Lost in translation – production, reproduction and transformation of teacher education knowledge in teacher educators’ local practices

ABSTRACT

European teacher educations today are expected to not only be ‘close to school practices’, but also to equip their students with academic knowledge. This article analyses one year of fieldwork data to discuss how these expectations are produced, reproduced and transformed in local practices by different categories of teacher educators (lecturers/assistant lecturers). The theory of practice architectures and Basil Bernstein’s concepts of vertical and horizontal knowledge discourses are employed to analyse different practices of teacher educators, and how these practices constrain and enable different actions, understandings, and relations. Different roles are identified, and it is argued that local and distal arrangements fuel isolation and fragmentation, leading to a situation where difference becomes a burden and important discourses risk being lost in translation. Under such circumstances, seemingly tangible, applicable knowledge risks overshadowing important general, theoretical, and context-independent knowledge that are crucial for a scientific professional knowledge base in teacher education.

KEYWORDS:

• Teacher education practice
• teacher educators
• teacher education knowledge
• practice architecture
• Basil Bernstein

Introduction

European teacher educations of today are, like other professional educations, often comprised of a complex composition of academic courses given by universities, which, together with practicum, are meant to prepare students for a highly multifaceted job. Two partly conflicting tendencies have increased the complexity in the construct of this composition during the last decades: On the one hand, a ‘practicum turn’, which emphasises the importance of experience and closeness to concrete classroom practices in teacher education, underpinned by a recurrent criticism against teacher education for being detached from ‘school reality’ (Cochran-Smith et al. 2020; Mattsson, Eilertsen, and Rorrison 2012). On the other hand, a ‘university turn’ which emphasises the importance of a scientific knowledge base and evidence-based education in teacher education, underpinned by broad efforts to academicise, and thereby professionalise, welfare professions by incorporating them into higher education systems (Kosnik, Beck, and Goodwin 2016). These two tendencies have reinforced challenges for teacher educations that have been discussed at length in the European Journal of Teacher Education, for example, regarding the relationship between academia and professional preparation (Resch, Schrittesser, and Knapp 2022) or between different forms of knowledge aims (e.g. Carmi and Tamir 2022; Marcondes, Finholdt Angelo Leite, and Ramos 2017). Similar challenges have been discussed elsewhere by scholars such as Darling-Hammond (2006), Labaree (2004), and Biesta (2017).

Amid these challenges are the teacher educators who, despite their centrality, rarely have been the object of study for research, although there is a slowly growing interest in, e.g. teacher educators’ roles, identities and work (European Commission 2013; Izadinia 2014). The historical lack of research on teacher educators is, in a way, understandable given that ‘the teacher educator’ is an elusive category that can include such diverse actors as school-active teachers, doctoral students and university teachers and researchers from various subject disciplines (Johnston and Purcell 2022; Murray 2017). In a broad sense, attempts to categorise teacher educators often revolve around the two tendencies above, i.e. whether the teacher educators have their primary backgrounds, experiences, identities and knowledge rooted in school practices or academia (e.g. Angervall, Baldwin, and Beach 2020; White 2019). For example, this has been discussed in terms of differences between access and non-access to research activities (Alvesson, Spicer, and Marja Flory and Dr Juup Essers 2016; Enders and Musselin 2008), ‘academics’ and school-experienced ‘educationalists’ (Maguire 2000), school-experienced and non-school-experienced teacher educators (Robinson and McMillan 2006), or school-based and university-based teacher educators (Ataş, Ayşegül, and Hildén R 2021; White 2019).

The objects of study in this article are two categories of university-based teacher educators that mirror the dividing line above, in the sense that they primarily differ in career trajectories (cf. Griffiths, Thompson, and Hryniewicz 2010). On the one hand, assistant lecturers,¹ a category that makes up a large proportion of teacher educators in Sweden (which is the national context of this study) and elsewhere. The assistant lecturers included in this study do not have a PhD and, therefore, have limited opportunities or time for research projects. They participate in teaching due to special skills (sometimes formalised in a degree) and experiences from schools, but also due to a lack of lecturers (see next). On the other hand, lecturers² with a PhD from educational research or other fields who participate in teacher education teaching. They commonly have more opportunities and time to participate in research projects, and have broader access to academic positions based on their merit of having a doctoral degree (Angervall, Baldwin, and Beach 2020). Assistant lecturers and lecturers are by no means two completely separate or homogenous professional groups. The purpose of this article is, however, not to give a detailed description of the two groups, nor of their participants. Rather, the aim is to analyse how the categorisation of teacher educators as ‘assistant lecturer’ and ‘lecturer’ act upon the production, reproduction and transformation of ‘the two turns’ in a local teacher education’s practices via social and organisational conditions (cf. Czarniawska and Sevón 1996).

Theory

When teacher educators participate in and ‘do’ teacher education practices ‘as’ assistant lecturers or lecturers, they do so in response to certain (and different) circumstances by making what is going on intelligible to them within established practices, which guide actions and give meaning to what ‘makes sense to do next’ (Schatzki 2002). These practices do not determine what teacher educators do – practices are always, to some extent, open-ended, under discussion, in tension and evolving. The practices rather prefigure, constrain and enable certain understandings, actions and relations. Being an assistant lecturer or lecturer thus means participating in a set of courses, but also being socialised into (partly different) relations, ways of doing, and understandings about teacher education that have existed before and that will continue to exist after one leaves them, albeit possibly partially changed. Such understandings and ways of acting tend to be regarded as parts of a seemingly permanent, fixed and routinised natural order but are always constituted by intersubjective social and material practices that shape how teacher education unfolds.

In this article, Kemmis et al. (2014) theory of practice architectures is used as a methodological tool to analytically divide teacher education practices into different dimensions. A practice is understood here as:

A socially established cooperative human activity involving utterances and forms of understanding (sayings), modes of action (doings), and ways in which people relate to each other and the world (relatings) that ‘hang together’ in characteristic ways in a distinctive ‘project’. (Mahon, Francisco, and Kemmis 2017, 7–8)

Initially, the sayings, doings and relatings of the teacher educators’ practices have been studied, i.e. how they understand, do and relate to one another in teacher education. Sayings, doings and relatings do not exist in a vacuum, but are enabled and constrained by the practice architectures of different practices, i.e. local and distal arrangements that have developed over time in the use of language, in the material world, social traditions etc. Analytically, Kemmis et al. (2014) distinguish between Cultural-discursive arrangements, which, e.g. include specialist discourses, shared experiences and a history of communication that enable/constrain certain forms of understandings (sayings); Material-economic arrangements, which, e.g. include physical or digital spaces, traditions, resources, rules and activity structures that enable/constrain certain forms of activities (doings); and Social-political arrangements, which, e.g. include categories, groups, networks, hierarchies (formal and non-formal), roles, power and processes of inclusion/exclusion that enable/constrain certain forms of relations (relatings). These dimensions are schematic and should be understood more as analytical tools than distinct elements

A single arrangement does not constitute a practice. Combinations of arrangements become part of a practice architecture when they are given a certain direction towards what Kemmis et al. (2014) refer to as a project. A project can be described as an ‘oughtness’ that shapes meaning and make activities intelligible by answering questions about ‘where to go next’ and ‘how to get there’, into which novices in a practice are socialised. In a general sense, the lecturers and senior lecturers participate in projects which involve the production and reproduction of knowledge about teaching, teachers, schools, education, learning, etc. What constitutes teacher education knowledge has been the focus of long-standing debates and discussions, such as the connection between theory and practice or what sorts of knowledge future teachers need to acquire (Livingston and Assunção Flores 2017). Here, I will use concepts elaborated by Basil Bernstein (1999) to describe and analyse how certain teacher education knowledge forms become important in different local practices’ projects, and how content is transformed between practices. Bernstein’s interest in different knowledge forms was not primarily in their epistemic relations, but, similarly to this study, rather in how knowledge is organised in, and organises, social relations (Wheelahan 2007). Drawing on Durkheim’s distinction between mundane and esoteric knowledge, Bernstein elaborated a two-part perspective of how abstract knowledge is generated in society: on the one hand, knowledge that is formed as a horizontal discourse concerns the ways meaning is constructed in relation to the material, everyday world, and immediate practical goals – that is ‘common-sense’ or ‘know-how’ knowledge about on-going and ever-changing social practices that stems from direct contact with ‘reality’ and others. According to Bernstein (1999), such knowledge ‘is likely to be oral, local, context dependent and specific, tacit, multi-layered, and contradictory across but not within contexts’ (159). On the other hand, knowledge that is formed as a vertical discourse concerns the ways meaning is constructed in relation to the immaterial, transcendental world – that is, ‘know-why’ knowledge stemming from a symbolic order of conceptual relations and collective representations. It depends on general (rather than particular), theoretical (rather than changing and direct) and context-independent (rather than context-dependent) concepts. While the former is segmentally organised in relation to different social relations and practices, the latter is characterised by strong distributive rules that regulate access to, and transmission of, coherent and systematically principled structures and specialised languages in (e.g.) university practices (Bernstein 1999).

In practice, horizontal and vertical knowledge are not mutually exclusive, as teachers must rely on both scientifically based ‘knowing-why’ and practical ‘knowing-how’. Consequently, several scholars (e.g. Brante 2010; Darling-Hammond 2006) stress that the linkage between the two is a necessity for teachers to foster professional knowledge in their work. As analytical concepts, however, vertical and horizontal knowledge discourses are ideal-typical; that is, they do not exist in reality, but rather serve as instruments which can be used to clarify certain analytical features. Hence, the concepts are used here in analyses to clarify which knowledge forms are enabled and constrained in different practices’ projects. This is not least important since, according to Bernstein (1999), they denote different discourses upon which (e.g.) teachers’ professional knowledge base can rest upon.

When practices with different but similar projects are structured to each other in mutual communicative, resource-related and material dependency relationships, they become part of what can be referred to as an ecology of practices. A practice can be symbiotically dependent on or support other practices, just as it can suffocate or be in tension or conflict with them (Kemmis et al. 2014). As suggested in the introductory argument, there are good reasons to consider a local teacher education as an ecology of practices characterised by complexity, contradictions, compromises, and structured by different, although interdependent, practice architectures that are in constant contact and influence one another. Central to the article is therefore to analyse the interfaces between practices that teacher educators participate in, i.e. how practices’ sayings, doings, and relatings overlap and influence each other’s practice architectures. This analysis requires a ‘way in’ that delimits and, so to speak, brings assumptions behind different practices’ projects to the fore as epistemic objects in the light of one another. One of the article’s focal points thus centres upon how concepts that articulate key ideas in the local teacher education mediate knowledge, meaning, and discourse in and between practices. Ideas in organisations are not static, but rather facilitate change when they, as Czarniawska and Sevón (1996) put it, ‘travel’ between practices and become ‘translated’ into partially new and different meanings. Hence, although concepts can appear to be relatively stable, the ways they travel and become translated via various activities, understandings, and relations in teacher education reveal and reflect different practices’ arrangements and projects.

Methodology

Although using one specific national context, Sweden, the general developments under analysis here are not country-specific, but have clear traits of the broader international trends that were described above. As in other countries, the ‘University turn’ has incorporated Swedish teacher education into the general system of higher education, and the ‘Practice turn’ has entailed increased demands on teacher education to come ‘closer to practice’ (Morberg et al. 2020). This article analyses data from one year of fieldwork in teacher education at a Swedish university. The purpose of the fieldwork was to study how a local ecology of teacher education practices was produced, reproduced, and transformed. Data collection was informed by an ethnographically-inspired approach and was designed in order to gain a deeper understanding of the complexities, nuances, contradictions, and tensions of teacher educations’ social practices (Atkinson 2007). Four courses at a primary school teacher education programme, given during the 2021–2022 academic year, formed the basis of the data collection. The programme was selected because primary school teacher education programmes have a relatively high proportion of both lecturers and assistant lecturers in teaching (Wahlström and Alvunger 2015). The courses had a duration of between 4 and 8 weeks (7.5 or 15 credits) and were specifically chosen to ensure a range of courses offered across various departments (educational and subject departments; practicum courses were excluded).

The courses were primarily documented through approximately 100 hours of observations of lectures and different types of seminars. These constituted the most common types of teaching activities, but various types of exercises and oral exams were observed as well. In addition, different types of meetings were observed, mainly meetings held prior to the start of courses in which participating teacher educators met to be informed and discuss various teaching segments. The observations were documented with the help of field notes, which were transcribed and developed in preliminary analyses immediately after the observations. Documents such as course syllabuses, reading lists, examinations, instructions, and schedules were collected in order to supplement the preliminary analysis regarding how established routines, activity structures, artefacts, and time resources enabled and constrained certain practices. Early on in this process, it became clear how the categories of assistant lecturer/lecturer were an overarching structure for how practices were shaped and how different practices related to one another. The analytical process was therefore increasingly zoomed in (Nicolini 2012) on how the two categories structured teaching in the courses.

Following the completion of a course, teacher educators who had participated were strategically chosen and invited to participate in an interview in order to attain a diverse mixture of lecturers and assistant lecturers, including some who were course-, programme-, or department leaders with overall responsibility for the education. The purpose of the interviews was twofold: On the one hand, to understand what it means to be an assistant lecturer and lecturer in teacher education – what one does, the contexts one experiences being part of, and what appears to be important/unimportant in the courses. On the other hand, to address certain events, relations, statements, priorities, problems, tensions etc., that appeared to be particularly important for how different categories of teacher educators’ work unfolded in practices during observations. All in all, 22 interviews were conducted (11 lecturers, 11 assistant lecturers), lasting between 45 and 90 minutes, each of which was transcribed in full in order to allow for a thorough analysis.

The study has followed the ethical guidelines for good research practice introduced by the Swedish research council (2017). Both fieldnotes and transcripts have been anonymised and all participants, including both students and teacher educators, were informed about the purpose and methods of data collection (e.g. in the beginning of a lecture or meeting). Individual participants who had their actions or statements documented (e.g. teacher educators who were interviewed or all the students in an observed seminar) gave their oral permission to participate.

The analytical procedure can best be described as a theoretically directed qualitative content analysis that use abductive reasoning (Peirce 1998 [1903]) to incorporate existing theory-dependent knowledge and empirical data. More concretely, the conceptual apparatus of the theory of practice architectures was used in an iterative analytical process that oscillated between inductive attempts to identify critical sayings, doings and relatings of local practices in the data, and deductive analyses of local and distal arrangements that shape these practices. Thus, it is not the individual teacher educators who are the object of study, but rather the arrangements that shape how they participate ‘as’ assistant lecturer or lecturer in teacher education practices. As recurrent themes were identified in the data from different contexts and with different teacher educators, certain sayings, doings, and relatings emerged as more interesting and relevant in relation to the aims of the study. Based on this, the analysis was directed towards constructing material-economic, social-political, and cultural-discursive arrangements that could explain how the categories unfolded in practices locally. These arrangements prompted re-readings and re-codings of transcripts, field notes, and documents.

Parts of the data collection for this study were conducted during the Covid pandemic, meaning that some teaching sessions and meetings had to take place digitally. To minimise the risk of spreading the infection, all interviews and the bulk of observations were conducted digitally. Digital versus on-site teaching obviously differs in a number of ways, particularly with regards to how teacher educators and students can interact. However, the observations clearly showed that formal and informal aims, divisions of labour between teacher educators, tasks, time and resource allocations remained relatively stable in the teacher education practices, despite (or perhaps because of) the rapid transition from on-site to digital teaching at the onset of the pandemic. This was also validated by several of the teacher educators in interviews. Digitalisation also affects what becomes possible to capture in data, e.g. spatiality or body language (cf. Brinkmann and Kvale 2018). However, digitalisation also allowed for recorded lectures to be studied in detail, and different courses and forms of teaching to be followed in parallel.

Results

Setting the scene

The local teacher education of this study is one among many in a highly diversified Swedish teacher education landscape. Almost all higher education institutions in Sweden offer some form of teacher education, with the autonomy to design courses and content, although autonomy is limited due to the highly regulated nature of these programmes. The activities observed were all university-based and largely dominated by two teaching practices that have been long established in universities: the lecture and the seminar. Lectures typically involve a monologic transmission of knowledge from a teacher educator to students, while seminars (here) involve various interactive forms of teaching that process and discuss lecture content and literature, guided by a teacher educator. The distinction between assistant lecturers and lecturers was one of the most decisive dividing lines for how teacher educators were involved in and influenced these practices. In the courses, assistant lecturers and lecturers lectured for approximately the same number of hours but from partly different points of departure; the latter to a greater extent on topics closely related to their own research areas, while the former on a broader range of topics, often with a focus on classroom application and referencing their personal experiences from the teaching profession. The vast majority of time spent on seminars was held by assistant lecturers (approx. 70–80%), why the majority of activities, particularly those that involved the processing of content and teacher knowledge through interactions with students, were led by assistant lecturers. One of the course leaders explained this division of labour by noting that lecturers serve as experts from various research fields, but lack the time to lead seminars:

The lecturers disappear somewhere else, and the assistant lecturers are very sought-after/ … /because they are really good and useful since they have ‘experiences from the floor. (Interview, Linda)

Susan, an associate professor, describes her departments’ ambition to involve both assistant lecturers and lecturers in all aspects of education, but concludes that:

… one has almost no time because one might have research time and often a few other assignments/ … /while we have quite a lot of assistant lecturers, who have no research time in their employment, why they have to teach all the more, so to speak. (Interview, Susan)

The categories of assistant lecturers/lecturers are thus inscribed in material-economic arrangements such as resource allocation and established activity structures. The arrangements establish boundaries between practices by assigning partly different roles, knowledge discourses, and activities to assistant lecturers and lecturers based on their access to research (‘experts in their fields’) or school practices (‘experiences from the floor’). The boundaries are established via routines, funding systems, and resources that structure the working hours of teacher educators. Time is, by default, composed of a predetermined number of teaching hours which can be reduced through various forms of internal and external funding and assignments. Lecturers typically have greater access to such funding and assignments, while assistant lecturers ‘have to teach all the more’.

The excerpts above also illustrate how established activity structures ascribe assistant lecturers to draw upon their ‘experiences from the floor” to gain a broader understanding of various topics and to participate in a broader range of activities, thereby allowing them to fill in for absent lecturers and contribute to seminar discussions by connecting different lecture contents. The lengthy and bureaucratic recruitment process for lecturers, which includes cumbersome peer-review procedures, reinforces this practice of ‘filling in’, since the recruitment of assistant lecturers, particularly those on fixed-term contracts, often is faster and more efficient (Interview, Carl). Hence, long-standing university hierarchies, which link career opportunities to lecturer positions, research publications, and academic credentials rather than teaching merits, create and maintain boundaries between the activity structures of assistant lecturers and lecturers.

Along with the activity structures and resource allocation systems described above, teacher education like all university education is under the influence of such arrangements as line organisation, result-oriented management, increased evaluation practices, detailed aims and demands for transparency and effectiveness (Beach 2013). When put into practice, these arrangements require long-term planning in teaching to comply with administrative systems, but provide scarce (time-) resources. One of the course leaders describes how her work has changed from ‘thinking about the content of the courses, of how we implement it, to merely managing what already exists’ (Interview, Linda) due to long administrative processes and lack of time. Established activity structures (enacted contents, scheduled positions, examinations) are thus stabilised and reproduced in intricate processes where regulated contents, and teacher educators are matched long beforehand in administrative routines and procedures. These arrangements shape practices in isolation and separation from one another, where teacher educators tend to lack insight into activities beyond their own participation, resulting in frustration. Lisa, an assistant lecturer, in response to student criticism about too many, too small and incoherent activities during a seminar, states that ‘I am not familiar with your entire course since I have jumped in to take my parts, that is probably the problem/ … /, that I can do something with my parts, but have a hard time doing anything about the others’ (Field notes, seminar). Susan, an associate professor, and Richard, a professor, express similar frustrations about their lectures in another course:

They ask me every year; can you do this? And I really don’t know … I think, honestly, why do they ask me? Like, what does this little island do in this course? It’s probably just like, well, we did it like this last semester, that’s kind of how I think it works. I hope they [course leaders] have the full picture. (Interview, Susan)

They [course leaders] say something like this:

- You are working with ICT and learning. Could you come and talk a little about that?

/ … /so there and then, content is formulated, in the intersection between what I can do; what I’m prepared to do with just a little effort of preparation, and the course leader’s need to fill a slot. (Interview, Richard)

Teacher educators’ frustration about ‘jumping in’, ‘being an “island”, or “filling a slot” are signs of fragmented teacher education practices, with great impact on how activities are distributed between teacher educators. Assistant lecturers are more involved in seminar practices that aim to bridge practices. The detail-regulated contents, ascribed experiences, as well as a constant lack of time and lecturers with matching competencies, are all arrangements that assign assistant lecturers the role of experienced generalists, to cover and connect broad and relatively different subject areas in seminars “across” lectures, subject areas, disciplines, and school practices. The lecturers’ access to research practices, ascribed expertise, and sometimes reduced time for teaching entails that they more often are involved in relatively detached and delimited lecture practices, shaped by a different set of arrangements that assign them the role of delimited specialists with no or little opportunity to influence the content before, after or outside of one’s own lecture.

Different practices, different projects

Continuing from the arrangements described above, we now turn to how relations are shaped in and between the partially isolated and fragmented teaching practices. The categories of ‘assistant lecturers’ and ‘lecturers’ are in a general sense inscribed in social-political arrangements that enable and constrain how teacher educators relate to one another and different projects – in hierarchies, established routines, traditions, ascribed or formal competencies etc. The arrangements are reproduced as assistant lecturers and lecturers are socialised into, participate in, and maintain relatively different practices with different projects. Karen, a newly employed assistant lecturer with long teaching experience, describes her experience of meeting these differences:

There certainly are groups, or not groups really, but definitely, a hierarchy, where the ones with a doctorate and a position as a lecturer are really into research, of course. They, perhaps, treat teaching a bit like…, not the most important thing. It’s not their highest priority, while we, as assistant lecturers, feel that we are the ones who are passionate about teaching and tomorrow’s teachers. Like, we are all very experienced teachers. We have worked for 30 years or more. We have a lot of practical experience that we think is valuable, that we want to share, so, in practice, it’s all about teaching students who soon are to become teachers, like, how do they do it for real? (Interview, Karen)

Karen certainly acknowledges the importance of research and lecturers in teacher education. However, she also describes her own participation in terms of another project formulated in contrast to the research practices of lecturers. It is a project that becomes intelligible from her own experience, what she perceives to be important for the students’ future professions, and how to do things ‘for real’. The importance of one’s personal teaching experience is clearly seen in the way many of the assistant lecturers talked about their work: Sara relies on her own experience for ‘all that I understand, of how the school works’ (interview), and Charles rests on his own experiences as a teacher to give him the ‘confidence to say that I, myself, have experienced what research says in the school world’ (interview). The quotes illustrate projects that involve knowledge formed as a horizontal discourse, which is experience-based and personally bound, enabling assistant lecturers to take on and be given the role of experienced generalists.

Karen can be contrasted with Emily’s description of her work as a relatively new lecturer with long teaching experience from the school:

I think that teacher education needs to have a way of thinking about things and teach analytical abilities, thinking, and problematising. These are the kind of things that I think is important in teacher education nowadays. I would have answered in a completely different way if you had asked me during my teacher training, that I wanted it to be concrete and hands-on. So, I notice that I have changed my view on what teacher education is, I don’t believe in concreteness at all anymore. That’s not what we’re best at, I mean, at the university, we’re best at other things. (Interview, Emily)

Emily’s discussion of teacher education illustrates a process of socialisation into and participation in another project that involves knowledge formed as a vertical discourse, distanced from school practices and grounded in research practices. The project is aimed at general knowledge unbound by time, towards what she perceives the university to be ‘best at’ - to problematise and to provide analytical perspectives, and to a lesser extent towards Emily as a person. This in a way narrows her ‘mode of use’ and limits the number of activities in which she can be involved. She becomes more of a delimited specialist.

The socialisation of assistant lecturers and lecturers into partly different projects and roles illustrates how differences in ‘oughtness’, of what makes sense to do, emerge over time and tend to be taken for granted. However, the boundaries between projects are not fixed, largely due to the fact that vertical discourses, which are typically generated and sustained in scientific disciplines, are associated with higher status in university contexts (cf. Bernstein 1999; Labaree 2004). Elizabeth, an experienced assistant lecturer, expresses this in relation to the recruitment of new assistant lecturers with the explicit aim of ‘bringing school practice into teacher education’. Elizabeth shared much of her background with the new assistant lecturers, and she herself had once been employed due to her school experiences. However, although she appreciated how the new teacher educators revitalised discussions, ‘it became too practical, it was sort of too much “doing”’ and came with a notion that ‘we can leave research aside’ (Interview, Elizabeth). Hence, Elizabeth had clearly been socialised into academic practices and projects formed as a vertical discourse that, as she perceived it, were not shared by the new assistant lecturers, and which was challenged by horizontal discourses. Processes of socialisation of teacher educators as assistant lecturers/lecturers thus create durability and perpetuation of practices (see Elizabeth above), as well as boundaries between practices, but external factors (such as new hires) and internal factors (such as processes of socialisation) can challenge or blur these boundaries. Nevertheless, the categorisation of teacher educators as assistant lecturers or lecturers continues to be a central arrangement for how work in teacher education is understood, organised and implemented.

Translations of concepts

A practice architectures approach entails that assistant lecturers and lecturers participate in overlapping practices that enable and constrain one another. The notion of an ‘ecology’ of practices suggests that teacher education ‘as a whole’ is formed in complex nexuses of practices, where the doings, sayings and relatings of one practice can, but must not, create practice architectures for other practices (Kemmis et al. 2014). The following will focus on this by examining how concepts that articulate key ideas in the teacher education ‘travel’ and ‘translate’ between the projects of different practices (cf. Czarniawska and Sevón 1996). It should be noted that the purpose of this is not to evaluate the use of certain concepts, but rather to approach concepts as carriers of meaning within and between practices that lecturers/assistant lecturers participate in, that shape, bind, and/or separate different projects.

In line with what has been described so far, concepts tend to be introduced via ‘lecture packages’, given by lecturers who relate the concepts to their research practices, as in the case of an introductory lecture to learning theories:

It is important to understand that several of these are perspectives on learning and describe learning in scientific articles. You choose a level, so to speak, what is called a unit of analysis, a level of analysis./ … /[In an article,] these theories are reasoned about as, so to speak, a starting point for research, and perhaps less as a starting point for how to teach. (Richard, recorded lecture)

Lecture packages thus often mediate an understanding of concepts that is formed as a vertical discourse, relating them to other scientific concepts and scientific fields. A similar understanding is conveyed when theories relating to professionalism in teaching are introduced. The theories are introduced by a lecturer who does much of his research in a closely related area and who emphasises that the theories are ‘perspectives, thinking tools by which situations can be analysed’ but cannot ‘provide answers about the right thing to do’ (Field notes, lecture, Matthew). A third example are political concepts of governance which were introduced in another course as a way to analyse a ‘tendency where the conditions and instruments for the exercise of power and governance take place‘ (lecture, Barbara). All of the ‘lecture packages’ above embed concepts in understandings directed by projects formed as vertical discourses, i.e. ‘knowing-why’ knowledge that aim to provide students with distance, perspectives or a critique of the teaching profession and/or conditions surrounding the profession.

As concepts’ travel’ into other activities, they become established and taken-for-granted cultural discursive arrangements in other practice architectures. For example, in a lecture and discussion about a teaching model, Elizabeth, who is an experienced assistant lecturer, takes her point of departure in the model’s sociocultural theoretical foundations, i.e. in one of the learning theories introduced in the lecture package above. However, the socio-political and material-economic arrangements described earlier provide her with few opportunities to gain insights into the students’ pre-understandings and knowledge about the theory.

Interviewer: I got the impression that you assumed that they had pretty good insights into sociocultural theory and Vygotsky. Is that right?

Elizabeth: Yes, that is probably true because that’s what the students usually bring with them, so I might very well have assumed that they had, without actually looking into it/ … /and that’s something that we often talk about among colleagues, that the students, if there is anything that sticks, it’s Vygotsky and sociocultural learning, perhaps a little too much sometimes. So, I have probably taken that for granted without reflecting about it, without checking to see if they had got it. (Elizabeth, Interview)

Although teaching is structured through different courses and departments, concepts such as a learning theory shape understandings that transcend practices, even when they are in relative isolation. The unreflected ‘taken-for-grantedness’ above demonstrates how concepts can be deeply inscribed in practice traditions (preconceived notions about students, contents, activities, etc.) that teacher educators participate in, rather than being dependent on any particular educator. Concurrently, and partly as a result of isolation, concepts tend to be ‘translated’ when they are incorporated into other practices and utilised for projects that involve the production and reproduction of horizontal knowledge discourses. In an interview, Charles (a fixed-term employed assistant lecturer) describes how he struggles to make the political concepts on governance above relevant and graspable for students during seminars since they are ‘too far away from the students’ reality and they want to get into issues on what to do to become a good teacher’ (Interview, Charles). During observed seminars, the concepts are transformed from general, theoretical and context-independent concepts about trends in governance to concrete discussions on how to teach, grade and perform national testing (Field notes, seminar). Similarly, the theories relating to professionalism above are reformulated in seminars from thinking tools that can provide perspectives to answers on how to act in specific situations (Field notes, seminar). Finally, there are no or few references made to the social-cultural theory when the teaching model introduced above is discussed during observed seminars. Hence, the cultural discursive arrangements provided in the lecture packages above are lost in translation, when contents are translated from vertical into horizontal discourses. In the case of the teaching model, other arrangements become important as the students are asked to discuss advantages/disadvantages with the model and examples from their own schooling. These are not questions that exclude reasoning based on the model’s theoretical foundations, but the changed cultural discursive arrangements form a way of reasoning that is shaped by horizontal rather than vertical discourses, that references teacher educators’ or students’ access to their own school practice experiences. This process of translation opens the model for understandings that the theoretical foundations do not cover, enabling it to be attributed with a new set of characteristics such as motivation, making teaching more enjoyable, preventing students from getting bored, and creating interest (Field notes, seminars). These are characteristics that are different, or even contradictory, to the sociocultural theory of learning as it was introduced earlier on.

Discussion

The analysis of this article has not focused on the formal employment of teacher educators as assistant lecturers or lecturers, but rather on the ways these categories are institutionalised in teacher education practices, the ways the categories ‘act upon’ teacher educators’ participation in practices and, by extension, shape teacher education. It needs to be emphasised that this approach does not claim to generate generalisable findings, particularly due to the heterogeneity that is inherent in the category of ‘teacher educators’ (Murray 2017). Moreover, different kinds of teacher education programmes differ, as well as teacher educations in different national contexts.

As initially suggested, the categories clearly do not predetermine what teacher educators do, e.g. when Elizabeth met with newly employed assistant lecturers. Although they resembled her when she was first recruited, over time she also had become part of, and actively contributed to reproducing academic practices whose projects heavily relied on vertical knowledge discourses. Despite this, established arrangements shaped much of her participation in teacher education in line with the role of an experienced generalist: Experienced in the sense that her authority and legitimacy in teaching primarily (but not entirely) came from ‘experiences from the floor’. It is worth noting here that such experience is partly disconnected from actual or concrete experience. ‘Experience’ is an elusive and less formal criterion than, e.g. a formal PhD exam, why it is the attribution of a notion of experience to assistant lecturers that operates in the production/reproduction of these projects, partly independent from the actual qualities of experiences, or from when the experiences were obtained. This process of attribution is inscribed in, on the one hand, cultural-discursive arrangements that are driven by ‘the practice turn’s’ discourses on creating ‘closeness to practice’ via assistant lecturers; and on the other hand in material-economic arrangements that seem ill-fit to facilitate local responses to expectations built into the ‘university turn’ – lecturers are too few or regarded to be too specialised to take on the role of generalists (often lacking ‘experiences from the floor’), and they tend to ‘disappear’ to other, more career-beneficial, activities or positions. Instead, the lecturers are typically attributed the role of delimited specialists, based on their expertise in a specific field of research. Concurrently, assistant lecturers become generalists since they, rather than lecturers, are given the task to process a wide range of vertical discourses with students: e.g. on political concepts, professionalism or learning theories.

To a certain degree, the different categories of teacher educators are socialised into different practices, with partly different projects and arrangements. Difference is not inherently problematic, as it can accommodate a variety of knowledge forms, both vertical and horizontal, that prospective teachers need to acquire (cf. Darling-Hammond 2006). However, rather than linking vertical and horizontal discourses (cf. Brante 2010), the locally established ecology of practices serves to further isolate teacher educators from one another, creating an education where many of them perceive their activities to be’ islands’ or ‘slots’. The established arrangements of these practices are not merely local phenomena, but rather local responses to the practice-oriented and university-driven trends that are impacting teacher educations in Europe and elsewhere. Firstly, the delineation of ‘assistant lecturers’ and ‘lecturers’ is deeply embedded in social-political arrangements that shape divisions of labour at universities in general. Degree requirements and regulated procedures for employment shape formal hierarchies, which restrict and enable access to certain activities and knowledge domains (e.g. research); as well as informal status, influence and authority (cf. Angervall, Baldwin, and Beach 2020). Secondly, notions of creating ‘closeness to practice’ and professionalising teachers through academisation are inscribed in general, policy-driven cultural-discursive arrangements. These arrangements carry disparate and sometimes contradictory demands and expectations that tend to revolve around the dividing line between lecturers and assistant lecturers (or their equivalents), not only in this local teacher education, but in others as well (cf. Maguire 2000; White 2019). Thirdly, local ecologies of teacher education practices are shaped by general material-economic arrangements that are reflected in the increasing implementation of New Public Management reforms in academia, manifested in e.g. increased systems of quality assurance, accountability, measured outputs, strategic planning and academic audits (Beach 2013; Olssen and Peters 2005).

The results of this article demonstrate how the distal arrangements for academic labour above limit local discretion, potentially preventing institutions from establishing and fostering connections between ‘knowing-how’ and ‘knowing-why’’ (cf. Brante 2010). The arrangements fuel isolation and fragmentation, nurturing an ecology of practices where difference becomes a burden and important discourses risk being lost in translation. The results further demonstrate how easily horizontal knowledge discourses can trump vertical knowledge discourses in such an ecology, since they seemingly offer tangible knowledge on how to take action in specific scenarios. Given that similar arrangements are established in other teacher educations (the three points of interwovenness with more distal conditions above point to this being the case) suggests that the ambitions with ‘the practice turn’ face some crucial challenges. For example, investments in more schoolteachers in teacher education run the risk of reproducing almost any account of social or socio-material activity, if the practices in which new teacher educators participate are isolated from, or compete with, vertical discourses of knowledge. These risks can accelerate if arrangements such as career paths, status indicators, and resource allocation impede lecturers from engaging in meaningful vertical knowledge discourses with students in teacher education. To be specific: established arrangements need to recognise assistant lecturers as ‘experienced specialists’ rather than as ‘experienced generalists’ in order to capitalise on ‘experiences from the floor’; lecturers need at least to some extent be recognised as ‘general specialists’ that not only provide delimited vertical discourses, but also process, nurture, and expand these discourses in order to assist students beyond immediate and tangible contexts. However, new or revised arrangements, both local and distal, need to be established in order to facilitate such clarifications of roles. Culturally-discursively, horizontal and vertical knowledge discourses need to be enabled to communicate in a manner that not only focus on how ‘close-to-practice-research’ can address questions ‘from the floor’, but also allows for vertical knowledge discourses to offer distance, perspectives, and critical appraisal ‘for the floor’ (cf. Hordern 2021). Material-economically, the NPM-inspired logics that underpin much of how education and career pathways are structured in higher education today (Beach 2013; Olssen and Peters 2005) need to be challenged and re-examined on both local and national levels to enable social-political arrangements that permit teacher-educators with diverse expertise (from experience as well as from research) to meet, discuss, and shape how different practices’ doings, sayings, and relatings can generate productive practice architectures for one another. If local and distal arrangements are not established in such ways, local teacher education risk missing out on both the ambitions of the ‘practice’- and the ‘university’ turns, potentially eroding central parts of its knowledge base.

Acknowledgments

I am sincerely grateful to the anonymous teacher educators who shared their thoughts and welcomed me into their teaching sessions. I also want to thank the reviewers for their constructive feedback, as well as the UFO-seminar group at the Department of Educational Sciences at Lund University for their helpful comments on the text.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ola Strandler

Ola Strander’s primary research interest lie in the realm of educational policy and on the institutional conditions that influence the practices of teachers and other school actors. This article is the product of a postdoctoral project he undertook at Lund University. Currently, he holds the position of a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Pedagogical, Curricular and Professional Studies at the University of Gothenburg.

Notes

1. ’Adjunkt’ in Swedish.

2. ’Lektor’ in Swedish.