“Being, Doing, and Knowing”: Exploring Teacher Educator Development Through the Lens of Tensions

• In Event: Becoming a Teacher Educator: International Perspectives

Abstract

Purpose: This paper offers insights into the nature and development of the author’s expertise as a particular kind of teacher educator - a former classroom teacher now working in the context of a research-intensive university.

Theoretical framework: Teacher educators’ knowledge as a specific and unique form of expertise has become a focus of increasing interest to the international teacher education community (Korthagen, Loughran & Lunenberg, 2005). Recent considerable research efforts have been directed towards studies examining various aspects of teacher educators’ expertise and how it develops (e.g., Bates, Swennen & Jones, 2011). Many of these studies have been undertaken by teacher educators themselves, as they have sought to articulate and establish the complex and distinctive nature of their knowledge and build recognition of the value of the work of teaching within their institutions. Difficulties emerge when personally developed knowledge generated through teacher educators’ experiences conflicts with established theories and institutional requirements. Learning to recognise and manage these complex and problematic aspects is a key task in the process of developing as a teacher educator (Author, 2009).

Methods: The study investigates the ‘being, doing and knowing’ of the author as a developing teacher educator. Using a self-study approach (Hamilton, 1998), the author conducted a longitudinal, qualitative analysis of the problems and issues she encountered in learning to teach prospective teachers. An important feature of the self-study process is that it yields knowledge about practice that is intended not only as a means of personal sense-making, but also to contribute to new collective understandings of practice amongst the teacher education community.

Data sources/Analysis: Data for this self-study were collected via a comprehensive range of qualitative sources that provided a means of looking into and out from the author’s practice as a teacher educator, including autobiographical narrative, video-recordings of teaching, colleague observation, student feedback, journaling. The frame of ‘tensions’ emerged through an iterative process of working with literature and data: developing a list of concepts from the literature associated with studies of teacher educators’ practice, checking these within the data obtained from the self-study of the author’s practice, and gradually building up a picture of the author’s evolving understandings of practice that was grounded both in the constructs of the literature and the data.

Results and Significance: The process of developing as a teacher educator involves complex negotiations across multiple and often conflicting demands. Conceptually, tensions offer a potentially powerful way of understanding teaching and learning about teaching that takes into account the intricacies of these demands, as they are encountered in the actual world of teacher educators' practice. The acquisition of expertise as a teacher educator can be framed in terms of learning to recognise the particular tensions at play in a particular situation and how they might be managed productively.

Author

• Amanda K. Berry, Leiden University