Educational reforms which have been implemented in several countries in the last ten years have assigned to teachers a central role in the improvement of education in schools. Teacher education became, thus, the most important topic in the reformist agenda. At the same time there seems to be an agreement among politicians, media agents and the population in general that having qualified teachers in all classrooms is the surest way to improve education. Furthermore, there is a general expectation that responsibility for preparing qualified and competent teachers rests primarily with teacher education programs at higher education institutions. This means that teacher educators are now assumed to be the spearheads in educational reforms. Preservice teacher education is an important stage because is when prospective teachers might either build a crystallized image of teaching or acquire a background of knowledge, practices and attitudes that will allow them to perform their professional task with the social and political responsibility that all educational actions involve. If preservice teacher education is a crucial stage in the professional development of teachers because it can provide the knowledge base for school teaching, its important to investigate who is in charge of this important task and how he/she performs his/her work. Despite the many expectations and demands on teacher educators, there has been little attention to how they see themselves as educators, how they build their professional identity and what working conditions they can count on to meet the complex demand of preparing teachers for the 21st century. The main objective of this paper is to investigate teacher educators´ views and teaching practices. Two groups of questions were used as guidelines: 1) Who are the teacher educators? Why they have decided to be teachers? How they see their role as educators? Which values and meanings they attribute to teaching, to their career and professional development? 2) How teacher educators perform their teaching work? What are their main knowledge sources? To what kind of resources they have access in their institutional contexts? What are the most important challenges they have to face in their teaching practice? The research theoretical framework included Maurice Tardif’s concepts of teaching knowledge and teaching work, Claude Dubar’s conception of professional identity and Menga Ludke’s ideas of teaching professionalization.

Three case studies were designed to be conducted in three different institutional contexts: a large state university, a large private university, and a College type university. So far, the main source of data gathering was the interview. About 30 teacher educators, 10 from each institution were interviewed. These data are being complemented with field notes, document analysis and a survey with prospective teachers.

Analysis of interview data indicates that the institutional context shapes different views and teaching practices. Working conditions also vary largely, according to institutional organization. A common point across the three institutions is teacher educators’ difficulty to work collectively, mainly because the institutions do not have an integrative project aiming at the education of prospective teachers. Another common point stressed by most teacher educators is the lack of time to do research because they all have to accomplish a great number of tasks, besides teaching. Moreover, they feel a great pressure to publish coming from their institutions and from government policies.