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Preparing future teacher educators in higher degree programmes: a Chinese perspective

While traditionally teacher educators were experienced teachers in schools before moving into higher education, over the recent years, in China and other contexts, such as Australia and the USA, there has been an increasing number of graduate students who enter teacher education after obtaining a higher research degree (e.g. PhD and EdD) without any formal school teaching experience (but usually with a strong research profile) (Mayer et al. 2011; Zeichner 2005). These graduate students mainly learn to become teacher educators through their teaching of pre-service teachers and research on different aspects of teacher education in their situated higher degree programmes in the faculty/departments of education or other related subject disciplines (e.g. Mathematics and English). However, without school teaching experience, they might lack a sufficient understanding of teachers’ practice and the educational reality (Wang 2013) and thus might experience difficulties in their work in teacher education (Yuan and Lee 2014). Besides, the existing research on teacher educator induction has demonstrated that novice teacher educators are likely to encounter a wide range of challenges and tensions (Kosnik and Beck 2008; Murray and Male 2005) in higher education, such as a heavy workload, the publish-or-perish system and the limited institutional support, which can exert negative impact on their professional practice and continuous development (Loughran 2014). Therefore, it is crucial for graduate students to receive effective preparation and guidance in higher degree programmes so that they can develop a better understanding of teachers and teaching and learn how to cope with the myriad challenges in higher education in order to take up their prospective roles as ‘linchpins’ and ‘gatekeepers’ in teacher education (Cochran-Smith 2003, 5). To date, there is a paucity of research on graduate students’ learning experiences in teacher education, and we also know little about what support they might need in their learning to become teacher educators. In order to fill this gap, this study draws on three graduate students’ experiences, to explore how a PhD programme in a university in China seeks to develop prospective teacher educators, which can generate useful implications about the effective preparation of teacher educators in higher education. One central question guides this study: how did the three PhD students learn to become teacher educators in their programme?