This paper provides an overview and update on the work of the Teacher Education Group (TEG) in the UK. This is a research capacity building initiative, conducted under the umbrella of phase 2 of the Teaching and Learning Research Programme’s (TLRP) Capacity Building work. This TLRP work is based on an ‘embedded social practices’ model (Rees et al., 2007:776) which targets the development of ‘research capacity by engaging with already existing ‘communities of practice’ within professional associations’, including those in teacher education. The TEG created an up-to-date annotated mapping of a substantial sample of current teacher education research, which has now been posted on the websites of the TLRP and the three other sponsoring organizations. The paper will argue that the problems in research capacity building in teacher education in the UK can be partly met by creating scholarly and generative (Shulman, 1999) resources to be used as pedagogical tools in teaching and learning about research. If accessible and up-to-date, such resources are seen to offfer the opportunity for teacher educators and their various groups of post-graduate students to develop research knowledge based around high quality, searchable, peer-reviewed material.

The TEG initiative is still on-going and this paper discusses and critiques the achievements of the first two years of the work. The paper addresses both methodological and substantive issues raised by the work of TEG to date (Murray et al, in review). These include: the impact of how the initial mapping was bounded; the implications of the chosen time frame and national contexts adopted; the lessons this holds for other databases; how paper based literature reviews relate to organising research knowledge accessed via hyper-textual learning structures; and the impact such learning structures have on the differentiated ways in which potential users access information. In addressing these issues, the paper identifies areas of interest to the various teacher educator research communities in Europe and their associated research practices. Drawing on recent and historical analyses of the contested place of research in teacher education (see, inter alia, Menter, Brisard and Smith, 2006; Furlong, 2007), it also identifies and examines some of the implications for the field across the four jurisdictions within the UK, and particularly for localised (institutional) research capacity building initiatives (Sikes, 2006). The paper also describes how the mapping exercise on the TLRP site is articulated through a series of ‘walk throughs’ (guided commentaries with embedded links to the mapping and other TLRP resources), generating a further pedagogical tool for exploring debates about research in teacher education for both new and experienced researchers in the field (Murray et al, in review) This part of the paper draws on findings about individual learning and professional development for teacher educators working as ‘new’ researchers on ITE courses in various contexts (Boyd et al, 2007). In conclusion, the paper raises questions about the dissemination and embedding of the initiative in the practices of teaching and learning abut research in Europe. We also identify some possible pan-European research agendas and discuss how these ideas may serve to extend current research-capacity building initiatives, whilst still maintaining clear and realistic focus on the challenges facing the European teacher educator/ researcher communities.