Looking into Teaching about Teaching

Research into how teacher educators are prepared and how their understanding of teaching about teaching develops has received little serious attention (Grossman, 2005). Berry (2004) notes that teacher educators have found it difficult to research and publish studies about their own work because they tend to carry high teaching loads and may see their work as undervalued. Not surprisingly, some of the baggage that teacher educators appear to carry is linked to the nature of their work and also to how they view their position in the academy. Dinkleman et al. (2006) illustrated how the transition into the role of teacher educator can occur suddenly, with little or no formal preparation, and this influences teacher educators' conceptualisations of their role. This issue of Studying Teacher Education offers papers that shed light on issues of teacher educator preparation and development from the perspective of teacher educators and their students of teaching.

The issue opens with a study of difficulties of forging a personal pedagogy of teacher education. Jason Ritter studied his transition from classroom teacher to teacher educator and realised that expectations of classroom teachers (being able to teach subject matter) are quite different to those of university-based teachers (being able to teach about how to teach subject matter). Developing a pedagogy of teacher education (Loughran, 2006) requires considerably more research, and Ritter shows how essential such work is and why it matters in shaping the conceptualisation of teacher education practices.

Hafthor Gudjonsson approaches his self-study through a philosophical lens as he reconceptualises his own teacher education practices. He recognised that he was, in many ways, experiencing himself as a “living contradiction” (Whitehead, 1993), a term that aptly captures the dissonance when beliefs and practices clash. He describes how his understanding of teacher learning was based on psychological processes that shaped the way in which he worked with his student teachers. Drawn to pragmatist and socio-cultural views that enabled him to see into teacher learning with fresh eyes, Gudjonsson describes his transformation to seeing learning to teach as situated, a view that raises important questions about the nature of professional development and the dynamics of teacher learning.

Some of these questions are taken up in the work of Hoban, Butler and Lesslie, who collaborated over a 6-month period in a professional development programme. This small, team-based programme focusing on a combination of four learning processes (reflection, sharing, action and feedback) results in interesting personal models of teaching learning. By introducing a self-study methodology, Hoban helps the teachers to develop insights into how they learned, and this led to deeper understandings of their own professional development.

Harriet Fayne follows with a paper that examines understandings of the school practicum as she examines supervision from a student teacher's perspective. Fayne asks fundamental questions, such as whether or not university supervisors add value to the student teaching experience and what characterises good supervision. Her findings revealed perceptions of the role differences between supervisors and cooperating teachers and encouraged her to engage supervisors in conversations about the nature of programme improvement.

Marilyn Johnston, Young Ah Lee, and Michael Thomas report a 4-year self-study of race and social justice issues in a teacher education programme. This paper examines how, by working with students of colour as consultants, the programme might be reconceptualised to be more sensitive to issues of race and social justice and might better prepare all students to be culturally sensitive teachers. What the authors learnt about themselves and their teaching was fundamental to reshaping their understanding of teacher education programmes more generally.

Patricia Prado-Olmos, Francisco Ríos and Lillian Vega Castañeda offer an intriguing self-study of three faculty members of colour engaged in teaching a special summer session geared to recruiting people of colour to teaching. They analysed their own writings about their teaching in the course, articulating issues of cultural identity, social justice and teaching. In so doing, they create possibilities for the reader to understand the specific while also looking out on a bigger picture dependent on “the role of critical consciousness in teacher preparation.”

Elizabeth Walker concludes this issue with a self-study of her own role as a teacher educator working with teachers in a Hong Kong adaptation of Japanese lesson study. She describes four roles that she identified in her data and explains what she learned about her own behaviour in each of those roles. The differences between school-based roles and those based in higher education institutions were not as great as anticipated, in part because of the need to extend teachers' subject knowledge and to support a research stance by teachers.

These papers highlight how self-study is strongly international; authors in this issue work in Australia, Iceland, Hong Kong and the USA. Underpinning their work is a deep concern to better understand the nature of teaching and learning about teaching and to do so by making their research available for critique and further development. By portraying aspects of a pedagogy of teacher education, they help to shape our understandings of the nature of the professional knowledge of teacher education practices.