The Role of Recruitment Processes in Defining Teacher Educators’ Work in Aotearoa New Zealand

Author(s):

Mavis Haigh(presenting / submitting)Alexandra Gunn David Berg Mary Hill

Conference:

ECER 2015

Network:

10. Teacher Education Research

Format:

Paper

Session Information

10 SES 01 D,

Paper Session

Time:

2015-09-08

13:15-14:45

Room:

325.Oktatóterem [C]

Chair:

Peter Gray

Contribution

In Aotearoa NZ, responses to a market approach to teacher education (Alcorn, 2014) have paralleled a global trend of wider provision of initial teacher education (ITE) but as of 2015 there is no totally school-based teacher education in this country. Instead, teacher education has moved primarily into the university sector following the merger of formerly independent Colleges of Education with their local universities. This shift of ITE into mostly university-based programmes has marked a significant change in context for ITE in Aotearoa NZ as it had done previously in other jurisdictions (Gilroy, 2014). Concurrent with this, teacher educators’ work, now constituted as academic work within the university also changed. In this transition to university based academic workers, teacher educators faced increased demands for research-led and evidence-based teaching along with requirements to produce research publications and to increase research productivity (Hill & Haigh, 2012). Davey’s (2013) research into several Aotearoa NZ teacher educators’ identities and their work also illustrates the expansion of teacher education work, particularly in relation to research. Service amongst the teacher educators in Davey’s study was also considered to be a much more complex activity than traditional university service understood as ‘institutionally focussed administration’ (82).

As a relatively new professional discipline in the university sector in Aotearoa NZ, ITE continues to face what Labaree (2008) describes as a persistent ambivalence to the place of the university in ITE and vice versa. Yet, conducting ITE within the context of university-based higher education induces an expansion to the work of teacher education. Whereas non university-based ITE might continue to occupy itself primarily with practices of early childhood education and schooling, ITE in the university must concern itself with a dual mission of scholarship and practices of early childhood education and schooling.

As institutions actively rally to preserve academic standing within high-stakes environments of research quality evaluation at the same time as ITE works to maintain its professional credibility, tensions between questions of rigour and relevance have emerged. Binary concepts of theory/practice, research/teaching, academic/professional, educating teachers/educating researchers, proliferate and enable constructions of teacher education work as troublesome (Ellis et al., 2013) to arise.

What is happening to the work of teacher educators as this expanded object of teacher education in Aotearoa NZ emerges? Our study (WoTE-NZ) is designed in part to understand more adequately, at this particular cultural-historical juncture, how teacher education as an activity of the academy is related to the institutional contexts within which it sits. This paper considers constructions of teacher educators’ academic work in the mix of such productive tensions and cultural shifts.

We are interested in how university-based teacher educators are defined as a category of academic worker. Following from and expanding upon research in the UK and Australia, our project brings questions posed in these existing Work of Teacher Educators (WoTE) studies to New Zealand. We are exploring how the cultural-historical production and maintenance of the category of ‘teacher educator’ occurs. In phase one of our project, we focused on this by exploring recruitment and appointment processes for university based teacher educators.

Our study is informed by Engeström’s (1987, 2001) cultural-historical activity theory. We are considering the teacher educator as a collective subject, exploring conceptions of teacher educators’ work, and building understandings of the activity systems within which teacher educators’ work resides.

Method

Following the UK and Australian studies, Engeström’s (1987, 2001) cultural-historical activity theory guided our approach to data gathering. Ethics approval for the study was sought from, and granted by, the two institutions within which the authors work. Understanding job advertisements and associated documents as cultural tools mediating the relationship between persons (applicants) and their objects (gaining employment), we collected texts and conducted interviews with named contact persons. Across six months (1 October 2013 – 31 March 2014) a weekly scan of unijobs.co.nz and institutional websites yielded advertisements and job/person descriptions for 37 positions. Of these, 11 were identifiably related with ITE and formed the basis of the data set for this phase of the study. Named personnel from the job advertisements were contacted by phone and email and invited to participate in a telephone interview. Using a structured interview guide, we explored how the position had come about, how its advertisement and associated documents were developed, the kind of skills and attributes desired in a potential recruit, and the nature of the work a potential recruit to the position would be involved in. Seven telephone interviews were conducted. Each interview lasted between 20 – 40 minutes and was audio taped and transcribed. Two major strands of analysis were employed. Ellis, McNicholl and Pendry’s (2012) strategies of membership categorisation, linguistic annotation, and key-words-in-context were used to identify attributions to and substantiations of the category of teacher educator. We then asked, what is the nature of the work? What characteristics are required if one is to do this work? What is unique about this work? And, what is prioritised in talk and text about this work? Next, we employed discourse analysis to understand how institutionalised patterns of thought and knowledge become manifest in constructions of the category of teacher educator. Ultimately discourses will have effects on the bodies of people who come to occupy the category; thus, the discourse analysis provides a means of understanding how the category may later relate with the corporeal.

Expected Outcomes

Three major constructions of teacher educator are evidenced in the NZ data: a ‘professional expert’; a ‘traditional academic’; and a ‘dually qualified teacher educator’. The ‘professional expert’ is the type of teacher educator who is qualified to teach (in early childhood education or in the schooling sector) and registered by the New Zealand Teachers Council, and whose work is described as needing to be supervised, as acting in support of, and as delivery. No requirement to research, or involvement in research, is expected although the professional expert is expected to build and maintain relationships with teachers, schools and early childhood settings in the community. The ‘traditional academic’ is clearly research and leadership focussed and described in terms of general academic skill sets and abilities. Teacher educators occupying this traditional academic category are expected to have a track record of successful leadership, tertiary teaching experience (for which there is no requirement to be qualified or registered as a teacher in Aotearoa NZ) and be research active. There is no requirement for persons occupying this category of teacher educator to be, or have been, a school or early childhood qualified and registered teacher. Those we named ‘dually qualified’ are teacher educators constructed as superteacher/researcher/leader, an expert who is an effective (school or early childhood) teacher with high enthusiasm and resilience, good community linkages and who can also engage in research and dissemination activities in pursuit of research informed tertiary teaching. These findings are presented in light of the erasure of teacher educator discerned from the Australian study, the emerging categories in the UK study, and NZ higher education and teacher education policy contexts.

References

Alcorn, N. 2014. “Teacher education in New Zealand 1974-2014.” Journal of Education for Teaching: International Research and Pedagogy, 40 (5): 447-460. Davey, R. 2013. The Professional Identity of Teacher Educators: Career on the Cusp? London and New York: Routledge. Ellis, V., J. McNicholl, and A. Pendry. 2012. “Institutional Conceptualisations of Teacher Education as Academic Work in England.” Teaching and Teacher Education, 28 (5): 685-693. Ellis, V., M. Glackin, D. Heighes, M. Norman, S. Nicola, K. Norris, I. Spencer, and J. McNicholl. 2013. “A Difficult Realisation: The Proletarianisation of Higher Education-based Teacher Educators.” Journal of Education for Teaching, 39 (3): 266-280. Engström, Y. 1987. Learning by Expanding: An Activity-theoretical Approach to Developmental Research. Helsinki: Orienta-Konsultit. Engeström, Y. 2001. “Expansive Learning at Work: Toward an Activity Theoretical Reconceptualization.” Journal of Education and Work, 14 (1): 133 – 156. Gilroy, P. 2014. “Policy interventions in teacher education: sharing the English experience.” Journal of Education for Teaching International Research and Pedagogy, 40 (5): 622-632. Hill, M. and M. Haigh. 2012. “Creating a Culture of Research in Teacher Education: Learning Research within Communities of Practice.” Studies in Higher Education, 37 (8): 971-988. Labaree, D. F. 2008. “An Uneasy Relationship: The History of Teacher Education in the University.” In Handbook of Research on Teacher Education: Enduring Questions in Changing Contexts, edited by M. Cochran-Smith, S. Feiman-Nemser, J. D. McIntyre and K. E. Demers, 290-306. New York and London: Routledge.

Author Information

Mavis Haigh (presenting / submitting)

Faculty of Education, The University of Auckland

Learning, Development and Professional Practice

Auckland

Alexandra Gunn

College of Education, University of Otago, New Zealand

David Berg

College of Education, University of Otago, New Zealand

Mary Hill

Faculty of Education, The University of Auckland, New Zealand

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