Teacher educators as knowledge brokers: reframing knowledge co-construction with school partners

Abstract

This paper explores the contention that teacher educators are especially well placed to help teachers bridge between practical experience and wider forms of knowledge. In its focus on issues derived from practice, knowledge co-construction and professional judgement, the paper articulates an alternative, but complementary, vision of evidence-informed practice to set alongside prevailing ‘What Works’ approaches. The paper uses the concept of knowledge brokering to analyse the ways that teachers collaborated with one English school of education’s teacher educators in five different projects in the course of a single academic year. Drawing on data from semi-structured interviews, common brokering mechanisms are identified, yielding a set of principles for creating conditions, boundary crossing and reciprocal working which cut across subjects and age phases. Four distinctive attributes of teacher educators are proposed as part of reframing such collaborative relationships. The paper adds to debates about the need to reconfigure university-school partnerships for professional learning in order to identify more clearly the distinctive contribution of the university teacher educator, respond to the role tensions of teacher educators and support teachers’ critical professionalism.