This research study addressed the neglect of teacher educators’ voices in the discourses surrounding teaching and teacher education (Swennen, Jones and Volman, 2010). In this study, five Queensland university teacher educators articulated, through the narratives of their professional lived experience, their thoughts and concerns about current and future education policy and practice. The context of the study is an international educational environment dominated by government reviews of teacher education, neo-liberal policies, standardised curriculum, ongoing assessment, and accountability.
Evidence of the neglect of teacher educator voices emerged from a search of the literature on teaching and teacher education from England, Finland, and California as well as across national boundaries such as the European Commission Thematic Working Group (2013) report “Supporting Teacher Educators”. The introduction of the UK government “Prevent” strategy (2011) places an expectation on classroom teachers to be frontline of actors in implementation of the strategy. These reports make comment on and recommendations about the current and future practice in teacher education but do not indicate the ways in which teacher educators have or have not been involved in the discussion of and preparation of the reports.
The overarching research question was: “How do five Queensland university teacher educators articulate, through the narratives of their professional lived experience, their thoughts and concerns about current and future education policy and practice”.
The principal objectives were, firstly, to break the silence of teacher educators’ voices in the policy/practice debate. Secondly, to make their voices heard through publication of what they articulated through presentations and journal articles. A third objective is to encourage other teacher educators to make their voices heard in political debates and policy decisions within their own national contexts and globally.
The theoretical framework was narrative inquiry (NI) as both methodology and method using the commonplaces of temporality, sociality and space (Clandinin & Rosiek, 2007). In the conceptual framework, the commonplaces were envisaged as three rivers flowing towards a confluence that became a generative space from which flowed the next steps in life.
NI is a research methodology that uses story through personal narratives to explore through a three-dimensional form of inquiry participants’ lived experience in the context of the topic being explored. The commonplaces of NI are temporality, sociality and space (Clandinin & Rosiek, 2007). These were envisaged in the conceptual framework as three rivers flowing towards a confluence that became a generative space from which flowed the next steps in life.
For the purposes of this research I used the term narrative to mean the encompassing of the stories of life into a whole telling of that life. Frank (2002) noted that, “Being narratable implies value and attributes reality” (p. 111). This has been evidenced through the process of co-constructing the participants’ narratives and their responses to this process which revealed they felt they had a story worth telling and recognised their professional lived experience and informed their professional identity as teacher educators.