ReConTEP’s ambitious goal to understand the content of teacher educators’ professionalism as enacted in practice, fed into a two-stage research process which combined theoretical work and an empirical case-study. The first stage of the research incorporated examination and redefinition of our current way of seeing teacher educator professionalism. While research warns us against the claim that there is a recipe book to teaching, still the dominant discourse in research and policy evokes the notion of general, context-free knowledge and skills that individual teacher educators acquire, possess and perform. This logic is often associated with expectations of uniformity and standardisation, as evidenced in the teacher educator standards being furthered in many European countries. Through a critical examination of these initiatives, ReConTEP has shown how teacher educator standards appeal to a ‘technicist’ model of teacher education and, in so doing, fail to account for the complex, relational and contextualised nature of teacher educator professionalism. In response to this, a novel theoretical lens in the form of a conception of enacted professionalism was developed. A conception of enacted professionalism gives center stage to what teacher educators actually do in practice, at a particular moment in time, in a particular context. It concerns professionalism as enacted by teacher educators, as engaged in their professional activities, as opposed to a conception of teacher educator professionalism as what is demanded from teacher educators by reference to professional standards. This reinterpretation of professionalism serves as a powerful theoretical and analytical resource for research on teacher educator professionalism, as well as a useful practical tool to support the professional development of this occupational group. This theoretical work informed the second stage of the research in which the proposed theoretical lens was operationalised and tested in practice through a multiple case-study design which successfully combined the voices and experiences of 11 teacher educators, 22 student teachers and 22 school-based mentors. The main data were gathered from observing each teacher educator on two supervisory conferences during student teachers’ internships. Drawing on positioning theory as developed in the field of social psychology, these supervisory conferences were framed as discursive practices in which teacher educators position both themselves and others (i.e. student teachers and school-based mentors) in particular ways. In so doing, they negotiate locally the meanings of good teaching, and divide responsibility amongst ‘the world of practice’ and ‘the world of theory’ in the process of learning to teach. These observational data were complemented by short interviews with teacher educators, student teachers and mentors a few days after each observation, a cycle of biographical interviews with teacher educators, and document analysis (e.g. lesson evaluation forms). Data analysis is ongoing and aims to build a typology of the different subject positions that teacher educators, mentors and student teachers ‘use’ in the supervisory conferences, and how this affects student teachers’ (opportunities for) learning.
