Teachers and teacher education: a call for a renewed sociological research agenda

ABSTRACT

This article provides an overview of the main sociological approaches applicable to the study and analysis of teaching, teachers and teacher education. Analytical perspectives from sociology are then compared to research on teachers from two other disciplines, education economics and educational psychology, which have produced the lion’s share of recent research on teachers. In the article’s final section, recent results are reported from surveys of student teachers and teachers in two Nordic countries, Denmark and Finland, to exemplify the importance of institutional and other contextual variables for the study of teachers and teaching. The article ends with a plea for a renewed sociological research agenda that studies teachers and teacher education.

KEYWORDS:

• Teacher education
• teachers
• sociology of teaching
• Nordic countries
• teacher effectiveness

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Ida Gran Andersen and Marianne A. Larsen for helpful comments on previous versions of this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. With respect to journal citation reports for the most recent year of observation (2016) these were the top international journals with impact factors of 3.051 (Sociology of Education), 1.036 (British Journal of Sociology of Education) and 0.439 (International Studies in Sociology of Education); (see https://www.scimagojr.com, accessed 25.03.2019).

2. Alternatively could one also search for the word ‘teacher’ in the title, abstract or keywords for an article. This query leads to an increase to 16.4% (N = 139) for the three selected sociology, 25.5% (N = 394), for the psychology and 13.7% (N = 184) for the economics journals. In my opinion, using the title only is preferable in order to identify articles that exclusively focus on teachers.

3. An additional search in three leading teacher education journals (Journal of Teacher Education, Teaching and Teaching Education and European Journal of Teacher Education) for articles that contained either ‘sociology’ or ‘sociological’ in the title, abstract or keywords revealed only six articles across all journals (search performed March 25^th, based on same database, publication type and date range as presented in Table 2).

4. As is the case for a number of the discussed topics, the consequences of student-teacher matching in terms of gender, race or ethnicity have received considerable attention from economists in recent years (for a recent review see Coenen, Cornelisz, Groot, Maassen van Den Brink, & Van Klaveren, 2018).