Section archive - Teacher Educators

This article describes a school-based professional development project, which established collaboration between two teacher educators and a group of elementary public school teachers. This collaborative project was called “Book in a Bag” (BIB), which was launched this project as a way to promote curriculum integration in classrooms and at the same time to provide a venue for research. The authors used a self-study to collect data. The authors came to understand that the tensions they experienced in the BIB project were evidence of real differences between the discourses of teacher educators and teachers. The authors identified competing discourses of teachers, teacher educators, and partnership, noting paradoxes that focused on discourse-bound knowledge, discourse-driven motivation, and discourse-limited aspirations.

This article explains the authors' involvement in an urban in‐district master’s program with a mission that included developing a ‘critical praxis’ for all participants. Their students' resistance to the readings written by teacher researchers brought the authors to question their pedagogy. This analysis reminds teacher educators to look carefully for often hidden opportunities offered for deeper learning when multiple perspectives come into contact.

This article considers the experience of mature trainee teachers in the United Kingdom, who participated in employment-based models of training. The paper documents collaborative action research by teacher educators focusing on the changing demands of their development work with the trainees.

This article describes an initiative, Becoming Teacher Educators (BTE). BTE is a community specifically designed for doctoral students whose career goal is to become teacher educators. The findings reveal a very high level of satisfaction from the members of BTE. Members frequently commented that the ongoing support from the community was the reason that they continued to learn, grow and share. In addition, the BTE community has provided members with additional educational and professional opportunities outside the basic requirements of their graduate programmes.