Examining teacher education research methodology: practices, priorities and politics

Attentive readers will have noted that, as a new editorial team, we have promulgated in a previous editorial a set of challenges to the field of teacher education. In this issue, we present a collection of papers, which relate, in particular, to our challenge #3, that is:

Employ or develop theoretical and methodological resources that are relevant to teacher education that draw from the experiences of education practice and research informed by and in engagement with the politics of Global South/North designation.

The papers are randomly assigned in such a way that they are the next “cabs” off the rank for publication in APJTE. Our intent is to examine them in terms of the methodological practices and priorities they present for teacher education research and to launch off them into questions about what counts methodologically in the field. Of interest are research sites and participant profiles, conceptualisations of research problems and significance, research designs, including methods of data-collection and analysis and interpretation, and findings and contributions to the field. These considerations are integral to research method courses that will be familiar to many readers and form foundational methodological knowledge and skills. That being said, and in line with our Challenge #3 above, we invite consideration of these foundational principles, practices and priorities in current teacher education research as well as engagement with the politics of research, that is, critical recognition of the norms and expectations embedded in current practice. Such critical awareness helps us to generate critique and transformation of existing practices; it also enables openness to “other” ways of engaging in and with research, including ethically and culturally appropriate ways of knowing, doing and being that transcend Global South/North distinctions. In so doing, the possibility for methodological plurality in teacher education research is enhanced.

In this issue, we examine seven papers for what they tell us about current methodological practices and priorities in teacher education research. Rather than the papers being presented individually, we synthesise the features that provide insights into what currently counts in teacher education research; indeed, we might see these features as methodological touchstones and reference points for researchers embarking on projects to advance knowledge, understandings and skills in teacher education in the future.

The papers are as follows:

1. Subverting Perceptions of Academic and Professional Learning with Drama by MacLaren, Welsh and Long

2. Teacher educators’ professional learning: Perceptions of Dutch and Chinese teacher educators by Ping, Schellings, Beijaard and Ye;

3. A multi-dimensional model: Implications for preparing preservice teachers for culturally responsive teaching by Hu, Xu, Neshyba, Geng and Turner;

4. School-STEM Professionals’ Collaboration: A Case Study on Teachers’ Conceptions by So, He, Chen and Chow;

5. Early career English teachers’ professional commitment change: A Macau study by Yu, Jiang and Kei;

6. Australian school-university partnerships: The(dis)integrated work of teacher educators by Manton, Heffernan, Kostogriz and Seddon;

7. “How can the creative arts possibly be taught online?” Perspectives and experiences of online educators in Australian higher education by Burke.

In terms of research sites, the papers report on studies across the Asia-Pacific – from the United States of America (US) (#3) to Hong Kong (#4), Macau (#5) and Australia (#1 and 7), while one is a cross-country contrastive analysis located in The Netherlands and China (#2) and the final paper is a review of Australian literature (#6). The research foci relate to three significant participant groups in teacher education: (i) pre-service teachers in undergraduate education courses; (ii) teacher educators; and (iii) practicing teachers. The studies with pre-service teachers were conducted in Australia (#1) and the US (#3), with the former investigating the use of arts-based pedagogy to engage students in “intellectual, emotional and social risks” while the US study presents the use of a multi-dimensional field experience model in building Culturally Responsive Teaching (CRT) competency in English as a Second Language (ESL) methods courses.

Teacher educators are the focus of three of the papers: (i) a report on an extensive digital questionnaire comparing the professional-learning perceptions of teacher educators at institutions in The Netherlands and China (#2); (ii) a policy and literature critique of current Australian government mandates for school–university partnerships that locate the responsibility for establishing partnerships with teacher educators (#6); and (iii) teacher educators querying if it is possible to teach the creative arts virtually in response to higher education imperatives to offer increased numbers of courses online (#7). Finally, practicing teachers are the focus of two articles: (i) a school-STEM professional partnership involving five primary school teachers and an environmental scientist creating authentic learning materials in Hong Kong as a response to air pollution problems (#4), and (ii) an investigation of three Early Career Teachers’ (ECTs) commitment to teaching in Macau, where concerns about teacher recruitment and retention operate in a context of gaming and extensive employment opportunities in the casino industry (#5).

Evident across all of the papers are a number of dominant themes in the research problems, findings and statements of significance: perceptions, partnerships and professional learning/commitment. The prioritisation of perceptions is an outcome of the research in four of the seven papers and applies across all participant groups: undergraduates’ perceptions of drama-based pedagogy (#1); Dutch and Chinese teacher educators’ perceptions of professional learning (#2); teacher educators’ perspectives on teaching creative arts online (#7); and practicing teachers’ conceptions of STEM and STEM pedagogies as the result of a professional collaboration (#4). One of the studies involved a teacher educator as researcher (#1). The attendant research methods include journals, self-reflections, interviews, and questionnaires.

The studies prioritising partnerships posit the benefits of partnerships across different cultures, disciplinary areas, and education sectors. In Paper 3, partnerships between pre-service teachers and high-diversity communities are found to be crucial in a multi-dimensional model of building culturally responsive understandings and pedagogical skills. The disciplinary dialogue between teachers and an environmental scientist brings together different areas of expertise and culminates in reciprocal learnings and conceptual change (#4). For the teacher educators tasked with initiating and sustaining partnerships with schools, the authors provide cautions on the “cultural-discursive, material-economic and social-political” domains that constrain the possibility of enduring partnerships (#6).

Finally, the themes of professional learning for teacher educators and teacher commitment for beginning teachers are presented, respectively, as critical for cultivating competent teachers and also retaining teachers in the profession. Comparisons are made between Dutch and Chinese teacher educator learning activities and teacher educators' reasons for undertaking professional learning (#2) while in the Macau study, the emphasis is on change in teacher commitment across teacher education milestones and the first 2 years of teaching appointments (#5). Where the Dutch/Chinese questionnaire used English and first language translations of Dutch and Chinese, the second study in Macau generated in-depth data from individual life history interviews in Chinese.

Our synthesis of the research sites, participant groups and dominant research objectives and methods are an attempt to make visible current priorities and practices in teacher education research as exemplified in this issue’s seven articles. Overall, many of the articles do not dwell too much on the methodological underpinning of their studies, beyond design considerations and descriptions of well-accepted methods. This is not to criticise authors but to signal the possibility of thinking about some of the problematics of research methodology in relation to the writing, that is, how, when and why to write about methodological details? Also, limited attention to the research methodological work in a paper does not mean that the work has not been done or that it is not important. But it does raise questions about the actual processes of knowledge production, their documentation, and how much they matter.

Seen together as a whole, it is evident that teacher education researchers prioritise mounting a case for the research question or problem and its significance and contribution to the field, and then defend their findings. Interestingly, all papers foreground the theoretical framework and locate it centrally as a resource for interpreting the data. We suggest that an important touchstone and reference point from these papers is the value of strong theoretical resources and the revelatory insights that they can generate.

Finally, we consider some emergent new directions and muse on their potential, especially in relation to our challenge for developing theoretical and methodological resources that are relevant to teacher education. In education research (and other fields, such as migration studies), there is increasing interest in co-design, participatory approaches and community-based initiatives. We wonder whether the contemporary popularity of these approaches tells us something about what is important to think about methodologically for teacher education research. For example, Design-Based Research (DBR) and other design-based approaches (see, for example, Costanza-Chock, 2020, on design justice research) can, and should, work to upset researcher–researchee power imbalances and the tired boundary riding of qualitative versus quantitative versus mixed methods. Equally, the “belief” that one must hold in a paradigm (positivism, critical and so on) – though perhaps, design approaches have a “belief” in pragmatism as their paradigmatic basis. In any case, the “co-ness” of design research approaches offers the potential for unlocking the methodological blackbox to scrutiny and new possibilities. In the process, there becomes at least a chance to “see” and think about who and what counts in terms of the production of knowledge about what, for what, and with whom. We ask how these orientations to “co-ness” might contribute to and extend current research priorities and methodological practices in the future, for example, around perceptions, partnerships and professional learning in teacher education? We suggest that such queries may open up research to its politics – depending, of course, on what we mean by politics and whether such questions matter to researchers.