p. 187). As with school teaching, teacher education involves engagement in difficult and complex practices that look deceptively easy and simple, yet in the academy it is often perceived as a profession that people do not wish to be identified with if they value their academic careers. ‘On the cusp’, in this sense then, connotes not only the idea of a career in the process of re-formation, but also the idea of a professional life spent on the ‘verge’, a community on the periphery, or the fringes, rather than at the centre of education.

‘On the cusp’ further suggests for me a profession that is increasingly seen as ‘betwixt and between’ a number of apparent binary divisions in the discourses of education policy. ‘On the cusp’ can be taken to imply a career in the ‘gaps’ between the school and the academy, between theory and practice, between teaching and research, between the ‘real world’ and the ‘ivory tower’, and so on. Each of these apparent binaries is addressed to a greater or lesser degree in this book.

I have therefore written this book on the assumption that in such times of change and re-formation, professional groups begin to ask more consciously than at other times why they are doing the job they do, what they, and others, value in what they do, and where their chosen field ‘stands’ in relation to other fields and professions. Such times offer, in short, fertile opportunity for discussions of professional identity.

The empirical work for this book began over seven years ago when it became clear to me that teacher education as a career in my own jurisdiction of New Zealand, as elsewhere, was on, or perhaps already over, the brink of a dramatic metamorphosis. By the turn of the century it had become obvious that teacher education would no longer be able to remain in the specialist, stand-alone Colleges of Education where it had been located for well over a century, and that existing state-funded teacher education institutions would all be re-structured and amalgamated into the universities. The per-student state funding subsidy for teacher education had almost halved over the previous decade, the period of study required for teaching qualifications had been cut by up to a quarter, and class sizes in teacher education were increasing between three and tenfold. At that time, I had been doing the job of a teacher educator for over a decade, and I was working in one of the last of the stand-alone Colleges of Education to merge with their local university. Like many of my colleagues, I was facing daily the myriad subtle consequences of policy reform and institutional re-structuring, all of which were causing me to reflect deeply on the role of teacher educator as I conceptualised and practised it.

I had also, at this time, become part of the Self-Study of Teacher Education Practices (S-STEP) Special Interest Group (SIG) of the American Educational Research Association (AERA). Reading and hearing the stories of other teacher educators in this group challenged me to become more explicit about my own values, beliefs and practice, and encouraged me to articulate these more overtly than I had done to date. As someone deeply interested in my own teaching, being part of a community with others intent on sharing and researching their problems of practice with the aim of improving their professional activities held immediate appeal.

I was drawn by both of these experiences not only to understand better my own teacher education practices, but also to locate more clearly my own experiences alongside the experiences of other colleagues both nationally and internationally. I wanted to gain a deeper understanding of how we collectively conceptualised our own professional identity as teacher educators, and how we defined the quality of our own practices in our different cultural, institutional and national contexts.

At the first encounter, the stories of my international colleagues seemed to highlight the very different structural contexts within which the work of teacher education is carried out worldwide. My first S-STEP Castle Conference, for example, reinforced my perceptions of the differences in our contexts, situations and practices, particularly with respect to my colleagues from North America. For one thing, I was teaching in a specialist College of Education while most of the other teacher educators at the conference worked in university education departments. At that time, very few of my classes had over thirty students, and I taught mainly in interactive, workshop environments which required me to work a large number of face-to-face hours. In most instances I visited my own professional studies students on their teaching practicums during their one-year graduate programme, and I was also engaged as an Advisor working in schools with individual teachers. Most of the other teacher educators at the conference appeared to teach fewer, larger classes, often in lecture format and often in undergraduate as well as graduate programmes. Few seemed either to mentor their own students on practicum, or to work with experienced teachers in the field as a major part of their role.

And, yet, on closer acquaintance, I was also just as struck by the commonalities that appeared to exist in our fundamental beliefs, goals, purposes, and professional dispositions. We in New Zealand, it seemed, were struggling with ‘leaving behind’ the very professional spaces that teacher educators in some other Western countries were trying to ‘get back to’. We both seemed to be trying to get to the same point, professionally, even if from almost diametrically opposite ends of a continuum. Despite the obvious differences in the ways in which teacher education had historically been constituted in New Zealand compared to their countries, I could still very much ‘identify’ with them, and they with me. A commitment to understanding more fully aspects of our pedagogical practices was a strong, common thread in all our presentations; all of us were committed to contributing to a scholarship of teacher education; all of us were committed to studying our own practices in ways that were not just storied but that also made them open to peer scrutiny and theoretical critique; and all of us seemed committed to roughly similar notions of a desired pedagogy for teacher education. It was such conversations that led me to wonder if what we had in common might constitute a shared identity as teacher educators.

One aim in conducting the research that forms the basis of this book, then, was to offer an empirical examination of the professional identity of the occupational group we call teacher educators. This is informed by a desire not only to give a voice to an educational community who (at least in English-speaking jurisdictions) seemed to see themselves as professionally marginalised and neglected, but also, and more importantly, to gain a deeper understanding of the professional lives of those who choose, like myself, to work in the ‘spaces in between’ the professional worlds of the school, the academy and educational policy.

Another aim was to take some steps towards developing a theoretical model of where teacher educators and teacher education might ‘stand’ – as a community of practice, as a career and discipline, or indeed as a ‘profession’. If teacher educators are a true community of practice, what is the nature of the ‘communality’ that characterises that community, and what ‘commonality’ is there in that practice? If teacher education is, indeed, a profession, just what, exactly, does it ‘profess’?

Teacher educators and identity

Unless teacher educators can themselves articulate what it is that they professionally know, believe in, and ‘stand for’, then, just as in the case of teachers … there is a danger that a knowledge-base [for teacher education] will be defined without the voice and perspectives of teacher educators [themselves].

(Zeichner, 1995, p. 21)

It is an axiom of the research literature on schools and schooling that ‘teachers matter’. One major synthesis of over 800 studies of student achievement in schools, for example, concludes that ‘teachers are among the most powerful influences in learning’ (Hattie, 2009, p. 238). Another claims that up to 59 per cent of variance in student performance is directly attributable to differences in teachers and classes (Alton-Lee, 2003). There is also a robust literature highlighting the importance within school teaching of teacher thinking, knowledge and decision-making (Elbaz, 1983, 1991; Schön, 1983; Shulman, 1987), teacher identity (Connelly and Clandinin, 1999; Day et al., 2005; Korthagen, 2004), the professional/personal nexus in teaching (Goodson, 1991; MacLure, 1993; Palmer, 1998), and the socio-cultural aspects of classroom culture (Bishop and Glynn, 2003; Darling-Hammond, 1997; Ladson-Billings, 1995; Nuthall, 1999). In other words, what schoolteachers think, what they value, the pedagogies they believe in, who they are as personalities, and how they relate to learners and to one another as a professional community matters insofar as these affect student outcomes. By extension, it is logical to assume that the same factors matter in relation to teacher education. If the quality of teaching in schools is determined in large part by who teachers are, and how, and what, they teach, then the quality of teacher education is also likely to be similarly affected by who teacher educators are, and how, and what, they teach.

A generation ago, Lanier and Little (1986, p. 528) claimed that ‘teachers of teachers – what they are like, what they do, what they think – are typically overlooked in studies of teacher education’. Despite the fact that since the turn of the century there has been something of a resurgence in interest in teacher education as a subject of both research and policy debate, the gap in relation to empirical studies of teacher educators persists. While we know a great deal more about many aspects of teacher education, especially its contested curriculum (Darling-Hammond et al., 2005), and the pedagogical practices of teacher education (Loughran, 2006; Loughran et al., 2004), there are still marked gaps. In particular, as one recent literature review concludes:

The literature of teacher education both domestically and internationally continues to lack references on the critical examination of teacher educators’ underlying beliefs and dispositions. … We currently lack research evidence about how teacher educators conceptualise the knowledge and understandings that they seek to develop in student teachers.

(Cameron and Baker, 2004, p. 35)

Moreover, much of the rhetoric around teacher educators’ status and role in the empirical research that does exist has historically been unflattering in tone. Ducharme (1993), for example, attributes some of the difficulty in even defining or identifying teacher educators as a community to the fact that few academics actually identify themselves as such, because of their low status and their recent arrival in the academy. ‘I once described them,’ he writes, ‘as “being among the least welcome guests at the educational lawn party of the establishment of higher education”’ (p. 3). Zeichner (1999) suggests that others with a stake in education regard teacher educators as ‘peripheral to the educational agenda’ (p. 6) and lacking in both political impact and agency. He also claims that policy decision-making relating to teacher educators rarely involves those who practise the job of teacher education. Their ‘voices’, observes Acker (1997, p. 67), ‘have been ignored’.

One might assume, given the ambiguous status of teacher educators within the academic firmament, their uncomfortable position ‘inside/outside the ivory tower’ (Maguire, 2000, p. 149), and a recognition that their voices have been seldom heard, that the literature would contain a wealth of empirical research on them as a professional group. However, this is not the case. What is most needed, moreover, seem now to be synthetic studies that might contribute to an emerging theory of the pedagogy of teacher education, and to the scholarly identity of teacher education more generally, by building conceptually, theoretically and methodologically on the body of individual case study work that has emerged since the turn of the century.

‘Beyond the stories’ – giving voice to a professional identity

We must make a compelling case that what we do has value.

(Bullough, 1997b, p. 30)

If, as Loughran (2008) and Zeichner (1999) argue, it is over to teacher educators to (re)claim their own voices and to open up the gaps and silences that surround their profession, then this study does that by contributing to the process of (re)claiming and articulating the voices of a small group of teacher educators as they have experienced a sea-change in their careers over the last decade.

During his 1999 vice-presidential address at AERA, prominent United States researcher Ken Zeichner claimed that the research on teacher education emerging from the S-STEP SIG of AERA was the most significant material to come out of teacher education in the last few decades. However, he has more recently criticised such research for not getting sufficiently beyond individual ‘tales’ of teacher educators in order to build a sounder theoretical base for teacher education as a pedagogy, as a professional identity, and as a body of knowledge (Zeichner, 2007). John Loughran laid down a similar challenge at the 2008 S-STEP conference in the United Kingdom when he enjoined that same teacher education research community to ‘get beyond the [individual] story’ in their research. Both thus argue that current research on teacher education must more clearly articulate any ‘theory’ of teacher education emerging from its empirical work, and better establish a common scholarship for teacher educators. As Loughran (2008) urges:

In a profession that understands what it does, how and why, the ability to speak for itself, to shape its own destiny and to seriously grapple with the expectations, needs and demands placed upon it is of paramount importance. Clearly it is time for the work of teacher educators to boldly shape that which is the problem of teacher education and to respond in positive, well-informed and meaningful ways.

(p. 1181)

On the other hand, there are those, such as Clandinin and Connelly (2000), who would surely critique the notion of ‘getting beyond the story’ by arguing that it is precisely through narrative or the telling of stories that we make theoretical sense of our experiences. They understand teacher identities as the stories we live by – as stories in which ongoing experiences are shaped, interpreted, reinterpreted and theorised as we live through them. In this book I hope to recognise the importance of both perspectives. While the work is grounded in the ‘stories’ of the professional careers and experiences of eight experienced teacher educators in New Zealand, it nonetheless attempts to ‘get beyond’ those career narratives to investigate some of the implications that their stories have for an emerging theory of teacher education and for their colleagues in other jurisdictions. Drawing especially on psychological, socio-cultural and post-structural theories of identity and social identity, I propose a definition of professional identity as ‘the valued professional self’, and use this perspective as a lens through which to analyse and evoke the professional identity of teacher educators as a distinctive professional group.

The structure of the book

Ultimately, I see the work contributing to the field of teacher education in two main ways. First, it attempts to establish a practical research methodology for ‘getting at’ the elusive, often referred to but seldom analysed concept that we call professional identity. Second, it endeavours to get ‘beyond the stories’ so as to start a conversation about what the essential characteristics of the professional identity of teacher educators (as opposed, for example, to either schoolteachers or academics generally) might be.

With respect to the first of these contributions (‘getting at’ a professional identity), while many studies in the teacher education field address particular aspects of professional identity (e.g. LaBoskey, 200...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: A career on the cusp
• 2 Identity and professional identity in teaching and teacher education
• 3 Investigating a professional identity
• 4 On becoming a teacher educator
• 5 On doing teacher education
• 6 On knowing: Teacher educators’ expertise
• 7 On being a teacher educator
• 8 On belonging as a teacher educator
• 9 Towards a professional identity for teacher education
• References
• Index