Tensions and possibilities in teacher educators' roles and professional development

Abstract

[Excerpt] This first issue of Volume 41 of EJTE is devoted to a key topic in teacher education: the professional roles and development of teacher educators. As I stressed in my first editorial (Flores 2017) much has been written on teacher education, but less is known about the identity, working contexts and professional learning of teacher educators, despite the growing interest about the topic in the last years. The need to better understand who teacher educators are and what they do, how they understand their roles and their professional development but also how they see themselves as teacher educators has been widely advocated (see, for instance, Izadinia 2014; Livingston 2014; Flores 2016; Czerniawski, MacPhail, and Guberman 2017). Teacher educators’ identity, their pro-fessional learning needs throughout their careers and their working contexts have been seen as key elements that deserve further attention in order to overcome the idea of teacher educators as hidden or unrecognised professionals (Livingston 2014) and to shed light on the invisibility of their work (Flores 2016). The need to make the work of teacher educators more explicit and visible within institutions in order to enhance the status of teacher education in academia has also been highlighted. Issues such as diversity, complexity, multidimensionality (and sometimes ambiguity) have been used to explain the characteristics of teacher educators’ work.[...]