Against a rapidly changing policy landscape for teacher education, exacerbated by 'Brexit' in the UK, findings are presented from an electronic survey of 272 higher-education based teacher educators in England, the Republic of Ireland and Scotland about their experiences of, and priorities for, professional learning. While the data generated were…

Conservatoires train musicians to high levels of proficiency in performance and other 'principal study' disciplines, but often, teaching is perceived as a second-class profession, and little is known about how music students learn to facilitate music making in others. Yet, conservatoires have a responsibility to contribute to the development of…

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…

This paper presents a critical overview of the way in which higher education institutions (HEIs) in the UK have had their research activity subject to review. There have been six such reviews to date, the first two carried out by the Universities Grants Committee and, from 1992, by its replacement, the four UK higher education (HE) funding bodies…

This article investigates the learning opportunities in school subject departments for student teachers when participating in a postgraduate certificate of education (PGCE) course in England. The paper draws upon data gathered from a year-long ethnographic study to explain why learning opportunities were different for student teachers in separate…

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 study…

This article offers an initial account of the Teacher Education Research Network (TERN), a pilot education research capacity building project funded by the ESRC and designed to test a "social practices" model for building an educational research infrastructure across England. The TERN project is still running at the time of writing, so…

Student teachers' research is usually valued more for its contribution to their professional learning than for its contribution to the research topic itself. This paper reports on a research collaboration with eight student primary teachers in England, intended to build on a previously established project investigating young children's…

This article compares the practices of teacher educators with those of academics working as educators on pre-service courses for nurses and social workers. It includes a framework for analyzing professional education work, which conceptualizes the educators as "second order practitioners." The findings of the study show that similar…

Summer 2009 saw the introduction in England of the Masters in Teaching and Learning (MTL). Funded in full by the Training and Development Agency for Schools, the MTL aims to improve the quality of teaching and to raise standards in schools. In this paper we discuss what the MTL might mean both for in-service teacher education and initial teacher…

This article highlights the blurring of boundaries as beginning teacher educators cope with the varying demands of teaching and research activities in higher education institutions (HEIs) in England. It suggests that the different forms of research and scholarly activities be made more transparent in order to support early professional learning in…