This paper reports on a research study of 28 literacy teacher educators (LTE) in four countries: Canada, the USA, England and Australia. It identifies three main forms of professional development: informal, formal and communities of practice and four spheres of knowledge: research; pedagogy of higher education; literacy and literacy teaching; and…

In which areas and domains do individual teacher educators prefer to work on their professional development? What kind of learning activities do they want to take on and with whom? Are there significant differences in these preferences between teacher educators? This article reports on a recent survey (N = 268) about the professional development…

To date, there is a paucity of research on graduate students' learning experiences in teacher education, and we also know little about what support they might need in their learning to become teacher educators. In order to fill this gap, this study draws on three graduate students' experiences, to explore how a PhD programme in a…

In a country like South Africa, as in many other countries around the world, there is an imperative to prepare student teachers for a wide variety of social contexts, as part of breaking the cycle of disadvantage for poor learners. This article explores the challenge of placing student teachers for their field experience in schools that differ…

This article addresses the teacher educator's role in defining and facilitating teacher well-being. It does so by first exploring the literature on teacher well-being, resilience, resistance, morality and professional dispositions. It then examines the policies and rhetoric of two countries, the USA and England, as examples of a global tilt…

New Zealand teacher education has been profoundly affected by major social and economic changes since 1974. From a separate sector controlled by the Department of Education, it has moved through deregulation to largely university provision with research imperatives for staff. Programme scope has broadened to embrace early childhood and the…

This article brings together two studies which contribute to the examination of the nature of professionalism in education by focusing on the perspectives of two under-researched groups namely "teaching assistants" and teacher educators working "either side" of the school teacher. The projects were conducted in, and framed by,…

Research conducted by teacher educators is considered important for their professional development, their actual teaching practice and their body of knowledge. However, for many teacher educators in Universities of Applied Sciences (UAS) in the Netherlands, research is a new challenge. A survey was conducted among 508 such teacher educators…

This study involved 28 literacy/English teachers in four countries: Canada, the USA, the UK and Australia. The goal of the study was to examine their backgrounds, knowledge, research activities, identity and support within the university. The teacher educators had a range of classroom teaching experience which they drew on in many ways. Most went…

This article describes a university-school collaboration project that investigates six English as a foreign language (EFL) teachers' attempts to change conventional feedback approaches in three secondary schools of Hong Kong, indicating the benefits university-school collaboration can reap for both teacher educators and school teachers.

Written collaboratively with research participants, this article reports the main findings of the Work of Teacher Education project that studied the labour of 13 higher education-based teacher educators in England and Scotland over the course of a year. The priority of maintaining relationships with schools (and between schools and student…

Reflecting on the experience of being a participant in the Work of Teacher Education (WoTE) research, and drawing on conceptualisations of teacher education as "domestic labour," I argue that teacher educators' closeness to classroom practice acts as a determining factor in their symbolic annihilation, a concept usually applied to…

This paper focuses on the Conservative-Liberal coalition government's policy in teacher education in England and its implications for the work of teacher educators. It does this by considering, for example, policy documents and the speeches of key politicians responsible for policy formulation. It argues that policies influenced by the…

This paper seeks to understand how persistent categories of written language in institutional texts support the cultural-historical production and re-production of teacher educators as kinds of academic workers in Australia. Fifty-seven job advertisements and allied materials produced by Australian universities were downloaded across a seven-month…

Agency has been seen as fundamental in the renegotiation of professional identities. However, it is unclear how teacher educators exercise their professional agency in their work, and how multiple discourses frame and restrict the practice of their professional agency. This study examines how teacher educators practise agency in negotiating their…