Substantialising: a descriptive framework for studying sociocultural influences on teacher educators

ABSTRACT

Researching teacher education often focuses on the content and practices used in training teachers, but rarely focuses on why that particular knowledge or those particular experiences are selected. This paper presents a descriptive framework for investigating the question of ‘why’ in teacher education by exploring sociocultural influences on the work of teacher educators. Beginning with the idea that all educators face dilemmas in deciding what to teach, the framework categorises influences into three domains: the national and local environment, the professional field, and the individual experiences and beliefs. Brief examples in two teacher education contexts serve as illustrations of using the framework in empirical research. The framework presented is applicable across different teacher education content areas and contexts, for both researchers studying the teaching of teacher educators and for teacher educators examining their own practice.

KEYWORDS:

• Sociocultural research
• teacher education
• sociocultural framework
• research framework
• teacher education research

Introduction

As knowledge in the field of education is developed on teaching and how teachers learn, research makes many recommendations for teacher education. But teacher educators are also teachers – teaching the content of education – and can benefit from explicit research on understanding their teaching choices and practices. Teacher education research has focussed on which practices are common in teacher education, such as the representation, decomposition, and approximation of teaching practice (P. Grossman et al. 2009) for people learning to be teachers (teacher-learners) or on specific pedagogies in teacher education, such as using different technologies (e.g. Gulzar and Barrett 2019; Stannard and Salli 2019) or practice-based teacher education (Matsumoto-Royo and Ramírez-Montoya 2021). Yet sociocultural understandings of why particular recommendations, content, or pedagogies have been emphasised in teacher education are rarer. In a field with many sociocultural frameworks for studying classroom or university teaching, this paper contributes a framework for studying teacher education as a unique teaching context – one in which the content to be learned is the act of teaching and where the factors at play across education and society can pull the teacher educator in conflicting directions. The overall aim of this framework is to provide language to describe the factors specific to influencing teacher educators and allow a researcher to understand why particular choices have been made in a given context.

The context of an instance of teacher education will play an undeniable and inextricable role in its realisation. The goal of the framework presented here is to provide categories flexible enough to describe nuance depending on the focus of the researcher or the findings that emerge. As this paper will explore, there are teacher education contexts in which national or state policy exerts a stronger influence and restricts the freedom to choose content. There are also contexts in which an individual has more freedom to design a workshop or a course particular to their interests and specialisation. And there are contexts in which the teacher educator focusses on big ideas from a particular field of research and teaching. The empirical examples in this paper illustrate from two very different teacher education contexts how the framework can apply across varied settings and circumstances.

Examining the choices and actions of teacher educators is important for understanding what is privileged in education, how the status quo is made and maintained, and how change can happen when teacher educators shift their response to conflicting social values. Conflicting values create dilemmas that educators at all levels of the education system must navigate. When teaching, educators enact the macro values of society in the microcosm of the classroom. Dilemmas are not problems for which there exists an easy or right answer, but the ‘unceasing interaction of internal and external forces, a world of continuous transformations’ (Berlak and Berlak 1981, 133). There are benefits and costs to either side, as well as patterns of resolution. Similar to the Bourdieuan notion of habitus, where people are ‘disposed towards certain attitudes, values or ways of behaving because of influence exerted by our cultural trajectories’, the resolution of dilemmas are ‘constituted in moments of practice’ (Webb, Schirato, and Danaher 2002, 38). Dilemmas lie in the tensions between the sociocultural and the individual in these moments of action.

In their practice, teacher educators must select from a tremendous amount of potential substance to teach. In 2009, Freeman defined the substance of teacher education as ‘what participants are expected to learn through [teacher education] designs’ (11) and more recently, as the combination of the topic and the process of teacher training (Freeman 2024). The traditional instructional triangle of teaching (Cohen, Raudenbush, and Ball 2003) maps out the relationship and interactions between the teacher, the students, the context, and the content, where the content area is the subject being studied by students. In teacher education, the ‘content’ to be learned is not the content area itself, but rather the entire traditional instructional triangle – what teachers do, what students do, how to teach particular content, and so on (Freeman 2016). That is to say, the substance of teacher education is unique in that it includes the teaching and learning of a content area, ideas about teaching and learning in general, and the experiences of teacher education for teacher–learners.

Teacher education must decide what teacher-learners need to know about both general and content-specific methods of teaching, the theories of general education and content teaching which ground those methods, and/or experiences teachers will have in schools in a particular context, for example local school structures or additional responsibilities beyond classroom instruction. Selections are not neutral; every decision is value-laden and reflects the navigation of dilemmas in that teaching-context at that time.

The process of transforming the broad field of teaching and learning into teachable substance for teacher-learners is here termed substantializing. This paper presents a descriptive framework to centre the question of why particular decisions have been made in the process of substantialising. The following section provides background on the idea of dilemmas in teaching as a way to understand why such a framework is valuable. Current trends in teaching define what is privileged in education and society and a shift in practices in teacher education has the potential to create changes in society at large. The next section identifies and breaks down three domains that contribute factors which influence the substantialising process of teacher educators. Finally, the paper briefly explores using the framework in two different contexts of language teacher education, which illustrate its utility as a descriptive tool to contextualise the practices in teacher education and to describe why particular choices are made in a specific instance.

Navigating dilemmas

Dilemmas exist in all teaching as conflicting social values about students, learning, and education weigh on the choices of educators. Dominant patterns of resolving dilemmas in education create the existing status quo. Through shifting established patterns of navigation, educators can change what is emphasised and privileged in education and society. For example, historical traditions of rote repetition of answers (Mann 1844) have shifted in teachers’ practice to ideas of supporting students as individuals to construct their own knowledge (Fenstermacher and Richardson 2005). In changing the navigation of dilemmas for primary/secondary teachers over time, teaching practice changes and therefore the experience of schooling changes for students.

Just as school-age children take cues from teachers about the organisation and power dynamics in society, teacher-learners may take away messages of what is important in teaching and education from their teacher educators. Teacher education offerings ‘define what is worth knowing and how it is best learned by those individuals who seek to become part of the profession’ (Freeman and Johnson 1998, 403). Framed by the idea that ‘all schooling … is political’ (Berlak and Berlak 1981, 253), this work begins from the assumption that social views and practices of education are transmitted through teacher education, even if the messages and lessons might sometimes result from traditional practices instead of innovative reforms. The way teacher educators resolve dilemmas in their practice conveys to teacher-learners the important concepts in education, chosen over the concepts which are not given a focus. In that way, teacher education ‘provides norms for teaching’ (P. L. Grossman and Richert 1988, 58) and is ‘indeed a political undertaking’(Freeman and Johnson 1998, 409). If teacher educators resolve dilemmas in teacher education differently, shifting their practices and what they emphasise as important, it stands to reason that shifts in education more broadly could follow.

The dilemmas framework developed out of work Berlak and Berlak (1981) did studying classrooms and teaching in Britain in the late 1970s and early 1980s in the hopes of understanding the ‘open’ education movement, ideas from which were gaining traction in the United States. Their formidable goal was to ‘illuminate … the intricate connections between everyday behaviour and the course of history’ (3). They developed a set of sixteen dilemmas as a common language to describe what they were seeing, acknowledging that putting language to a phenomenon both ‘sharpens’ and ‘distorts’ (111). One could use the dilemmas framework to study those sixteen original dilemmas as social values which create tension in teaching.¹ Here, I use a broader notion of dilemmas as a way to conceptualise conflicting social values which educators resolve when they make choices, not specifically tied to the sixteen Berlak and Berlak (1981) identified. Dilemmas provide a means to discuss the tensions between influencing factors on the decisions of teacher educators and the process they go through in substantialising teaching and learning.

Substantializing teaching and learning

I use the term ‘substantialising’ to represent that the work of teacher educators is an on-going process they are ‘doing’, making decisions and designing coursework. At the same time, the framework explores these micro actions as influenced by the macro values of society. I wanted the framework to represent the relationship between education as it is perceived and practiced in the national environment versus concepts of education privileged in the professional field, while respecting that the individual teacher educator ultimately presents the substance of their teacher education courses. In doing so, I separated factors into domains and argue that these influences are the result of sociocultural experience.

Originally developed by Vygotsky, sociocultural theory and a sociocultural approach to research centres the idea that the learning is social and mitigated through cultural tools, both concrete and abstract (van Compernolle 2021). Other scholars have taken a broad view of socioculturalism, maintaining that ‘higher-level human cognition in the individual has its origins in social life’ (Johnson 2009, 1). The substantialising framework also takes this broader view – that all the cognitive decisions that go into teacher education, whether conscious or subconscious, are influenced by the social environment and interactions the individual has experienced. The goal is to understand individual choice as something constantly influenced by social experience – cultural, professional, and individual – and acknowledge the role of tensions between conflicting social values in creating dilemmas.

Many examples of applying sociocultural theory to study education exist. Two examples from Tatto et al. (2018) and Valdés (2018) share similarities with the substantialising framework in that they divide the influences into three categories of influence. Valdés’ framework studies school programs, not teacher education programs, and focusses on the three categories of ‘theoretical and ideological’, ‘policies, contexts, and traditions’, and ‘core program elements’ (394).² She also argues that the three categories in her framework are hierarchical. Tatto et al’.s (2018) framework focusses on the learning of students in teacher education and the sociocultural influences on their experiences in student-teaching. They define three hierarchical levels that are constantly in interplay with one another: the macro level is teacher education, the meso level is the practices in the institutions in which the student-teacher is learning to teach, and the micro level is the individual. The goal of the Tatto et al. framework is to ‘not make simplistic judgements about [student-teacher] practices, their origins or motivations’ (22) while the students are learning the complex activity of teaching, but rather to respect that they are influenced by the sociocultural environment.

The substantialising framework is similar in that it attempts to put language to the influences on the ‘practices, their origins or motivations’ of teacher educators. However, one key distinction between both Valdés’ and Tatto et al’.s frameworks is that the domains of influence in substantialising are not assumed to be hierarchical and do not presuppose the settings. The framework provides flexibility depending on the context and which domain is exerting the strongest influence in that space. The substantialising framework borrows from Berlak’s and Berlak (1981) conceptualisation of macro and micro – that the teaching happening in a class is an enactment of some macro social value of education reflected in the micro actions of an individual. In other words, what is privileged and desired in education in society at large is mirrored in the cumulative actions of individuals, but the domains themselves are not ranked hierarchically. In studying the teaching of teacher educators in particular, this distinction becomes particularly valuable, as teacher educators both explicitly and implicitly impart ideas about what is important in education. The only hierarchy in substantialising is the overarching influence of sociocultural experience on all three domains.

Existing sociocultural frameworks are important for studying their targeted objective. Valdés’ framework provides language to understand language programs in schools; Tatto et al. provide a means to understand the teaching and learning of student-teachers without judging their learning process. Substantialising treats teacher education as a unique instance of teaching, one in which the entire act of teaching and learning is the content to be taught but, similarly, attempts to put language to the complexity of the act without ‘simplistic judgment’. The substantialising framework has factors that overlap other sociocultural frameworks in its domains, yet is set up to consider the teaching of teacher educators specifically. Aspects of various other frameworks or foundational ideas from teacher education research overlap and fill out the domains, including ideas from teacher education research, such as communities of practice (Wenger 1998), teacher knowledge (Ball, Thames, and Phelps 2008), or teacher expertise (Berliner 1986).

Given that time is a limited resource in teacher education, choices must be made as a natural part of the process, whether those ‘choices’ are conscious decisions by the teacher educators or larger systemic patterns. The degree to which teacher educators have the freedom to choose their course content themselves is highly context dependent. Even in universities with tenured faculty, courses are expected to cover specific content, and professors might feel constrained by institutional mandates. In contexts where teacher education is strictly standardised, the degree of choice may be even lower. These differences, however, do not create a limitation in using the substantialising framework. Instead, it becomes a stronger factor in analysing the actions of teacher educators. I shift slightly here from the word ‘choice’ to the word ‘action’ precisely to show that some required actions may be beyond the free will of teacher educators. The substantialising language allows a researcher to characterise all the influences pulling a teacher educator in one direction or another, while also evaluating the weight of those different influences. In a context where teacher education is highly standardised and regulated, the source of that standardisation (whether a national policy or an institutional mandate) becomes the factor in that setting that exerts the strongest influence. However, those instances also provide an interesting context in which to study the dilemmas teacher educators face and whether they feel tensions between the policies and their individual experience, as one example.

Similarly, the substantialising framework seeks to avoid an overly simplified judgement of teacher education practices. By recognising an influencing factor that creates more standardisation in a context, the researcher can acknowledge the significance of that factor before drawing other conclusions about the teacher educators’ decisions. Every context has policy and even those contexts which provide more flexibility in deciding course content will be influenced by some policy. But the point of the substantialising language is to recognise that other factors also exert pressure and to consider what is ‘winning out’ when navigating a dilemma created by conflicting social pressures. Studying substantialising is not intended to be evaluative or prescriptive, but rather to describe teacher education in various contexts from a sociocultural standpoint – starting from the premise that social and cultural interaction are ‘the essential processes through which human cognition is formed’ (Johnson 2009, 1).

Domains of influence

The substantialising process is affected by sociocultural factors originating from various domains of influence. The three domains were developed by gathering the factors studied in education to understand influences on teachers and teacher education (e.g. policy, communities of practice, materials, experience, etc.) into a list and grouping them by where the factor is most likely to originate for a teacher educator. The resulting domain categories, the national and local environment, professional field, and individual experiences and beliefs, all exert pressure on the teacher educator substantialising teaching and learning, with many factors involved in each domain (Figure 1). The domains are simultaneously conceptual and concrete, in that they include the influence of ideas (e.g. an ideological belief or a theory) as well as reifications of those ideas (e.g. official policies which reinforce a belief or a publication on a theory). I argue that teacher educators in all fields and contexts are influenced by these domains to various degrees when substantialising the teaching and learning of their content area and the framework can be used broadly to consider sociocultural influences across and within content areas.

Figure 1. The substantializing framework for teacher education.

National and local environment

The term national and local environment refers to the cultural and political setting of a country or local area, its (albeit sometimes arbitrarily bounded) ideologies and policies, and its common educational structures and practices in primary/secondary schools. Some of the factors in the national and local environment will be more closely aligned with a state, district, or even school, but national and local environment is used to encapsulate all the levels of the education system in a country. The factors related to the national environment focus on cultural beliefs and practices as a collection of habits and customs in education (Lampert 2010). Although the term context is frequently used to represent this idea, I attempt to avoid confusing national political context with teaching-context (the classroom settings the teacher-learners will teach in) by referring to the former as an environment.

Ideologies, broadly defined, are ‘a systematic body of ideas, organized from a particular point of view’ (Kress and Hodge 1979, 6). Ideologies contain a ‘loading of moral and political interests’ (Irvine 1989, 255), meaning they are not a neutral point of view, but rather strongly upheld by their ideologues and linked to power. Education is affected by ideologies related to how education should be organised and funded, who should receive education and how, and what should be learned, how, and why. Teacher educators must contend with both the ideologies which they are aware affect them and ideologies which may influence their actions subconsciously. Teacher-learners will also arrive in teacher education with beliefs related to the content area, often as a result of their time in school and the apprenticeship of observation (Lortie 1975) and teacher educators must decide how to navigate those beliefs in their practice.

Ideologies affect policies in that they have political power, but policies also affect ideologies over time, as they provide or obstruct certain opportunities that influence people’s beliefs and understandings. Policy is difficult to draw clear boundaries around as

[it] is both ‘textual’; that is, a document that announces an authoritative position and allocates resources in a given area, and also ‘discourse’; that is, the debates and discussion that surround decision making about what is to be done in a particular area (Lo Bianco and Slaughter 2009, 17).

Policies include ‘all the measures, explicit and implicit’ which impact actions and relations to a ‘political domain and its discourses’ (Phillipson and Skutnabb-Kangas 2009, 30). In education, policies affect everything from how schools are funded generally to how individual students receive services in schools. Teacher educators must consider which policies are necessary for teacher-learners to explore and understand, such as including coursework related to assessment or legal rights of students with exceptionalities.

The last set of factors from the national domain is practices and structures in schools. These factors include how districts and schools are organised as a result of common practices (as opposed to those factors which result from policy). Some of these practices become de facto policies, blurring the lines between implicit policy and common practice. For example, the practice of having a homeroom to take morning attendance has changed into an advisory class, which is now policy in many districts. Common practices in content areas that have been established over time would be classified under structures and practices, such as push-in or pull-out classes for second language students. Some content area practices will transcend national boundaries and other practices will be emphasised more in some countries, as shown in the OECD Global Teaching InSights study of classrooms around the world (2020). Teacher educators must therefore consider which aspects of established practices in schools to include as substance in teacher education.

Professional field

The professional field is the academic or institutional setting in which a teacher educator works or to which a teacher educator feels connected through their work. The field provides input for the educator on what is established as theory, knowledge, and practice and what is innovative, as well as the academic rationale for change and innovation. Richards (2008) calls this ‘internally initiated change’ in which ‘the teaching profession gradually [evolves] a changed understanding of its own essential knowledge base and associated instructional practices through the efforts of … specialists in the field’ (159). Many aspects of the professional field influence an educator, including participation in communities of practice, the ideas prevalent in publications and discourse in that field, and the transfer of knowledge between networks of educators. As Bourdieu sets forth, ‘there is no other criterion of membership of a field than the objective fact of producing effects within it’ (1983, 323)³ and participating as a teacher educator in a professional setting is in part an investment in the effects.

One can argue that the professional field exists within a national environment in that universities and professional organisations are located in different states and countries. That claim is certainly true and the influences of local school practices and the professional field overlap. Professional teacher education institutions may unintentionally reinforce ideas about national ideology or may intentionally include information teacher-learners need to know about policies. However, I locate the influences from the professional field as their own domain for two reasons: first, to represent that the discourse and ideas of the professional field (and specifically academia) sometimes conflict with discourse and ideas in national ideologies, policies, and school practices and, second, to recognise the transnational movement of ideas through a field.

The professional field often provides theoretical perspectives on teaching and learning, as well as what is deemed desirable in content area teaching, regardless of whether it matches policy and practices in the national environment. For example, the argument for the advantages of bilingualism and supporting students’ first language in the classroom often comes from the professional field of language education, even in countries where the national ideology is monolingual and policy enforces that ideology. Teacher education works to bring desirable innovation to teaching, but it often must compete with socialised conceptions of teaching (Lortie 1975) and traditional pedagogy in higher education (Zeichner and Tabachnick 1981).

The professional field includes both the conceptual influences from discourse and publications, but also the institutional influences from professional organisations working towards common goals in education, such as universities, companies, and administrative offices. As teacher educators participate in the work of an institution, they become members of the communities of practice (Wenger 1998) which function in that institution and make meaning of their activities through shared understandings of its enterprise. At the same time, they are members of other communities of practice in the professional field, such as professional networks or educators working in the teacher educator’s area of expertise. Influences from various communities of practice are important to consider when studying the substantialising of teacher educators. One might, for example, explore which choices in substantialising directly relate to institutional influences as opposed to other sources of ideas and discourse in the professional field.

Discourse in a professional field includes ‘the debates and discussion that surround decision making about what is to be done in a particular area’ (Lo Bianco and Slaughter 2009, 17). This meaning of discourse centres ‘the articulation, discussion, deliberation, and legitimization of our ideas about our actions’ (Schmidt 2010, 15) instead of discourse as a verbal exchange between parties. The discourse of a professional community is reified through publications, presentations, and use. Textbooks are a good example of this reification, where key ideas become the expected topics to be taught in teacher education courses.

At the same time, ideas, discourse, and practices can move across communities in the professional field through networks which ‘facilitate the negotiation and settlement of global standards through regular interaction of experts and professionals’ (Stone 2012, 495). These transfers potentially take on new meaning for new communities. Teacher educators are influenced by what has been privileged in the academic field as they work in communities of practice and are connected through transnational professional networks which ‘share their expertise, information and form common patterns of understanding’ (495).

Individual teacher educators

The teacher educator is an individual, who brings all their experience, expertise, and personal beliefs to their practice. Although the national environment and the professional field have tremendous influence, we should not discount the individual in action. As educational research historically has shown, individual educators become experts (Berliner 1986), make decisions about their practice (Shavelson 1973), and recognise the dilemmas in the daily practice of the classroom setting (Lampert 1985). Teacher knowledge has been written about widely, from pedagogical content knowledge (Shulman 1986) to practical knowledge (Elbaz 1983) to specialised content knowledge and common content knowledge (Ball, Thames, and Phelps 2008). These factors create individual difference in knowledge and expertise which influence the choices made when substantialising.

Individual experiences and beliefs, naturally, do not develop in a vacuum. Beliefs, choices, and knowledge are the result of social interaction in a national environment and professional field. The teacher education program a teacher educator originally attended, for example, has potential influence on the discourse to which they adhere and the communities to which they belong. It is therefore possible, as with all domains in the framework, to focus on difference in the individual domain or to explore the relationship between the individual’s beliefs and experiences and the other domains of sociocultural influence.

The individual domain is intentionally separate from choices made in a particular time and place. The domain of individual experience and beliefs represents knowledge and beliefs specific to a person. The influence of those experiences, however, might play out differently depending on the setting. The teacher educator in time and place, located in the centre of Figure 1, represents ‘relationships between consciousness, behaviour and the social context past, present and future that are “in” individuals in the moments that they act’ (Berlak and Berlak 1981, 223). In other words, the individual domain is about differences or similarities in individuals which may affect their substantialising. The teacher educator in time and place substantialising is about how people instantiate sociocultural factors, both individual and communal, into the specific work they do.

Studying substantialising

As both Figure 1 and the acknowledgement of overlap in the above descriptions represent, the sociocultural domains work in combination with one another. Their boundaries are artificial and permeable, and ideas move between them. For example, experts in the professional field are often a part of making policy. Teacher educators in professional communities of practice, ideally, influence the local practices of the teacher-learners they teach. Simultaneously, the structures in schools or the dominant ideology surrounding a content area affect the focus of the professional field. The individual’s experiences are sometimes located within the national environment and professional field, yet a single individual can become a powerful voice in education.

A researcher can choose to focus on the influencing factors from a particular domain, e.g. studying differences that result from individual’s experiences or focussing on the influences of a particular theory from the professional field. Or a researcher might study an instance of teacher education and in the analysis of what is happening, discover that one domain of influence is leading to the decisions being made in that place and time for those teacher-learners. As addressed above, the substantialising framework does not treat the domains of influence as inherently hierarchical – what exerts the strongest influence is highly context dependent. In an instance of, for example, an international webinar, no one policy is going to reign supreme and dictate the content. In such a context, a prominent topic in the field or the individual research focus of the teacher educator might take centre stage.

Certainly, national policy will create obligatory mandates in some contexts and the framework allows the researcher to address them as such. Yet it also provides the freedom to recognise when another domain or factor is exerting greater influence in a particular teacher education setting. Even within the same program, same country, or same teacher educator, various courses might emphasise different aspects of education. In that way, the substantialising framework provides language to study how a teacher educator navigates dilemmas differently depending on the goals in a specific context (course, training, program, etc.).

The domains are also not embedded within one another and therefore it is not a series of overlapping circles. Consider for instance an individual teacher educator who was brought up and educated in a different context than the one where they live and work. While the national and professional domain where the teacher educator works will clearly exert an influence, individual experiences of schooling and beliefs about education will certainly play a role in their decisions. Similarly, a teacher educator might leave the national context of their professional institution to train teachers in a different setting. They will be influenced by a national and local setting which is not the context of their usual professional or individual domains.

Therefore, the three domains always affect each other in some manner, but how they interact in a particular time and place varies considerably. Using the framework to guide research means acknowledging the influence of the various domains on teacher educators, albeit to varying degrees depending on the research question and study. The entire substantialising framework for studying the work of teacher educators presents multiple smaller points of entry into exploring why teacher education is enacted as it is. Again, the intended audience of this paper and this framework is researchers who wish to study the choices and actions of teacher educators while recognising that sociocultural influences come from various points of pressure. By leaving flexible the analysis of what factors are weighing the heaviest on the teaching of teacher educators, the framework can be applied in most any teacher education context. The two empirical studies⁴ in the next section provide examples of how I used the framework in two different settings – one within and one outside of university, one pre-service and one in-service – allowing me as the researcher to understand the teaching of teacher educators in those particular instances (Webre 2020).

Empirical examples

The following short empirical examples are not intended to focus on the methods or findings from the two studies. Instead, this section serves to illustrate how the substantialising framework provided descriptive language to understand the decisions of teacher educators in two very different contexts. As the purpose of the framework is to understand teacher education in its context and not to evaluate the choices of teacher educators, the two studies are in no way intended to be comparative. The only comparison to be made is the fit of the framework for studying factors affecting the work of teacher educators.

The first context is a pre-service setting housed in a German higher education institution. The second example is from an in-service context in Australia, run through a private teacher-training company, Lexis Education. I briefly provide background that is necessary to understand the context and the targeted content area in each study. The focus, however, is to demonstrate how exploring the influences from the different substantialising domains helped to put language to what is happening in that teacher education setting.

Pre-service, higher-education based bachelor program

The first study took place in Germany in 2016, at the end of a year in which large numbers of refugees from Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Eritrea, and Albania were received in Germany (Dearden 2017). As a result, German as a Second/Foreign Language (DaZ/DaF – Deutsch als Zweit- und Fremdsprache) became a more frequent focus of conversation, as more language and integration courses were offered for refugees. The study investigated what was happening in a pre-service DaZ teacher program at a college of education and what careers teacher-learners were being prepared for. The data included observation field notes and artefacts from seven classes across a thirteen-week semester in a bachelor’s program as well as supporting interviews with the three teacher educators I observed, studying substantialising through its enactment in practice and explanations for those choices.

The courses focused on generalised language teaching practices and a formal view of grammar and language competence. The program also put a heavy emphasis on challenging discriminatory views of language learners and encouraging diversity. While the number of school-aged students learning DaZ had increased dramatically, graduates with degrees from the bachelor program in DaZ had no route to teacher certification in that state at that time. Instead, in-service teachers of other content areas were being offered training in supporting DaZ students. Because there were no DaZ positions for their graduates in German schools, the teacher educators focussed instruction on the two contexts their teacher-learners were most likely to work in: teaching adults DaZ in Germany or teaching DaF in other countries. At the same time, the focus on specific conceptualisations of language learning and grammar were strongly influenced by European Union policy regarding foreign language teaching and the use of the Common Framework of Reference (CEFR – Council of Europe 2020). The emphasis on language discrimination and the need for an asset-view of multilingualism reflected national ideologies that the teacher educators work to combat in their practice, particularly the monolingual habitus (Gogolin 1994) in German society.

Positioning the findings about language education within the national and local environment (i.e. the German and EU job market and policy context) explained patterns in DaZ teacher educators’ choices regarding instructional strategies while respecting the complexity of training teachers for multiple potential teaching-contexts, all at the same time in the same course. Instead of making evaluative judgements about not training DaZ graduates for schools, the framework allowed me to explore what was the focus instead and why in that context. When the choices of the teacher educators were viewed through the lens of addressing the available teaching-contexts of their graduates, CEFR definitions of language competence, and a major emphasis on combating discrimination and embracing diversity, the substantialising framework offered a means to describe and contextualise these decisions, particularly at a time when there was a broad call for supporting newly arrived refugee children in schools. By exploring the factors weighing on teacher educators from the national and local environment, one is left with a deeper understanding of what was happening in a DaZ/DaF bachelor program in that particular context and why. The teacher educators expressed tensions they felt regarding the needs of DaZ school-aged students, but their choices in the program coursework correspond most closely to restrictions and opportunities afforded by the national and local setting.

DaZ programs in different states were (and are) changing, providing pre-service coursework for content area teachers (Scholz, Wassermann, and Zahn 2020). Focusing the study on how DaZ and DaF have been substantialised up until now in a national environment which has limited supports for school-age DaZ learners highlights dilemmas teacher educators can consider as they shift some time and resources to prepare pre-service teacher-learners for that teaching-context. DaZ teacher educators have the chance to reflect on the substantialising of language teaching and learning as it has been done and whether the choices they have made in the past for the existing DaZ/DaF teaching-contexts are appropriate for school-age DaZ learners in German schools.

In-service private teacher training company

The second study was conducted in Australia in the context of a private in-service teacher training company, Lexis Education (2020), which focusses on training teachers to work with a functional approach to language in their classrooms. The company specialises in supporting students learning English as an Additional Language or Dialect (EAL/D). The research inquiry asked what allows such trainings to be wide-spread across a range of schools in Australia and internationally. By categorising the influences on the teacher educators according to the substantialising framework, one can draw conclusions about the successful implementation of the program in the Australian context, as well as what one would have to consider if conducting such trainings elsewhere.

The focus in this study was less on the instructional choices of the teacher educators and more on their motivations and their views of what allows their work to be successful. The substantialising framework provided language for describing the factors that had an effect on that work. The teacher educators acknowledged national factors that influence the success of the program, such as a national English curriculum (ACARA 2015) that reflects ideas from systemic functional linguistics (Halliday 1973). They also mentioned national factors that challenge program implementation, such as an ongoing debate about how best to teach language and literacy in Australia (Snyder 2008). But the study showed that the influences from the professional field were what united the trainers in the program. They were part of a community of practice connected by (1) shared ideas from the theory of functional grammar and its utility in classroom teaching and (2) shared curriculum materials from Lexis Education. In a national context where a literacy debate rages, their loyalty to a particular idea from the professional field may even be stronger due to the need to defend it frequently against conflicting theories. With the substantialising framework, tensions between the national and local environment and the professional field became visible, but the shared social facts, i.e. the facts that matter for the community members and connect them to the work (Freeman 2016), arise from the professional domain.

This context provides an example that is not affiliated with a university and, as a private company, the influences from the institution clearly affect the teaching of the teacher educators. But the influences went beyond simply having a strong standardised curriculum to a deeper belief in the discourse around systemic functional linguistics and teaching. The teacher educators were motivated by individual beliefs tied to the professional field, even while encountering both supports and challenges from the national environment.

Discussion and conclusion

The two programs, a German pre-service program taught by school of education faculty and an Australian in-service training taught by tutor trainers, represent vastly different instantiations of teacher education. The studies focus on different aspects of substantialising (the national and local environment in Germany and the professional field in Australia) and ask different questions precisely because they were such different contexts (‘what influences the topics focussed on in DaZ education?’ versus ‘which factors enable functional language training for teachers in Australian schools?’). Yet using the framework provides flexibility and one could study the same aspect of the substantialising framework in two different national environments in more similar teacher education settings. Future research could also explore specific factors within a domain, one domain in depth, or all three domains simultaneously depending on the questions and methodology. The substantialising framework offers a way to not just collect data on the pedagogies of teacher education, but to respect the sociocultural influences at work in a setting.

Similar to how Berlak and Berlak (1981) argued that using the language of dilemmas allowed one to connect ‘the ordinary – and sometimes unusual – events of everyday school life to the significant broader concerns of social and economic justice’ (3), I argue that considering the domains from which dilemmas arise in teacher education provides researchers and teacher educators with language and terms to explore what has influenced current program and classroom decisions. Although the domain boundaries are artificial, discussing the domains as separate allows one to consider and put language to where ideas may have originated, where they are held most strongly, and where tensions arise within and between the domains. It would be difficult to give equal attention to all influencing factors, nor would it be worthwhile to do so for every research question. Researchers will inevitably highlight and focus on the domains of sociocultural influence they feel are most appropriate to answer the questions they are asking.

For those of us who are also teacher educators, the substantialising framework offers a tool to explore in our own practice how we have navigated dilemmas and why. Berlak and Berlak (1981) encouraged the use of dilemmas as a means for teachers to engage in critical inquiry with oneself and with others. If teachers should ‘be engaged … in reflecting upon the ideological forces that are present in their classrooms, schools and communities’ (Richards 2008, 174), so too should teacher educators. Phillipson and Skutnabb-Kangas (2009) contend that ‘a challenge to scholars is to investigate how their (our?) … policy and politics activities relate to political power nationally and internationally, and their/our function in upholding a globally oppressive system’ (30–31). Through critical inquiry, we can reflect on what we desire from education, what we are already doing that works towards our goals, and which dilemmas we might need to resolve differently to encourage changes we want to see in education and society.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the University of Michigan’s School of Education, Rackham Graduate School, and Weiser Center for Europe and Eurasia for funding the two studies described in this paper. I would also like to thank Donald Freeman, Kathleen Graves, Mary Schleppegrell, and Marlyse Baptista for their feedback on an earlier version of this framework.

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studies, University of Michigan Weiser Center for Europe and Eurasia University of Michigan Marsal Family School of Education.

Notes on contributors

Anne-Coleman Webre

Anne-Coleman Webre completed her PhD at the University of Michigan School of Education in 2020. She is currently a lecturer at RWTH Aachen University in the Institute for English and American Studies. Her research focuses on understanding choices made in teacher education. She also studies systemic functional linguistics in teacher education courses and practice in both language teaching and other content areas.

Notes

1. I would argue, however, that dilemmas in teaching practice change over time and space and while the original sixteen may still serve an important purpose in some places, researchers would need to consider which ones have become more or less salient and which new dilemmas have emerged in the changing education landscape.

2. In previous studies with this framework, I too used the term curricularizing (Webre 2020), but have since moved to substantialising for a number of reasons. I wanted to avoid the connection with the word ‘curriculum’, as well as avoid confusion with the same term as the Valdés framework, which is substantially different in overall focus, specific factors, and conceptual details.

3. A reviewer suggested the relationship between this domain and Bourdieu’s theory of fields would be a worthwhile avenue to explore. Given the scope of this paper, it was not possible to go in-depth with possible connections. I agree it would be valuable in future work to consider Bourdieu’s field, habitus, and capital in conversation with the entire framework and also with regard to the work of scholars who have looked at education and habitus transformations (e.g. von Rosenberg 2016).

4. Germany study IRB number: HUM00115495.

Australia study IRB number: HUM00150771