Becoming a teacher educator: Voices of beginning teacher educators

Abstract

This chapter is about the readers of this book, about the rewards and challenges of beginning teacher educators. As was outlined in the 'Introduction and Overview' of this book, teacher educators are not an easily recognisable group and their problems and rewards during their first years as teacher educators may vary a great deal. Nevertheless, from the limited research that has been done, and from our own experience as teacher educators, we know that the transition from teacher to teacher educator can be more challenging and difficult than beginning teacher educators may expect. This chapter is based on three sources of data. As there has not been a lot of research about beginning teacher educators, we first analysed self-study literature of teacher educators who described their first years in teacher education and the problems they encountered. In their articles, these teacher educators look back and reflect on their transition from teacher to teacher educator. Looking back from a distance gives them a wide perspective on the challenges and problems they encountered. Moreover, these teacher educators were and are involved in self-study and publish about their own development and other issues concerning teacher educators (Guilfoyle, Hamilton, Pinnegar, & Placier, 1995; Knowles & Cole, 1994; Zeichner, 2005). We will refer to these teacher educators as 'the self-study teacher educators'. A second source we drew upon was Australian research on teacher educators and their career trajectories. These narrative and collaborative studies are based on structured and unstructured interviews, written stories, descriptive metaphors of journeys in teacher education, time lines of careers and professional documentation such as curriculum vitas and diaries (Cooper, Ryan, Gay, & Perry, 1999; L. Ling, P. Ling, Burman, & Cooper, 2000; L. Ling, Burman, Cooper, & P. Ling, 2002; Perry & Cooper, 2001). For the purposes of this chapter, we used the data from these studies and focussed on the beginning years of the participants' careers as teacher educators. We will refer to these studies as the 'narrative studies'. A third source we examined was a small-scale study about the induction of beginning teacher educators that was conducted by members of the Research and Development Centre (RDC) 'Professional Development of Teacher Educators', which is one of the many RDCs of the Association of Teacher Education in Europe (ATEE). Eleven members of the RDC, all experienced teacher educators, interviewed 11 beginning colleagues, 8 women and 3 men from 26 to 50 years of age (see for a full description of this study Van Velzen, Van der Klink, Swennen, & Yaffe, 2008). Characteristic of these 11 teacher educators is that they were undergoing their own induction period at the time of the interviews. These beginning teacher educators were not involved in research, let alone self-study about their own development. We will refer to these teacher educators as the 'interviewed teacher educators'. In the chapter, we will describe the transition from teacher to teacher education based on the limited research that is available about this topic. If we want to understand the transition from teacher to teacher educator, we have to understand some of the aspects of the work of teacher educators and we will describe the complexity of the work of teacher educators and the fact that they are always a model for student teachers. We will then describe the main challenges of the beginning teacher educators through the self-study, narrative studies and interviewed teacher educators. These challenges include a heavy teaching workload, pressure to engage research, isolation and a clash of ideas and ideals. Beginning teacher educators do not just face challenges and difficulties; they also experience joys and rewards and these help them to develop their identities as teacher educators. They know about teaching, and this gives them strength to deal with their challenges. Most rewarding, though, is working with students and collaborating with colleagues, and we will describe these aspects of the first years of teacher educators as well. We also discuss if and how beginning teacher educators expand their identity from teacher to teacher educator. As induction for teacher educators is a relatively new idea, beginning teacher educators often have to organise their own networks of support (see Chapter 7). We conclude this chapter with some suggestions for beginning teacher educators on how to organise this support to survive and thrive in the first years as beginning teacher educators and on how to improve and enhance their work and lives as teacher educators.