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The Work of Teacher-Educators

This special issue brings together a range of papers focussing on the work of teachereducators, an emerging international body of scholarship that has begun to fill the gap so well pointed out by Jean Murray (2012) in highlighting the “work” involved in much of the daily work of hidden educators. In attempting to address this gap, Ellis and his colleagues (2011, 2012) pioneered a systematic approach, using cultural-historical theory, to fill in the lineaments of a field of academic work that is not well understood by its practitioners, let alone by those from other academic fields. As Bourdieu noted in Invitation to Reflexive Sociology (1992), academics are more prone to study fields of practice other than their own. However, sociologically and psychologically reflexive study of our own fields are particularly needed at a time when the institution of the university itself is undergoing major changes, along with broader fields of education that teacher education serves through its graduates. The Work of Teacher Education (WoTE) project seeks to understand how the “teachereducator” is constructed and maintained as a category of academic work in the context of shifting institutional settings and higher education policy. Ellis and his colleagues in England and Scotland (Ellis et al., 2011, 2012; McNicholl, Ellis, & Blake, 2013) used third-generation Activity Theory, developed by Engeström (1987, 2001), to examine the work of teachereducators. Their projects adopted this explicitly materialist cultural-historical approach to workplace practices and outcomes, paying particular attention to dimensions of research and teaching, and their relationship, in teacher-educators’ work, as well as (inter-)personal and institutional workplace practices employed to construct and maintain systems of teacher education. This special issue reports on studies across a developing international network, involving research in three settler-societies in the Asia-Pacific region: Australia, New Zealand and Canada. Across this network, projects replicate the methodological framing of the original Ellis et al. projects as well as adding dimensions relevant to particular national university sectors. The papers represent several phases of the project, taking up the cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT) and methodology used in WoTE, while also bringing them into constructive interaction with other theoretical and methodological resources. The opening paper from Aotearoa New Zealand, by Gunn, Hill, Berg and Haigh, covers several phases of WoTE data gathering: analysis of advertisements for teacher education positions; follow-up interviews with contact persons for those positions; work shadowing and interviews with teacher-educators and a workshop analysing findings. It offers a good overview of WoTE project design and CHAT, while providing a recent country-specific history of teacher education as focus for the analysis. Three different teacher-educator trajectories emerge from their study: the professional teacher expert with a teaching license but no time provided for research; a traditional academic who does not require a teaching license and is expected to be strong in research and a teacher-educator dually qualified in teaching ASIA-PACIFIC JOURNAL OF TEACHER EDUCATION, 2016 VOL. 44, NO. 4, 302–305 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1359866X.2016.1200246