An Exploration of Teacher Educator Identities Within an Irish Context of Reform

Abstract

As teacher education undergoes reform in many jurisdictions, who teacher educators are, their lives and their work, continue to be in the spotlight internationally while remaining relatively underexplored in the Irish context. The research from which this chapter draws is an attempt to address this lacuna. Performativity and accountability agendas globally and the European economic austerity landscape have set the scene for a radical reform agenda in initial teacher education (ITE) in Ireland. From a largely autonomous college-based system of provision at primary level, now ITE is subject to stronger regulation and oversight by the Irish Teaching Council and through a rationalisation of ITE within higher education. Drawing on a phenomenological approach and in depth interviews with ITE educators across five education departments in Ireland, we decode their experiences, values and concerns relative to changing contexts. We explore the diverse pathways, values and experiences that construct them as teacher educators in the present, and gain insight in to the strength of former professional identities. Bourdieu’s metaphor of habitus and field enables us to make sense of distinctions in values and practices across the subfields of initial teacher education and to explain why practitioner teacher identity continues to be privileged in the context of this policy agenda.

There is for many in Higher Education a growing sense of ontological insecurity; both a loss of a sense of meaning in what we do and of what is important in what we do. Are we doing things for the ‘right’ reasons – and how can we know! (Ball2012)