Research into the professional identity development of teacher educators in Europe has indicated that the roles of researcher and teacher educator are sometimes seen as antithetical, or that the researcher role is given a low priority, in comparison with that of being a former school teacher (Swennen et al 2011, Murray  et al 2011).  The changing institutional contexts of teacher educator’s work in some European countries have also raised the profile of research and publication (Lunenberg & Hamilton 2008), but the types of research that are given status within the wider academic community are not always those that are valued by teacher educators (Murray 2008).

The relative lack of research engagement by many teacher educators may result in lowering the status of teacher education both within and beyond universities and create a division between   ‘researchers’ and ‘practitioners’ within the teacher education community.  This paper will argue that teacher educators need to be both ‘consumers and producers of knowledge’; both practitioners and researchers (Cochrane-Smith 2005, Lunenberg & Hamilton 2008) in order to make the distinctive nature of teacher educators’ professional knowledge explicit.

Self-study has been shown to be a powerful research approach in developing and strengthening the professional identities of teacher educators, and in articulating this distinctive knowledge (Loughran 2007, Lunenberg et al 2011, Swennen et al 2008) .   The research discussed in this paper seeks to explore how a group self-study project can contribute to the professional development of teacher educators as researchers, to the production of theoretical knowledge for teacher educators and to the improvement of practice (Zeichner 2007).

The research context discussed is a teacher education department within a ‘new’ university in England. There is not yet a strongly established research culture in the department, nor a requirement that academic staff will engage in research as well as teaching. This is similar to the  university departments in England researched by Murray et al (2011), but also to that of some teacher education departments in Europe.  The introduction of the self-study project  within the department was seen as a means of supporting the development of  teacher educators  as researchers, while retaining the focus on practice which was seen as central to the professional identities’ of the majority of department members.

The research questions for the project as a whole focus on two issues: how far self-study approaches can support teacher educators in developing their identities as researchers, and whether the establishment of a department-wide self-study project facilitates the development of a collaborative research culture.

This paper reports on the outcomes of the first full year of the project, with specific research objectives:

to ascertain the views of teacher educators involved in the project as to the challenges or barriers experienced,  the perceived benefits and projected future benefits in relation to their roles as teacher educator researchers

to evaluate the views of teacher educators and project facilitators concerning the support provided by the project structures in developing a community of researchers.

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