Section archive - Teacher Educators

This paper explores the experiences of seven teacher educators who met monthly over one academic year to engage in a collaborative self-study focused on exploring the text, Developing a Pedagogy of Teacher Education: Understanding Teaching and Learning about Teaching. The authors' experiences demonstrate how self-study research, undertaken within the context of a professional learning community engaged in book-study. Their experiences hold the potential to enhance teacher educators’ understandings, foster collaboration, and provide a catalyst for meaningful observations about their practices, students, and teacher education program. The authors highlight that this has altered some of their practices and their discourse with others.

This self-study had two purposes. First, the authors were interested to examine their own beliefs and belief structures, including how these beliefs influenced their instructional practices. Second, the authors were interested to explore possible commonalities across their personal findings that could be identified as fundamental beliefs for all mathematics teacher educators that in turn might serve as tools for others’ growth. The authors identified four common fundamental beliefs about mathematics teacher education which they shared and which were instrumental in further examination of their own beliefs and practices: (1) mathematics is problematic and generated through sense-making; (2) a community of learners enhances learning; (3) mathematics teacher educators need to be explicitly aware of the learner in different contexts; and (4) teaching is complex at all levels.

The present study explores teacher educators' talk about student learning (TASL) in community in order to understand its characteristics and functions for professional development of this distinct population. The findings revealed three genres of discourse: managing understanding, advisory talk, meta-analytic talk. The authors also found three functions: awareness of the connection between teaching and learning is one such function, promoting an inquiry stance, and developing awareness of teacher educators’ own learning.

This article examined teacher educators' collective professional agency and identity within an identity coaching programe. This article illustrates how collective agency and identity are closely intertwined. The authors argue that it appears that a shared understanding of collective identity directs collective agency. In addition, the study reveals the importance of agency in negotiating new kinds of crystallized collective identity. Through strengthened collective agency, the participants were able to give a new meaning to themselves as a professional group within the department, deserving of respect. In conclusion, this study suggests that when one is seeking to understand collective identity and agency in professional contexts, it is important to address people's own individual narratives and learning pathways. Hence, this research emphasizes that in supporting collective identity and agency among professionals, it is pivotal to create shared learning platforms and processes that will allow the professionals to encounter each other, and to discuss issues concerning continuous changes, work, and professional identities.