Language Teacher Educator Identity

Barkhuizen
The author examines who language teacher educators are in

the field of language teaching and learning. This includes a
description of the different types of language teacher educators
working in a range of professional and institutional contexts,
an analysis of the reflections of a group of experienced
English teacher educators working in Colombia and enrolled Language Teaching
in a doctoral programme to continue their professional
development, and an exposition of the work that language
teacher educators do, particularly in the domains of pedagogy,
research, and service and leadership (institutional and
community). All of this is done with the aim of understanding
the identities that language teacher educators negotiate and
Language Teacher
Language Teacher Educator Identity

are ascribed in their working contexts. The author emphasizes
the need for research to pay attention to the lives and work of
Educator Identity
language teacher educators, and offers forty research questions
as an indication of possible future research directions.
About the Series Series Editors

This Elements series aims to close the gap Heath Rose
between researchers and practitioners by University of
Gary Barkhuizen
allying research with language teaching Oxford
practices, in its exploration of research- Jim McKinley
informed teaching, and teaching- University College
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informed research. The series builds upon London
a rich history of pedagogical research in
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Elements in Language Teaching
edited by
Heath Rose
Linacre College, University of Oxford
Jim McKinley
University College London
LANGUAGE TEACHER
EDUCATOR IDENTITY
Gary Barkhuizen
University of Auckland
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DOI: 10.1017/9781108874083
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DOI: 10.1017/9781108874083
First published online: February 2021
Gary Barkhuizen
University of Auckland
Author for correspondence: Gary Barkhuizen, [email protected]
Abstract: The author examines who language teacher educators are in the
field of language teaching and learning. This includes a description of
the different types of language teacher educators working in a range of
professional and institutional contexts, an analysis of the reflections of
a group of experienced English teacher educators working in Colombia
and enrolled in a doctoral programme to continue their professional
development, and an exposition of the work that language teacher
educators do, particularly in the domains of pedagogy, research, and
service and leadership (institutional and community). All of this is done
with the aim of understanding the identities that language teacher
educators negotiate and are ascribed in their working contexts. The
author emphasizes the need for research to pay attention to the lives
and work of language teacher educators, and offers forty research
questions as an indication of possible future research directions.
Keywords: language teacher educator, identity

© Gary Barkhuizen 2021

ISBNs: 9781108812665 (PB), 9781108874083 (OC)
ISSNs: ISSN 2632-4415 (online), ISSN 2632-4407 (print)
Contents
1 Who Are Language Teacher Educators? 1
2 Teacher Educators Reflecting on Their Identity 16
3 What Do Language Teacher Educators Do? 34
4 Further Professional Development of Language Teacher

Educators 55
5 Future Research on Language Teacher Educator Identity 65
6 References 75
Language Teacher Educator Identity 1
1 Who Are Language Teacher Educators?

It sounds simple enough – language teacher educators teach teachers how to
teach language. But when we think about this sentence more deeply questions
immediately begin to emerge. For example:
1 Who are these teachers learning to teach language? Have they ever taught
before; that is, are they pre-service teachers, or do they already have some
teaching experience?
2 Who are the teacher educators? How do they teach the teachers? How much
experience do they actually have as classroom language teachers? What
other professional responsibilities do they have; for example, doing research,
managing a department, advocating for policy change? What are their quali-
fications to become teacher educators?
3 What exactly do the educators teach the pre-service or in-service teachers?
What does language teacher education pedagogy look like? Is it all about
language teaching methodology – what to do in the classroom? What is the
place of theory? What about social justice education?
4 Is the language to be taught the first language of the student teachers, or an
additional language, or one of many languages in the particular teaching/
learning context? How proficient in this language or these languages are the
teachers and the teacher educator? Does it matter?
5 Do language teacher educators reflect on their practice?
6 Is there a knowledge-base of language teacher education? What does it
consist of?
These questions focus on three core domains. The first of these relates to the
teachers who are learning to teach or who are continuing their professional
development. They are the central characters in the language teacher education
enterprise, and this is reflected in the relatively large literature that deals
with second or foreign language teacher education, including empirical studies,
teacher education textbooks, and specialist handbooks and edited compilations.
This work aims to examine and understand how teachers learn to become
teachers, what they know when they know how to teach, how they continue to
develop professionally over time, and how their teacher identities relate to what
they do, both inside and outside the classroom.
The second core domain raised by the questions has to do with the content
and pedagogy of language teacher education. This refers to what is taught to
teachers and what they learn in the process of their teacher education. It includes
how the process of this teaching and learning unfolds and why. There is no
preferred description or universal explanation of this process, and there is no
2 Language Teaching
one set of recommendations for how it should be done. There are two obvious
reasons for this: one is that the contexts of teacher education – regional,
political, economic, institutional – are infinitely varied globally, and two,
these contexts, as well as the disciplinary field of language education more
generally, are constantly evolving. Language, of course, is central to the process
of language teacher education, not only as the subject matter that is taught by
teachers, but also as the medium through which they are taught to teach that
language or languages by teacher educators. Labels such as ‘first’, ‘second’,
‘native’, ‘foreign’, and ‘additional’ applied to these languages reflects the
varied and changing nature as well as the complexity of the teacher education
landscape.
The third core domain involves the teacher educators. In language teacher
education, educators can vary from those who have very little classroom
experience, if any at all, to those who are deeply connected to classroom life,
either through their own concurrent practice and employment as a language
teacher, or through the supervision or mentoring of student teachers during their
teaching practice (practicum), for example. Language teacher educators teach
(prospective) language teachers, and their pedagogy is a major constituent of
the work they do as educators. But it is not all. They are also involved in
scholarly activities, such as reading and doing research, participating in work-
shops and conferences, and even studying for further qualifications. In addition,
they typically engage in the interests of professional associations and take part
in policy discussions in order to keep up with and contribute to developments in
the language education field, sometimes locally within a particular institution or
region but also more widely.

These three core domains – the language teachers, the content and peda-
gogy of teacher education, and the teacher educators – are significant con-
stituents of the knowledge-base of language teacher education (LTE),
however it may be defined. In reflecting on past conceptualizations of this
knowledge-base, Johnson and Golombek (2020) point out that a major omis-
sion in its focus has been ‘what teacher educators do’, in other words, ‘LTE
pedagogy’. They argue that LTE pedagogy needs to ‘be recognized as
a central domain in the knowledge-base of LTE’ (p. 117). They elaborate
on what this entails:
Greater attention to LTE pedagogy means making explicit not just what
teacher educators ask teachers to do in their teacher education programs but
what we do, as teacher educators; our goals, intentions, expectations, the
quality and character of our pedagogy, and the consequences of our pedagogy
on the ways in which teachers come to understand both the scope and impact
of their teaching. (p. 117)
This proposal clearly positions teacher educators and their work as vitally
integral to the activity of language teacher education. Others too have decried
the lack of attention paid to teacher educators in language teacher education
scholarship. Trent (2013) says straightforwardly that teacher educators ‘have
not been thoroughly researched’ (p. 262), and others concur (Farrell, 2015;
Kani, 2014; Wood & Borg, 2010; Wright, 2010), including Peercy et al. (2019)
who say, ‘We currently know relatively little about teacher educators as learners
and as reflective scholars open to examining their own practice and research’
(p. 2). This latter comment adds a further dimension to our lack of knowledge
regarding teacher educators; that is, how they (those that do) go about exploring
or self-reflecting on their own work as educators.
Despite this apparent deficiency in knowledge about language teacher edu-
cators, efforts have been made to uncover their autobiographical experiences
(Casanave & Schecter, 1997) and qualities (Moradkhani et al., 2013), and more
recently Farrell (2015) collated personal descriptions of the work and pro-
grammes of teacher educators in various international contexts. Maley (2019)
invited twenty very experienced professionals, most working as teacher educa-
tors for many years, to reflect on their personal histories, including the places
they have worked, the people they met along the way, and critical moments in
their own development. And a recent issue of TESOL Journal (Lindahl &
Yazan, 2019) included a number of research-based articles focussing specific-
ally on English teacher educators.
The overdue recommendation to focus on teacher educators means by neces-
sity that our gaze shifts to who the educators are – their history, their beliefs,
experiences, roles and practices, emotions and desires, and their moral stance.
In other words, their language teacher educator identity, or more accurately,
their multiple identities. This represents yet another aspect of language teacher
educators’ lives that remains underexplored and surprisingly invisible. As
Yazan (2018) asserts, language teacher educator identity ‘is still undertheorized
and underresearched’ (p. 141). This Element is about the identity of language
teacher educators. I attempt to describe who language teacher educators are.
Gee’s (2000) well-known and seemingly straightforward definition of identity
claims that identity is ‘being recognized as a certain “kind of person”, in a given
context’ (p. 99). The questions that guide my discussion include, therefore:
what kind of people are language teacher educators, in the professional contexts
in which they work? How are they recognized as language teacher educators?
How do they learn to become teacher educators, and how do they grow as
educators? Identity, of course, means not only how people are perceived by
others, but also how they see themselves – their own reflexive understanding of
who they are. To address this dimension of identity, I draw on interview data
4 Language Teaching
from a study that explored the shifting identities of experienced language

teacher educators, from their perspectives, as they transition through further
study.
1.1 The Aim and Organization of This Element

This Element has five main sections:
1 In this first section I introduce the topic: language teacher educator identity.
I ask who language teacher educators are, and provide examples of the types
of professionals who work as teacher educators. I also provide some working
definitions of concepts to be used in later sections, including some published
definitions of ‘teacher educator’.
2 The second section introduces a study I conducted with teacher educators in
Colombia, which I will refer to in later sections as well. In this section, brief
excerpts from narrative interviews illustrate the educators’ understandings of
their own changing teacher educator identities. Main themes from their
reflections are extracted and discussed.
3 In Section 3 I ask: what do language teacher educators do? Having estab-
lished in the first two sections who language teacher educators are, this
section explores the pedagogical work of teacher educators in relation to
their perceived identities. To address this broad question, I use the eight
propositions that Johnson and Golombek (2020) suggest constitute LTE
pedagogy as a central domain for the knowledge-base of teacher education,
and do so from the teacher educators’ perspective, focussing particularly on
their identity construction. To support the propositions, I draw on concepts
from a study by Hacker (2008) that explored the learning of language teacher
educators.
4 Section 4 then considers why language teacher educators decide to continue
their professional development. It returns to findings from the Colombian
study. Here, I explore the reasons why the teacher educator participants
decided to enrol in a doctoral programme, and how this decision intersected
with their investment (Norton, 2013) in further education and the negotiation
of their identities.
5 The final section concludes the Element by considering avenues for future
research in the area of language teacher educator identity. Based on the
previous four sections, I suggest topics for research and include related,
specific research questions.
The five sections, then, follow a logical sequence of first introducing who
language teacher educators are, then examining their reflections on their
identities, followed by a discussion of the work they do in relation to their

identities, an exploration of their reasons for deciding to continue their educa-
tion, and then ending with questions for further research. In each section,
I include one or two brief personal narratives from my career as a language
teacher and teacher educator. The narratives serve to position me as author of
the Element, generally and in relation to the content being discussed at the time.
I hope that they are both interesting and informative.
Having outlined the content of this Element, here is a note about what it does
not cover. This falls into two main areas. The first has to do with the process of
language teacher education – how it is or should be done. In other words, this is
not a textbook about second language teacher education, its pedagogies and
curriculums, or the design of its programmes. In a sense, though, it is about all of
these, but only insofar as they relate to the identities of the people pivotal to the
teacher education process – the teacher educators.
The second area not covered in this Element is theories of identity. This
Element is not the place to repeat these theoretical positions and would distract
from its main purpose, that is, to present in some detail an overview of the
identities of language teacher educators by addressing the question: what kind
of people are language teacher educators, in the professional contexts in which
they work? Nevertheless, I include a brief statement here of some of the more
prominent theories. Conceptualizations of identity – what identity is, different
epistemological perspectives – and particularly teacher identity, have in recent
years been covered quite extensively elsewhere in the literature (Barkhuizen,
2017; De Costa & Norton, 2017; Gray & Morton, 2018; Varghese et al., 2016;
Yazan & Lindahl, 2020). The range of perspectives, reflected in methodological

approaches to investigate identity, include poststructural orientations such as
Norton’s (2013) notion of investment in relation to the theories of Bourdieu,
identification within communities of practice (Canagarajah, 2017; Trent, 2013),
identity-in-discourse (Varghese, 2017), identity-as-practice (Morgan, 2004),
critical realism (Block, 2013), and theories of race, colonialism, and empire
(Motha, 2014). De Costa and Norton (2017) draw on the work of the Douglas
Fir Group (2016) to propose a transdisciplinary approach to language teacher
identity in the introductory article of a special issue of The Modern Language
Journal, which includes six contributions that cover topics such as how teacher
identity intersects with the multilingual and translingual realities of contempor-
ary classrooms, the investment of teachers in developing the semiotic reper-
toires of learners and a socially inclusive learning environment, and the
emotions and ethical practices of teachers. Following a transdisciplinarity
agenda, and drawing on a range of different theories in conceptualizing teacher
identity, the studies take into account the highly inter-related macro-, meso-, and
6 Language Teaching
micro-level dimensions of language teaching and learning. De Costa and

Norton (2017) note in their discussion that ‘there is much evidence to support
the view that language teaching is indeed “identity work” and that language
teaching is enhanced by effective teacher training, both inservice and preserv-
ice’ (p. 11).
This final comment raises two matters pertinent to this Element. The first is
that language teaching is identity work (Miller, Morgan, & Medina, 2017); the
self-formation of being and becoming a teacher in the practice of doing teach-
ing. The same applies, of course, to language teacher educators. Doing teacher
education is identity work. Who individuals are as teacher educators, including
their past and imagined future identities, affects their pedagogies and all other
aspects of their teacher education work, and at the same time their practices
constantly change who they are and desire to be. This relates to the second
matter regarding De Costa and Norton’s comment: that language teaching is
enhanced by effective teacher training. Once again language teacher educators
(trainers) are vitally positioned in the language teaching/learning enterprise, as
Vanassche and Kelchtermans (2016) also remind us, ‘teacher educators are key
to educational systems . . . as they strongly impact the quality of teaching and
learning in our schools’ (p. 355).
To end this introduction, I briefly define a few terms so that for the following
sections we are all on the same page, so to speak. These are not particularly
controversial, though they have been defined differently by various scholars,
and even the same scholars have changed their ideas about them over time. The
three terms I wish to clarify are as follows, and I am guided by the distinction
that Freeman (2016) makes:
1 Language teacher education: this is the superordinate term describing

a process that serves like a bridge ‘to link what is known in the field with
what is done in the classroom, and it does so through the individuals whom
we educate as teachers’ (Freeman, 1989, p. 30). ‘We’ here refers to teacher
educators who are the subject of interest in this Element, and the ‘individ-
uals’ are pre-service or in-service teachers who learn to teach and learn about
teaching. Freeman (2016) expands the description of language teacher edu-
cation as follows: ‘To describe the connecting, building, and refining of
knowledge and know-how through formal processes of professional prepar-
ation and further development’ (p. 9).
2 (Continuous) professional development: as a type of language teacher edu-
cation, professional development is focussed on the teacher learner and less
directly on any particular ‘intervention’ (see teacher training in the next
point). Freeman (2016) cites Day (1999) who says, ‘Professional
development consists of all natural learning experiences and those conscious

and planned activities [workshops, conferences, formal study] which are
intended to be of direct or indirect benefit to the individual, group or school’
(p. 9).
3 Teacher training: as a second type of teacher education, training involves
more direct intervention – it is specific, focussed, and timely (Freeman, 2016,
p. 8). Richards and Farrell (2005) add that it involves activities where the
goals are immediate to short term and relate to a teacher’s current teaching
circumstances, whether that be preparing for a first teaching position or a new
situation as a more experienced practitioner.
One might say, at the risk of over-simplifying matters, that training focusses
on providing teachers in preparation with practical skills to operate in the
classroom, whereas professional development aims to enable teachers to
develop a broader knowledge-base, including relevant theory and the ability
to self-reflect and to engage with and in research; both being teacher education
and not always easily distinguishable. (See also Bolitho, 2020, who exemplifies
this distinction when he describes differences between initial certificate courses
and higher education courses.)
1.2 Who Are Language Teacher Educators?

This section starts with my first personal narrative. The aim of this one is to
introduce one kind of language teacher educator – one who is teaching without
any intention of actually being a teacher educator, but might just marginally be
so. After briefly discussing the narrative, I give further examples of more
obvious language teacher educators.
PERSONAL NARRATIVE 1: STARTING TO TEACH

My first formal teaching experience was as a graduate teaching assistant at
university. In my institution we were called tutors. At the time I was a BA
Honours student (a post-BA graduate qualification) in the linguistics
department at Rhodes University in South Africa. My degree included
papers in sociolinguistics, the history of the English language, Anglo-
Saxon literature, and methods and assessment in second language teach-
ing. At this university, students who studied English literature in their
first year were required to take modules in linguistics, and so were taught
in lectures and small group tutorials by members of the linguistics depart-
ment. My teaching job was to contribute to the tutorials. Each week I’d
facilitate about four or five groups of around fifteen students, usually
repeating the same material in all tutorials in any particular week.
8 Language Teaching
Topics ranged from introductory syntax and phonetics, to language and

society, and discourse analysis. It is probably true that many of the
students sitting in these tutorials were going to become English teachers,
although that need not have been the case – there were many other
available majors at the university that allowed a course or two of
English in their curriculums. Many of these latter students probably
ended up becoming English teachers anyway, even though that might
not have been their intention at the start of their studies. However, the
focus of the tutorials was definitely linguistics, and not teaching or
pedagogy. I conducted tutorials in this programme for one academic year.
In this narrative, I was not being a teacher educator – at least not on purpose.
I suppose one could argue that for those students who intended to become
teachers, I was serving some teacher educator role by delivering content
relevant to their future work as English teachers, what has been called discip-
linary knowledge (see Freeman, Webre, & Epperson, 2019). These early pre-
service English teachers might have been listening to me talking about linguis-
tics subject matter and even learning something about linguistics. They might
also have been making connections with their imagined future practice as
English teachers. But that would not have been because of me intentionally
functioning as a language teacher educator. My unintentional identity as
a teacher educator in that particular role, therefore, might be perceived to be
on one extreme end of a teacher educator identity continuum (perhaps even
further towards this non-teacher-educator end of the continuum would be the
situation where the English literature students in the tutorials did not intend
becoming teachers, but did anyway!), with more clear-cut definitions of lan-
guage teacher educator being positioned towards the other end; for example,
teacher educators working in institutions of higher education (in an education
department), with the specific professional job description of preparing teachers
to teach, and may themselves even be concurrently practising as language
teachers.
It would be an impossible task to attempt to classify the different types of
language teacher educators working around the world. There are just too
many variables to take into account. For example, on a macro level one would
need to consider national political systems, educational systems and related
policies, sociocultural practices, sociolinguistic landscapes and language pol-
icies, and economic conditions (Hayes, 2005; Motteram & Dawson, 2019). At
the micro level, what goes on in regions, communities, institutions, and
classrooms reflects these macro-level variables, and is typically evident in
the institutional and other professional roles language teacher educators play,
their place of work and the facilities and conditions there, and what they
actually do in their practices (Padwad & Parnham, 2019; Teemant, 2020).
Nevertheless, below I give examples of different types of language teacher
educators, based mainly on the roles they play and the work they do in their
particular contexts, in order to illustrate the scope of their work and the kinds
of professional people they are (Gee, 2000). As I’ve just said, this list is not
exhaustive, but certainly captures the core aspects of their work and identities
as language teacher educators. I believe anyone who identifies as a language
teacher educator would be able to place themselves in one (or close to one, or
more than one) of the fourteen categories. For each type I give the following
information: (a) their teacher educator role, which may be institutionally
designated; (b) place of work, or institution; (c) what professional work
they do, very much like a job description; (d) potential self-identity descrip-
tion, or how they might perceive their identities as teacher educators; and (e)
relevant references that address or directly research the particular type of
teacher educator.
1 Role: Academic leader

Where: Higher education institution, such as university or college of
education.
– Do minimal teaching.
– Perform management roles such as head of a department, dean
of a faculty, or leader of a team.
– Minimally active in research related to their academic
discipline.
These academics might identify as former teacher educators, and possibly
still do, but would not have been in a language classroom for some time. They
primarily see themselves as managers or leaders in institutions where teacher
education takes place. References: De Stefani (2019); Shah (2017).
2 Role: Academic position

Where: Higher education institution, typically a university.
– Teach content courses such as linguistics, literature, sociolin-
guistics, discourse analysis (not necessarily for teachers).
– Engage actively in research in their fields of expertise, not
related to language teaching.
These academics would not identify as teacher educators, and would not be
involved in language schools or other teacher education activities. They see
themselves as specialists in their academic subjects, and may not even be aware
10 Language Teaching
that pre- or in-service teachers are sitting in their classes. References: Billot
(2010); Smith et al. (2016).
3 Role: Academic teacher educator position

Where: Higher education institution, university, or college of
education.
– Teach courses that are relevant to pre- and in-service teachers,
such as teaching methods, second language acquisition, lan-
guage assessment.
– Engage actively in research in these same areas.
The teaching and research of these academics is closely applicable to lan-
guage teaching and teachers, and they would see themselves as teacher educa-
tors. Though some may identify more as researchers, with little contact with
teachers in schools. References: Golombek (2017); Maley (2019).
4 Role: Teacher educator position

education.
– Hired specifically as a teacher educator.
– Teach relevant teacher education courses.
– Supervise student teacher (action) research.
– Supervise students during their internship or practicum
experience.
– Do no or very little research.
These teacher educators identify strongly as teacher educators, though they

also seek professional credibility from their former (or current) language
teacher identity, which they do not want to give up, thus creating identity
conflicts. They may feel marginalized if their institutions do not recognize or
legitimize their institutional status. References: Al-Issa (2017); Kani (2014).
5 Role: Academic and supervisor of student research

– May do some teaching in areas relevant to the teacher educa-
tion programme, but minimal.
– Main academic activity is supervising graduate student
research (Master’s and particularly doctoral).
– Supervise limited if any undergraduate research.
– Highly active researchers in area of expertise.
These teacher educators work with experienced teachers who are seeking
further qualifications. They do not see themselves as classroom-focussed in
their work, but identify as skilled academic researchers and supervisors of high-
level academic research. References: Bégin and Gérard (2013); Halse (2011).
6 Role: Teacher trainer

Where: College of education or private teacher training institution (or
school-based).
– Work directly face-to-face or online with pre-service teachers
participating in their initial teacher training.
– Teach content that is close to classroom practice.
– Tend to focus on own development of teaching methodology
and skills.
– Observe and assess teaching practice and micro-teaching.
Trainers identify with and as practitioners. They see themselves as situated in
the language classroom and knowledgeable about what to do there. They may
attend workshops and teaching-focussed conferences, and may engage in self-
reflection, but otherwise do not typically identify as formal researchers or
academic scholars. References: Motteram and Dawson (2019); Wright and
Bolitho (2007).
7 Role: Mentor of teacher research

education.
– Work closely with teacher-researchers in schools, usually one-
on-one or in small groups.
– Develop teacher-researchers’ research skills.
– Provide emotional and professional support.

– Teach relevant courses in addition to mentoring, and carry out
own (practitioner) research.
Mentors identify as caring collaborators working closely with teacher-

researchers. They strive to maintain equal power relationships and desire attri-
butes such as guide, helper, supporter, and collaborator. In their institutions they
are also active teachers, and may carry out research, which would be directly
related to teacher education and might not always be appreciated as ‘academic
enough’ by the institution. References: Békés (2020); Smith (2020).
8 Role: Mentor for teachers on internship or practicum

education.
– Develop teachers’ practical classroom skills.
– Observe and assess teaching practice.
– Manage the programme collaboration between school and

higher education institution.
– Liaise with school’s co-operating teacher (see point 11).
own research.
Mentors of teachers on internships or practicums probably have other teacher
educator roles, such as teacher, potentially a researcher, and administrative co-
ordinator of the internship or practicum programme, thus negotiating multiple
identities. However, some might be hired in institutions mainly or exclusively
as a practicum mentor, and they would more strongly identify with this role.
References: Nguyen (2017); Yazan (2018).
9 Role: Mentor for in-service teachers in schools

education.
– Work on collaborative research project, teaching, or curricu-
lum innovation, or policy implementation.
– Manage the collaboration between school and higher education
institution.
– Liaise and organize regular meetings with school-based team
members for duration of project.
own research.
Mentors of in-service language teachers in schools working on specific
projects identify as facilitators or consultants with the relevant knowledge and

experience. The members of the ‘team’ bring different skills and personal
qualities to the project. The mentors also have teacher educator and researcher
roles in their institutions. References: Brancard and QuinnWilliams (2012);
Clarke (2019).
10 Role: School-based teacher educator

Where: Based in the institution that teaches language – a school.
– Released from regular teaching duties (to some extent) to
mentor student teachers (interns).
– Observe teaching and provide feedback.
– Provide emotional support.
– Function as model teacher.
– Induct student teacher into institutional and professional life.
Mentors potentially identify as ‘parent’ or ‘guardian’, and also as role model.

They are seen by the institution and self-identify as expert teachers, with more
experience and the ability to establish and sustain collegial collaborations on
multiple levels, including personal and institutional. References: Bullough
(2005); Grassick (2019).
11 Role: Co-operating teacher

Where: Based in the institution that teaches language – a school.
– Host student teacher in their classroom and school while
continuing regular teaching duties.
– Are observed teaching by student teacher.
– Observe student teacher and provide critical feedback, as well
as encouragement and support.
– Liaise with teacher educator from student teacher’s
institution.
Co-operating teachers are based in schools or language-learning institutions
and continue regular teaching, and so identify primarily as teacher practitioners.
They see themselves as critical supporters of student teachers with appropriate
levels of expertise, responsibility, and institutional knowledge. References:
Farrell (2008); Yan and He (2010).
12 Role: Graduate teaching assistant

– Assist university academics teaching a class (or, more rarely,
solely responsible for own class), which will be more or less
language education focussed.

– Plan course content, though usually to a limited extent.
– Assess student teacher work.
– Do associated administrative tasks.
Teaching assistants are graduate students and this is their primary identity at
the time. They have no or little language teaching experience, though some may
be considerably experienced, especially if studying for a doctoral-level qualifi-
cation. Teaching assistants may experience tensions among their multiple
identities, with internal and external power struggles, including those involving
their student teachers and their professors. References: Wang and Mantero
(2018); Yazan (2019).
13 Role: Teacher educator and language teacher

Where: Higher education institution, university, or college of educa-
tion – and language school.
– Perform teacher educator functions at higher education

institution.
– Concurrently, teach language in the same institution or in
a different language school.
These professionals have two main roles at the same time, language teacher
educator and language teacher, and may even be employed in two different
institutions. Their identities would reflect this complex mix of roles, duties, and
loyalties, and may create quite stressful identity dilemmas for them. References:
Vaillant (2011).
14 Role: Teacher of English or of English for specific or academic

purposes
education.
– Teach general English classes for students at the institution,
some of whom may become language teachers.
– Teach English for Specific or Academic Purposes to students
at the institution, some of whom may become language
teachers.
– Perform some or all tasks associated with full- or part-time
language teaching, such as course design, lesson planning,
material writing, and assessment.
These practitioners identify as language teachers, either of general English or
English for specific or academic purposes, within their higher educational
institutions. Some may engage in practitioner research, or collaborate with

academic researchers, but they would not claim a researcher identity (and
would typically not be paid to do research). References: Nagatomo (2012);
Van Lankveld et al. (2017).
1.3 Definitions of Language Teacher Educators

The section above exemplifies the scope of professionals who identify as or who
might be recognized as language teacher educators. As I have cautioned, the
fourteen categories are only a partial representation of types of language teacher
educator, since many contextual factors inevitably mean that considerable
variation exists. Broadly speaking, however, they do have significant character-
istics in common. For the purposes of their study, Goodwin et al. (2014) define
teacher educators as ‘university-based, doctoral prepared faculty who engage
in teacher educating – that is, the preparation of preservice or future teachers’
(p. 300). This is also the case with most of the language teacher educator types
outlined above, but Goodwin et al. do go on, at least from the perspective of the
United States, to acknowledge that:
many field- and school-based educators also participate in teacher education

(such as cooperating teachers and field supervisors), and that in recent years,
there has been an exponential rise in school-based or other alternate teacher
preparation programs resulting in a concomitant increase in individuals who
hold the title ‘teacher educator’. However, the majority of new teachers are
still prepared by university-based programs, and tenure-line faculty holding
doctorates remain the primary architects of these state-approved programs
that lead to initial certification. (p. 300)
This extension captures some of the other types of teacher educators in the fourteen
categories, but not all, and, as I’ve said, there are no doubt other types as well.
The following selection of definitions of ‘teacher educator’ taken from the
literature on both language and general education illustrate some of the broad
commonalities across all the educator types.
1 Amott and Ang (2020) define a teacher educator as ‘any education profes-
sional working to support the professional learning of teachers, whether they
be student teachers, newly qualified teachers, or experienced teachers’ (p. 1).
In this definition, teachers with all levels of teaching experience are included,
and educators are designated as supporters of the teachers’ learning, which
the authors refer to as ‘professional’ learning.
2 Lunenberg, Dengerink, and Korthagen (2014) also refer to ‘supporting’
when they describe what teacher educators do, and they define them as ‘all
those who teach or coach (student) teachers with the aim of supporting their
professional development’ (p. 6). They speak of professional ‘development’
rather than professional learning, and use the concept ‘coach’, which has
connotations of training, as opposed to education (see my definitions of these
concepts in Section 1.1 above).
3 With specific reference to language teacher educators, Moradkhani et al.
(2013) define teacher educators as ‘those professionals who provide formal
instruction and support for both teacher candidates and practising teachers
during pre-service and/or in-service teacher education/training programs’ (p.
124). Once again the role of support is mentioned in this definition, alongside
‘formal instruction’, which emphasizes the systematic nature of the teacher
education process. They also include pre- and in-service teachers, and cover
both education and training situations.
4 Peercy and Sharkey (2020) assign three identities to their definition of lan-
guage teacher educator, ‘as scholar, as practitioner, as researcher’ (p. 106).
These will be explored in more detail later, but briefly and simply: scholar is
the academic identity that engages in the pursuit of knowledge relevant to
language teaching and learning; practitioner relates to language teaching
pedagogy and know-how, with regard to both (student) teachers and the
teacher educators themselves; and researcher identifies the teacher educator
as being active in research, to actively pursue current and relevant knowledge.
5 Finally, Yazan (2018) also includes the researcher component of the teacher
educators’ role and identity, and adds that this aspect of their work is
typically an institutional requirement: ‘Teacher educators also identify them-
selves as academics or researchers in most cases, because research product-
ivity is typically a key component in their professional responsibilities
framed by institutional norms’ (p. 144).
These broad definitions provide a backdrop to the language teacher educator

reflections in the next section. In the reflections, the educators talk about how
they perceive their teacher educator identities. Finer details of what it means to
be a language teacher educator very quickly emerge.
2 Teacher Educators Reflecting on Their Identity

In this section, I draw on data from a study that explored the identity experiences
of a group of seven teacher educators, four males and three females, enrolled in
a doctoral programme at a public university in Colombia, South America. The
teacher educators formed a cohort of students, meaning that they start the
programme together, work their way through the required coursework, and
participate in an overseas internship together before embarking on their disser-
tation research independently. The aim of the study was to explore the construc-
tion of their teacher educator identities within the institutional structures of the
doctoral programme, as well as more broadly over their professional experience
within the context of the education system in Colombia. I introduce the study in
this section since I will be discussing it further in Section 4 below. I then give
examples of statements the educators make about the kind of language teacher
educator they are – reflecting their identity, and at the same time illustrating
aspects of the definitions of teacher educator identity discussed above. After
discussing the educators’ reflections, main themes related to identity are
extracted and discussed. But before continuing, I present a second personal
narrative.
PERSONAL NARRATIVE 2: STUDYING ABROAD

Immediately after tutoring linguistics for a year during my postgraduate
honours qualification I secured a junior lecturer position in the same
department at Rhodes University. This involved conducting the same

tutorials, but now included teaching a number of undergraduate courses
in linguistics subjects, such as phonetics and phonology, and sociolinguis-
tics. I continued this work for three semesters when I was fortunate enough
to be awarded a scholarship to study for an MA in applied linguistics at
Essex University in the UK. I discovered when I arrived at the university
that second language teaching experience was required for entry to the
programme, and, of course, I had none; having taught only linguistics to
English ‘first language’ speakers at university level. I was by far the least
experienced teacher in the rather large MA class, and I felt like a fraud!
After completing the MA, I returned to South Africa with plans to become
a high school teacher, and so enrolled in an accreditation-gaining higher
education diploma, once again at Rhodes University. This one-year quali-
fication got me thinking much more about teaching, and education more
generally, and included two six-week stints teaching in high schools on
a practicum experience. I also got my old job back as a part-time graduate
tutor in the linguistics department for the year. However, after completing
the diploma, in the mid-1980s, I felt uneasy about teaching in apartheid
schools, and decided to pursue further study abroad. This time I was
fortunate to receive a Fulbright Scholarship to study at Teachers
College, Colombia University, towards my doctorate in TESOL.
I arrived at the university to begin my studies, still without having taught
an ESL or EFL class before! Within a few months I had a teaching job at
a community college in New York City, where I taught a few hours a week
for the next three years. At last, I started to feel like an English teacher.
And at the same time, at Teachers College, I got a position as an adjunct
instructor, which involved placing and then observing student teachers in
city elementary and high schools. The observations were followed by one-
on-one conversations about their teaching and we also held productive
weekly seminars where we all got to share our experiences. So, in a small
way, that was my entry into teacher education.
This narrative illustrates a somewhat tentative start towards becoming

a language teacher educator. But it is probably true that for most teacher
educators this journey is seldom smooth or predictable. Everyone’s story is
different. In my case, I was studying at the doctoral level, in TESOL, without
having taught ESL before – although I did have classroom experience as
a university graduate tutor and lecturer of linguistics. By the end of the doctorate
I still had not taught English as a full-time teacher – although I had three years’
experience working at a community college teaching English to adult immi-

grants for a few hours a week (incidentally, I also taught writing to ESL students
hoping to gain entry to mainstream classes at the college). I observed student
teachers on their practicum and commented on their teaching with very little
experience myself, so could hardly call myself a teacher educator – although our
approach was not to evaluate the teaching, but rather to describe and reflect on
what happened and to consider and try out alternative practices (see Fanselow &
Hiratsuka, 2019). My narrative signals my early developing identity as
a language teacher educator. In particular, it shows the transition from teacher
to teacher educator (see Williams, Ritter, & Bullock, 2012), albeit very hesi-
tantly, since both identities had barely taken shape themselves. And because the
narrative indicates my feelings of guilt, uncertainty, uneasiness, legitimacy, and
accomplishment, it reveals the close interrelationship between identity and
emotion (Gkonou & Miller, 2020). These and other dimensions of language
teacher educator identity are explored in more detail in the reflections that
follow.
2.1 Background to the Study

The doctoral programme in which the Colombian teacher educators are enrolled
is an inter-institutional programme with a specialization in English language
teaching education. The teacher educators are all very experienced English
teachers, in schools or universities, and some have taught Spanish as well.
A few have worked abroad for short periods of time, and all identify to varying
degrees as teacher educators. What this means is that they have taught ‘content’
courses (e.g., linguistics, pedagogy, and sociolinguistics) to university students

who intend to become English teachers, typically in pre-service teacher educa-
tion programmes. They have also mentored student teachers during their prac-
ticum experiences and action research projects. Most have held some
administrative or leadership positions in their institutions, such as course
convener, programme coordinator, or head of department. At the time of the
study, the teacher educators had varying levels of research experience, mainly
classroom-based action research and projects attached to their previous qualifi-
cations, and some had carried out independent studies that were published in
local journals. More recently, some have published conceptual pieces or
research-based articles based on their doctoral work. Even so, all would prob-
ably described themselves as early career researchers (Murray & Male, 2005).
I had met some of the teachers before the study started through my
participation in an annual conference in Colombia. At the same conferences
I met and developed professional relationships with faculty at the university
where the doctoral programme was located. So I was reasonably familiar with
the regional, educational, and political context in which the study was carried
out (Gómez-Vásquez & Guerrero Nieto, 2018; Pereira, Lopes, & Marta,
2015). The design of the study consisted of two narrative interviews with
each participant four months apart. During narrative interviews (Chase, 2003)
participants are invited to ‘tell me about’ (p. 88) their lived and imagined
experiences, rather than being asked (only) direct questions, the aim being to
elicit reflective stories co-constructed by both the narrator and the inter-
viewer. Stories, as Kramp (2004) says, ‘assist humans to make life experi-
ences meaningful. Stories preserve our memories, prompt our reflections,
connect us to our past and present, and assist us to envision our future’
(p. 107), and are thus an ideal means for investigating the teacher educators’
histories, desires, and ambitions.
The first interview was conducted at the end of the teacher educators’
first year of study, and lasted about one hour. Topics covered included their
personal biography, language learning and teaching history, work as a teacher
educator, reasons for doctoral study, doctoral journey so far, and professional
goals for the future. The second interview was slightly shorter and addressed
a number of common themes that I had discovered after analyzing the first set of
interviews. In what follows, the teacher educators reflect on their identities as
language teacher educators in response to a direct question towards the end of
the first interview that requested them to do so. I briefly discuss their responses
to illustrate some of the features of the published definitions of teacher educator
given above, the purpose being to ‘bring them to life’ with real personal
experiences, and also to unpack them in finer detail, particularly as they pertain
to language teacher educators. Before each interview excerpt I provide a short

biography to introduce the teacher educator.
2.1.1 Ana
Ana grew up in a large city and struggled to learn English when at school. She
decided nevertheless to ‘study English teaching’ at university and struggled
there too. However, after extra lessons and with determined effort she began to
make progress, to the extent that she started teaching English at an institute in
the city while still an undergraduate. After graduation she worked in an elem-
entary school, then decided to teach Spanish in Asia for a few months before
returning to Colombia to complete a Master’s degree while continuing to teach
in numerous institutions. She got involved in teacher education during this time,
supervising student teachers’ action research projects. Ana desires a full-time
position as a teacher educator at a university, but a lack of research experience
(and publications) is preventing her from achieving this professional goal.

Reflecting on her identity as a teacher educator she says:
1 it’s so confusing
2 it’s so confusing for different reasons
3 I want to see myself contributing to language teacher education from
a decolonial perspective
4 meaning having a knowledge of our own
5 preparing our own materials
6 experiencing experiencing language teaching from our sense
7 I don’t know if I will be able to do it
8 because this doesn’t only depend on me
9 in the sense that I can contribute to teachers’ education working at
universities
10 but that depends if I will be accepted
11 if there is a position for me at local universities
12 because we also depend on economics
13 I came to the realization that because of studying this PhD
14 it doesn’t mean that I’m going to be better received
15 because sometimes we think that
16 because of being educated
17 then that’s going to grant us something
18 and that’s not always the case because of economic reasons
19 I would like it to be like that
20 I would like to work preparing teachers to become teachers
21 and becoming a solid teacher educator right

22 yeah a teacher educator that has a discourse of her own.
Four aspects of Ana’s teacher educator identity emerge from this reflection.
The first (lines 1–2) is its complexity. She acknowledges that there is no straight
answer when asked about her teacher educator identity; instead, being a teacher
educator is ‘confusing for different reasons’. Part of the confusion relates to two
other identity aspects. Both are desires she has for the future. The first is her
developing commitment to ‘language teacher education from a decolonial
perspective’ (line 3), where her student teachers will have a ‘knowledge of
our own’ (line 4) and prepare ‘our own materials’ (line 5). To achieve this, she
faces a dilemma, however, and that is finding ‘a position for me at local
universities’ (line 11). Here, as she articulates elsewhere in the interview, she
is referring to a full-time academic position as a teacher educator with research
responsibilities. She believes that occupying such an institutional position will
enable her to become ‘a solid teacher educator’ (line 21), perhaps reflecting her
image of an ‘ideal’ teacher educator, where she could practice ‘a discourse of

her own’ (line 22), that is, enact a decolonial teacher education pedagogy
(Domínguez, 2019). The problem is, however, for ‘economic reasons’ (lines
12 and 18) such a position might not become available. Even if it did, and even
armed with her PhD, Ana commented that ‘it doesn’t mean that I’m going to be
better received’ (line 14). The fourth aspect of her teacher educator identity,
then, interconnects with the macro context – this time economic – current in
Colombia at the time.
Identity keywords: complexity of teacher education; decolonial pedagogy;

university teacher educator; macro (economic) context.
2.1.2 Juan
Juan started learning English when he was ten years old. He attended a public
school in a large city and, after a false start studying towards a science-oriented
degree at university, he switched to English so as to become an English teacher.
He majored in English and Spanish, and after completing his BA and Master’s
degrees he became a Spanish teacher for a year or so at a high school. Because
of his advanced English proficiency he was asked to teach English. He then
moved to a teaching position at university where he also became involved in
English teacher education. Juan has been teaching for about fifteen years.
1 I am a person who is interested in the students

2 I want them to learn what is the implication of being a teacher
3 it doesn’t matter the subject that I am teaching
4 but I really want them to learn what is the implication
5 what implies
6 because I think or I feel that our students nowadays
7 here in Colombia
8 they are starting doing the majors just without understanding what they are
studying
9 and it really concerns
10 it is a really okay
11 it really worries me
12 because they are going to be teachers
13 and they are going to replicate those feelings in other people
14 so one of the things that I want to do
15 is that they understand what is to be a teacher
16 what they have to do
17 what they have to be as teachers
18 and other thing that can describe myself as a teacher is that
19 although I feel I could sometimes show myself as a severe teacher

20 very strict
21 but I’m not that way
22 and they feel sometimes that I am very demanding with them
23 but I am demanding
24 but I really care about them
25 if they have problems
26 if they have something
27 I really care
28 I understand and I listen to them right
Juan reveals two major dimensions of his teacher educator identity in his
narrative. The first is his attitude towards his student teachers – undergraduate
pre-service teachers of English in Colombia. He starts in line 1 by saying that he
is ‘interested in the students’, and later repeats ‘I really care about them’ (lines
24 and 27). He adds, ‘I understand and I listen to them’ (line 28). These
comments show Juan to be a teacher educator deeply committed to the welfare
and advancement of his students (Kubanyiova, 2020). He may project an
identity as ‘a severe teacher’ (line 19) who is ‘very strict’ (line 20) and ‘very
demanding’ (line 22), but this is probably because he cares so much. And also
because ‘it really concerns’ (line 9) and ‘really worries’ (line 11) him that his
students are preparing to become teachers ‘without understanding what they are
studying’ (line 8). In other words, he believes they do not know what it means
‘to be a teacher’ (line 15), or probably how to be an English teacher, and so they
will be jeopardizing (‘replicating’, line 13) the learning of their future English
students. His aim, instead, even if it means being somewhat ‘demanding’, is to

get his student teachers to ‘learn what is the implication of being a teacher’
(line 2) – what they need to know and do in their future lives as practising
teachers in Colombia.
Identity keywords: meaning of being a teacher; projected identity; caring

teacher–teacher educator relationship; demanding work ethic.
2.1.3 Eduardo
Eduardo majored in a non-education field and worked in business for eight years
where he acquired an interest in English because of the international work he was
doing. He decided to take English classes at an institution in the large city where
he lives. He then made a life-changing decision to return to university to complete
another undergraduate degree majoring in English. He went on to do his Master’s
and has been an English teacher and teacher educator for twenty years.
1 I am a teacher educator who wants to share with the students

2 not for showing off
3 but for teaching actually teaching is that right
4 teaching is not have that specific perspective that teachers are over students
5 and students they have to look up to the teacher
6 just because he is always higher
7 no it’s because
8 and I don’t want my students to admire me actually
9 I just want them to see that I have a role
10 that I really have
11 I don’t know if that is the correct word
12 I have influence in the way they see their profession
13 is more than that
14 I am also a person who is really demanding
15 and my students know about that
16 because they usually say that to me
17 they say ‘teacher you’re very kind
18 you’re really friendly but you are really demanding’
19 possibly that’s the way I have learned to do the things
20 and to me that is the way to get the things
21 and I just want to like pass that specific perspective on to my students
22 that they also see that hard work themselves
Eduardo shares some identity features with Juan. For example, he says that
his student teachers perceive him to be ‘really demanding’ (lines 14 and 18),
even though they refer to him as ‘very kind’ (line 17) and ‘really friendly’ (line
18). What Eduardo means is that he requires a strong work ethic from his
student teachers. Working hard is the way he himself ‘has learned to do the
things’ (line 19), ‘to get the things’ (line 20), and he wants to ‘pass that specific
perspective on to my students’ (line 21). Eduardo desires to project a role model
identity as a teacher educator (Lunenberg, Korthagen, & Swennen, 2007), not
that he wants his students ‘to admire me actually’ (line 8) or to ‘look up to’
(line 5) him in a more powerful, ‘higher’ position. Instead, he wishes to ‘share
with the students’ (line 1) the meaning of hard work and to ‘influence in the way
they see their profession’ (line 12). Like Juan, he wants his student teachers to
understand what it is they are getting themselves into by becoming English
teachers, and to make the most from their teacher preparation experience
through hard work and awareness.
Identity keywords: teacher educator as role model; demanding work ethic;

projected identity; meaning of being a teacher.
2.1.4 Alex
Alex lives and works in a large Colombian city. He went to school there, and
only started learning English ‘seriously’ when he went to university. He hadn’t
planned on becoming an English teacher, but dreamed of travelling and living in
the United States. After graduation he taught English at a private English
institute that catered for a wide variety of English learners. He completed his
Master’s five years later and progressively became involved in working with
future teachers of English at the institute, and then at university. He describes
himself as a language teacher educator as follows:
1 very dynamic very dynamic

2 resourceful
3 I would say that I have reached the level of teaching with example
4 why
5 specially at the Master’s programme
6 with the different English teachers that I have worked with
7 is not only theory
8 all that they read for the module is applied by the teacher
9 by the person who is in front
10 I consider that the language teacher educator I am today
11 although I have some fails
12 I need to continue improving
13 I consider that first of all
14 I don’t focus on the theory
15 I focus on the reflection about the theory
16 and the application of the theory in the teaching of my students

17 as a researcher that is something in which I admit I don’t have much
experience
18 as a researcher
19 although I have oriented different research projects at the Master’s pro-
grammes and the BA programmes
20 I consider that I need to improve a lot
21 I feel I think I am a better language teacher educator than a researcher
Alex describes his teacher educator self as ‘very dynamic’ (line 1) and having
‘reached the level of teaching with example’ (line 3), meaning, like Eduardo, that
he is role model to the English teachers in the Master’s programme in which he
works. Despite this level of perceived self-efficacy, Alex concedes that he has
‘some fails’ (line 11) and needs ‘to improve a lot’ (line 20). This need for further
development is a common characteristic of teacher educators (Malm, 2020), and
in Alex’s case stems from a desire ‘to continue improving’ (line 12) and to foster
meaningful learning in his student teachers, as we also saw with Juan. Alex
believes his strength lies in his pedagogy, which ‘is not only theory’ (line 7) but
emphasizes ‘reflection about the theory’ (line 15), and particularly ‘the application
of the theory in the teaching of my students’ (line 16). His pedagogical approach
makes connections between theory and practice and thus strives to be applicable
to ‘the person who is in front’ (line 9). One domain in which Alex does not have
much experience is ‘as a researcher’ (line 18), even though he has supervised
(‘oriented’, line 19) ‘research projects at the Master’s programmes and BA
programmes’ (line 19). Again, he concedes that this is an area in which he
needs to improve (line 20), and ends his reflection by saying that he feels he is
a ‘better language teacher educator than a researcher’ (line 21), distinguishing
a researcher identity from a superordinate teacher educator identity, to which he
appears to give a pedagogical focus.
Identity keywords: teacher educator as role model; continuing professional

development; application of theory; mentor of student teacher research; teacher
educator as researcher.
2.1.5 Diego
Diego has been teaching for close to fifteen years. He was a product of the public
school system in a large Colombian city, so when he started university to major
in English and Spanish he ‘actually didn’t speak much [English], I didn’t speak
at all, probably’. Nevertheless, he started teaching English at a private institute
before graduating, and then post-graduation he taught at a number of univer-

sities before embarking on a Master’s in applied linguistics three years later.
When he finished, he secured his current position at a university where the main
focus is the preparation of future English language teachers.
1 I think I am a politically biased language educator

2 I think I am conscious of a political role
3 and I usually put it on the table
4 like I try to
5 I don’t know to what extent students are expecting
6 but I try to make sure that every linguistic topic and every topic of a unit
7 which we’re covering in a course
8 has space for reflection about society
9 has space for reflection about what is beyond the individual game
10 like meaningfully
11 definitely these students that we’re working with will have
12 will be privileged because they will be needed

13 the prestige that the university already has
14 they will get a job definitely
15 many of our students
16 even before graduating
17 are already working as junior teachers
18 or teachers for children within the [name of] centre
19 so then what I’m having them do
20 is like offering them situations or contexts for reflection
21 about to what extent their profession is not going to be about their individual
game
22 about you know like is going to be profitable for them
23 but what is going to happen with society
24 and like the role that they also have in probably recognizing what biases
a society has
When articulating his teacher educator identity in his reflection, Diego

reveals an emotionally reinforced social justice orientation (Boylan &
Woolsey, 2015). He makes it clear that he approaches his work as ‘a politically
biased language educator’ (line 1) and that he is ‘conscious of a political role’
(line 2) in what he does. He strives to ensure that this aspect of his identity-in-
practice is visible to his students, to ‘put it on the table’ (line 3). In his pedagogy
he gets his student teachers to shift their attention ‘beyond the individual game’
(line 9) by making ‘space for reflection about society’ (line 8). Diego teaches at
an institution with ‘prestige’ (line 13), which means graduating teachers ‘will be
privileged’ (line 12) and ‘will get a job definitely’ (line 14), and therefore life ‘is
going to be profitable for them’ (line 22). He feels, therefore, that they need not
be concerned about their own personal circumstances or about securing
employment; in fact, some ‘are already working as junior teachers’ (line 17).
Instead, Diego offers them ‘situations or contexts for reflection’ (line 20; see
Johnson and Golombek (2020), who propose that language teacher education
pedagogy be ‘located’ in sociocultural contexts, which will be discussed later in
Section 3). In all aspects of the course, in ‘every linguistic topic and every topic
of a unit’ (line 6), Diego encourages his students to reflect about society, and
‘what is going to happen with society’ (line 23). Perhaps most important for him
as a teacher educator is for his students to consider ‘the role that they also have
in probably recognizing what biases a society has’ (line 24). He is thus not only
providing opportunities for his students to think about society beyond their
immediate personal concerns, but to understand and question the ideologies
they find there.
Identity keywords: social justice pedagogical orientation; political identity;

macro sociocultural context.
2.1.6 Jenny
Jenny has been teaching English for about twenty-five years. She went to
university with the intention of becoming an English teacher, and after com-
pleting her degree acquired her first job teaching English for specific purposes at
a university. She has also taught at elementary school level, and has spent time
abroad – several months in the United Kingdom as a Spanish teacher. After
obtaining her Master’s in applied linguistics fifteen years ago, she worked full-
time at a university training pre-service English teachers.
1 well I am very committed with my job

2 I always think that we have to be a model for the students
3 what do I mean by model
4 that we have to be punctual
5 I have to show them that I prepared my classes right
6 I have to show them that I care for the students
7 because if I want them to be like that
8 if I want the students to be context sensitive I have to do the same right
9 so I think I should be a model for them
10 and at the same time I have to be able
11 not only to teach them a lot of methodology or theories
12 but to be aware of what they really are going to deal with
13 and that is something that has been challenging

14 because the students come with these questions every day
15 ‘what can I do with this’
16 some of the students
17 ‘what can I do with these situations’
18 and it makes me feel that as a language teacher educator I have to be updated
19 because probably when I was teaching
20 when I was a language teacher when I was working with these kids
21 when I was working at this institute I told you about
22 the situations I faced are very different from the situations my students are
facing at the moment
23 so it means that I have to be updated
24 sometimes I feel that what I teach them
25 or tell them from my experience
26 is not useful for them
27 because the context that they’re facing now is very different from the one
that I faced
28 so I think we as language teacher educators have to be updated
29 and we have to be models
To demonstrate that she is ‘very committed with my job’ (line 1), Jenny desires
to be a role model for her student teachers (line 2). She does this in practical ways,
such as being punctual (line 4) and being prepared for her classes (line 5). But she
also wants her students ‘to be context sensitive’ (line 8), and so as a role model
believes that ‘I have to do the same’ (line 8). First, by context sensitive, and like
Diego, she aims to make her student teachers ‘aware of what they really are going
to deal with’ (line 12); that is, how they will operate as teachers in their future
sociocultural contexts. Even now, the students come to her with specific ques-
tions, such as ‘what can I do with these situations’ (line 17). Second, in order to
achieve this aim, Jenny needs to be current herself (see Hacker, 2008; Loughran,
2014) about these contextual conditions (‘I have to be updated’, line 18). She
repeats this belief in line 23, ‘it means that I have to be updated’, explaining that
when she worked in her previous job ‘at this institute’ (line 21), the ‘situations
I faced’ as an English teacher ‘are very different from the situations’ (line 22) her
students will face when they become English teachers. When she draws on her
early experiences to teach her current students, she feels that it is potentially ‘not
useful for them’ (line 26). This reinforces her belief that ‘we as language teacher
educators have to be updated’ (line 28).
Identity keywords: teacher educator as role model; continuing professional

development; being current; meaning of being a teacher; sociocultural context.
2.1.7 Yvonne
Yvonne grew up in a small city and learned English in the public school system.
She went on to major in English at university and, after graduating, started
teaching English at a private school, then later English for specific purposes at
university. While continuing to teach English she started to teach a ‘course on
didactics’ and later became more fully involved in formal teacher education,
including mentoring student teachers during their practicum. She obtained her
Master’s degree and now works full time at a university in a large city.
Altogether Yvonne has been teaching for over twenty years.
1 as a dynamic teacher educator working with student teachers

2 pushing them
3 and achieving their personal and academic goals
4 I love dialoguing with them
5 so I think that is what I mean

6 what I have been doing but also what I would like to do
7 to keep working on my areas of interest
8 so when I work with my student teachers now
9 I try to interconnect at all times those agendas
10 and how to balance our practices
11 so I think that being a researcher is a wonderful way to learn more about my
profession
12 to learn more about me
13 and to learn more about what I’m able to do as a teacher educator
14 so it is like a journey a path
15 and making connections with other teachers interested in the same area I am
working on
16 in Latin America I think that we have a tendency to believe that
Eurocentric thought is the only one we should consider
17 but I know that there are other wonderful experiences in Latin America
18 and I think it would be quite interesting for me to be in contact with them
19 to share what we’re doing here
20 to give me the possibility to learn more about how they do it there
21 what decisions to make
Yvonne describes herself as a ‘dynamic teacher educator’ (line 1), meaning

that when ‘working with student teachers’ (line 1) she actively gets involved
‘dialoguing with them’ (line 4) and ‘pushing them’ (line 2) to achieve their
goals (line 3). As a teacher educator she has her student teachers’ best interests
at heart. Talking and listening to them is her pedagogical approach, something

she ‘loves’ to do (line 4) and something she would like to continue doing
(line 6) in the future. Having a dynamic teacher educator identity also means
that Yvonne is willing and open to change, in her words ‘to learn more’ (line
11). This is a phrase she repeats three more times in her reflection (lines 12, 13,
and 20). The first time, she references ‘being a researcher’ (line 11) and how
doing so will enable her to ‘learn more about my profession’ (line 11).
A researcher identity, as we saw with Alex, is considered to be an important
facet of a language teacher educator identity, and Yvonne recognizes this. She
also knows that by engaging in research she will ‘learn more about me’ (line
12) and ‘what I’m able to do as a teacher educator’ (line 13). Here she turns the
focus onto her own development and her professional learning about teacher
education. Her third mention of learning more (line 20) relates to her ‘making
connections’ (line 15) with other teacher educators in Latin America who are
‘interested in the same areas I am working on’ (line 15). Yvonne thus desires to
become part of a community of teacher educator scholars (Hökkä,

Vähäsantanen, & Mahlakaarto, 2017) who, as Ana articulated in her reflection
above, feel that a decolonial pedagogy and research focus would push them to
question their ‘tendency to believe that Eurocentric thought is the only one we
should consider’ (line 16). In this community, they could share ideas (line 19)
about what they are doing, thus informing their practice (‘what decisions to
make’, line 21).
Identity keywords: dynamic teacher educator; continuing professional develop-

ment; macro sociocultural context; decolonial pedagogy; teacher educator as
researcher; being part of a community.
2.2 Key Identity Themes in the Teacher Educator Reflections

The five published definitions of teacher educator discussed in Section 1.3
raised a number of broad ideas about who teacher educators are and what they
do. Briefly, they can be summarized as follows:
1 Teacher educators work to support the professional learning of teachers.

2 Support could be in the form of coaching, training, mentoring, or formal
academic instruction.
3 The teachers could be at various stages of their careers, from pre-service, to
novice and early career, to in-service.
4 Teacher educators are teachers and scholars, and are typically active in
research.
5 Teacher educators’ practices usually occur within or are affiliated to institu-
tional contexts.
The teacher educators’ reflections in Section 2.1 reveal much more detail
about these broad ideas – unpacking them to uncover finer meanings, and to
understand their substance in real-life experience. It is also important to remem-
ber that the seven teacher educators are working in a context where they have
been or still are English teachers, and where their student teachers are or will be
teachers of English. So what we are hearing about are the reflections of
language teacher educators. The finer details or key identity themes based on
the reflections of the teacher educators are summarized in Table 1.
Although not a strict thematic analysis, I would propose that five main
identity-related categories result from further examination of the key themes
presented in Table 1; that is, by looking for similarities and patterns of associ-
ation among them. I conclude this section with a brief description of the
categories, which will be re-organized and refined by the end of the next section
(Section 3).
Table 1 Key identity themes from teacher educators’ reflections.
Teacher
Key Identity Theme Educator Identity Descriptions
Complexity of teacher Ana The complex nature of language teacher
education education, in which teacher educators
experience their professional lives
and construct their identities.
Decolonial pedagogy Ana An approach to pedagogy in language
Yvonne teacher education that rejects
Eurocentric or Anglo-Western
theories, methods, and materials in
(English) language teaching and
research; reflected in the identity of
teacher educators who take this stance.
University teacher Ana A teacher educator who holds a full-time
educator position in a university, usually with
research responsibilities (see teacher
educator Types 3 and 4 in Section 1.2).
Macro (economic or Ana The broader historical, sociocultural,
sociocultural) Diego economic, political, and institutional
context Jenny contexts with which the processes of
Yvonne language teacher education
interconnect, and in which teacher
educators negotiate and construct their
identities.
Meaning of being Juan The ongoing understanding that

a teacher Eduardo language teachers have of being or
Jenny becoming a language teacher; teacher
educators fostering this understanding
as part of their identity-in-practice.
Projected identity Juan The identities teacher educators project to
Eduardo their student teachers and colleagues as
they go about their teacher education
work; the public representation of their
outer teacher educator self.
Caring teacher– Juan As integral to their practice and identity,
teacher educator teacher educators caring for their
relationship student teachers, promoting their
well-being, and encouraging their
personal, academic, and professional
advancement.
Table 1 (cont.)
Teacher
Demanding work ethic Juan Through modelling or training,

Eduardo informing student teachers about the
Yvonne meaning and benefits of hard work;
teaching them to practise this work
ethic in their future teacher lives.
Teacher educator as Eduardo Teacher educators being a role model
role model Alex for student teachers in terms of
Jenny pedagogy and professional conduct.
Continuing Alex A commitment to continue learning as
professional Jenny a teacher educator, to improve, to
development Yvonne grow, and develop personally and
professionally.
Application of theory Alex In teacher education pedagogy to focus
not only on teaching theory but on
how to apply theory in practice in the
process of teaching; to apply theory in
the classroom.
Mentor of student Alex Mentoring or supervising student
teacher research teachers who undertake research
projects as part of their formal
studies; teacher educators identifying
as a mentor of research.
Teacher educator as Alex Engagement with and in research for

researcher Yvonne professional development, as an
academic scholar or because of
institutional requirements;
identifying more or less as
a researcher.
Social justice Diego Displaying and practising a moral and
pedagogical political stance in teacher education;
orientation promoting a social justice orientation in
the teacher learning of student teachers.
Political identity Diego Being political and projecting a political
teacher educator identity in all
aspects of teacher educator work; in
the classroom, the institution, and
beyond.
Table 1 (cont.)
Teacher
Being current Jenny Constantly striving to achieve currency,

to be up to date with relevant theories,
methods, and policies; for the
purposes of teacher educator
knowledge and student teacher
learning.
Dynamic teacher Alex Teacher educators changing and
educator Yvonne developing, and remaining open and
willing to change; to reflect on
practice and try alternative practices.
Being part of Yvonne Sharing ideas and pedagogical
a community experiences and practices with
professional colleagues, and learning
from them; seeking research
collaborations.
1 Pedagogy: language teacher education pedagogy refers to ‘what teacher

educators do and say in their activities and interactions and the reasoning
behind those activities and interactions’ (Johnson & Golombek, 2020,
p. 117). This includes what they do with student teachers inside formal
teacher education classrooms, as well as with teachers (one-on-one or in

groups) outside of classrooms in schools or other settings where languages
are taught. Teacher educator identities are enacted and constructed in the
process of doing teacher education work (Barkhuizen, 2019a).
2 Research: teacher educator research refers to the research activity they engage
in, which can vary according to level of desire and commitment, and whether
teacher educators see research as part of their job description and their identity.
Sometimes it may be institutionally required. Teacher educators have differing
beliefs about the value of research for their professional learning (Amott &
Ang, 2020), and differing conceptions of what research is or should be
(Barkhuizen, 2020a), and thus identify as researchers to varying extents.
3 Currency and development: keeping constantly current and professional
development (Hayes, 2019) often go hand in hand, because being up to
date with theory, methods, and policy means enhanced self-efficacy and
feeling better able to support student teachers (Hacker, 2008). Currency and
development relate to both pedagogy and research.
4 Context: this potentially ambiguous and variously interpreted concept
(Douglas Fir Group, 2016) extends from micro levels, such as one-on-one
mentoring partnerships and classrooms, to broader institutional and commu-
nity levels, to even more macro levels such as geopolitical regions (nations)
and beyond, for example international professional associations and global
trends and events. Language teacher educators are embedded and active
within those ever-changing spaces.
5 Political and moral stance: the fifth theme to emerge from the language
teacher educator reflections has to do with the moral (Farrell, Baurain, &
Lewis, 2020; Vanassche & Kelchtermans, 2016) and political (see Peercy
et al., 2019) positions teacher educators take in the work they do. These
positions are enacted in their pedagogical practices and in their research
activity, and are integral to the identities they claim and project.
3 What Do Language Teacher Educators Do?

This section looks more closely at what language teacher educators do, and how
what they do intersects with their teacher educator identities. To set the scene,
I start with an overview of the process of becoming a new language teacher
educator, highlighting particularly the potential identity tensions educators
experience during this period of transition. To address the broad question of
what teacher educators do, I use the eight propositions that Johnson and
Golombek (2020) suggest constitute language teacher education pedagogy as
a central domain for the knowledge-base of teacher education, and do so from

the teacher educators’ perspective, focussing particularly on their identity
construction. To illustrate the propositions, I draw on concepts from a study
by Hacker (2008) that explored the learning of language teacher educators.
I conclude Section 3 by producing a language teacher educator identity concep-
tual framework that includes discussion of aspects less frequently examined in
the literature.
3.1 Becoming a Language Teacher Educator

The picture often painted of language teachers transitioning to the role of
language teacher educator is one of moving (in a linear fashion) from
a position of relative comfort, confidence, and feelings of self-efficacy to
a position where suddenly everything is unstable, unfamiliar, and problematic.
Murray and Male (2005), for example, found in their study of new teacher
educators in higher education contexts in the United Kingdom that:
One of the major challenges for the teacher educators in this study was to
identify how they could draw on their accumulated professional knowledge
and understanding of school teaching to achieve feelings of personal confi-
dence and competence about inducting student teachers into the profession.
(p. 136)
It may well be the case that teachers entering a professional or academic

teacher educator position are confident in their subject matter and peda-
gogical knowledge, and may have considerable experience teaching lan-
guage, but this is not the same for all teachers. Some may have had limited
or inappropriate language teaching experience, or none at all, for example,
taking on a teacher education role directly after completing a qualification
(and which usually applies to those who perform well in that qualification).
A further example peculiar to language teachers, and possibly even more so
to English teachers, is that their work might have taken them to multiple
countries to take up a mixture of full-time and part-time employment in all
sorts of language learning institutions. This differs somewhat from the
comparatively stable situation of teaching in a public school for ten to fifteen
years, and then taking the path of gaining a further qualification, and subse-
quently moving on to a language teacher educator position in higher educa-
tion, which might be more typical in the general education field. In sum,
Goodwin et al. (2014) say, ‘too many academics who may be hired to do
teacher education work are not necessarily prepared, qualified, or even
choose to do this work’ (p. 298). Whether prepared or not, confident or not,
experienced or not, the transition to being a language teacher educator is
nevertheless a change in direction, and this means a disruption to the profes-
sional identity of the new teacher educator.

Various metaphors have been used to describe the move from teacher to
teacher educator, including being on a journey, a career path, or even ‘a rocky
road’ (Wood & Borg, 2010, p. 17), indicating that the transition may not always
be a smooth one. Trent (2013) uses the concepts of boundaries and boundary-
crossing to explore the transition with a group of teacher educators in
Hong Kong. The crossings, says Trent, ‘not only represent opportunities for
learning but are also potentially conflictual, marginalizing experiences’
(p. 262). Williams (2014) talks of entering a third space ‘where activity systems
of schools and universities intersect and overlap’ (p. 316). Williams cites
Zeichner (2010), who describes what he calls hybrid spaces as those that
‘involve a rejection of binaries such as practitioner and academic knowledge
and theory and practice, and involve the integration of what are often seen as
competing discourses in new ways – an either/or perspective is transformed into
a both/also point of view’ (p. 316). It is within these spaces that for beginning
teacher educators their former language teacher identity and new developing
teacher educator identity begin to merge, or overlap, or re-shape in some form,
as they learn new pedagogical practices, try to make sense of unfamiliar
institutional norms and roles, work with different kinds of learners, and become
researchers.
It is clear that two things will happen during the early stages of induction
into becoming a teacher educator (and probably for much longer). One I have
already mentioned – the former language teachers’ identities will change. In
Trent’s (2013) study, the teacher educators’ ‘identities were shaped and
reshaped in the transition’ (p. 263); and in Murray and Male’s (2005) study
the teacher educators experienced ‘significant adaptations to their previous
identities as schoolteachers’ (p. 126). The second thing that will happen,
consequently, is that new teacher educators will experience some identity-
related tensions in their professional life. Williams, Ritter, and Bullock (2012)
actually use the word ‘tensions’ (p. 251); they add that these tensions may
create a ‘challenge’ and a ‘dilemma’ (p. 250) for the teacher educators. Trent
(2013) calls the identity boundary-crossing ‘problematic’ (p. 263) for the
teacher educators, and Yazan (2018) says that they may ‘feel professionally
uncomfortable’ (p. 144). Murray and Male (2005) use ‘conflicts’ (p. 139) to
describe the clash of identities. One reason frequently cited in the research
literature for conflict is articulated by Williams, Ritter, and Bullock (2012):
‘Maintaining a teacher identity is very important because many beginning
teacher educators perceive this as part of their professional creditability in the
eyes of pre-service teachers and mentor teachers in schools’ (p. 248). So, on
the one hand, teacher educators desire to hold on to and make salient their
teacher identity for the sake of credibility – to show their student teachers and
their colleagues that they know what they’re doing because they have the
relevant experience – but, on the other hand, they also need to demonstrate that
they’re part of the community of (academic) teacher educators who are
teaching teachers – drawing on and constructing for themselves a different
knowledge-base and doing research, for example. This ‘grappling’ with iden-
tity (Golombek, 2017) and negotiating ‘identity dilemmas’ (Nelson, 2017) is
something that continues to some extent throughout one’s career as a teacher
educator. Davey (2013), for instance, says that being a teacher educator
involves ‘an ongoing negotiation or dialogue among one’s past history and
experiences, one’s values and ideologies and one’s current socio-cultural and
politico-historical context’ (p. 143).
Finally, experiencing tensions in the process of establishing a teacher
educator identity is not something that should be treated lightly, by both
teacher educators themselves and host teacher education institutions. And
yet, not much is done in terms of systematic induction for new language
teacher educators (Wright, 2010). This, of course, refers to teacher educators
who leave, fully or partly, language learning schools to become teacher
educators in institutions of higher education (see Types 1–9 in Section
1.2) – and not school-based teacher educators or those solely in mentoring
roles. The former are very much left to get on with the job themselves, which
they typically do, drawing richly on their language teaching experience and
their apprenticeship observing (Lortie, 1975) their own teacher educators,
and enduring the inevitable sink or swim phenomenon in most aspects of their
work. Where professional development has been made available for teacher
educators (though not specifically language teacher educators), Amott and
Ang (2020, p. 4) indicate that it has been found to have four features: (a)
learning communities, similar to communities of practice, in which new
teacher educators share knowledge and skills with each other and with
more experienced colleagues; (b) supportive relationships, such as being
assigned a more experienced teacher educator as a mentor; (c) reflective
activities, which may include opportunities to collaborate in narrative writing
with other teacher educators (Mendieta & Barkhuizen, 2020), for example, or
to engage in critical self-reflection (see Peercy & Sharkey, 2020); and (d)
research, which has been discussed above, to refer to engaging with and in
research for the purposes of professional development and to establish
securely an institutional academic researcher identity. I end this section
with a personal narrative that takes me from the end of my doctoral studies
to high school, and then to my first formal language teacher educator position
at university.
PERSONAL NARRATIVE 3: FROM UNIVERSITY TO HIGH SCHOOL

TO UNIVERSITY
After completing my doctorate at Teachers College, Colombia University,
I returned to South Africa to take up a job teaching English as a Second
Language (ESL) at a high school. The school was situated in the far north-
west region of the country on the edge of the Kalahari Desert, and the
majority of the students were thus Setswana speaking, an indigenous
African language. I initially signed up for two years but ended up staying
for four altogether, such was the rewarding nature of the professional
experience. The school encouraged innovative teaching, curriculum
development, and assessment practices, in which I enthusiastically
engaged. I also gained some early leadership experience by establishing
and becoming head of an independent ESL department within the school’s
organizational structure. Over the same period, I published a few chapters

from my doctoral dissertation. After leaving the school I headed back to
my alma mater, Rhodes University, where I accepted an academic position
in the linguistics department (I had been a student there and also a graduate
tutor). This time my teaching included sociolinguistics and numerous
applied linguistics courses; applied linguistics being an area that the
department was eager to grow. I was heavily involved in a graduate
programme called English Language Teaching (ELT), and in fact became
Director of the programme, teaching a number of its courses; well, those
courses that required an experienced English teacher to teach them (or one
with recent teaching experience, who was interested in language teaching
and language teacher education as an academic endeavour). And I was the
one who most closely fitted that description. The programme was small
when I started, perhaps five to eight students. I thoroughly enjoyed
teaching them. I had loads of classroom teaching experience to draw on,
with real materials – lesson plans, worksheets, tasks, assessments, sylla-
bus documents – readily available. I felt absolutely genuine and convin-
cing in my teacher educator role, and cannot recall experiencing any
identity tensions. I received excellent teaching evaluations, and the pro-
gramme started to grow. I was also in a very supportive institutional
environment, with collaborative and friendly colleagues, who I suspect
were rather pleased to see someone else, rather than them, doing the
applied linguistics content. Within a few years the programme grew to
around twenty to twenty-five students, and my personal research agenda
developed rapidly, with a three-pronged focus on multilingual education,

teacher education, and sociolinguistics. I truly was starting to feel like
a language teacher educator.
3.2 Doing Language Teacher Educator Work

In this section, I discuss each of the eight interrelated propositions put forward
by Johnson and Golombek (2020), which they believe constitute language
teacher education pedagogy as a central domain for the knowledge-base for
language teacher education (LTE). I do so from the perspective of the teacher
educator, focussing specifically on what they mean in relation to their identity.
I want to stress here that Johnson and Golombek’s (2020) propositions repre-
sent only one view of the processes or pedagogy of language teacher educa-
tion, and I am not saying that these propositions indicate what should be
happening in teacher education programmes. They themselves make the point
that context is important (see below): the context of teacher education and the
context of language teaching. And I have made the point a number of times
myself so far in this document that these situated educational processes differ
substantially from context to context – sociocultural, historical, geopolitical.
Nevertheless, the propositions incorporate interaction, mediation, and devel-
opment, which in different configurations (and with different outcomes, which
we do not always know about) are probably common to all varieties of
language teacher education. And central to all of this, and this is my focus
here, is the identity of the language teacher educator; how it is embodied,
negotiated, enacted, constructed, and re-shaped.
The eight propositions have their foundation in a Vygotskian sociocultural
theoretical perspective, and thus Johnson and Golombek envision that:
the dialogic interactions that unfold in our LTE programs as the very external
forms of social interaction and activities . . . will become internalized psy-
chological tools for teacher thinking, enabling our teachers to construct and
enact theoretically and pedagogically sound instructional practices for their
students. (p. 118)
Teacher educators are the mediators in this process, as they ‘orient to and enact
intentional and systematic pedagogies’ (p. 119) that support the professional
development of the student teachers. It is the teacher educators who set up and
engage in the interactions and activities with the student teachers; they are
integrally immersed in what goes on with their teacher education. And so are
their identities. Who they are as language teacher educators interconnects with
the processes of teacher education. While this is going on, Johnson and
Golombek emphasize the need for language teacher educators to recognize that:
while we are engaged in the present, we must collaboratively and coopera-

tively acknowledge the past and imagine the future, all the while recognizing
what we are doing as happening in an evolving, ever-changing and challen-
ging system. (p. 119)
The temporal dimension evident in this statement brings to the fore the dynamic
nature of teacher educator identities. Poststructuralist theories of identity (see
Block, 2013; Norton, 2013) maintain that identities change, in short-term
interactions with other people and material objects, and over time. In other
words, in enacting an LTE pedagogy teacher educators’ identities are constantly
in flux, in the day-to-day classroom interactions with student teachers, as well as
longer term over the course of their careers.
Before getting on to the eight propositions, I introduce Hacker’s (2008) study,
which examined the nature of language teacher educator learning; that is, the
experience of learning to become a language teacher educator in the particular
contexts in which they were working as language teacher educators. In discuss-

ing each of Johnson and Golombek’s (2020) eight propositions I make reference
to concepts from Hacker’s study. Her narrative inquiry included fifteen partici-
pants, all experienced teacher educators working in institutions of higher
education in New Zealand. Data for the inquiry consisted of narrative inter-
views and numerous follow-up conversations with the participants. Following
a detailed thematic analysis of the interviews and the storied configuration of
each of the individual educator’s experiences, Hacker inductively developed
a conceptual framework of language teacher educator learning, with its core
being a number of learning dimensions. The most salient of these are teachers,
teaching, professional position, and currency. These dimensions apply to the
learning of teacher educators, but it is very easy to see how they can be usefully
applied to examine their identities.
Teachers is the dimension concerned with language teacher educators’ experi-
ences ‘relating to the people they teach or in some way assist to develop as
promoters of language learning, and who are often referred to by the educators as
their students’ (Hacker, 2008, p. 140). Identities are negotiated and constructed in
social interaction with others, and for teacher educators the teachers they work
with are their main interactional focus. Their relationship primarily involves the
dimension of teaching, which is concerned with language teacher educators’
experiences ‘relating to any aspect of their own teaching in their work as language
teacher educators in their contexts of practice’ (Hacker, 2008, p. 139).
The professional position dimension is concerned with language teacher
educators’ experiences relating to their particular formal job descriptions:
‘This involves the activities and requirements that educators are recommended
or expected to engage in, perform and meet in their professional positions in

their contexts of practice’ (Hacker, 2008, p. 139). Aligned with these positions
are particular roles and responsibilities, and the positions are usually clearly
visible to others in the workplace. By currency Hacker (2008) means language
teacher educators’ experiences relating to ‘the most recent information avail-
able in the fields in which they have interests or responsibilities as language
teacher educators’ (p. 140). This may relate practically and/or theoretically to
their pedagogy or research, or to other involvements they have in their capacity
as language teacher educators, such as leaders or curriculum developers.
Johnson and Golombek’s (2020) eight propositions follow.
3.2.1 LTE Pedagogy Must Be Located

Teacher education takes place in the particular contexts where teacher educators
do their work. And future language teachers will practise in particular contexts.
I have addressed ‘context’ a number of times already in this Element (see, for
example, Section 2.2). My message has been, as Johnson and Golombek (2020)
remind us, that ‘context is not limited to specific geopolitical boundaries but
includes socio-political, sociohistorical, and/or socioeconomic contexts that
shape and are shaped by local and global events’ (p. 120). What happens locally
in language teacher education, therefore – in classrooms, in teaching practi-
cums, in action research projects – is interconnected with much broader scales
of context, larger ideological discourses with which teacher educators and
student teachers engage. Teacher educators need to provide opportunities for
teachers to reflect on and make sense of their development in the context of their
teacher education, and also to provide them with the resources so that they can
continue to locate their teaching in their particular working contexts when they
start to teach. Teacher educators also need to reflect on and make sense of their
own practices and continuing development in their working contexts, in relation
to the past, the present, and the future.
In this relationship with context, both in the actual process of teacher educa-
tion, in collaboratively imagining the future teaching of their student teachers,
and in imagining their own future teacher education practices (including peda-
gogy and research), teacher educators negotiate and construct their identities.
This broad proposition, that LTE pedagogy must be located, aligns with all four
of Hacker’s dimensions, possibly just like the other propositions do too. For
example, the teacher educators’ primary focus is the teachers they work with;
this stems from the professional position they hold within their institution,
a position with which they identify. In the process of teaching, teacher educators
interact with teachers, form relationships with them, mentor them, and construct
their own identities, as they locate the teachers’ and their own ongoing devel-
opment in context. To do so effectively requires currency, being and feeling up
to date and knowledgeable in one’s field. Teacher educator’s identities are
implicated in all aspects of this process – they relate to what they do with
student teachers and how they do it, how they see themselves in practice and the
effect they have, and how others see them.
3.2.2 LTE Pedagogy Must Recognize Who the Teacher Is and Who the
Teacher Wishes to Become
This proposition aligns most closely with Hacker’s teachers dimension;

a concern, interest, and passion for the student teachers teacher educators
work with. The proposition means that teacher educators must get to know
‘who the teacher is and who that teacher wants to become’ (Johnson &
Golombek, 2020, p. 121). And it relates to teacher identity – giving the student
teachers (or in-service teachers) the opportunity to try out and reflect on their
developing identities; and to align those identities with their teaching practice.
For this to happen requires a certain kind of teacher educator – one who sees
the importance of self-reflection as a means of understanding both who one is
and is becoming (one’s identity) and one’s teaching actions. When this
happens teacher learners are ‘active mediators of their own learning’
(Farrell, 2018, p. 4). As teacher educators strive to get to know who their
student teachers are, they also work to understand themselves. Teacher edu-
cators thus need to recognize who they are as language teacher educators and
who they wish to become. In other words, this proposition also applies to
teacher educators. In the being and becoming they self-reflect on their devel-
oping identities, in context, with the same goals as their student teachers; that
is, to learn more about themselves, their teaching practices, their socio-
cultural and working contexts, in order to develop and grow as people and
teacher educators. Hacker’s teachers dimension, with its emphasis on teacher
educators assisting student teachers to develop as promoters of language
learning, could be re-interpreted for teacher educators to mean assisting
them to develop as promoters of learning to teach.
3.2.3 LTE Pedagogy Must Be Intentional and Goal-Directed: These

Intentions and Goals Must Be Made Explicit
For LTE pedagogy to be intentional and goal-directed, teacher educators must

‘make explicit their motives, intentions, goals, and ideologies when designing,
sequencing, and enacting’ teacher education pedagogy (Johnson & Golombek,
2020, p. 121). This really opens up teacher educators to scrutiny from their
student teachers, and also their colleagues. People get to see what they do, and
figure out why they do it that way. It exposes not only their practices, but also
their ideas about language teaching and learning, about teacher education, and
about education in general – ideas that are embedded in the teacher educators’
personal and professional histories, and their political convictions. Following
this proposition, teacher educators would, of course, attempt to make their
intentions and goals explicit but there always remain unspoken, un-signalled
(even hidden) aspects of one’s practices in classroom interactional encounters.
It is sometimes difficult to find a balance between being explicit and ‘overex-
posure’ where too much of oneself is revealed, thus leaving oneself vulnerable
(Vanessche & Kelchtermans, 2016) or potentially crossing some ethical line.
Identities could be contested by others, or by the teacher educators themselves.
Hacker’s teaching dimension – an educator’s focus on pedagogy for language
teachers – carries some risks, therefore.
3.2.4 LTE Pedagogy Must Create Opportunities to Externalize Everyday

Concepts While Internalizing Relevant Academic Concepts Through
Authentic, Goal-Directed Activities of Teaching
What this proposition means is that teacher educators need to work towards
supporting student teachers to unite their everyday concepts – gained from
experience and often implicit and unanalyzed – with the new academic concepts
they encounter in the teacher education programme. The academic concepts are
those generated by research and other scholarship (theorizing) in the field of
language teaching and learning; they are the ‘theory’ in the complex theory–
practice relationship. So the goal is to link the academic concepts to teaching
practice so that teachers are better able to understand their teaching and thinking
about teaching, and thus make more informed pedagogical decisions about
future activity. For teacher educators, remaining current (Hacker’s (2008)
currency dimension) is vitally important. They too are concerned with uniting
their everyday concepts, generated from previous language teaching experi-
ence, for example, but not systematically analyzed or reflected upon, with recent
developments in the disciplines of language teaching and teacher education; for
example, new knowledge about second language acquisition, multilingual
education, online language learning. To keep in touch with the new knowledge
requires teacher educators to strive for currency. One of the participants in
Hacker’s study, a senior manager of a teacher education programme, regularly
attends Ministry of Education workshops; another insists on maintaining close
and constant contact with language learners; and a third belonged to
a supportive teacher educator learning community who worked in the same
curriculum area as she did. These ‘currency strategies’ kept them up to date with
what was happening in their fields and allowed them to internalize new concepts
applicable to their teacher education work.
3.2.5 LTE Pedagogy Must Contain Structured Mediational Spaces

Where Teachers are Encouraged to Play/Step Into Being and Becoming
a Teacher
Hacker’s (2008) teaching and teachers dimensions are most salient with regard
to this proposition; in the process of creating mediational spaces for teachers, in
which they take part in goal-directed activities and interactions, teacher educa-
tors become mediators, expert others, models, providers of emotional support,
and instructors of academic concepts (Johnson & Golombek, 2020). Their focus
is centrally on their teachers and also on their own teaching, so that they achieve
the goal of promoting the development of their student teachers – to enable them
to ‘try out emerging teacher identities, alternative instructional practices, and
new modes of engagement in teaching’ (p. 123). Doing all of this is demanding
‘identity work’ (Miller, Morgan, & Medina, 2017). Teacher educators have to
be vigilant of maintaining their mediator identity in their interactions with their
student teachers, without overstepping their responsibilities, for instance,
‘model’ and ‘the expert’. This identity juggling goes on in spaces beyond the
teacher education classroom, in schools during the practicum, as supervisor of
student research projects, and as leaders or coordinators of programmes.
Mediational spaces should be safe for both teachers and teacher educators –
safe for both to explore, try out, and question their identities collaboratively.
3.2.6 LTE Pedagogy Must Involve Expert Mediation That Is Responsive

to Teachers’ Immediate and Future Needs
This proposition emphasizes ‘responsive mediation’, whereby expert teacher
educators first (see proposition three above) make explicit their goals, cognitions,
and emotions in their interactions with their student teachers. In these interactions
they aim to learn about and understand their teachers as much as possible (i.e.,
upping a notch their responsiveness to them); to ‘fine-tune their understandings of
teachers’ immediate needs and capabilities, engaging in responsive mediation, as
they attempt to identify the upper limits of teachers’ potential’ (Johnson &
Golombek, 2020, p. 124). This requires even more attention from teacher educa-
tors to their teachers, the nature and effect of the interactions they engage in with
them, and ultimately to their development. As if this is not demanding enough, at
the same time teacher educators have to pay close attention to their own teaching,
interactions, and learning. Once again, Hacker’s teachers and teaching dimen-
sions are crucially relevant here. From the perspective of teacher educators,
responsive mediation is about focus, listening, being open, decision making,
supporting, and feeling. This is taxing indeed. Identities are exposed in the
process, which implies they are open to inspection and challenge. Further, as
Johnson and Golombek point out, teacher educators are expected to perform other
roles in institutions (Hacker’s professional position, through which teacher edu-
cators learn to be teacher educators and in which they continually construct their
teacher educator identities), such as evaluators of teaching performance or super-
visors of research, and these types of ‘ascribed’ identities add further authority to
their enacted expertise and perceived power. When teacher educators interact with
their student teachers in these situations, they (co-)construct multiple identities –
those they desire to project, those institutionally ascribed, and those recognized by
the teachers – and this can lead to emotional tensions, such as vulnerability,
disappointment, and anxiety, on the part of both student teachers and the teacher
educators, which the latter will necessarily respond to and manage.
3.2.7 LTE Pedagogy Must Have a Self-Inquiry Dimension, Involving

Teacher Educators and Teachers Working Together or By Themselves,
In Which They Seek to Trace Teacher Professional Development As It
Unfolds Over Time and Place
As student teachers do their teacher education work, whether that be activities
with fellow student teachers and the teacher educator, or classroom teaching
practice during practicums, they must, according to this proposition, engage in
self-inquiry; that is, to reflect deeply on and ask questions about their ongoing
development as teachers over time, in order to understand it and position it
within their socio-cultural, institutional contexts of practice. Johnson and
Golombek (2020) suggest that teacher educators mediate this process of self-
inquiry, for example by working with the teachers to provide feedback, com-
mentary, and support during the inquiry activities, and thus not always leaving
the students to work on their own. Teacher-educator-mediated narrative inquiry
is one approach to inquiry that allows the teachers to make meaning of their
experiences through the stories they tell. Stories have a temporal dimension, and
so teachers can trace their development over time – from the past and into their
imagined and actual future teaching lives – and they also have place and people
dimensions, where the action of stories unfolds with other characters in the story
world (see Barkhuizen, 2020b). In the narrative space that these interrelated
dimensions create, and mediated by teacher educators, student teachers self-
inquire, become aware of, monitor, think about, and understand their develop-
ment. All of this applies to the teacher educators as well. Because of their
institutional professional position (Hacker, 2008) teacher educators are usually
required to do research (see types of language teacher educators in Section 1.2),

manifesting their researcher identity. Besides the goals of publishing and
advancing their careers (and nurturing their academic identities), for teacher
educators the aim of gaining further knowledge about and keeping up to date in
their field (Hacker’s currency) is part of their own professional development.
Narrative inquiry is certainly an option for such self-inquiry purposes.
3.2.8 LTE Pedagogy Must Demonstrate a Relationship of Influence Between

Teacher Professional Development (As a Result of LTE Pedagogies) and
Student Learning
Pre-service and in-service teachers participate in language teacher education so

that they can develop as language teachers; specifically, to learn how to teach and
learn about teaching language to their students. A ‘relationship of influence’
(Johnson & Golombek, 2020, p. 125) refers to this connection to student learning.
An important question to ask, therefore, is: how do the activities of teacher
education – what teacher educators and student teachers do in their interactions
together – influence the language learning of the teachers’ students? In Hacker’s

(2008) explanation of her teachers dimension, she references the teacher educa-
tor’s relating to their student teachers ‘as promoters of language learning’ (p. 140).
In other words, their interest in and commitment to their teachers is undertaken
with both insight and foresight; they are ultimately concerned about the language
learning of people who are not present in the teacher education happening now.
A relationship of influence might also refer to the influence that teacher educators
have on their own student teachers. In a similar way to the teacher educator–
teacher–language learner relationship there exists an institutionally oriented
teacher education programme–teacher education–teacher relationship. In these
two relationships of influence, the teacher educator has slightly different roles, and
claims and exhibits different identities. Just like the former, the latter is worthy of
further investigation (see Section 5). The question here is: how do the activities of
teacher education programmes – what programmes offer and what teacher educa-
tors do – influence the teaching learning of the student teachers?
The above eight propositions obviously have a strong focus on pedagogy,
since they are the ‘central domain’ for the knowledge-base of language teacher
education (Johnson & Golombek, 2020, p. 119). They are also clearly founded
on the principles of sociocultural theory. However, if one takes a look at the key
identity themes that emerged from the reflections of the Colombian English
teacher educators (see Table 1, Section 2.2), it is noticeable that many of them
make an appearance in the discussion of the eight propositions in this section.
So, although I hesitate to claim that the sociocultural theory-based propositions
are universally applicable – that all teacher educators do or should operate in
this way – I do believe that many of their characteristics would be evident in
language teacher education programmes, activities, and processes in other

contexts. This, again, is particularly from the perspective of pedagogy and
also research (inquiry). Less is said about the other activities that teacher
educators engage in, such as institutional service, taking on leadership posi-
tions, and professional and community involvement. The next section will look
a little more closely at these teacher educator activities.
3.3 The Identity Work of Language Teacher Educators

It is probably true to say that ultimately language teacher educators are con-
cerned about language learning. Most will have been language teachers at some
time in the past and some even continue to be while working as teacher
educators. Most would have learnt another language, if not more than one,
and many may even be teaching teachers how to teach that language. Teacher
educators’ language learning histories are intimately entwined with the teacher
education work they do; that is, they draw on their experiences of learning and
using (and teaching) language (Varghese, 2017), and in the process construct
identities that legitimize their professional work as well as who they are, for
themselves and for their students and colleagues. The interest and often passion
for languages and language learning – as well as their dedication to the
development and well-being of their student teachers (Hacker, 2008) – are
manifest in language teacher educators’ commitment to language teacher edu-
cation (Kani, 2014). This commitment is reflected in varying levels of ‘active
participation in a wide range of communities of practice’ (McKeon & Harrison,
2010, p. 38), and it is within these interrelated and often competing communi-
ties that teacher educators’ professional identities are continuously shaped and
reshaped. Malm (2020) references teacher educators’ roles as emerging from
three major domains, which could easily be perceived as communities, with
their distinct discourses and practices: teaching/pedagogy, research/scholar-
ship, and administrative/service. One might assume that these three are applic-
able only to teacher educators in higher education institutions, specifically
academic teacher educators. However, defining them more loosely, it could be
argued that all language teacher educators, whatever type they are (see Section
1.2), engage in different forms of teaching, research (including self-inquiry),
and administration or service. I describe these domains in more detail below,
where I add a fourth: briefly, what I do is split the service domain into two,
creating institutionally oriented service work and community service work
external to the institution, such as working with professional associations and
governmental organizations, for example. These four interrelated domains are
represented in Figure 1.
Figure 1 represents four interrelated areas of language teacher educators’ work;
four communities within which teacher educators do their professional work and
negotiate their professional teacher educator identities. Before describing it
further, I acknowledge that the figure does not completely or precisely capture
all the work of teacher educators, and also that it does not apply to all teacher
educators in all contexts. However, I believe that it serves a useful purpose by
illustrating the interconnectedness of the different aspects of teacher educators’
work, the different roles they play, and therefore the multiple identities they
negotiate, construct, draw on, and project in these different professional commu-
nities. The figure also emphasizes the centrality of the language teacher educator
in the processes of teacher education, a position often neglected in the scholarly
and research literature. And most important for our discussion here is that the
identity of the teacher educator is also positioned in the centre of the diagram.
Just a brief note about the design of the figure. It contains four inter-linked
outer circles, each representing the four domains or communities of teacher
LTE pedagogy
Institutional
Language teacher
service and LTE research and
educator identity
leadership scholarship
Community
service and
leadership
Figure 1 The identity work of language teacher educators.
educator work. Their inter-relationship is shown by the straight lines that join
them and also by their intersecting with the inner circle, which represents the
teacher educator’s identity. The four outer circles are of slightly different sizes,
representing actual workload and ‘identity-load’ associated with those domains.
This may be more or less true for one type of language teacher educator,
typically those working in institutions of higher education. The size of some
of the circles might expand or shrink (or even disappear) depending on the kind
of teacher educator one is and the contexts in which they work.
A final point before describing the four domains. Being a member of four
communities – performing roles and constructing related identities within
these communities – inevitably means that ‘struggle and conflict . . . can arise
from the interplay of discourse and agency’ (Trent, 2013, p. 272), meaning
that within and across communities (the four working domains) teacher
educators’ identities can be contested if what they do and say is perceived
to be in non-alignment with the dominant discourses of that particular
community. This is particularly the case with beginning teacher educators,
who ‘experience institutional political or power structures that challenge their
sense of belonging’ (Williams, Ritter, & Bullock, 2012, p. 250). As a result,
in some cases teacher educators find themselves complying with institutional
norms (see conforming, Section 5) even when they really do not agree with
them or imagine themselves identifying with their related practices. Feelings
of marginalization can result. This potentially applies to all four domains.
This is not always the case, however. Teacher educators’ practices and
contributions may very well align with current community discourses and
be acknowledged, accepted, and promoted. They may even transform the
community in some ways. When this happens, teacher educators would
identify closely with the community, aligning with it and experiencing
a sense of belonging.
Having identities associated with and emerging from the four interrelated
communities would inevitably mean that teacher educators experience some
internal conflicts. How often do we hear academics say something like, ‘I love
teaching and research, but hate admin’? Consequently, they resent having to do
administrative service when required to and seldom take on management or
leadership roles within their institutions. They see their primary identity as
teachers of teachers. Others do as well, and these, for example, might like to be
more research active, but a heavy teaching load might prevent them from doing
so. Their desired researcher identity is thus suppressed. And yet others may seek
and thrive in institutional administrative roles, coordinating programmes and
leading departments. And doing it well and making an essential contribution to
the success of the community. The point here is that with these multiple roles
and identities, the potential exists for tensions to arise when teacher educators
try to balance their preferences, allegiances, and skills. In what follows,
I provide brief descriptions of the four teacher education domains, paying
particular attention to how they pertain to the work and identities of language
teacher educators.
3.3.1 LTE Pedagogy
Much of what has been discussed so far in this Element, especially in Section
3.2 above (Johnson & Golombek’s (2020) eight LTE pedagogy propositions),
relates to pedagogy. This is because it is the core work of teacher educators, and
thus represented by the largest of the four circles in Figure 1. Without in some
way being involved in teacher education pedagogy – interacting with teachers
about their professional development – one could hardly call oneself a teacher
educator. In other words, all language teacher educators must do pedagogy,
which will include some or all of the following:
- Teaching language or teaching about languages.

- Teaching language teaching methods, including the use of appropriate mater-
ials and assessments.
- Teaching ‘content’ subjects such as second language acquisition, sociolin-

guistics, discourse analysis, and academic literacy.
- Providing supplementary language support, particularly for speakers of lan-
guages other than the medium of teacher education.
- Mentoring student teachers during their internship or practicum experience.
- Observing practice teaching and mediating feedback.
- Mentoring student teachers’ exploratory action research or narrative inquiry
projects.
- Supervising graduate student research.
A language teacher educator’s identity is fluid and constantly changing but

whatever shape it takes at any particular time and place it will always include,
often primarily, a pedagogical dimension. As members of an LTE pedagogy
community, language teacher educators identify as teachers, mentors, and
supervisors, and although this identity may fade at times or over time as they
take on other roles, the core of who they are will always be a teacher.
3.3.2 LTE Research and Scholarship
This circle in Figure 1 is slightly smaller than the pedagogy circle for two
reasons: (a) not all teacher educators are required by their institutional employ-
ment conditions to engage in research, and therefore don’t, although all should
be encouraged to do so or at least be involved in self-inquiry for the purposes of
professional development (and be given time and support for this); and (b) even
for those teacher educators who do research, it is usually to a lesser extent than
their teaching responsibilities. The advantages of being research active have
been discussed above (e.g., we saw good examples in the reflections of the
Colombian teacher educators in Section 2.1), and include remaining current
with ideas in the field (Hacker, 2008), learning more about one’s own area of
professional interest, making contact and collaborating with other scholars, and
continuing to develop professionally. What does having a teacher educator
researcher identity entail?
- Engaging in self-inquiry in the form of (exploratory) action research or

narrative inquiry projects.
- Establishing and implementing a research programme, which could be up to
half or more of a designated institutional workload.
- Carrying out research projects independently or in collaboration with col-
leagues on topics relevant to language teacher education or related fields.
- Disseminating research findings in publications and at conferences, work-
shops, and seminars, locally and internationally.
- Drawing on research findings to inform pedagogy and one’s own professional

development.
- Using findings to inform relevant curriculum and policy development at
institutional level or macro levels of government.
Enacting a researcher identity in language teacher education certainly has its

benefits, as pointed out above. In fact, doing exceedingly well as a researcher –
publishing books and articles in high-profile journals, for example – can lead to
a major identity shift, so that teacher educators begin to feel like and to be
recognized primarily as researchers. Invitations to present at conferences and to
contribute to books follow, and this reinforces the self-perceptions of a researcher
identity. Identity dilemmas and feelings of resentment may result when these
teacher educators are reminded by their institutions that they have pedagogical
and service duties to fulfil. Similar feelings may emerge in teacher educators who
conduct self-study or other self-reflective practices that are not recognized as
rigorous research by their institutions (Cochran-Smith, 2005). In some institutions,
simply being a teacher educator, whether doing research or not, is enough not to be
taken seriously as an academic (Goodwin et al., 2014; Peercy et al., 2019).
3.3.3 Institutional Service and Leadership
There are always administrative and management tasks associated with teaching.
As all teacher educators know, even running one course involves mundane tasks
such as monitoring attendance, booking rooms and equipment, conducting course
evaluations, and submitting grades. These may increase in volume and require
extensive paperwork in more bureaucratic institutions or at times of organizational
transformation. However, other service contributions can be more meaningful in

the lives of teacher educators, and they could also potentially facilitate the smooth
running of the institution beyond the teacher education classroom. The institu-
tional service and leadership circle in Figure 1 is smaller than the pedagogy and
research circles. For most teacher educators this reflects the amount of work time
they spend as teacher educators. It is also probably true to say that it reflects how
teacher educators perceive their professional identities. Very few would identify as
an administrator, for example. Some of the service and leadership contributions
language teacher educators typically make include the following:
- Administering courses, either in-classroom or online, which includes close

liaison with student teachers and institutional administrators.
- Co-ordinating practicums, including placing student teachers in language
schools, meeting and planning with co-operating teachers, and scheduling
school visits.
- Co-ordinating programmes beyond the level of courses, such as a major (e.g.,

TESOL), a qualification (e.g., MA), certificate (e.g., CELTA), or an in-service
teacher professional development programme (e.g., a series of workshops or
a conference).
- Communicating with teacher accreditation bodies if student teachers are
planning to work in educational systems that require official accreditation.
- Liaising with Ministries or Departments of Education to remain informed of
syllabus, curriculum, and policy updates, and to contribute to discussions
regarding these developments.
- Serving on committees at departmental, faculty, and university level, includ-
ing chairing the committees when taking on leadership roles.
- Heading a department or school within an institution of higher education,
which would involve responsibility for budget and staffing, as well as men-
toring junior faculty, supporting all faculty, and leading by example.
As teacher educators advance in their careers they might move into manage-
ment positions and take on leadership roles within programmes and higher up in
institutions; their re-constructed identities would reflect these changes. For
early career teacher educators, performing service and taking on leadership
roles are important for the purposes of gaining tenure and promotion. Some of
these teacher educators might resent having to do the service and consider it
a necessary evil (disrupting their research activity, for example) to be tolerated
as they work towards their career goals. In the process they might experience
tensions or disempowerment as they acclimatize to the systems and require-
ments of their institutions (Murray & Male, 2005). Performing service does not
necessarily lead to an institutionally imposed identity; some teacher educators

might willingly seek opportunities to become engaged in administrative work or
to take on leadership roles, seeing this aspect of their work as important to their
professional development and to who they want to be as teacher educators,
particularly outside the institution.
3.3.4 Community Service and Leadership

A recent publication by the British Council (2017) presents a framework for the
continuing development of teacher educators, and lists as one of its recom-
mended professional practices, ‘promoting the teaching profession through
examples of creativity, innovation, passion, and vision within teacher education
and within teaching’ (p. 16). This, of course, is achieved through interactions
with student teachers in teacher education classrooms, mentoring relationships
and research supervision, as well as through research activity and the dissemin-
ation of relevant and useful research findings. However, it is also achieved
through professional activities outside of these domains, and outside the insti-
tution, for example through networking and sharing practices and expertise
through forums, webinars, conferences, and short-term professional develop-
ment programmes. Teacher educators can develop quite high-profile identities
within these communities, especially if they become particularly active, or take
on leadership roles, thereby modelling leadership in the profession (Smith,
2005); for example, serving as president of a language teaching association,
or as editor of a regional language teacher education journal. Institutions may
even offer release time for such activities, and would certainly consider them to
be significant contributions in tenure and promotion applications. The following
are just a few examples of the wide range of possible professional community
service contributions teacher educators engage in:
- Participating in professional language teaching associations, perhaps serving

on or chairing sub-committees or executive committees.
- Sitting on boards or advising community language schools for immigrant
or refugee language learners, and preparing their language teachers.
- Participating in curriculum development at regional or national level.
- Contributing to the work of external language assessment or examining bodies.
- Conducting professional development workshops for language teachers in
local schools.
- Organizing and presenting at language teacher conferences.
- Securing funding for collaborative research projects involving student
teachers and teachers.
- Participating in language-in-education planning at regional and national level.
- Examining PhD and MA theses and dissertations from other universities in

the field of teacher education.
- Serving on teacher education journal editorial boards and reviewing article
submissions.
- Engaging with Ministries or Departments of Education to seek opportunities
to gain and develop ‘knowledge of current local or government initiatives’
(Amott & Ang, 2020, p. 5).
The community service and leadership circle is the smallest of the four circles
in Figure 1. This is because language teacher educators probably identify least
with this community domain. I say ‘probably’ because first and foremost their
official job description places them within an institution with an assigned
professional position (Hacker, 2008). For most teacher educators this is where
their key responsibilities lie, where their student teachers are, and where the
work they do gets remunerated. It is possible not to do professional community
service. On the other hand, there are some teacher educators who are heavily
committed to community service and leadership, and willingly so. It is some-

thing they desire to do; they perceive that work to be integral to who they are as
teacher educators. This section concludes with a personal narrative, in which
I reflect on some of my service and leadership contributions.
PERSONAL NARRATIVE 4: LEARNING ABOUT LEADERSHIP

I spent nearly ten years at Rhodes University in South Africa, building the
graduate ELT teacher education programme and teaching applied linguis-
tics courses. I also ensured I maintained contact with language teachers in
schools through my research and other professional activities, including
working for an independent national examinations board, where I set,
graded, and moderated external examinations in the subject English
Second Language. My next academic position took me to the University
of Auckland in New Zealand. I joined a very active department with some
high-profile researchers and very experienced teacher educators, and I felt
inspired to be working with such colleagues. My first academic year saw
me teaching on four courses with large classes of current and future
language teachers from diverse local and international backgrounds. For
a newcomer to the university, I also found generous support for my
research, in terms of both funding and time. Within six months I was
asked to be deputy head of the department and, within another year, head
of department. I was still finding my own way around the large university
(never mind trying to settle in a new country) and so took on these roles
reluctantly. There was only a small reduction in my teaching workload and
research expectations remained as high as ever. The department was

thriving at the time, with good student numbers, reasonably happy faculty,
comfortable facilities, and adequate funding available for teaching and
research support. Tasks such as managing the budget, planning teaching
schedules, and dealing with the endless requests and deadlines from
administration was something I easily learned and often enjoyed doing.
There was always someone to ask and always someone to help. The part of
the role I looked forward to the most was working with my teacher
educator colleagues. I had the opportunity to work with them more
closely, not only in the classroom but also in conversations about their
development, their future plans, their problems, their successes. I learned
a lot about language teaching and teacher education from them – with their
vast experience of working in countries around the world, teaching in
a wide range of contexts, and researching in areas unfamiliar to me.
During my nearly four years as head of department my professional
identity was pushed and pulled in many different directions as, for
example, I tried to emphasize my teacher educator identity in some
situations but was positioned as manager by colleagues, as I positioned
myself as researcher at certain times but was instead identified by the
institution as leader. These tensions certainly caused some stress in my
working life, but I always tried to learn from them. A few years later when
the department merged with two other departments to form a large school
(like they tend to do in modern universities), incorporating Asian and
European languages, I became the inaugural head of that school. The
tensions, identity struggles, and related emotions intensified of course,
but doing that institutional service and leadership also had enormous
personal benefits. It opened up spaces for interaction with new profes-
sional colleagues, it enabled new networks and travel, and it taught me
about disciplinary areas with which I was less familiar. One also hopes that
one’s work and effort makes a contribution to one’s colleagues’ profes-
sional lives and to the institution as well.
4 Further Professional Development of Language Teacher

Educators
Vanassche and Lelchtermans (2016) refer to teacher education professional
development as a learning process that ‘spans one’s career’ (p. 356). This
professional development can take many different forms, such as self-inquiry,
carrying out research, attending conferences, working with a mentor, and
participating in workshops and seminars. It can also involve further formal

study, including enrolling in Master’s and doctoral qualifications. When teacher
educators embark on in-service graduate studies their identities potentially
become disrupted. They enter spaces that entail re-thinking what they do and
(re-)imagining what they can do in the future. Kanno and Stuart (2011), with
reference to language teachers, claim that learning about teaching ‘is not so
much the acquisition of the knowledge of language teaching as it is the
development of a teacher identity’ (p. 249). The same applies to teacher educa-
tors; in the process of further and continuing professional development teacher
educators’ identities develop and change. In this section I examine how this
happens with the group of experienced Colombian teacher educators introduced
in Section 2. In that section, the teacher educators, a cohort of doctoral students
at a public university, reflected on their teacher educator identities in relation to
their past and present professional experiences. From their reflections
I developed a list of key identity themes (see Table 1), which I then arranged
into five main identity-related categories: pedagogy, research, currency and

development, context, and political and moral stance. In this section, I explore
their identities further by focussing particularly on their reasons for deciding to
engage in further professional development in the form of formal teacher
education.
The narrative interviews conducted with the teachers after their first year of
study revealed that ‘moving across major life boundaries’ (Donato, 2017, p. 25),
such as from being a teacher/teacher educator to a doctoral student/researcher, led
to the transformation of their professional teacher educator identities. As the
teacher educators’ stories show, however, this transformation began at the time
when they first started thinking about further study and was shaped by their
personal reasons for wanting to make that boundary crossing. In the interviews
I didn’t specifically ask the teacher educators why they desired to continue their
professional development in the form of a higher qualification, but they all offered
their personal and professional reasons for wanting to do so. An important concept
for making sense of their decisions is Norton’s (2013) social construct of
investment.
Investment refers to language learners’ desire and commitment to learning
a language. By investing in learning a language, they expect that they will yield
some capital (some social value) as a result of that investment. An investment in
learning is therefore also an investment in their identities. The construct can be
applied to teacher education and teacher identity as well (see Barkhuizen, 2016).
Darvin and Norton (2015) consider investment as occurring at the nexus of identity,
ideology, and capital, and they claim that ‘investment indexes issues of identity and
imagined futures’ (p. 39). Investing, in other words, means imagining the future
and imaging one’s identity in relation to that future world. Its relevance to the
Colombian teacher educators is evident: they are investing in further teacher
education in order to enhance their own capital for the various personal reasons
to be discussed in the sections below. At least, this is what they anticipate when they
make the decision to pursue (invest in) further professional development. Kramsch
(2013, p. 195) sums up these ideas succinctly, saying investment ‘accentuates the
role of human agency and identity in engaging with the task at hand, in accumulat-
ing economic and symbolic capital, in having stakes in the endeavour and in
persevering in that endeavour’ – the task at hand being pursuing a doctoral degree
to enhance one’s professional development, practices, and career. In Colombia,
Viáfara and Largo (2018) report that there is some reluctance for language teachers
to embark on further teacher education in the form of graduate study. Although
there is an expectation that they do, they see it as too theory-based, without options
to guide them in how to employ that theoretical knowledge to tackle the real needs
they face in schools. The teacher educators below have committed to doctoral study
and the reasons they give for doing so relate directly to who they are as profes-
sionals: who they want to be and want to become; what their aspirations are for the
future; what their goals are for their work, their student teachers, and their
profession.
4.1 Teacher Educators’ Reasons for Continuing Professional

Development
In this section I report on the reasons the teacher educators reveal in their
narrative interviews for deciding to undertake further graduate-level study.
For any one participant there might be multiple reasons, as is evident in some
of the short extracts below. However, in my commentary I focus on those that
are most salient. The aim is to show what the reasons tell us about their
transforming identities as teacher educators and the identity tensions (e.g.,
between their perceptions of self and ascribed identities in the midst of
a period of transition) in their professional lives that contribute to that trans-
formation. More broadly, the question these reflections address is the following:
why do language teacher educators decide to continue their professional devel-
opment, in this case, in the form of formal teacher education? Please refer to
Section 2.1 for the short biographies of the teacher educators that immediately
precede their reflections.
4.1.1 Juan
1 nowadays it is important to have a PhD here in Colombia

2 because the demand for PhD is increasing
3 however that was not my main motivation

4 because I don’t want to be like a director
5 or like an administrative part of the administrative staff of any place
6 but I want to continue working with my students
7 and I think that was one of the motivations
8 because I feel that my Master’s the Master’s that I took that I studied
9 was not that strong
10 and I didn’t learn as many things as I wish
Juan wants to ‘continue working with my students’ (line 6) when he has

completed his doctorate. As a teacher educator he feels (line 8) academically
behind where he should be, saying ‘I didn’t learn as many things as I wish’ (line
10). He believes his Master’s qualification (line 8) did not provide him with the
necessary academic knowledge to do his job the way he would like to. His
reason to study further, therefore, has to do with personal academic
development in order to become a more informed teacher educator. What is

interesting in his story, however, is what he says in lines 1–5. Here he comments
on the importance of having a PhD in the Colombian teacher education context,
meaning that to be employed full-time in a university, a doctorate is necessary
(see this point articulated vociferously by Ana below). Although Juan says ‘that
was not my main motivation’ (line 3), he is obviously aware of the pressure
exerted by educational institutional authorities on their (prospective) faculty,
mirroring international trends (Pereira, Lopes, & Marta, 2015). This would
mean the imposition of researcher and ‘director’ (line 4) or ‘administrative
staff’ (line 5) identities – identities that would compete with a teacher educator
identity (see Dinkelman, 2011). Post-doctorate, Juan is not willing to sacrifice
his classroom work with student teachers, and thus the teacher educator identity
he claims for himself.
4.1.2 Yvonne
1 well I love learning

2 I mean I know that it is good to have a title
3 but I don’t do it because of the title
4 I do it because I like learning
5 I do it because I think that it is an opportunity for me to re-think what I’m
doing
6 how I’m doing
7 the possibility I’m having in my hand
8 what I can do for my student teachers
Yvonne’s clearly stated reason in line 1, ‘I love learning’, contrasts sharply with
a reason others might give for doing a PhD – ‘to have a title’ (line 2). Yvonne
says, again unambiguously, ‘I don’t do it because of the title’ (line 3). This
contrast raises the tension, already expressed by Juan, between the institutional
expectations for teacher educator faculty (i.e., having a PhD) and the more
personal reasons they may have for entering further in-service study to prepare
for those positions – expectations that may discourage or even exclude them
from further study. Besides enjoying learning, Yvonne desires the ‘opportunity
to re-think what I’m doing’ (line 5) in order to work more productively ‘for my
student teachers’ (line 8), reflecting Juan’s story. In Juan’s case, however, he felt
the need for a ‘gap’ to be filled since his Master’s had not been sufficient
preparation for his current work. Yvonne desires instead to invest in further
study to reflect on and transform her current practice for the benefit of her
student teachers.
4.1.3 Eduardo
1 because I wanted to
2 but that ‘wanted to’ means it was something for myself
3 [describes teaching experience since obtaining Master’s]
4 in these six years five years
5 I felt like uncompleted
6 because I was not studying something extra
7 or apart from my studies for the subjects that I was teaching
8 and I was not learning something
9 and I said and I wanted to be academically speaking at the top of studies
10 so I wanted to study a PhD
We see here a sense of something missing in the professional, and intercon-

nected personal, life of Eduardo. He says the doctorate is ‘something for
myself’ (line 2) – it is for the sake of personal fulfilment. But it is also for
academic advancement; he wants to be ‘academically speaking at the top of
studies’ (line 9). Since completing his Master’s he feels that he has not been
learning anything new (‘I was not learning something’, line 8), only what he
needs to know for the subjects he has been teaching. His self-perceived identity
as an unfulfilled teacher educator has prompted him to pursue a doctorate. Later
in his story, Eduardo reveals that his reasons also have to do with sharing his
investment with his professional community, ‘my knowledge of the things that
I can share with others, is for others’.
4.1.4 Alex
1 well I started to look for a PhD after three years working at the Master’s
programme
2 after three years six semesters six different groups of teachers
3 I realized something there
4 and is that in my curriculum in my module of curriculum design
5 the teachers didn’t have either epistemological instances
6 or pedagogical instances
7 towards teaching or learning yeah
8 because the focus of the module that I give isn’t that yeah
9 what is curriculum
10 but what is curriculum from an epistemological position
11 and pedagogical position
12 well I realized that
13 and I started to look for PhDs
Alex’s motivation for investing in further formal in-service study primarily has
to do with advancing his knowledge of his subject area (‘curriculum design’,
line 4). ‘After three years’ (line 1) teaching pre-service English teachers in
a Master’s programme, Alex came to the realization (‘I realized something
there’, line 3) that the content of his curriculum design course fell short of what
he expected for his student teachers at their academic level. Like the other
participants, he perceived a ‘gap’ in an aspect of his teacher education practice.
To address this situation, he ‘started to look for a PhD’ (line 1 and line 13) that
would provide him with the relevant knowledge to develop his course so that his
students would begin to explore the construct of curriculum more deeply,
beyond its mere theoretical definition. His concern appears to be how we
learn or acquire knowledge from curriculum (‘epistemological position’, line
10) and how we apply the curriculum in teaching practice (‘pedagogical
position’, line 11). Alex has invested in further graduate teacher education
therefore, not only to upskill himself, but ultimately to improve his course for
the benefit of his pre-service teachers.
4.1.5 Diego
1 what I’m basically looking forward to is like

2 somehow allowing voices that haven’t been heard
3 I don’t know to what extent I could do that
4 but my intention is to fight somehow things that I consider are perpetuation
of systems of injustice
5 even in terms of what languages are supposed to be
6 so language and bilingualism in Colombia has been considered from a very

instrumental perspective
7 and well I have always have this idea of a language as something that is
much more than that
8 is eventually part of your identity
9 and part of your rights
10 like your linguistic human rights
11 and that was something that I always felt passionate about
12 if my intention is to generate at least a change of perspective
13 like having people think again about like unfair approaches towards
languages
14 and towards individuals who speak [indigenous] languages
When articulating his reason for doing further in-service graduate study,
Diego’s identity reveals an emotionally reinforced social justice orientation.
In his powerful story he sums up the overarching goal he desires to accomplish
in line 2: ‘allowing voices that haven’t been heard’. Through his PhD research
and armed with a higher qualification he plans to ‘fight’ (line 4) the ‘systems of
injustice’ (line 4) that he believes have persisted in the Colombian language
education system. The main thrust of his resistance comes from his interpret-
ation of the bilingual language policies in the country that have ‘been con-
sidered from a very instrumental perspective’ (line 6). By this he means that the
policies support the teaching and learning of English (a colonial language) as
the language of progress in employment and education, at the expense of
indigenous languages (line 14), and that those who do not succeed usually
find themselves on the margins of society (Wilches, Medina, & Gutiérrez,
2018). Instead, Diego believes that language is ‘something that is much more
than that’ (line 7). It is ‘part of your identity’ (line 8) and ‘part of your rights’
(line 9). Diego feels ‘passionate’ (line 11) about promoting this social justice
perspective in his future work and is determined through his investment in his
doctoral research especially to get people to ‘think again’ (line 13) about these
policies and their accompanying ‘unfair’ (line 13) practices. These people
include his pre-service student teachers as well as their future English learners.
His desire is to instil in them ‘a change of perspective’ (line 12) so that they can
ultimately transform the ‘unfair approaches towards languages’ (line 13).
4.1.6 Ana
1 well they opened they opened some posts

2 and I would apply for it
3 but then they said that I was not prepared
4 I mean I was not prepared because I didn’t have research

5 because I didn’t have this and that
6 ‘because your only piece of research is the one that you did for your
Master’s degree’
7 and I was like ‘oh so I’m not enough
8 what I have done is not enough’
9 and so I said ‘oh’
10 so I was thinking ‘maybe I should study a PhD’
11 cause like having a Master’s will never be enough
12 if I want to work in a full-time position in a university
Ana’s story starts with a job application for an English teacher educator
position at a university. However, her application was unsuccessful ‘because
I didn’t have research’ (line 4). As in many universities around the world,
obtaining a full-time academic position as teacher educator requires research
experience and a recognized publication record. Ana has neither (she says
later in the story, ‘I am not publishing or researching’), at least not to the

extent required by the hiring institution. She does, however, have consider-
able experience as a language teacher. Ana’s identity dilemma (Nelson,
2017) is reflected in her sarcastic outburst, ‘Oh so I’m not enough/ what
I have done is not enough’ (lines 7–8). She knows she has considerable
experience as an English teacher and adequate experience as a teacher
educator, but despite having done a ‘piece of research’ (line 6) for her
Master’s degree, her researcher identity was contested by the hiring univer-
sity. She did not meet their requirements for the professional position they
wanted filled. To resolve this English teacher–teacher educator–researcher
identity dilemma Ana decides that the best course of action would be to
invest in a PhD (‘maybe I should study a PhD’, line 10). She realizes that
without the research experience and its associated symbolic capital ‘no
university will accept me’.
4.1.7 Jenny
1 it was an accident
2 I didn’t plan to do that
3 I was part of I am part of a research group
4 and the director or the coordinator
5 he told me that he was going to be in charge of one of the emphasis of the
doctorate programme
6 and he invited me to be part of that
7 [summarizes previous formal study]
8 I realized that is a good opportunity to be part of a community

9 that we are creating in the doctorate programme
10 and this community is something that we don’t have in Colombia
Jenny had not been searching for a PhD like Alex, and unlike the other teachers
had not identified a personal or professional ‘gap’ in her working life that
needed to be ‘filled’ by further in-service teacher education. Rather, she stum-
bled upon the possibility (‘it was an accident’, line 1) after having the new PhD
drawn to her attention by the director of the ‘doctorate program’ (line 5). Jenny
seized on the opportunity to be more formally part of an academic research
community, pointing out that ‘we don’t have in Colombia’ (line 10) such
communities of practice. In recent years she has become a participant in various
informal research groups, even establishing some herself, ‘to do research, but
not institutional research’. Her investment in further graduate study, therefore,
at least in the short term, was also an investment in her identity as a community
member of PhD research students.
4.2 Interconnected Identity-Related Professional

Developments
All participants in this study perceive some sort of ‘gap’ between who they are
and who they want to be (or who they think they should be) as professional
teacher educators of future English teachers. It is this gap they desire to fill by
embarking on further in-service graduate study. By investing in this further
advanced professional development a number of things happen. They enter
a period of transition in their professional lives where their familiar teacher
educator identities are disrupted, (re)negotiated, and (re)constructed. As evident
in the interview extracts, the teachers are aware of this change – it is what has
made them decide to study further. As Donato (2017) says, they are ‘creatively
engaging with, responding to, and renegotiating the self in ways that contribute
to one’s own personal growth and development as a professional’ (p. 28). Their
reasons for studying further, therefore, are intimately interconnected with how
they see themselves and with who they want to be in the future. Figure 2
illustrates this relationship between their reasons and identity, with investment
or the act and goals of investing in further professional development connecting
them together.
Development, the yield of their investment, emerged as a major theme in the
teacher educators’ stories, as can be seen in the short extracts above (and also in
their longer interviews). Development means they will change as professionals –
their identities will change. And development means their practices will change.
To reflect these meanings, I have categorized their reasons into five types of
perceived development; described below and represented by the arrow-headed
lines in Figure 2 that thread through the three sectors – reasons, investment, and
identity. It is probably true to say that all the teacher educators desire and
Reasons Identity
Investment
PerFD
AcaFD
PraFD
ResFD
SttFD
Figure 2 Five types of identity-related professional developments.

envisage all five developments, although only one or two are explicitly refer-
enced by each of them.
1 Personal-focussed development (PerFD) for doctoral students includes per-

sonal growth and the development of new skills and knowledge (see Halse &
Mowbray, 2011). It comes with an increase of social and cultural capital
(Norton, 2013). Yvonne says ‘I love learning’ and that doing the doctorate is
‘an opportunity for me’. Eduardo says it is ‘something for myself’ and that he
‘felt like uncompleted’.
2 Academic-focussed development (AcaFD) refers to enhanced knowledge and
competences that have to do with the more theoretical aspects of teacher
education. Juan says that he ‘didn’t learn as many things’ as he wished during
his Master’s, and the doctorate will be an opportunity to update his know-
ledge, and Eduardo aims to be ‘academically speaking at the top of studies’.
3 Practice-focussed development (PraFD) relates to practice – pedagogical
practice as a teacher educator. Alex wants to learn more about curriculum
theory so that he can revise ‘my module of curriculum design’, and Yvonne
want to ‘re-think what I’m doing’.
4 Research-focussed development (ResFD) relates to both research compe-
tence – how to do research – and also how to use that competence to fulfil
professional goals, such as getting published, belonging to productive
research groups, and securing a full-time job. Driven by political activism,
Diego’s planned research has a definite social justice objective, ‘allowing
voices that haven’t been heard’. And Ana says straightforwardly, ‘I want to
work in a full-time position in a university’.
5 Student teacher-focussed development (SttFD) is the outcome of the work

that teacher educators plan to do with their pre-service teachers. Juan wants
to ‘continue working with my students’, Yvonne says she will ascertain what
she ‘can do for my student teachers’, Alex will improve his curriculum
design course for the sake of his students, and Diego desires to encourage
his future English teachers to ‘generate at least a change of perspective’ with
regard to unfair conceptualizations of language in the Colombian educational
context.
Bearing in mind these five developments, the teacher educators had high
expectations of their investment to pursue further professional development.
They all perceived needs in their current working lives and articulated goals
for their future lives. These needs and goals are embodied in the reasons they
gave for deciding to embark on doctoral studies, and are thus tied to their
professional identities. Furthermore, identities are nearly always constructed
in and through emotional experience (Miller & Gkonou, 2018). For example,
Ana expressed frustration and possibly anger at the hiring university’s require-
ment for research and for not valuing her extensive teaching experience.
Diego feels ‘passionate’ about linguistic human rights. Yvonne says ‘I love
learning’, and Jenny is excited about being part of a research community. In
answer to the question, then, posed at the beginning of this section, why do
language teacher educators decide to continue their professional develop-
ment, in this case, in the form of formal teacher education?, it is to invest in
further education to meet needs and achieve goals and to develop personally
and professionally in all or some of the five ways described above. It also
means investing in identity (Norton, 2013) and navigating the associated
emotions through which the identities are constructed. Although the focus in
this section has been on the experiences of a cohort of English language
teacher educators practising in Colombia, much of what was found in terms
of their reasons, identities, and desired developments is probably applicable to
language teacher educators in other contexts too.
5 Future Research on Language Teacher Educator Identity

This section offers forty questions to encourage further research into the lives
and identities of language teacher educators. The questions are not meant to be
unalterable research questions to be taken up wholeheartedly within a particular
study. Instead, I hope that they prompt reflection (and suitable adaptation) on the
part of researchers who might be interested in exploring further the field of
language teacher education, particularly the identity of language teacher educa-
tors. Language teacher educators might also wish to consult the questions for
the purposes of self-inquiring into their own professional experiences and

development. Coming up with a research topic (see Barkhuizen, 2019b) is not
simply a matter of finding a question and investigating it in one’s particular
context. Researchers need to draw on their own experience, consider their own
knowledge and skills, ascertain the appropriateness of the question to their
context, and evaluate practical conditions such as equipment and other
resources. Nevertheless, as I say, I hope that the following questions suggest
possible research topics that might be of interest and use to the scholarly work of
those working in this field. I have divided Section 5 into four parts. The first
focusses on beginning language teacher educators and suggests some key
concepts relevant to early career teacher educators that could be explored
further. The second addresses conceptualizations of language teacher educator
identity, and the next suggests questions relating to the work of teacher educa-
tors in the areas of pedagogy, research, and service. The final section concludes
this Element.
5.1 Beginning Language Teacher Educators

In this section I draw on an induction framework (Barkhuizen, 2002) that helps
to explain the early experiences of entering a new professional role. I use key
concepts from that framework to suggest the first ten questions. Becoming
a teacher educator or taking on a teacher educator role for the first time, such
as mentoring student teachers on a practicum experience or conducting a series
of professional development workshops for teachers, always leads to a certain
amount of tension or instability in the teacher educators’ lives. Bateson (1972)
refers to instability in life in general, saying that people are self-corrective
systems. By this he means that people adjust to instability or transitions in
order to achieve equilibrium. In other words, when people experience ‘disequi-
librium’ or instability in their lives, they strive to self-correct in order to once
again achieve stability.
I have used the term coping in educational contexts to describe this self-
correction, which could be cognitive (e.g., rationalizing or attempting to under-
stand the situation) or an activity (e.g., doing something about the cause of the
instability). Coping can be of two kinds. The first is instability-reducing, which
describes thinking or actions that reduce or constrain perceived instability in
educational contexts.
Q1: What do institution-based language teacher educators do to reduce

instability in their institutional lives during their first year as a teacher educa-
tor? How does what they do relate to their developing teacher educator
identity?
Q2: How do teacher educators cope in achieving their pedagogical aims in
linguistically diverse classes of pre-service English teachers? How does their

developing teacher educator identity relate to their coping?
Instability could also be prevented before it occurs. This thinking or activity is

therefore referred to as instability-preventing, and occurs in situations where one
anticipates a state of tension or instability and acts to prevent it before it occurs.
Q3: What strategies do language teacher educators employ in their pedagogy

when their language is different from the institutional medium of instruction,
and different from the language of the majority of their student teachers? What
do their instability-preventing strategies say about their perceptions of their
and their teachers’ identities?
Q4: What effect does an unexpected, sudden curriculum change (e.g., moving
teacher training online; implementing a new assessment regime) have on the
planning and practices of a teacher educator? How does it affect their emotions
and sense of self-efficacy?
Fairclough (1989), referring to his concept of discourse, says that ‘each

discourse type establishes its particular set of subject positions, which those
who operate within it are constrained to occupy’ (p. 102). I refer to this process
as conforming. Conforming implies change; there is a movement towards fitting
in, towards doing something differently or, perhaps, towards becoming like
someone else. This means that although teacher educators may not intend to act
in a certain way, or may not have expected to act in some way, they do, and these
actions become recurring in their lives as teacher educators.
Q5: How does a language teacher educator new to a particular context display
conforming practices during their first semester or year as a teacher educator,
or over the course of a professional development programme? What effect does
this have on their professional identity?
Q6: How does the conforming of language teacher educators vary over the
course of their careers? Do their identities align with their changing levels of
conforming?
Generating is the development of new beliefs or practices that are part of the
working life of teacher educators. To generate is to try something new, to try
some alternative or something opposite to one’s established, usual patterns of
practice. Teacher educators innovate all the time, sometimes consciously and
sometimes unconsciously, especially during the early part of their careers as
they learn about teacher education and construct new identities. To prevent or
reduce instability is not to generate; that would be coping.
Q7: How does teaching a particular language teaching innovation to student

teachers unfold over time in a teacher education course or programme? What is

the role and responsibility of the teacher educator, and what identities are
exposed and hidden during the innovation process?
Q8: What risks are involved in not being seen to be a generating language
teacher educator (e.g., personal, professional, institutional)? What are the
advantages of being recognized as a generating language teacher
educator?
I use the term opposing to refer to thinking and acting that goes against the
existing system (or agenda or ground rules) of the institutional workplace or its
professional teacher education practices, negating them and valuing their
opposite. This thinking and acting, however, stays within the existing frame-
work: the teacher educator operates or opposes within the existing system. If,
for example, the practice of a teacher education department is to require its
faculty to use only English in its classes, and a teacher educator believes that
would be unfair on some student teachers and a waste of class time and therefore
decides not to follow this rule, this would be opposing activity.
Q9: How might practising opposing behaviour make a language teacher

educator feel as a professional? How do these opposing acts become visible
to teacher educators’ colleagues in a programme and how do they make them
feel?
Q10: Do poor student teacher evaluations lead to opposing practices from
language teacher educators? What are some sources of opposing thinking
and activity in a teacher education programme?
Resisting means thinking and acting differently, rejecting the existing system
(or agenda or ground rules) of the institutional workplace or its professional
teacher education practices, and at the same time actively attempting to change
the system. So, resisting is going a step further than opposing. To continue with
the English-only example, if the opposing teacher educator manages to con-
vince the whole department of the futility of the practice, and the department
decides to discontinue the requirement of using only English in its classes, then
the teacher educator would have exhibited resisting practices.
Q11: Does foregrounding language teacher educator’s social identities ‘open

up new spaces for agency and critique of existing structures, and create new
possibilities for the ways in which our students understand themselves and
enact their teaching’ (Peercy et al., 2019, p. 12)?
Q12: Reform, re-structuring, and re-organizing are words often heard in the
corridors of neoliberal institutions of higher education. How might language
teacher educators become involved in such activities or how and why might they
actively resist participation?
5.2 Defining Language Teacher Educators

In my edited book, Reflections on Language Teacher Identity Research
(Barkhuizen, 2017), I thematically analyzed all the chapters in which the forty-
one authors reflected on their perceptions of language teacher identity in their area
of scholarly expertise, to produce a composite conceptualization of teacher iden-
tity – a broad ‘definition’ that aimed to capture the various theoretical perspectives
on language teacher identity drawn from the ideas in the chapters. The conceptu-
alization captures many of the ideas relating to language teacher educator identity
presented so far in this Element, so I present it here, slightly adapted (p. 4):
Language teacher educator identities are cognitive, social, emotional, ideo-

logical, and historical – they are both inside the teacher and outside in the
social, material and technological world. Language teacher educator iden-

tities are being and doing, feeling and imagining, and storying. They are
struggle and harmony: they are contested and resisted, by self and others, and
they are also accepted, acknowledged and valued, by self and others. They are
core and peripheral, personal and professional, they are dynamic, multiple,
and hybrid, and they are foregrounded and backgrounded. And language
teacher educator identities change, short-term and over time – discursively
in social interaction with pre- and in-service teachers, other teacher educa-
tors, language learners, administrators, and the wider community, and in
material interaction with spaces, places and objects in classrooms, institu-
tions, and online.
I suggest in the book that this composite conceptualization be interpreted

variously from different theoretical perspectives as well as from different
contextual realities (e.g., spaces where teacher education and language teaching
are practised). Here I suggest in addition that the conceptualization serves as
a stimulus to generate research questions in these contexts, and list the follow-
ing as possible avenues for further investigation.
Q13: How are language teacher educators perceived by colleagues in other

disciplines and by management in their institutions? What professional iden-
tities are ascribed to them, and how does this make them feel?
Q14: How do language teacher educators’ intersecting identities inform who
they are in the classroom and how does this shape what they do and how they
are perceived by their student teachers?
Q15: In what ways do language teacher educators ‘story’ their professional
experiences? What do the stories they tell about their teaching, research, and
service say about their identities at particular times and in particular places?
Q16: What would a typology of language teacher educators look like? Who
would be included and who would be excluded? What would the selection
criteria be?
Q17: What are the main similarities and differences between a language teacher
identity and a language teacher educator identity? How do we find out?
Q18: How should induction programmes for new language teacher educators
take into account their professional identities? What should institutions do to
acknowledge and work with their identities in the planning and implementation
of these programmes?
Q19: How feasible is it for language teacher educators to use ‘identity as an
organizing framework to understand their practices and potential venues for
ongoing growth’ (Yazan, 2018, p. 152)? What do language teacher educators
find the strengths and limitations of this approach to be?
Q20: Teacher educators’ identities are ‘struggle and harmony’. In a world
where social justice and well-being are becoming more embedded in
institutional policies and professional practices, how do language teacher

educators ensure that they take care of themselves in the course of their teacher
education work?
5.3 Being Language Teacher Educators

I categorize this final set of questions according to the four domains of language
teacher educators’ identity work illustrated in Figure 1 (see Section 3.3).
5.3.1 Pedagogy
Q21: How does and what type of student teacher engagement in the activities
assigned and mediated by language teacher educators influence what and how
they learn? What role does the teacher educators’ identity play in this pedagogy?
Q22: How do language teacher educators make space for and legitimize student
teachers’ voices in their teacher education classes? What is their approach to
opening up these spaces and how do they negotiate for their own professional
identities to enter those spaces?
Q23: What approaches do language teacher educators use to ensure their
student teachers develop the knowledge and skills necessary to apply their
teaching education learning to their real-school language learning contexts?
Q24: How are language teacher educators ‘complicit in maintaining structures
and discourses that produce and reproduce inequities’ (Peercy et al., 2019, p. 12)?
What do their identities have to do with this?
Q25: What metaphors are used to describe the teaching practices and peda-
gogical identities of language teacher educators?
5.3.2 Research
Q26: How important is a researcher identity to language teacher educators

working in different roles (e.g., mentor of practicum student teachers, research
supervisor, university academic) in different contexts?
Q27: How do language teacher educators balance institutional requirements
and responsibilities and personal desires and preferences with regard to
research activity, engagement, and productivity? How do their researcher
identity and pedagogy identity interrelate?
Q28: How does self-study (Peercy & Sharkey, 2020) contribute to a deeper
understanding of the language teacher educator as practitioner and researcher
over a period of time?
Q29: How do interactions between student teacher researchers and teacher

educator (research supervisory meetings, mediations, consultations) lead to learn-
ing about research? What kind of learning emerges from the interactions? What
identities do language teacher educators negotiate during these interactions?
Q30: To what extent do very experienced researchers with little to no inter-
action with classroom language teachers or pre-service teachers identify as
language teacher educators?
5.3.3 Institutional Service and Leadership
Q31: In higher education institutional settings, in what ways are language

teacher educators ‘a particular type of academic’ (Murray & Male, 2005)?
What is it that they do that makes them different from other academics?
Q32: How does a language teacher educator become a manager of
a programme, department, or school, and how do they practise as a manager
and feel about being a manager? Does managing distance them from their
teacher educator identities?
Q33: How is ‘service’ defined in a particular programme or institution, and
how does this definition apply to language teacher educators compared with
colleagues in other disciplines? Is there such a thing as a language teacher
educator service identity?
Q34: How might a language teacher educator lead the design of a teacher
education programme that, being committed to social justice and equity in
language teaching, takes into account ‘why we teach languages, what lan-
guages we teach, and how we teach languages’ (Gao, 2019, p. 165)?

Q35: How can language teacher educators instil in their teachers the import-
ance of making a service contribution to their courses, programmes and institu-
tions? Should they, and what might the nature of these service contributions be?
5.3.4 Community Service and Leadership
Q36: ‘The impact of globalization has in recent years given rise to a healthy
debate in TESOL regarding the peculiar nature of English as a global language,
its imperialist features (both colonial and neo-imperialist) and its impact
worldwide’ (Hayes, 2005, p. 190). How does the meaning of this statement
influence the community work of a language teacher educator or team of
educators working in a particular geopolitical context?
Q37: What do language teacher educators gain from participating in local
language teacher conferences and how can they contribute?
Q38: What are the experiences of language teacher educators who have
contributed to language-in-education policy debates at government level?
How did they contribute, and what were the outcomes? How were they per-
ceived by stakeholders from outside the educational context?
Q39: What kind of work do language teacher educators do in professional
language teaching associations? What is the perceived value of their contribu-
tions and how are they perceived by other members?
Q40: How important is it to have ‘good leaders’ for the development of the
language teaching profession? What do language teacher educators have to do
to become those leaders?
PERSONAL NARRATIVE 5: DEVELOPING A RESEARCHER IDENTITY

When do you feel you are a researcher? At what point in your career do
you think that part of what you do as a professional is research? That you
have a researcher identity? These are questions I constantly ask myself,
even after many years of being a teacher educator and doing research.
I had to do research to gain a doctorate. When I was a high school teacher
(post-doctorate) I did no research – I was too busy teaching English. When
I got my first full-time university position I had to do research – it was in
my contract. When did this having to do research cross over to being
something that I did because it was my choice or because I saw a need or
a gap to be filled? When I did my doctoral research I thoroughly enjoyed it.
I investigated the classroom experiences of a first-year ESL teacher during
the first six weeks of her teaching career in a New York City high school.
I was fascinated. I couldn’t wait to observe her classes and to interview
her. I loved analyzing the transcripts, word by word, and found the
writing-up process intriguing (why do it this way and not that way?).
I didn’t think at the time I was fulfilling any particular need, or making any
contributions to anything. I was doing the research for a qualification,
learning a lot in the process, and, incidentally, being of some support to the
new teacher during a particularly challenging time for her. A few years
later I was living in South Africa during the time apartheid was being
dismantled. Educational institutions were becoming racially integrated,
and therefore multilingual, including schools and universities. This situ-
ation was therefore ripe for linguistic investigation, and there was an
urgent need to understand what was happening in these institutions to
inform policy and curriculum decisions. My research attention therefore
turned to investigating the language practices and learning in these insti-
tutions. Of course I found the research interesting, but this time I was
responding to a need (and, since I was working at a university, I was also

fulfilling my institutional research obligations). The balancing of passion
and need – a personal desire and interest in research, and an obligation or
response to a societal or educational need – is a constant tension in my
researcher identity. The ideal way to resolve the passion versus need
dilemma is to focus on research questions that achieve both; that is, they
ask about topics one is passionate about and they also fulfil some commu-
nity or institutional need. This is a balance I have tried to achieve through-
out my research career. It is what keeps my researcher identity vital, it
allows for easy and useful transfer of my research findings to my teacher
education pedagogy, and it maintains my motivation to keep on
researching.
5.4 Conclusion
To conclude this Element I return to the beginning, where I declared that
language teacher educators teach teachers how to teach language, and com-
mented that although this statement sounds somewhat simple, a closer examin-
ation immediately raises questions; questions to do with the teachers who
participate in teacher education, the contexts in which teacher education occurs,
and the language teacher educators who are pivotal in the whole process. This
Element has attempted to address some of these questions, and may even have
answered some along the way. What it has shown is that the lives of language
teacher educators are extremely varied. Any one teacher educator working
across time and place will change the work they do, and in the process they
too will change. And different teacher educators working in different contexts
can be doing very different things but all call themselves language teacher
educators. Characteristic of their work is pedagogy, research, and service
(institutional and community), and working across these domains with their
own communities means that teacher educators are constantly negotiating their
multiple identities to position themselves where they want to be or do not want
to be. At the same time they are being positioned by others – their student
teachers, colleagues, and institutions. This Element has tried to show what
identities language teacher educators construct in this process, how these relate
to the different types of language teacher educators there are in the field, and
what sort of work teacher educators do as they construct and enact their
identities. A number of researchers have commented that language teacher
educators have been neglected in the research literature in language teaching
and learning. I hope that this Element has highlighted the need to focus attention
on the work they do and signalled the broad scope of scholarly potential that
exists to be investigated, particularly that in relation to the development of their
identities. Perhaps the forty questions asked in Section 5 give some indication of
the way forward.
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Acknowledgements
Thank you to the language teacher educators from Colombia and to Harold
Castañeda-Peña for his collaboration. Thanks also to Manka Varghese and
Jagadish Paudel for sharing documents and conversations, and to the two
reviewers of the manuscript for their careful reading and useful comments.
Heath Rose, Linacre College, University of Oxford

Heath Rose is an Associate Professor of Applied Linguistics at the University of Oxford. At
Oxford, he is course director of the MSc in Applied Linguistics for Language Teaching.
Before moving into academia, Heath worked as a language teacher in Australia and Japan in
both school and university contexts. He is author of numerous books, such as Introducing
Global Englishes, The Japanese Writing System, Data Collection Research Methods in
Applied Linguistics, and Global Englishes for Language Teaching. Heath’s research interests
are firmly situated within the field of second language teaching, and include work on Global
Englishes, teaching English as an international language, and English Medium Instruction.
Jim McKinley, University College London

Jim McKinley is an Associate Professor of Applied Linguistics and TESOL at UCL, Institute of
Education, where he serves as Academic Head of Learning and Teaching. His major research
areas are second language writing in global contexts, the internationalisation of higher
education, and the relationship between teaching and research. Jim has edited or authored
numerous books including the Routledge Handbook of Research Methods in Applied
Linguistics, Data Collection Research Methods in Applied Linguistics, and Doing Research in
Applied Linguistics. He is also an editor of the journal, System. Before moving into
academia, Jim taught in a range of diverse contexts including the US, Australia, Japan and
Uganda.
Advisory Board
Brian Paltridge, University of Sydney
Gary Barkhuizen, University of Auckland
Marta Gonzalez-Lloret, University of Hawaii
Li Wei, UCL Institute of Education
Victoria Murphy, University of Oxford
Diane Pecorari, City University of Hong Kong

Christa Van der Walt, Stellenbosch University
About the Series

This Elements series aims to close the widening gap between researchers and
practitioners by allying research with language teaching practices, in its exploration
of research-informed teaching, and teaching-informed research. The series builds
upon a rich history of pedagogical research in its exploration of new insights within
the field of language teaching.
Elements in the Series
Gary Barkhuizen
A full series listing is available at: www.cambridge.org/ELAT


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Barkhuizen

The author examines who language teacher educators are in

Language Teacher Educator Identity

About the Series Series Editors

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108874083 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Cover image: EduLeite/E+/Getty Images ISSN 2632-4415 (online)

Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge.

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of

Elements in Language Teaching

Keywords: language teacher educator, identity

© Gary Barkhuizen 2021

1 Who Are Language Teacher Educators? 1

2 Teacher Educators Reﬂecting on Their Identity 16

3 What Do Language Teacher Educators Do? 34

4 Further Professional Development of Language Teacher

5 Future Research on Language Teacher Educator Identity 65

1 Who Are Language Teacher Educators?

region but also more widely.

from a study that explored the shifting identities of experienced language

1.1 The Aim and Organization of This Element

identities, followed by a discussion of the work they do in relation to their

Yazan & Lindahl, 2020). The range of perspectives, reﬂected in methodological

micro-level dimensions of language teaching and learning. De Costa and

that Freeman (2016) makes:

1 Language teacher education: this is the superordinate term describing

development consists of all natural learning experiences and those conscious

1.2 Who Are Language Teacher Educators?

obvious language teacher educators.

PERSONAL NARRATIVE 1: STARTING TO TEACH

Topics ranged from introductory syntax and phonetics, to language and

1 Role: Academic leader

2 Role: Academic position

3 Role: Academic teacher educator position

4 Role: Teacher educator position

These teacher educators identify strongly as teacher educators, though they

5 Role: Academic and supervisor of student research

6 Role: Teacher trainer

7 Role: Mentor of teacher research

– Provide emotional and professional support.

Mentors identify as caring collaborators working closely with teacher-

8 Role: Mentor for teachers on internship or practicum

– Manage the programme collaboration between school and

9 Role: Mentor for in-service teachers in schools

projects identify as facilitators or consultants with the relevant knowledge and

10 Role: School-based teacher educator

Mentors potentially identify as ‘parent’ or ‘guardian’, and also as role model.

11 Role: Co-operating teacher

12 Role: Graduate teaching assistant

language education focussed.

13 Role: Teacher educator and language teacher

– Perform teacher educator functions at higher education

14 Role: Teacher of English or of English for speciﬁc or academic

institutions. Some may engage in practitioner research, or collaborate with

1.3 Deﬁnitions of Language Teacher Educators

many ﬁeld- and school-based educators also participate in teacher education

These broad deﬁnitions provide a backdrop to the language teacher educator

2 Teacher Educators Reﬂecting on Their Identity

PERSONAL NARRATIVE 2: STUDYING ABROAD

department at Rhodes University. This involved conducting the same