Teacher educators no longer are the overlooked and poorly understood occupational group they once were. They have become more prominent in research and policy agendas over recent years, following recognition of their centrality for Initial Teacher Education (ITE) (a.o. Kelchtermans et al., 2017; Murray et al., 2021). With this growing attention, also come initiatives to map and describe the knowledge and skills invested in the work of educating teachers. Many countries now have standards for teacher educators in place (e.g. the Netherlands, Belgium, Estonia, Australia, Israel, Luxembourg, the US). Although the exact content and nomenclatures used (e.g. developmental profiles, competence profiles, standards) differ across countries, all of them are an attempt to be precise about this occupational group and to match the important role of teacher educators for quality ITE with clear, meaningful expectations.

While the debate on the function(ing) of teacher standards is a lively one in the literature (see Stone-Johnson, 2014), there is only a small body of research focusing specifically on the more recently developed standards for teacher educators (Murray, 2008). Teacher educator standards are generally met with enthusiasm; considered a sign that the profession is finally getting the attention it deserves. Standards have indeed contributed considerably to the visibility of teacher educators in policy and practice and delivered an important impetus to their professional development. However, the dearth of research on these standards is problematic as, in many locations, working with the standards has quickly become the logical way to do things: mapping teacher educators’ support needs, sharing and discussing practice, hiring new teacher educators, evaluating performance, etc. 

This paper serves as an invitation to pause and step back. It takes a social-constructionist approach to language (a.o. Jorgensen & Philips, 2002) to analyse the discourse on teacher educator professionalism enacted in the Dutch and Flemish standards. A social constructionist approach understands language as social practice. The primary purpose with invoking discourse in this study is to draw attention to what teacher educator standards (make us) do. We take an interest in de-familiarizing standards as a seemingly passive list and open up their capacity to steer and interact with what we do and what we value (a.o. Bacchi, 2000). Standards do not simply list and describe the knowledge, skills and attitudes demonstrated by teacher educators; they also bring along a certain ‘image’ of the profession and articulate a particular (normative) discourse on what it means to be a teacher educator today.

To map this discourse, this study builds on the concept of position call from positioning theory (Davies & Harré, 1999). It is a heuristic device allowing to examine what spaces and possibilities the discourse enacted in standards offers for teacher educators to inhabit (Adams, 2014; Holloway, 1984). Position calls are clusters of “rights, duties, obligations, but also expectations about how an individual will enact such rights, duties, and obligations” (McVee et al., 2011, p. 5). The discourse of teacher educator professionalism enacted in the standards entails a call to look at the profession in particular ways and involves expectations as to how teacher educators act and perform. For example, emphasizing “teacher educators as inquiring professionals” who “substantiate their decisions with, among other things, scientific insight” (VELON, 2015, pp. 98-99) attends to some aspects of the work, but not others, opening up particular courses for action, but closing down others. As Burke (1935) highlighted, “every way of seeing is also a way of not seeing” (p. 70). Extending the metaphor, this paper aims to uncover what aspects of teacher educator professionalism standards are attending to and open up what is left unspoken or unseen.

Our explorative analysis of the current discourse of teacher educator professionalism in this paper focusses on the standards texts in the Netherlands (VELON, 2018) and Flanders (VELOV, 2015). The Dutch standards have been in place for over two decades and are an important hub in a larger network of activities (i.e., certification procedure, induction and professional development programmes). The standards in Flanders are younger and not as tightly linked to supporting activities. The varying degree of institutionalisation turns this set of standards into critical cases (Flyvbjerg, 2006) with strategic importance in relation to our research interest in the current discourse of teacher educator professionalism. These cases are also critical in the Foucauldian (1978) sense of drawing attention to what is rendered common sense (i.e. our current way of seeing teacher education) to make it ‘fresh’ and strange again. The analysis preceded in a three-stage process, from broad to narrow, to broad again. First, we identified authoritative text materials surrounding the two standards documents which formed the focus of the analysis (intertextual compatibility; Ball, 1993). This included supporting materials (e.g. references to standards in other locations, the Dutch knowledge base for teacher educators), documentation available on the webpages of the respective associations of teacher educators, and previous iterations of the standards. Second, we performed several rounds of close reading the material as a whole before engaging in line-by-line coding of the two standards documents for the subject positions made available to teacher educators. We coded for patterns of rights, duties, and obligations of a (group of) teacher educator(s) to perform particular actions in particular ways. This included, for example, the teacher educator as someone with specific competencies; as someone who consumes and produces research; etc. All emerging subject positions were noted and described until an exhaustive list of positions was available. Fourth, we engaged in systematic recoding of the standards and supporting text materials to identify information related to the following analytic questions: (1) How is the teacher educator represented in the standards? (2) What kinds of knowledge, skills and attitudes are made relevant? (3) What presuppositions underpin this representation of teacher educator professionalism? (4) What is left unproblematic? Where are the blind spots? A matrix was created with information on these questions to facilitate interpretation within and across text materials. Memo writing was used throughout the process to draft emerging patterns and keep track of confirming and disconfirming evidence.

The discourse of teacher educator professionalism enacted in the standards is (re)constructed in three key premises: 1) Professionalism is a quality acquired, possessed, and performed by individual teacher educators The standards adopt an individualist discourse, assuming that professionalism is an individual acquirement and possession of teacher educators. Professionalism is conceived of as something individual teacher educators can work on and achieve. Individual teacher educators have (or lack) professionalism; individual teacher educators are (un)professional(s). 2) Professionalism can be mapped, measured, and assured through engagement with the standards Underpinning the standards is the premise that we can map what makes up the professionalism of teacher educators; that we can use this map to check at a given point in time what the state of professionalism of an individual teacher educator/group of teacher educators is (premise 1); and that observed gaps between the actual and preferred state of professionalism provide teacher educators –on the individual and/or team level- with clear foci to plan their induction and ongoing professional development. 3) Professionalism is generic and context-free The second premise evokes a related notion that professionalism is generic and context-free. The assumption is that once a teacher educator has acquired a particular role or competence area, and maintains it, the link with practice is a direct and stable one: the individual teacher educator draws on the knowledge and skills s/he possesses to enact high-quality practice across situations. These premises will be substantiated further with references to the intended purposes and methods of use suggested for the standards, the language used in the standards documents, and the speech functions performed in it. The paper will conclude with scrutinizing blind spots or limitations in this discursive positioning of teacher educator professionalism, followed by “inventive imaging” (Bacchi, 2012, p. 22) of an alternative discourse drawing on recent research.

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