Section archive - Teacher Educators

In this article the authors address the question: 'What sub-identities of teacher educators emerge from the research literature about teacher educators and what are the implications of the sub-identities for the professional development of teacher educators?' To answer the research question, the authors set out to analyze the research literature relating to teacher educators to search for ways in which such sub-identities might be explicitly or implicitly described. Based on the research literature the authors found four sub-identities that are available for teacher educators: schoolteacher, teacher in Higher Education, teacher of teachers (or second order teacher) and researcher.

The aim of this study was to explore the teacher educators' experience in writing a book. Eighteen experienced teacher educators, who completed their respective books, were interviewed individually or participated in a focus group discussion. The findings reveal that although the teacher educators had different motivations for writing and took various paths in their writing, they all view this experience as contributing to them cognitively, emotionally and in practice; teaching nourished their writing but was also influenced by and improved as a result of the writing. The authors suggest providing teacher educators with a supportive infrastructure - budgetary, editorial and managerial - in order to encourage them to write and publish.

In this study, a group of teacher educators converse about their teaching practice in light of a new provincial K-12 program of social studies. The most noteworthy feature of this new program is its explicit call for teachers to include Aboriginal and Francophone perspectives as they teach to the program's two central themes of “identity” and “citizenship”. The author reads teacher educators' conversations about their practice to identify a set of educational questions that the author argues speak both to and beyond this specific programmatic context.

The need for capacity-building in teacher education in the UK has been raised as a serious issue by a number of commentators. This paper provides an analytical account of an initiative conducted by the Teacher Education Group (TEG) to build research capacity in teacher education. With reference to a review of the national contexts for research in the UK and research on teacher educators, the article argues that, in order to build research capacity initiatives we need to provide motivation and new types of networking opportunities for researchers, as well as developing their expertise.