Introduction
Quality teaching is key to improve student learning. Quality teaching depends on teacher quality which is seen as one of the most important school-related factors influencing student achievement (OECD 2005; Darling-Hammond 2000; Hattie 2003). Teacher quality depends on quality teacher education. Thus, teacher educators play a key role in the process of teacher learning (EU 2013). There has been extensive research on teaching and teachers, but less attention has been paid to teacher educators.
More recently, it is possible to identify research which has focused on teacher educators, in particular on their roles and responsibilities and on their professional learning (Kelchtermans, Smith, and Vanderlinde 2018; Meeus, Cools, and Placklé 2018; Bouckaert and Kools 2018; Yamin-Ali 2018; Shagrir 2019). While there has been growing attention to teacher educators, existing literature points to divergent orientations and, to some extent, to lack of clarity in regard to who they are, what they do, and how they develop professionally (Flores 2018; Ping, Schellings, and Beijaard 2018). As Murray (2016) argues, teacher educators are ‘an under-researched, poorly understood, and ill-defined occupational group’.
Added to this is the complex and varied nature of their roles, particularly regarding research, teaching and teaching how to teach. In this context, tensions related to how teacher educators handle the two man roles – teaching and research – have been identified (Murray and Male 2005; Czerniawski, MacPhail, and Guberman 2017). Teacher educators have been viewed as ‘hidden’ or ‘unrecognised’ professionals (Livingston 2014) within a multi-faceted (EU 2013) and heterogeneous profession (Smith 2011; Ping, Schellings, and Beijaard 2018). Issues of invisibility, diversity, complexity, and sometimes ambiguity have been used to describe the characteristics of teacher educators’ work. Within this complexity of roles, teacher educators develop professional identities related to practicing agency, ‘their capacity to negotiate and renegotiate professional identities within their local work practices’ (Hökkä, Eteläpelto, and Rasku-Puttonen 2012, 86) in the attempt to handle the many different responsibilities. Initiatives led by teacher educators in different parts of the world in order to foster their professional development may be identified (Shagrir 2019) namely through communities of practice (Shagrir 2019; Hadar and Brody 2018), self-studies and study groups (see, for instance, Flores et al. 2016; Vieira et al. 2019). Issues such as building collective responsibility for improving teacher education programmes, providing support, developing a shared commitment to student teacher learning and developing a scholarship of teacher education have been discussed as a result of such initiatives. However, in other contexts, dilemmas, tensions and concerns associated with the complexity of teacher educators’ role and practice have also been identified (see, for instance, Vieira 2013; Meeus, Cools, and Placklé 2018; Maareneen et al. 2019). It is, therefore, important to examine who teacher educators are and what they do, how they understand their roles and their professional learning and development (see, for instance, Izadinia 2014; Livingston 2014; Flores 2016; Czerniawski, MacPhail, and Guberman 2017; Hadar and Brody 2018; Springbett 2018). This paper focuses in particular on the Janus face- teacher educator and researcher. It draws on existing international literature, and our aim is to position ourselves in the discussion relating to our own and other research.
Who is the teacher educator and how are his/her roles described?
As a backdrop to discussing who is the teacher educator and what his/her roles are, it is useful to problematise the university context in which teacher educators work. Labaree (2004) talks about the low status of Ed-school in American tertiary institutions, and at the same time criticised them for being distant to the practice field. Brennan and Willis (2008), describing the Australian context, claim that: Education is not a top discipline in the university sector (s. 297). Teacher education has, in many countries, previously mainly taken place in colleges, and not in universities, yet since the 1990 there has been a process of merging teacher education colleges with universities in for example UK, Australia, New Zealand, and recently also in Norway. Thus, teacher education must find its place within the university structure and develop an academic identity which fits into a university model. Teacher educators who in the past identified themselves mainly as ‘teachers’, are now required to develop new identities to fit the university model. A look at existing research literature points to the vagueness of the definition of the term ‘teacher educator’. This lack of clarity leads, in turn, to the vague definition of who teacher educators are with implications for their identities, role description and professional development. In a recent paper, White (2019) asserts that defining who the teacher educator is depends on ‘which country and work context you are located in; it depends on which position and perspective you take on the wider project of educating teachers, and it depends on individuals who either choose to identify or not, as a member of this group’.
Attempts have been made to overcome the lack of a shared and clear understanding of the term in existing literature. For instance, teacher educators have been described as ‘all those who actively facilitate the (formal) learning of student teachers and teachers’ (EU 2013, 8). In a similar vein, Snoek, Swennen, and van der Klink M (2011, 652) state that a teacher educator is ‘someone who contributes in a formal way to the learning and development of teachers’. These definitions entail a broad understanding of the concept which includes those who work in universities (including those who teach school subjects) as well as school based mentors. The above definitions particularly highlight the formal dimension in which teacher educators’ work is embedded. As White (2019) asserts recently, teacher educators ‘remain poorly understood and yet paradoxically vital to policy reform’.
Multiple or sub-identities as teacher educators may be identified as they may see themselves in different ways. For instance, school mentors might, rightly so, think of themselves primarily as school teachers, and teachers in higher education are likely to see their roles mainly as researchers and/or as teachers of teachers (Swennen, Jones, and Volman 2010). In order to answer the question ‘who is the teacher educator?’ it is important to consider the components of the teacher education curriculum (Flores 2016) and to include into the equation those who are involved in teaching disciplinary knowledge, didactical knowledge, general pedagogy, and teaching practice, i.e. foundational courses, content knowledge courses, and teaching practice courses. As such a wide definition of teacher educators is advocated including all involved with the education of teachers regardless of the context and content. In other words, there are multiple teacher educators who are to be associated with various primary expertise and role in the education of (student) teachers in different contexts of learning. White (2019), in a recent literature review and local policy analysis study in the Australian context, identifies three sub-groups belonging to the broader teacher educator occupational group: i) university-based; ii) school-based; and iii) community-based teacher educators (for instance, parents, community leaders and, in examples from both Canada and Australia, Indigenous Elders). Each of these categories plays a key role in the education of teachers across their career to best meet the needs of all students.
Other issues pertaining to the complex and demanding nature of teacher educators’ professional knowledge and work have also been discussed in recent research literature. Smith (2015) claims that teacher educators is a professional group within another professional group, that of teachers. There is a certain unique combination of characteristics of teacher educators’ professional knowledge and skills, such as content knowledge, communicative knowledge, knowledge about adult learning, feedback and motivation, research knowledge, and how to develop reflective competence within others (Smith and Ulvik 2015). Taking into consideration that a specialised professional education for teacher educators is rare or non-existing in most contexts, teacher educators’ professional knowledge is mainly acquired through experience. In Israel Orit Avidov-Ungar and Forkosh-Baruch (2018) studied the professional identity of teacher educators with regards to pedagogical innovation, including being, the conceptual component; doing, the practical component; and having, the environmental support component. The authors found that the ‘being’ component is the dominant mode of existence and is strongly connected to the construction of professional selves. They also conclude that the demands of the digital era compel teacher educators to re-examine their professional identity vis-a-vis technology-integrated teaching and that institutional support was vital for professional identity construction.
Other studies have examined how teacher educators enacted their roles differently within a school-based development project (Postholm 2019) and their collective professional agency and identity within an identity coaching programme (Hökkä, Vahasantanen, and Mahlakaarto 2017). Recent research has also focused on their professional roles (Meeus, Cools, and Placklé 2018; Bouckaert and Kools 2018; Yamin-Ali 2018), on their professional learning, development and change (Brody and Hadar 2018; Czerniawski et al. 2018), on their conceptualisation of the teaching/learning process (Kosnik et al. 2018; Cao et al. 2018), and on their identities and the integration of technology (Jonker, Marz, and Voogt 2018; Uerz, Volman, and Kral 2018). This literature emphasises the tensions teacher educators encounter in their work, in some cases related to a mismatch between their own expectations and the expectations of their institutions as well as the need to better align their professional development with their needs and career stages including both formal and informal learning contexts. An expansion of their roles, lack of support, scarcity of relevant professional development opportunities, tensions between research and teaching and lack of visibility of their work have also been identified. In a recent systematic review of what, how and why teacher educators learn, Ping, Schellings, and Beijaard (2018), drawing on 75 research articles, concluded that while research on teacher educators’ professional learning appears to be a growing field of interest, it is fragmented in focus. The same authors found that i) there is no clear knowledge base essential for teacher educators’ work, ii) teacher educators undertake different activities from which to learn, and iii) they generally experience the need to learn to do their work as teacher educators.
The importance of reflecting on teacher educators’ practice and research as a strategy of professional development has also been explored within the framework of the self-study movement (see, for instance, Russell and Martin 2014; Russell 2018). A Finnish study suggests, however, that teacher educators express more confidence in exerting agency in their teaching roles than in their roles as researchers (Hökkä, Eteläpelto, and Rasku-Puttonen 2012). Moreover, research has shown that teacher educators are a particular group of teachers as their instructional practices are significantly different from those of other higher education faculty in terms of the use of various types of traditional and constructivist strategies (Goubeaud and Yan 2004). Cao et al. (2018, 481) argue that ‘The uniqueness of teaching in teacher education is that the focus of teaching is not just on what student teachers should know and believe about teaching, but more importantly on what student teachers actually do when they are teaching’.
In this paper we discuss school-based and university based teacher educators (e.g. the mentors or cooperating teachers in the schools during practicum and beyond) in order to shed additional into their identity and work and particularly into the ways in which they deal with varied and sometimes competing demands embedded in their professional responsibilities.
Teaching and research
Drawing upon data about the process of enacting change in initial teacher education, as a result of the Bologna process, Vieira et al. (2019, 53) identified resistance, tensions, and dilemmas as ‘tradition and innovation are difficult to reconcile within organisational cultures that tend to be conservative, and where divergent interests and power imbalances often undermine demo...
