Teacher educators and the self-study of teaching practices

Abstract

Among the global community that prepares teachers for teaching, there are many ways to become a teacher educator. For example, in Australia, the traditional route to being a teacher educator was that an experienced successful teacher moved into teacher education as a curriculum method lecturer from which part-time enrollment in a d ctorate might follow in order to pursue an academic career. However, in recent times, this transition has become more difficult as a tenure track position usually requires a doctorate, meaning that many successful teachers who would make excellent teacher educators are not prepared to dramatically alter their income and professional status by moving from the top of one profession to the bottom of another. In Brazil, the majority of teacher educators have Master's level degrees. However, when teacher educators teach at the university level they have doctorates in education or in related areas. In the United States most teacher educators have some experience in the public schools and most teacher educators have earned doctorates in education-related areas. In the Netherlands only a minority of Dutch teacher educators have research as an integral part of a job description that mainly relates to the preparation of teachers (Lunenberg & Hamilton, 2008). Only recently have expectations begun to shift to include research tasks for the utch teacher educators. For many years the research lives of teacher educators received little notice and generated little interest. Recently, however, the work of teacher educators and their research practices have garnered more attention and have been examined in more detail. For instance, from ways to describe teacher educators' roles in the classroom and profession (Korthagen, Loughran, & Lunenberg, 2005) to ways to demonstrate pedagogical expertise (Loughran, 2006) to ways to understand the development of their professional knowledge, the roles and development of teacher educators have been depicted and described. While more traditional research practices have been surveyed with some specificity, one missing element has been discussion of the research tea her educators do on their own practice; often in their own classrooms. Self-study is attractive to many because teacher educators, it can well be argued, regardless of backgrounds, preparation or experience need to take a reflective look at their pedagogy and the complex nature of learning and teaching to prepare tomorrow's teachers. Whether called self-study or by another name, many teacher educators engage in the self-study of their teaching practices. That is, they study their own teaching practice in their own classrooms, reflect upon their own actions, their students' actions and the ways that they, as teachers, bring their beliefs into action in their classrooms. In the simplest of terms, self-study differs from action research, reflection or inquiry by the nature of the rigour of the research of practice and the commitment to sharing the learning outcomes with others in the profession-most commonly through conference presentations and publication in journals and books. Explicitly engaging in self-study strengthens their practice and the study of their practice. The central issue of the chapter is the value of self-study in the work of teacher educators and their work with student teachers. To facilitate a better understanding of self-study practices, we include excerpts from our work, along with the work of others, to identify issues we think matter for our practice, our professional knowledge and our ways of being scholars in the field. First we present the conceptual framework we used to organize this chapter. Our chapter considers: how teacher educators can derive professional satisfaction and still maintain that strong link to teaching; how they can develop beyond teaching while being conscious of, and sensitive to, the learning about teaching done by their student teachers as well as their own teaching in their own classrooms. Next we present a list of issues associated with becoming teacher educators, growing into the job and utilizing research in the form of self-study to strengthen the work.We probe the transitions from school teaching to teacher education as well as from teacher educator to teacher educator scholar. The use of self-study research while teaching and when preparing our students for teaching can be critical in this development.