Teacher education has become a key instrument of reform where the work of schools and universities has increasingly been subject to marketisation and associated audit (Ball, 2003; Furlong, 2005, 2013). In England, such trends are typified by the introduction of School Direct: a model of teacher training that enables schools to select their own trainees. This reflects a new emphasis on teaching being increasingly conceptualised in technicist or craft-based terms where the university elements of training have become more optional and increasingly shaped by the immediate demands practice in particular schools (Browne et al., 2013). This policy climate has substantially altered trainee experience in many European countries (Cartout et al., 2009; Cosenefroy et al., 2013; Hodson, et al., 2012; Luttenberg et al., 2013; Pillen et al., 2013; Smith et al., 2013).

This paper forms part of a wider study that has explored the affect of School Direct on university practice and how university teacher educators have experienced these policy adjustments. The long-term shift from academic- to school-based emphases has resulted in changes to university teacher educators' base of expertise, where older staff members are more aligned with the former, and younger with the latter. Various authors have spoken of how this uncertainty of job definition impacts on the emergent sense of self of new entrants to the profession of teacher education. For example, Boyd et al. (2010:10) have reported on how "the workplace context encourages the new lecturers to hold on to their identity and credibility as school teachers rather than to pro-actively seek new identities as academics within the professional field of teacher education". Less work however has been conducted in relation to longer serving members of university staff now obliged to adjust from earlier practices. The study aims to capture how members of this group have experienced recent professional demands as a result of schools increasingly setting the terms of teacher education. It questions how they have altered their own practice and how their attitudes to research as a dimension of the job have changed. More broadly, the study aims to articulate what can be defended as the distinctive university contribution to teacher training as school-based elements extend further.

The theoretical ambitions of this study are aimed at building an understanding of how ideological identifications work through teacher educator practice. Teacher educator motives are variously harnessed by identification with particular discourses (retention of university values, the need to support practice, the promotion of research, the need to comply with directives to retain "outstanding" status, etc). Some asserted the academic dimensions of teacher education or the development/retention of humanistically defined pedagogical processes. Others were motivated more by operational than by academic concerns. Policy documents meanwhile regulate practices more generally such that participation in both teaching and teacher education becomes a form of bureaucratic compliance. Lacan's schemata of the four discourses provides a way of understanding four key social phenomena: governing, educating, protesting and revolutionising (Lacan, 2007; Bracher, 2007). For Lacan there is always a gap between performance and awareness or articulation of that performance, where this gap results from moving between alternative identificatory modes (Zizek, 2006; Brown, 2008). Specifically, teacher educators are depicted as wavering between governmental regulation (master discourse) and professional imperatives (university discourse), where the latter comprise an uneasy alliance of expertise in school and academic rigour. Through depicting the unsettlement of practice and accounts of it (hysteric discourse) the study points to possible resolutions that might be achieved through more systematic resistance to external demands (analytic discourse). That is, the university teacher educator identity results from attempted resolution of these conflicting demands.

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