In this review, we map international research on teacher education indexed in the Web of Science citation database. Previously, we have developed a way of organizing knowledge in and on teacher education (Lindblad et al., 2021) and thereafter more specifically mapped research on Swedish teacher education (Lindblad, Samuelsson & Nelhans, submitted). We found a fragmented research field and argued for a need for increased knowledge of this as well as increased conversations between researchers of these various aspects of teacher education research.

This paper intends to explore research communication and arguments in international teacher education research, given an overall late-modern globalized interest in education and a globalized research community. Ananin & Lovakov (2022) took a bibliometric perspective of research on teacher education, but this review also considers teacher education as a space where different actors meet and interact, thus asking how teacher education research and its role is understood in the teacher education agora.

The review is based on the observation that research on teacher educationis changing in tandem with professional and societal developments, and that such changes in return might have an impact not only on the research society but also on politics and policymaking. Both the educational and societal importance of teacher educations are, for different reasons, frequently emphasized in for instance political, medial, and professional discourses, and connected with both hopes and fears (see e.g., Barber & Mourshed, 2007; Clandinin, & Husu, 2017; Lagemann, 2000; Popkewitz, 2017, Author, 2020). Following this, teacher educations – with all their differences – are often described as highly problematic or as the solution to problems in education and society at large (Bacchi, 2012; Cochran-Smith & Zeichner, 2009). Thus, in this review, we want to explore and understand such changes and relations by analysing patterns in research publications on teacher education. We aim at describing an international research field of teacher education through its conversations and thereby gain insights into one component of the international teacher education agora. In accordance with Czarniawska (2022) we are interested in research as conversations rather than hierarchy and status. Therefore, we analyze how teacher education research is organized intellectually and socially in terms of research communication. What does these conversations, or lack of them, tell us about the intellectual traditions and research fronts in research on teacher education? How is research on teacher educations located in time and space, and how does this correspond to interests in, and problems ascribed to teacher education? We will discuss our results in relation to matters of research communication, globalization, and uses and abuses of bibliometrics in educational research. Like other scholars studying science-society interactions (see e.g., Nowotny et al., 2003), we also wonder if research on teacher education might have a performative capacity.

Thus, the research is based on two complementary approaches. First, we are interested in the dynamics of the intersection of science and society as an agora in Science and Technology Studies (Nowotny et al, 2003). These dynamics are based on the interplay between different agents (here, educational research, policymaking, and professional work), serving as preconditions for academic organization (Whitley, 2000). Here, we are focusing on the organization of the educational research community in terms of research communication. Second, we use citation analysis (Garfield, 1972; Persson, 1994) in mapping organizing patterns and social networking in international teacher education research communities including their intersection with other fields.

This research is inspired by bibliometric methods and resources. Almost 24 000 articles indexed in Web of Science made up our database (“teacher educ*” in abstract OR titles OR author keywords), which we described and to which we thereafter applied bibliometric citation analyses (Garfield, 1979). Following Gough et al. (2012), we differentiate between different types of research reviews: aggregative (what works or how effective are certain actions) or configurative (theory generating or interpretative) ones. These two added meta-reviews were carried out “… in order to understand the development of research on an issue within and across different research traditions.” (Gough et al., 2012, p. 4). In that sense, our study is also a kind of meta-review. We used techniques of bibliometrics and citation analyses as presented by Persson (1994). This approach analyses publications and their citations in a matrix, where the identified publications and their references are listed in rows. Correspondences between these publications in terms of what they are citing are used to form clusters which identify different research fronts, while correspondences between the cited references (their co-citation) form clusters of intellectual bases. Persson (1994., p 31) stated: "In bibliometric terms, the citing articles form a research front, and the cited articles form an intellectual base". Added techniques deal with differences in the number of references and terms of mapping techniques. The visualizations that are the outcome of these algorithms are used for exploring the material, implying a quali-quantitative approach where patterns found in the algorithmically constructed maps are evaluated by visual interpretation. For all analyses and visualizations of the data, the software application VOSviewer is used (Van Eck & Waltman, 2010). Using this framework for bibliometric analysis we present structures of publications and their communication in terms of citing research patterns on teacher education as research fronts and intellectual bases. This translation of our research questions into bibliometrics gives us possibilities to map a broad field of research in terms of publications, and authors of references. This mapping provides us with patterns in the intellectual and social organizing and conversations of TEDU research that differ from distinct knowledge contributions presented in specific publications.

Our results highlighted that publications were increasingly published after 2010, often with an Anglo-Saxon origin. A diversified teacher education research field appeared, related to different societal interests (see also Cochran-Smith & Villegas, 2015). We argue that as researchers in a globalized research community an overall knowledge of the field is acquired so that critical conversations between and across fronts and traditions can be developed. We found that today’s international communication mainly existed within and not across different research areas. Four overall positions – or ideal types - in teacher education research are put forwards (i) oriented towards problems concerning the political and policy such as Apple (2001); (ii) oriented towards the teaching profession and its training (Zeichner 2010); (iii) oriented towards opportunities for education policy to improve or develop teacher education, for example to bring about a better teacher education system (see, for example, texts from the OECD); and finally (iv) oriented towards the opportunities for teacher education and the development of prospective teachers' insights and abilities (e.g. Shulman, 1986). A more general note is that the field is shaped by a dominating orientation to implement changes or improvements in teacher education. Here, the researchers often draw from various intellectual traditions such as social constructivism, theories of language and performativity, or resistance to racism and oppression. In conclusion, we see knowledge of the structure of the research field as important for understanding the social and intellectual organization of teacher education research (cf. Whitley, 2000) and how it interacts with its surroundings. Given such reflections on the interaction between research and the outside world, we hope to provide better opportunities to understand differences in various hopes and fears regarding teacher education as well as the problems and tasks assigned to them, aiming at a vital conversation based on known arguments.

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