Public discourses concerning teacher education have grown rapidly during the last few years (Korthagen, Loughran & Lunenberg 2005; Murray, 2008). These discourses have posed challenges to teacher education, including teacher educators’ work and professional identity negotiations. Teacher educators are increasingly required to redefine their professional identity including a move away from the traditional identity of “me as teacher” towards that of “me as researcher” and “me as learner and developer” (Cochran-Smith, 2005; Margolin, 2007). Simultaneously, demands for improvements in teacher education have strengthened; it is argued that schools will not change unless the ways in which teachers are educated change (Hökkä, Rasku-Puttonen & Eteläpelto, 2008; Bransford, Darling-Hammond & LePage, 2005). These competing and even contrasting discourses frame the social context where teacher educators operate and practice their agency in the centre of local and global discourses. Although the prevailing discussions concerning teacher educators’ work has emphasised the turbulent nature of present-day academic work and erosion of traditional academic professionalism (e.g, Murray, 2008), teacher educators are still found to be relatively autonomous and very committed to their work (Vähäsantanen, Hökkä, Eteläpelto, Rasku-Puttonen & Littleton, 2008). In this study we address in detail the agentic practices of teacher educators and elaborate: (i) how teacher educators exercise their agency in the negotiations of their teacher-, learner- and researcher-identities. We further seek to understand (ii) how teacher educators describe the nature of the possibilities for the manifestation of agency and the structures that subjugate their practices. In theoretical terms, this study is informed by critical socio-cultural theory, which emphasises the meaning of individual agency and power relations in identity negotiations (Lewis, Enciso & Moje, 2007). In this study professional identity negotiations are seen to be constructed in interaction between personal agency and social contexts (e.g. van Oers, 2002). Agency is understood as individuals’ resources and capacity to act intentionally and strategically, to make decisions concerning their work and career, and to negotiate professional identity in their workplace settings. However, individual agency and identity negotiations are always related to social practices and discourses and realised within structures of power (Fenwick, 2006; Lewis, Enciso & Moje, 2007).

In this study we utilise discursive approach to understand the emergent processes implicated in teacher educators’ identity negotiations in the context of social and cultural resources and discourses. The analysis applies our understanding of language as resource in identity construction by utilising critical discursive psychology (Edley, 2001; Wetherell, 1998) to elaborate how educators describe the nature of possibilities and obstacles for agentic practices in their professional identity negotiations. The data for this study were gathered during 2005 through open-ended interviews with eight teacher educators in a large Finnish academic (university level and research-based) teacher education department

We demonstrate how teacher educators position themselves as professionals within the interactional context of contrasting discourses and how they realise their personal agency within these positionings. Teacher educators practiced their agency primarily to secure resources to teach and develop their own teaching i.e. to construct their teacher- and learner-identity. Thus, to be an active agent required negotiation of ones own position in a work community primarily as a teacher. In contrast, negotiation of researcher-identity was described as more subjugated and conflicting. We discuss what these findings suggest for the negotiation of teacher educators’ professional identity in context of multiple discourses concerning teacher education. In order to understand recent challenges posed to teacher education we suggest that it is important to gain a better understanding of the complexity of teacher educators’ agency and identity construction, and of the relationship between teacher educator identity and the theory and practice of teacher education.