Becoming a teacher educator: evidence from the field

Abstract

This article makes a contribution to understanding the challenges new teacher educators face in establishing their professional identities in Higher Education. The data collected for the study allowed the researchers to analyse the tensions and conflicts arising for 28 teacher educators in their first 3 years of working on Initial Teacher Education (ITE) courses in England. The findings of the study show that, despite having previous successful careers in school teaching, the majority of the interviewees took between 2 and 3 years to establish their new professional identities. They faced challenges in two key areas-developing a pedagogy for HE-based ITE work and becoming research active. Meeting both of these challenges required significant adaptations to their previous identities as schoolteachers.

Becoming a university lecturer in teacher education: expert school teachers reconstructing their pedagogy and identity

“…A further study (Murray & Male, 2005) of seven departments, in contrasting institutions including new and old universities, concluded that there is a need to support the transition of school teachers appointed to higher education. It argued that post-graduate courses on teaching in higher education are likely to be useful, that mentoring is useful but varies widely in quality, that research capacity building needs to be central to induction support, and that there is a need to raise awareness amongst teacher educators of the bond between research and teaching in higher education.…”

Collaborative learning in pre‐service teacher education: an exploratory study on related conceptions, self‐efficacy and implementation

“…Therefore, a challenging role is reserved for in-service and pre-service teacher education (Cohen, Brody, and SaponShevin 2004;Hornby 2009;Ishler, Johnson, and Johnson 1998;Veenman et al 2002). Following Murray and Male (2005), the process of implementing CL into teacher education should be situated at two different levels. Teacher educators can implement CL as a teaching strategy in their own lessons (second order education), and in the content of their lessons they can instruct student teachers on how to apply CL in their future classroom practice (first order education).…”

Becoming a teacher educator – the motivational factors

“…It has been suggested that teacher educators usually undergo a mid-career transition (Murray and Male 2005) however it is interesting to note that the three participants in this study were still fairly early in their teaching careers. The issue of relatedness and the participants' prior knowledge or experience of teacher education and higher education in general also has an implication for Cognitive Evaluation Theory (CET, Deci and Ryan 1985), a sub-theory of SDT which specifies that extrinsic considerations can contribute toward feelings of competence and therefore enhance intrinsic motivation.…”

“…They were conscious they would need to undertake research and learn new skills in this area. Some teachers making this transition can find this process difficult (Murray and Male 2005), specifically due to the requirement to undertake research, and only ever become 'semiacademics' (Murray 2002, 77). However the participants demonstrated differing levels of confidence in relation to learning in this area with participant 3 stating: 'Nor did the idea of carrying our research fill me with dread; this was something I was actively looking forward to doing (P3 initial reflection)' whereas participant 2 seemed more cautious stating: 'In particular…”

“…There have been a number of studies considering the process and challenges associated with becoming an early career lecturer (Murray and Male 2005;Zeichner 2005;Swennen et al 2009;van Velzin et al 2010;Boyd and Harris 2010;McKeon and Harrison 2010;Williams and Ritter 2010) and related research over the last decade has covered various issues ranging from international comparisons of teacher education (Maandag, et al 2007), doctoral students progression to become teacher educators (Kosnik et al 2011) and experiences of school-based teacher educators (White, Dickerson and Weston 2015). The current paper covers, in part, some of the issues addressed by this literature.…”