The importance of experience in teaching teacher education: exploring change in teacher educators’ identities over time

Author(s):

Jean MurrayPatti BarberGerry Czerniawski

Conference:

ECER 2010

Network:

10. Teacher Education Research

Format:

Paper

Session Information

10 SES 01 B, Research on Teacher Educators

Paper Session

Time:

2010-08-25

09:15-10:45

Room:

AUDITORIUM XII, Päärakennus / Main Building

Chair:

Rose Dolan

Contribution

Research on teacher educators as an occupational group is limited (Zeichner, 2006), but there is a particular lacuna in knowledge of the shifts and changes in professional identity which occur as careers develop and time in Higher Education increases.

One of the aims of the project, titled ‘The Academic Tribe of Teacher Educators’ (A3TE) was to redress this omission in existing research. In this particular paper, we report only on the part of the study relating to teacher educators’ changing constructions of their own identities. The specific focus of enquiry here is to analyse if increased time spent in HE brings changes in academic-professional identities for the sample group. The project drew on a small-scale pilot study, as well as previous research on teacher educators’ identities and knowledge bases in the UK context, including research by Furlong et al (2000) and Murray (2002), and on relevant international research (see, for example, Acker, Brock & Dillabough [2005]; Arreman & Weiner [2005])

No existing theoretical frameworks offered a precise ‘fit’ for this study. We therefore harnessed a substantial body of research to theorise teacher educators’ identities, including Wenger’s (1998 ) concept of communities of practice, Czerniawski’s (2007) study of teacher identities in Norway, Germany and England and Becher and Trowler (2002) arguments that there are complex links between fields of enquiry, academic cultures or terrains and academic ‘tribes’ or groups (2002:159) in HE. A conceptual framework for analysing teacher educators’ work as second order practitioners (Murray 2002), was also used.

Method

This was a small scale interpretive study, drawing on established qualitative research methods for embedded case studies (Yin 2002), and conducted along ethical guidelines, provided by BERA. An institutional sample of three universities took some account of the diverse university settings for teacher education in England in terms of institutional differentiations. All teacher educators working on relevant ITE courses were asked to complete email questionnaires. Follow-up interviews in each university, with a purposive sample of staff, were used to explore resulting issues in depth. This data was subjected to an initial content analysis that generated a number of emergent themes through the use of open coding. These initial codes were then refined by repeated analysis and used to define recurring themes. This process resulted in the creation of core categories to be included in the findings.

Expected Outcomes

Data analysis is on-going, but initial findings show some complex patterns in terms of the differing and multiple identities which pre-service teacher educators construct and deploy, and differentiated changes in identity with increasing time in HE. Although those in our sample group share some common understandings of what it means to be teacher educators, they also constructed differing repertoires of academic/professional identities. In the section below we give one exemplar of differentiation in identities over time; detailed exemplars will be available in the full paper. Having less than two years experience of HE meant that teacher educators were likely to foreground their professional identities as teachers in schools, stressing the importance of ‘recent and relevant’ experiential knowledge of schooling. A second sub-group of educators with 4+ years in HE emphasised their identities as teachers of teachers, claiming key roles in the (re)production of knowledge and strong pastoral identities. For another sub-group of experienced teacher educators, identity was essentially premised on a sense of being an academic and an active researcher. The project aims to make a contribution to the growing international literature on teacher educators (Korthagen et al 2005).

References

Becher, T. and Trowler, P. (2002) Academic Tribes and Territories: intellectual enquiry and the culture of disciplines. Buckingham: SRHE and OUP. Czerniawski, G (2007) Context, Setting and Teacher Identities: a comparative study of the values of newly qualified teachers in Norway, Germany and England - PhD Thesis - King's College London Furlong, J., Barton, L., Miles, S., Whiting, C., & Whitty, G. (2000). Teacher Education in Transition. Buckingham: OUP. Korthagen, F., Loughran, J. and Lunenberg, M. (2005) Teaching teachers – studies into the expertise of teacher educators. Teaching and Teacher Education 21.2. Murray, J. (2002) Between the Chalkface and the Ivory Towers? A study of the professionalism of teacher educators working on primary Initial Teacher Education courses in the English education system. Collected Original Resources in Education (CORE) volume 26, number 3. October 2002. Murray, J. (2008) Teacher educators’ induction into Higher Education: work-based learning in the micro communities of teacher education. European Journal of Teacher Education 31.1. Wenger, E. (1998) Communities of Practice: learning, meaning and identity. Cambridge: CUP. Yin, R. (2002) Case Study Research: Design and Methods. Newbury Park: Sage Zeichner, K. (2006) A Research Agenda for Teacher Education in M. Cochran-Smith, M. & Zeichner, K. (eds.) Studying Teacher Education. New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum and the American Educational Research Association.

Author Information

Jean Murray

University of East London

Cass School of Education

London

Patti Barber

Institute of Education, UK

Gerry Czerniawski

University of East London, United Kingdom

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