Date

2019-09-03

Author

Gümüşok, Fatma
Seferoğlu, Gölge

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There is an established association between teacher quality and student learning in schools, which promotes research studies focusing on teachers. However, a similar link has not been established between teacher education and student learning (Murray & Kosnik, 2011). Despite a slightly notable increase in studies about teacher educators, this group of professionals is regarded as under-researched, insufficiently understood and generally ignored (Cochran-Smith, 2003, Murray & Male, 2005; Vanassche & Keltermans, 2016). There are various definitions of who teacher educators are. The one which is adopted in this study defines “teacher educators as teachers of teachers, engaged in the induction and professional learning of future teachers through pre-service courses and/or the further development of serving teachers through in-service courses” (Murray & Swennen & Shagrir, 2009, p. 29). In this definition, teacher educators are not involved in initial teacher training only but also teachers’ professional development which is a life long process. The literature mainly concentrates on teacher educators who work at higher education institutions and who have entered academia, having experienced the transition from first-order teaching to second-order practice (White, 2014). Many of these studies place teacher educator professional identity in the center of understanding of what it means to do teacher education (Olsen & Buchanan, 2017; Murray, 2010; Murray & Male, 2005). Based on this, this study investigates professional identities of in-service teacher educators who are responsible for training language teachers at state schools in Turkey. Considering professional identity as a group of attributes that are employed to differentiate one group of professionals from another (Ben-Peretz & Kleeman & Reichenberg & Shimoni, 2010), the researchers utilized the framework suggested by Davey (2013) for teacher educators. Davey (2013) described professional identity as both personal and social; fragmented and multifaceted, changing and evolving. It is related to emotional beings and is value-driven, includes a sense of group membership, and it is collective (pp 31-32). In this presentation, in order to have a deeper understanding of ‘what is it like to be an in-service teacher educator?”, the focus will be on in-service teacher educators’ conceptualizations and definitions of training teachers; challenges, and the sources of reward that help them deal with the struggles of training teachers. Overall, in Turkey there is a dearth of research studies on teacher educators’ profiles and their professional development (Yıldırım, 2013). Specifically, as Borg (2011) and O’Dwyer and Atlı (2015) point out, research on language teacher educators’ identity and professional learning is quite scarce. Therefore, exploring professional identities of language teacher educators is quite important. Moreover, investigating particularly professional identities of in-service teacher educators carry utmost significance since in contexts like Turkey frequent changes occur in the education system (Uztosun, 2018), and in-service teacher educators are the ones who primarily guide teachers through these educational reforms. Moreover, studying in-service teacher educators’ professional identities will contribute to the expansion of research which focuses on roles, practices, knowledge domains of teacher educators as the unique group. In this sense, this study will offer insights into the growing research field of identity studies on professional development facilitators and school-based teacher educators.

URI

https://eera-ecer.de/ecer-programmes/conference/24/contribution/46845/
https://hdl.handle.net/11511/73640

Collections

Department of Foreign Language Education, Conference / Seminar