Teacher Educators and Expansive Learning in the Workplace and Beyond

Murray, Jean; Kidd, Warren; McMahon, Andrea; Viswarajan, Sheeba

doi:10.3389/feduc.2020.00084

ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Educ., 30 June 2020

Sec. Teacher Education

Volume 5 - 2020 | https://doi.org/10.3389/feduc.2020.00084

This article is part of the Research Topic Expansive Learning in Teacher Education View all 8 articles

Teacher Educators and Expansive Learning in the Workplace and Beyond

$\nJean Murray$ Jean Murray^*

Warren Kidd

Andrea McMahon

Sheeba Viswarajan

The Cass School of Education and Communities, University of East London, London, United Kingdom

Research on the professional learning of teacher educators is a relatively young and under-researched area, despite the importance of this occupational group in the fast-changing area of teacher education internationally. Past provision for learning has often focused on either one-off professional development events or workplace learning. Aiming to develop new knowledge and understanding of professional learning for teacher educators, this article attempts firstly, to analyse the impact of a one-off learning event, offered by the European InFo-TED group, on its participants, and secondly, to look at where and how the learning generated there developed further learning back in the workplace. Deploying a conceptual framework emphasizing participatory professional learning and Engestrom's concept of expansive learning, we explore how these two forms of learning might be planned and implemented in order to provide integrated, professionally relevant and enduring forms of learning.

Introduction

Professional learning across the career-course is clearly essential for ensuring the on-going relevance of the practice of all professionals and of the organizations in which they work. Yet research on such learning for teacher educators, working in higher education institutions, is a relatively young and under-researched area (Lunenberg et al., 2014; Vanderlinde et al., 2017); this situation is in contrast to the wealth of research on the professional development of school teachers. This deficit still persists, despite some advances in the area of teacher educators' learning over the last decade. Some of these advances have been in Europe, through the work of the InFo-TED project, described in this article, and the work of a Research and Development Community within the Association for Teacher Education in Europe (ATEE). Both of these groups have developed alternative conceptualizations of professional learning and development for teacher educators (see, for example, Kelchtermans et al., 2017), which have been influential increasing understanding of professional growth for this distinctive occupational group, central to the teaching of teachers, as we outline below.

This article attempts firstly, to analyse the impact of a one-off learning event on its participants, and secondly, to look at where and how the learning generated there developed further learning back in the workplace. Our overall aim is to develop new knowledge and understanding of how these two types of learning might be planned and implemented in order to provide integrated, professionally relevant and enduring forms of learning. We plan to achieve this aim by, firstly making reference to the specific learning opportunities offered by a Summer Academy—a one-off, face-to-face, structured learning event, planned, organized and implemented within the InFo-TED project for teacher educators from across participating European countries. We then look at how such a one-off learning opportunity, in a setting far from the workplace and the daily practices of the attending teacher educators' working lives, has led to further experiential learning in those workplaces.

To explore this learning, the article draws upon two general evaluations of the InFo-TED Summer Academy (Kelchtermans and Deketelaere, 2019; Rust and Berry, 2019), enhanced by further data in the form of auto-ethnographical reflections, vignettes and journals of Summer Academy participants (Kidd et al., 2019). By using these additional date sources, we seek to situate some of the teacher educator's professional learning within the workplace context of England, a country which has undergone very significant “reforms” in its teacher education system in the last decade. This article begins, however, by exploring the occupational group of teacher educators internationally and our conceptual framework for professional learning, influenced by the work of Engeström (2001, 2005) and Engeström and Sannino (2010).

Teacher Educators

In a recent European Commission report, teacher educators were defined as

“all those who guide teaching staff at all stages in their careers, model good practice, and undertake the key research that develops our understanding of teaching and learning” (European Commission, 2013, p. 2).

This inclusive definition of teacher educators has been particularly influential in recognizing the importance of those who mentor and support student teachers in schools. Nevertheless, internationally, many of those explicitly recognized as teacher educators are still working in higher education, and it is this part of the occupational group which is foregrounded in this article.

Teacher educators, of course, have distinctive roles, identities, pedagogies and practices as “teachers of teachers” (Loughran, 2006) or as “second order practitioners” (Murray, 2002; Murray and Male, 2005). They work with adults who are intending teachers in what may be conceptualized as second order contexts (Murray, 2002), that is in spaces where teacher educators are teaching teachers Because they are a distinctive group teaching those who are intending or serving teachers, it follows that their professional learning needs are necessarily distinct from those of teachers. This is not least because their distinctive attributes often include a fundamental identity shift from the first order context (teaching in schools or colleges) to the second (Murray, 2002; Murray and Male, 2005).

In their second order working context teacher educators need to be able to generate a second level of thought about teaching, one that focuses not (only) on content, but also on how to teach teaching itself (Loughran, 2014). As Russell (1997, p. 55) identifies, a fundamental aspect of teacher educators' teaching is the need to focus on “the pedagogical turn” in teacher education, or “realising that how we teach teachers may send much more influential messages than what we teach them.” To put this in another way, the work of teacher educators as “teachers of teachers” includes a unique body of knowledge that requires them to move beyond seeing teaching as solely “doing” and “transferring” what has been learned in previous work experiences or study (Loughran, 2014).

Certainly, enabling and facilitating learning about teaching is a key task for teacher educators, but in addition to being a “teacher of teachers,” they have other professional roles (Lunenberg et al., 2014) or sub-identities (Vanassche et al., 2015)—as researchers, scholars, coaches, mentors, gatekeepers, managers, administrators and curriculum developers, not least. This is not to say that teacher educators fulfil all these roles at any one time; nor do these roles belong to specific career phases, as Kelchtermans et al. (2017) identify. Instead, these roles need to be perceived as inter-related to the different and often varied contexts for work and the different relationships formed during that complex, multi-faceted, changing and changeable work. Ellis et al. (2013) claim that teacher educators are “a troublesome category of academic workers' (p. 267), being both practitioners and academics, with working conditions that often differ from those of other academics, not least in the close contact with the field of schooling they often maintain. Like the teachers they teach, they are often subject to frequent and sometimes radical policy changes. Most teacher educators see themselves as researchers and scholars, although their degrees of actual engagement in research production and their “researcherly dispositions” vary (Tack and Vanderlinde, 2014, 2016). Time to engage in research and the intellectual capital and resources to do such work are often limited, especially where teacher educators come into higher education without doctorates of equivalent experience of sustained research. All of these aspects of work influence the professional learning needs of the occupational group.

Professional Learning

In this article, for the most part, we use the phrase “professional learning” rather than “professional development,” although both terms are in common usage internationally, and indeed much of the work of InFo-TED uses the latter term. This choice is made is for a number of reasons: professional development can imply a passive act of being “done unto” in terms of receiving knowledge from others; it is now clear that passive learning alone does not reliably create changes in practices (Borko, 2004; Smith, 2010; Stewart, 2014); many professional development practices still focus on delivering content rather than enhancing learning (Webster-Wright, 2017); consequently there has been what Webster-Wright (2017, p. 23) describes as “a shift in discourse and focus from delivering and evaluating professional development programs to understanding and supporting authentic professional learning” (Webster-Wright, 2017) within collaborative practice (Stewart, 2014); and finally, our conceptual framework for this article involves emphases on Engestrom's (Stewart, 2014) concept of expansive learning, as an active and open form of learning. In summary, learning in a professional community is often considered to be more effective than traditional professional development methods now (Stewart, 2014; Webster-Wright, 2017).

Yet for teacher educators, importance may still be placed upon one-off, face-to-face, short term learning events (such as induction or research workshops), despite the fact that such formal learning provision alone is unlikely to exert a major impact on teacher educators' development (Czerniawski et al., 2017). We do, however, acknowledge the importance of some one-off professional learning events for organizational stability and growth and for focused individual development, but we argue that this in itself is not sufficient. This is in part because the very limited number of studies of teacher educators' professional learning indicate how important formal and informal learning in the workplace is (see, for example, Murray and Male, 2005; Boyd et al., 2011; Lunenberg et al., 2014) since it takes place in professionally and personally relevant contexts and often involves experiential learning. This is defined here as being learning which takes place alongside work, but is not the primary goal of that work. Workplace learning for teacher educators, however, is not well-theorized compared to the strength and depth of theorization found in other professional fields (McNamara et al., 2014). This, we argue, is a real omission in knowledge of teacher educators' professional learning since it is vital to consider this occupational group as both workers/employees and learners/scholars.

Engeström (2001, 2005); Engeström and Sannino (2010) highly influential definitions of expansive learning may be seen as influencing changing conceptions in three areas of professional learning: the nature of the learning and knowledge itself; the processes of knowledge generation and consequently learning; and the contexts in which such learning can take place. In terms of knowledge itself Engestrom argues that that there is “a new generation of expertise around, not based on supreme and supposedly stable individual knowledge and ability, but on the capacity of working communities to cross boundaries, negotiate, and improvise” (Engeström, 2005, p. 145). Expansive learning is a social and communal act, involving the creation of that new professional knowledge. Here, such learning is opposed to the metaphor of “learning as acquisition” (Sfard, 1998), that is the individual or communal learner's acquisition of stable and pre-existing knowledge which was previously unknown to them.

Engeström's emphasis rather uses the metaphor “learning as participation” and attributes the difference between these two metaphors for learning to the question: Is the learner to be understood primarily as an individual or as a community?' This emphasis on learning through participation in activity systems (Engeström, 2001, 2005; Engeström and Sannino, 2010) in some ways mirrors similar emphases within the work of Lave and Wenger (1991) who talk of participation in a community of practice) or Billett (2001, 2004) who explores learning through workplace participatory practices. For Engestrom, heterogeneous groups of learners grow and learn together, influenced by the characteristics of the participating individuals, including their previous work experiences, their professional and personal values and their pre-existing knowledges (sic). Heterogeneity within groups is particularly important as this enables new collaborations through the crossing of pre-existing professional boundaries and the sharing and creating of differing types of knowledges (sic), experiences and points of view. This generation of new knowledge involves new expertise which Engestom terms “knotworking”; his “integrative characterization” for the new type of expertise is “collaborative and transformative expertise” (2005, p. 161). Where solutions are required, engaging in these processes facilitates the discovery of new approaches. Engeström (2005) then sees expansive learning resulting in three types of change: transformed practices; novel theoretical conceptualizations; and a new (or renewed) sense of agency.

The InFo-TED Group

The InFo-TED group was initially established in 2013 by four experienced teacher educators and researchers—Kari Smith from Norway, Mieke Lunenberg from the Netherlands, Ruben Vanderlinde from Belgium and Jean Murray from the UK. This founding group judged it timely to highlight the importance of teacher educators and the complexity of their professional learning internationally. By early 2019 InFo-TED had expanded to become an active group of 20 teacher educator researchers from six European countries (Belgium, the Netherlands, Norway, England, Scotland, Ireland). In addition, the group draws on the expertise of the Mofet Institute in Israel and has other external members from the USA and Australia. From 2016–2019 InFo-TED received grants through the Erasmus + funding stream. In general, Info-TED now disseminates ideas, knowledge and research about teacher educators' professional learning through face-to-face events and a website https://info-ted.eu/.

Design Principles for the InFo-TED Project

In 2017 nine members of the InFo-TED group co-wrote an internal document (Vanderlinde et al., 2017) with the goal of describing the underlying general design principles that the Council intended to use for the development of the two main outcomes of its Erasmus+ project. These outcomes were: first, a European Summer Academy for teacher educators; and second, a website and a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) for the same group. In this article we focus only on the first of these goals but we intend to report on part of the second in a future publication.

The design principles were based on two pieces of research: the first, a conceptual model developed by the group in 2015/16 (see Kelchtermans et al., 2017); and the second, empirical research in the form of a survey (Czerniawski et al., 2017). The design principles were deliberately made general, with the intention of contextualizing them in the next phase of the project, the Summer Academy event which is one of the major focuses of this article.

The conceptual model for teacher educators' professional learning provided a shared language that was essential before colleagues from different national contexts were able to engage in collaborative research, improvement of practice and discussions with policy makers. Like this article, the model foregrounds teacher educators' professional learning in and through their practices (Kelchtermans et al., 2017). This “practice-based approach”—instead of a “blueprint approach” (Vanderlinde et al., 2017)—started from a positive appreciation of the practices through which teacher educators “enact” their professionalism as they undertake their daily work; these practices reveal “who” a teacher educator is, and what they stand for since the professional self or identity is reflected in their actions. As Kelchtermans (2013) states, the teacher educator as such only “emerges” through practice, which in turn is generated within and by the (different) contexts for teacher educators' work.

The empirical research on which the design principles were based was a large survey (1,158 participants) of higher education-based European teacher educators' learning needs (Czerniawski et al., 2017). The participants worked in Belgium (Flanders), Ireland, Israel, the Netherlands, Norway and the UK. In general, the findings suggest that teacher educators had “a strong desire” for further professional learning of two types: first, learning relevant to activities inherently linked to day-to-day work; second, learning relevant to career progression in academia. In the latter, there was a strong focus on addressing research and writing skills. Overall, these teacher educators preferred learning with and from colleagues and viewed professional learning communities as the best form of learning. There was also a strong preference for professional learning opportunities that were continuous and adapted to individual needs and contexts, rather than traditional one-size-fits-all provision such as generic courses and workshops.

Working from these two pieces of research, the core didactical focus of the InFo-TED project became the exchange of practices amongst teacher educators in order to create networks and communities of practice and learning. Nine design principles (Vanderlinde et al., 2017, p. 5) were distinguished: (1) ownership of content and process, (2) work in professional learning communities, (3) knowing each other and sharing, (4) informal and formal learning at the workplace, (5) attention for teacher educators' multi-layered and multiple identities, (6) changing practices takes time, (7) take into account the pressures on teacher educators' time, (8) forming networks, and (9) striving for integration. As the summary below indicates these principles certainly influenced the design and implementation of the Summer Academy.

The Summer Academy Within the InFo-TED Project

The goals of the Summer Academy, partially supported at the time by the Virtual Learning Environment (VLE), were: the dissemination of the conceptual model for teacher educators' professional learning and the evidence-based experiences of InFo-TED; the collaborative professional development of the 42 participating teacher educators; the stimulation of pan-European networks; and the instigation of collaborative research and practice within these networks.

The Summer Academy aimed to build upon its diverse participants' viewpoints, professional experiences and learning needs in order to create an integrated learning experience. Pedagogic principles central to the design included: giving opportunities for teacher educators to work in professional learning communities (here these were considered to be both the full group of 42 participants and stable, small groups of six or seven individuals meeting at least once daily over the week-long programme). Within these communities, it was seen as important to create open and safe learning climates in which relationships based on professional trust could be built, and where multi-layered and multiple identities were recognized, and honesty, openness and personal values were respected. A further aim was to foster a growing sense of ownership of the resultant professional learning amongst all the attending teacher educators.

The final design aimed for a balance between plenary presentations, lectures and whole group discussions on the one hand and working in smaller groups on the other, with all teaching, facilitating and presenting methods reflecting the “teach-as-you-preach”-principle. There was then a formal “curriculum” for the Academy in which research-based theoretical and pedagogical models were introduced to participants, but there were also many opportunities for individuals to discuss their own experiences and reflections and to debate and contest the curriculum content, including the concepts and research findings. The timetable, for example, balanced time for informal meetings and exchanges among participants with the formal presentations, plenaries and group work. Overall, one further aim was to achieve an integrated form of professional learning which modeled a variety of pedagogies relevant to teacher educators and teacher education.

As indicated above, preparations for the Academy included the design of the VLE in a private part of the wider InFo-TED website. Only Summer Academy attendees could log in to access this VLE, which was intended to support interactions both before and after the Academy. This online tool was designed to be collaborative, interactive and asynchronous, following existing models for online professional development (see, inter alia, Fichtman et al., 2016; Murray and Kidd, 2016).

As with all the other preparations for the Summer Academy, the VLE was also driven by InFo-TED's previous conceptual and empirical work on professional learning. In theory then, through the carefully constructed and inter-active “spaces” within the VLE, participants were able to collaborate and interact across local, national and professional “boundaries.”

Contexts for This Study

The Data

As we have stated above, our overall aim in this article is to develop new knowledge and understanding in relation to teacher educators' professional learning, specifically analyzing the effects of a one-off, formal learning opportunity, in a setting far from the workplace and the daily practices of the attending teacher educators' working lives, and the ways in which this has led to further experiential learning in the workplace.

In terms of data the article draws upon two evaluations of the Summer Academy, firstly Kelchtermans and Deketelaere (2019), an internal evaluation document written for the group's consideration, and secondly, the full, public project evaluation (Rust and Berry, 2019). The data collection strategy for the internal evaluation used various tools to collect perspectives from all groups involved in the Academy (for example, InFo-TED Council members, facilitators, presenters and the participants) throughout the process of preparation, design, implementation and follow-up. Those data collection tools included documentary analysis, field notes from participant observation, informal reflective interviews and ‘public video selfies' from each participant. At the end of most days, participants were asked to make private video recordings in English on their phones, addressing questions for structured reflection such as, what has struck me today? What unexpected new insight/thought did I have today? And what is today's main impact on me as a teacher educator (developer)? (Kelchtermans and Deketelaere, 2019, p. 3). These private recordings were not used in the evaluation process, but at the end of the week, all participants were asked to make a “public video selfie,” a 5-minute recording drawing on their previous videos to summarize their professional learning experiences. These “public videos” did become part of the data set for the evaluation.

Part of Rust and Berry's report aimed to analyse the impact of the Academy on participants' learning after 3 and 6 months. It drew on all the internal evaluation data cited above, but additionally, it analyzed the evaluative Letters to Oneself which participants wrote at the end of the Academy, further communications with eleven participants, and the retrospective interviews held with five interviewees, each representing a different country (for further details see Rust and Berry, 2019). The interview data was collected twice at 3- and 6-month intervals after the Summer Academy. The evaluation does not report the data analysis methods used.

We have added to the data from these two reports in the form of auto-ethnographical reflections, vignettes and journals from Academy participants from England, as collated and recorded in Kidd et al. (2019). By using these additional date sources, we seek to situate some of the teacher educators' professional learning within the context of England, a country which has undergone very significant “reforms” in its teacher education system. Essentially, we locate the accounts of two Summer Academy participants from England and two InFo-TED Council members, one of whom (JM) attended the Academy as a facilitator, within wider and recent calls for a renewed attention given to teacher educator professional learning in England (Czerniawski and Kidd, 2018). In writing this article, we adopt a range of complex positionalities then; we are variously experienced and inexperienced teacher educators, Summer Academy participants and project conveners, researchers, and policymakers.

One of us (AM) had only recently moved into university-based teacher education before attending the Academy (but had a wealth of experience in education management in a college setting); another (SV) had been working as a teacher educator on a pre-service science education programme for more than 7 years before the Academy event. Neither of these participants had doctorates or sustained research experience at the time of the Academy. The two Council members (WK and JM) were both experienced teacher educators, who also sometimes positioned themselves as “educators of teacher educators” (Lunenberg et al., 2016). Like AM and SV—and the vast majority of teacher educators working on pre-service programmes in England—they had also made the transition from teaching in colleges or schools into the university, that is, from first order to second order practice (Murray, 2002). Both WK and JM had been intensively involved in many aspects of the general InFo-TED project, but neither were involved in the design or evaluation of the Summer Academy.

This tranche of data was collected retrospectively (up to 18 months after the event), sometimes systematically for an earlier study (Kidd et al., 2019) and sometimes on an “ad hoc” basis. It may seem then that, in terms of conventional research, there are distinct limitations to this additional data. We acknowledge these limitations and ask that the findings below are read through the lens of that acknowledgment. We emphasize that the sample for this data tranche is very small; there was certainly no formal or extensive sampling strategy, rather we researched as a group of colleagues working and learning in the same university; only self-report data collections methods could be used because of the above factors; that data was collected and analyzed by participants in the event and/or InFo-TED Council members at that time, although that analysis was systematic (see below); and, finally, one of us, as author, is also still involved in the on-going InFo-TED project. Our positionality in this research is therefore multiple and complex.

Nevertheless, we would stress that all aspects of the research aimed for authenticity, dependability and reciprocity, as valued alternative criteria for evaluating qualitative research (Denzin and Lincoln, 2011). The data was analyzed using a collaborative approach drawing on broad procedures from both action research and self-study research traditions. Within this approach, coding strategies derived from grounded theory (Charmaz, 2014; Corbin and Strauss, 2015) were deployed for identifying key themes, with the aim of making the analysis rigorous and trustworthy.

The English Context for the Study

Because our focus in this article is specifically on professional learning for teacher educators in England, we now give a brief account of that context. From 2010 onwards teacher education experienced radical “reforms” as successive governments made wide-ranging changes to provision. In implementing these reforms, policy makers were influenced by a model of teaching as a “craft” involving limited pedagogical knowledge—beyond a subject-specialist degree (Gove, 2010)—and best learned through apprenticeship in schools. These changes were underpinned by often explicit political and professional skepticism about the value of university contributions to teacher education.

For teacher educators based in universities, these changes brought new roles and working practices, often amidst shifting forms of power relations, autonomy, and trust (Brown et al., 2015; Vanassche et al., 2019). There are multiple tensions around these new—and sometimes diverging—practices for teacher educators, involved in brokering and navigating change. In effect, teacher educators in England are often creating new practices, structures, and relationships in changing spaces as the landscape of teacher education shifts around them.

Working in teacher education in England can then be intensive and time-consuming, and to add to the complexity of this picture, as in many other countries, regulation and surveillance of teacher educators' work has increased, bringing a steep increase in management and accountability related tasks, especially in contexts which experience “policy churn.” This then is an unstable workplace in a “state of radical discontinuous change” (McNamara et al., 2014, p. 13).

Most teacher educators' work is still conducted in workplaces within the walls of universities and their partnership schools, but it is not limited to just those physical environments where they engage with their learners and colleagues daily. Research and scholarship, preparation for teaching, student assessments and administrative tasks are frequently undertaken outside normal working hours and off-premises. Additionally, there are virtual spaces for teacher educators' work and learning, clearly well-beyond their physical workplaces.

In this complex educational landscape, there are multiple imperatives for teacher educators as an occupational group to navigate in developing their knowledge of both the first and second order contexts (Murray, 2002) in which they work. Yet formal professional learning opportunities for teacher educators are often limited (Czerniawski and Kidd, 2018). Where they exist, opportunities tend to be organized around the generic needs of the university (for example, attendance at short, institutional, training events) or focused on specific, short-term outcomes. Regulation, surveillance and auditing regimes mean that designated learning outcomes can be focused on strategic compliance with government or institutional agendas rather than on the learning required for professional growth by individuals. As in other national contexts, some opportunities do exist for professional learning through attendance at subject-specific seminars and conferences, but these have been severely limited by funding restrictions during a decade of austerity and budget cuts in many UK universities (Czerniawski and Kidd, 2018).

The phrase “learning in the workplace” may suggest that there is a designated space where opportunities for “authentic” professional learning exist; this is very often not the case in English faculties of education. Although such opportunities may well exist in some workplaces, in others they are too often likely to be constrained. The pressure and pace of work for many teacher educators means then that opportunities for learning may often be restricted by the working environment (Czerniawski and Kidd, 2018). In summary, then, many teacher educators' workplaces are likely to provide restrictive learning environments, with employers and managers often not identifying that learning could be a dimension of normal working practices. Within this landscape, the importance of professional learning for teacher educators needs then to be re-emphasized.

Learning During and After the Summer Academy

Our analysis shows that the overall effect of the Academy was to offer new learning to the participating teacher educators in three areas: “identity forging,” personal practice, including teaching, research and scholarship, and the importance of professional development. This learning was initiated during the Academy but often generated new activities back in the workplace. Changes were, strikingly, underpinned by that sense of “identity forging” for all the participants but for those from English participants, in particular. Because this theme was so strong, we have chosen to focus on this first in the analysis which follows.

Identity Forging

As Kelchtermans and Deketelaere (2019, p. 3) states, in evaluating the Academy, for all the participants,

“self-understanding (sense of identity) as teacher educators constituted a red thread throughout the programme of the Summer Academy and was present—one way or another- in almost every activity, session and discussion.”

Rust and Berry (2019, p. 2) conclude similarly saying that, “the week enabled (the participants) to see and claim themselves as teacher educators. For some, this was transformative. For others, it confirmed and strengthened their identity.”

For one participant, quoted in Rust and Berry (2019, p. 2), for example, the Academy offered a “great opportunity” to reflect on professional identity and professional development. For AM the whole week was “inspiring, offering a rare chance (for) time to reflect on my own professional journey, which for me was the crossing over from being a teacher to a teacher educator in HE.” For AM, one specific session led by Geert Kelchtermans, on how teacher educators “confront their own vision and identity” was a key learning accelerator, leading to the reflection that “we have multiple identities, which often overlap and can at times create a “pedagogy of discomfort.” For AM, the “novice” teacher educator from England, this work on identity development had long term effects. As she says,

It is nearly a year since I participated in InFo-TED. During that time, I have developed more confidence in my new role and an understanding of its overlapping complexities. I am aware of the journey I am on to developing a new professional identity that reflects the nature of higher education.

Many of the planned sessions did involve discussion of deeply held personal convictions and knowledge about teacher education and teacher educators' work, so it is no surprise to find that participants' professional identity was often at stake. In both the general evaluations, (Kelchtermans and Deketelaere, 2019; Rust and Berry, 2019) participants reported that knowledge and understanding of both their own identities and the contexts within which they worked were deepened or refined. The programme seemed to have achieved this in large part because it gave opportunities for learning about the diversity of teacher education including its organization, practices and belief systems in different contexts. This happened notably through the plenary sessions and the small group work, including an on-going activity in the programme called the storylines experience. Here participants mapped their learning biographies and personal stories of becoming and being teacher educators, whilst working in mixed groups.

For VS the storylines experience meant that she worked with a diverse group, comprising “three teacher educators from Norway, one from Scotland, one from Denmark and two from Israel.” She soon realized that, although everyone was, in varying capacities, a second order practitioner involved in teacher education, they

came from diverse professional backgrounds and contexts. We all seemed to have entered teacher education at different points of our careers with different experiences and had identified different learning needs in our storylines.

In each small group it was clear that participants were meeting new people from different countries and contexts to debate, compare and contrast and critique national systems and the assumptions underlying them. In many cases participants found that the same tensions and struggles were experienced across national contexts, with identification of the tensions between what Kelchtermans and Deketelaere (2019, p. 4) call “different normative views on good (teacher) education” and personal beliefs and pedagogies leading to rich discussions of education policies and differing types of regulation and “surveillance” of teacher educators' practices. This was possible in part because the small groups, over time, created senses of community and trust, constituting “a safe and yet constructively challenging learning environment” (Kelchtermans and Deketelaere, 2019, p. 3). In the words of one participant, this contributed to the programme as a whole forming “a safe place/third space” or “an edge environment” for professional learning (Rust and Berry, 2019, p. 2).

Developing Personal Practices in Teaching and Research

Planning for the programme was informed by the knowledge that, whilst teacher educators often have diverse roles and responsibilities as we outlined earlier, being a teacher and being a researcher emerge as the two dominant, but seemingly often contradictory, roles (Cochran-Smith, 2005; Smith and Ulvik, 2018). Planning also took into account that, whilst most teacher educators want to be involved in research, the participants would be at different stages of experience and achievement—from thriving post-docs, researching and publishing regularly, to those without doctorates or experiences of sustained research engagement—and some might be struggling to balance these two roles in their daily practice. Learning opportunities to re-think the roles and their inter-connectivity were therefore very important. Whilst the empirical survey (Czerniawski et al., 2017) showed that that many teacher educators distinguished between academic/research and pedagogic/teaching professional development needs, the design principles rejected this distinction, and participants were challenged to re-think on-going dichotomies in education between research and teaching, what is sometimes referred to in shorthand terms as “the theory/practice divide.” Throughout the Academy participants were invited to ask the question “what does this mean for me in my practice?,” reflecting on how they thought their work, particularly their inter-related teaching and research roles, might change based on their learning.

Not surprisingly, one of the aims of the Academy was to provide focused “curriculum content,” reflecting current research and thinking about teacher education, deploying relevant and engaging pedagogies, in each part of the programme. Both evaluations (Kelchtermans and Deketelaere, 2019; Rust and Berry, 2019) show that this aim was achieved, with participants noting the careful choices made for each session and the high quality of the pedagogical methods in use both to provide immediate models of the “teach-as-you-preach” principle and to spark inspiration for later use in personal practice. Certain metaphors for learning and teaching used in the programme had particular and enduring resonance and power for participants; these included the “pedagogy of discomfort,” the zipper analogy for bringing together theory and practice, “voice over teaching,” and the principle of how-I-teach-is-the-message (Kelchtermans and Deketelaere, 2019). These metaphors set within the pedagogic experiences of the Academy clearly led to new understandings and conceptions of the work of teacher educators as research-active teachers of teachers, with participants talking repeatedly about possible changes to personal pedagogic practice in the internal evaluation data (Kelchtermans and Deketelaere, 2019).

For VS, Geert Kelchtermans' presentation on the zipper analogy was a powerful point of learning, part of widening her existing knowledge in new ways and enabling her “to reflect on her practice from a more informed perspective” (quoted in Kidd et al., 2019, p. 5). The diverse “micro-communities of practice” formed during the Academy repeatedly allowed her to “share interests, discuss concerns and reflect the 'zipper' analogy for bringing together the theory and practice.” She realized that,

In order to merge the theory into practice, I would need to zip them together, so professional learning requires a conscious action to be taken i.e., enacting on what I took away from the sessions. If zipping is enacting the professional learning, then would a zipper jam be such a bad thing? The jam results from conflict, unease, problematisation, and brings us to a pedagogical discomfort triggering a heightened self-awareness and close reflection. I can learn so much during this discomfort This part of the learning could … involve disconnecting from my previous learning and starting afresh.

Here VS sees new knowledge emerging from her learning experiences; previous learning is left aside or disconnected in a process which may not always be easy and may well bring pedagogical or intellectual discomfort, but the end result will be new insights into teaching. Following Engeström (2001, 2005); Engeström and Sannino (2010) conceptualisations of expansive learning, this then may be seen as the creation of new professional knowledge - not purely the learner's acquisition of pre-existing knowledge. That act of knowledge creation during the Summer Academy was supported by VS's realization that, within the micro community of practice or expansive learning environment formed by her group, diverse “professional backgrounds and spatial contexts influence(d) our interpretation of the content or the theory” of each session. As in Engestrom's conceptualization of learning then, at the Academy new knowledge was forged by working in a heterogeneous group of professionals from diverse national contexts to collaborate in discussing both the known and the unknown in teacher education practice.

This professional learning for VS also has future implications for the ways in which she teaches student teachers (often called “trainees” in England). In this she is typical of many of the participants for whom “possible changes in student teachers' learning results operated as the ultimate horizon and justification … of changes in their behavior” (Kelchtermans and Deketelaere, 2019, p. 5). Thinking about her personal learning (as above), alongside her students' learning needs, VS asks,

Isn't this the same for our student teachers too? What they take away from our professional sessions vary depending on their interpretive framework and as teacher educators, surely, we can support them explicitly in taking conscious action on it i.e., help them in zipping up.

For VS then both transformed practices and novel theoretical conceptualization's for teacher education emerged from her learning experiences at the Summer Academy. These are two of the points of change which Engeström (2005) defines as evidence of expansive learning. These points of change were not uncommon for the participants. Rust and Berry (2019, p. 3) report that other teacher educators also “wrote about (future) plans to integrate practices from the SA (Summer Academy) into their teaching,” again citing most frequently the storylines, voice over teaching, zipping, modeling, and the idea of a pedagogy of discomfort. The evaluators rightly conclude then that “‘how I teach is the message” is being carried over into practice'; moving from the Academy to the workplace in new and creative ways, as VS's example shows.

Amongst other changes in practices occurring during and after the Academy, participants explicitly described themselves as “educators who were working with a researcher's attitude” (Rust and Berry, 2019, p. 8), implicitly involved in a “constant dialogue between theory, practice and research” (Cochran-Smith, 2005). Kelchtermans and Deketelaere (2019, p. 4) evaluation also comments on participants' “increased awareness of the central importance of research and theory in their work.” As we have noted above though, for some teacher educators involvement in knowledge production through research can be limited by time, experience of research or lack of academic resources. This was certainly the case for the two participants from England. Emerging from the Academy, however, both shared a renewed sense of conviction about the importance of research and scholarship in teacher educators' practice. As AM stated, engagement in research

“is not only key to our growth as individuals, but also for the trainees we work with, who should benefit from the knowledge that can be gained through research, and related scholarly activity” (quoted in Kidd et al., 2019).

For both of these participants their engagement in research-informed practices was accelerated and taken in new directions through the continuing collaborations begun through the Academy. For both this led to the formation of new “local” (here defined as institutional) learning groups or communities of practice focused on research-informed practice. Rust and Berry (2019) in their evaluation identify the benefits of two or more colleagues coming to the Academy from the same institution for generating local research activities afterwards. This was certainly so for AM and VS, both of whom formed new research partnerships with each other and with WK and JM. As AM says,

In July, a colleague and I will do a conference presentation at another university into the expansion of the teacher education provision at our university as a means by which to widen participation for non-traditional learners.

This initiative has now also resulted in two related publications in research journals.

In defining the three points of change occurring in expansive learning, Engeström (2005) signals the importance of new or renewed senses of agency. This is exactly what the data shows here as engagement in the Summer Academy has left distinct legacies for VS and AM in terms of their growing engagement in research and their self-identification as researchers.

The Importance of Professional Learning

Another enduring legacy of the Academy was participants' enhanced commitments to professional learning or development. As Kelchtermans and Deketelaere (2019, p. 6) comment, their insights into the “multi-layered phenomenon of professional development” were more conscious, concrete and complex and their attitudes toward the importance of teacher educator learning were “further grounded and strengthened.”

This was certainly so for VS and AM, with the latter commenting that, “There should always be a place in our busy work lives for our own personal and professional development. This is … key to our growth as individuals.” Both were convinced of the need for local and national learning programmes for teacher educators, including both induction and continuous professional development (CPD). Such programmes were seen by VS as alleviating “some of the initial feelings of inadequacy that are common amongst teacher educators” and as it would improve “teacher educators own professional practice throughout their careers and hence will lead to better quality and experiences of their student teachers.”

Differentiated Experiences and Outcomes

We have already stated the methodological limitations of this study, and we emphasize them again here as a frame our largely positive findings. There were, however, undoubtedly some less positive aspects of the Academy, difficult as it is to see in the two evaluation reports. Rust and Berry (2019, p. 12) do, however, include one section on “suggestions for improvement” for the next iteration of the Summer Academy. Here, some of the evaluation participants suggest “spending less time on product oriented (sic) working in groups that may not have complete buy-in from all participants particularly when the time allotted was too short to finish the product.” Others note “concerns about continuation of dialogue and support…. i.e., sustainability.”

Some of these concerns were justified. One of the more difficult aims of the Academy was certainly to achieve the elusive goal of “sustainability,” as required by the European Commission funding criteria for Erasmus+ grants. The project design planned to achieve this in part through the group plans for future activities, but to date, only one group achieved this longer-term aim. This was the group in which VS worked during the Summer Academy. Focusing on focused on initiating and researching their practices using new technologies, this group “developed a clear path forward with a time line and deliverables” (Rust and Berry, 2019). As planned, their emerging findings were presented at an international conference the year after the Summer Academy, publication of a journal article is forthcoming, and plans for mutual visits have been made. This group then was particularly well-focused in terms of deciding its future and communal teaching and research activities, and that work has since generated more extensive networks within and beyond the group members. Other groups have networked and engaged in some informal, shared activities but, in most cases, these are currently without clear senses of direction.

Another area where engagement did not happen as planned was the VLE, planned to support pre- and post-attendance at the Summer Academic. Despite a very strong design, informed by all relevant research and practice in e-learning, this did not function as fully as intended. Rust and Berry (2019, p. 15) noted comments that the online engagement was “helpful …for knowing who else was coming and giving them something of an idea of what to anticipate,” but use before the Academy was “limited except when prompted through email.” This was disappointing, not least because the design principles tried to maximize “ownership” by participants. One explanation for this relative lack of engagement is timing: the Summer Academy happened just after the end of the academic year, at one of the busiest times for teacher educators. At this point in time, opportunities for participation in the VLE may have been limited for some. Another explanation may be that engagement required participants to take “a leap in the dark” in terms of sharing personal details and professional situations with others they did not yet know; in this sense perhaps some form of more extensive form of “induction” into the e-learning might have been useful in building more sustained senses of understanding and trust amongst participants.

We should note that follow-up engagement after the event was also limited. Rust and Berry (2019) state that, since the Summer Academy, participants have only gone back to the VLE “to download papers and presentations.” As stated above, sustainability of other formalized activities, notably the group work, was limited. In terms of the VLE, in particular, this may have been exacerbated because the planned roles and responsibility within the Council for encouraging that participation and presence on the VLE could not be implemented as planned.

Overall, our analysis shows that the Summer Academy had a positive impact on many of its participants. But the “suggestions for improvement” and caveats stated above do indeed give the InFo-TED Council information to help plan improvements for the next Summer Academy in 2021¹.

Conclusion

This article has analyzed the impact of the InFo-TED Summer Academy as a one-off learning event on its participants and shown that it had an enduring legacy in generating longer-term activity and learning back in the workplace. The three points of change which Engeström (2001, 2005); Engeström and Sannino (2010) describe as occurring through expansive learning—transformed practices, novel theoretical conceptualizations and a new or renewed sense of agency—are all present in the evaluations of the Academy and its legacies. New forms of learning, practice, and identity emerged then within this expansive learning environment.

We suggest that this has been achieved because many of the features of the Summer Academy replicated those of Engestrom's (Engeström and Sannino, 2010) and some of his many interpreters' (see, for example, Fuller and Unwin, 2004; Boyd et al., 2011) descriptions of an expansive learning environment. The Academy set up close, collaborative working in high trust environments with heterogeneous groups of learners; those colleagues were mutually supportive but at the same time ready and able to challenge, debate and critique; there was an explicit focus on teacher educator learning in ways that integrated many areas of practice that went beyond institutional and national priorities and norm-based assumptions; it gave space for participants to stand back from their own working contexts in order to think differently about their identities and practices; and finally, this “off-the” “job learning” had high relevance for further professional learning in the workplace. Throughout the week participants seemed to be not just participating but creating and enacting new learning—and they continued to do that back in their own institutions. In many senses then this was true participatory learning, following Engestrom's (Fuller and Unwin, 2004; Boyd et al., 2011) model for expansive learning within an expansive learning environment.

For the participants from England working as teacher educators in an unstable and fast changing workplace, where boundary crossings and new practices within an emerging “third space” are required on a regular basis, the opportunities brokered within the Academy were perhaps particularly needed. Certainly, the expansive learning they experienced there has, as Engestrom's (Fuller and Unwin, 2004; Boyd et al., 2011) work suggests, had the potential to transform aspects of their professional identities, knowledge bases, visions and practices. These things are valuable in themselves, but they have also generated new learning opportunities for these teacher educators, for their colleagues and for their student teachers within both the immediate workplace (the institution concerned), as well as nationally and internationally. As VS concluded, “the Summer Academy sessions have been the most thought provoking and productive that I have attended in my 7 years as a teacher educator.”

Overall, as Rust and Berry (2019, p. 5) conclude, “the impact of the SA may, like a pebble thrown into a pond, have a ripple effect reaching and influencing the practice of teacher educators far beyond … (those) who participated in the SA.”

Data Availability Statement

The datasets generated for this study are available on request to the corresponding author.

Ethics Statement

The studies involving human participants were reviewed and approved by NTNU Ethics Committee. The patients/participants provided their written informed consent to participate in this study. Written informed consent was obtained from the individual(s) for the publication of any potentially identifiable images or data included in this article.

Author Contributions

All authors listed have made a substantial, direct and intellectual contribution to the work, and approved it for publication.

Funding

This project received funding from the European Commission's Erasmus + project (2016-1-NO01-KA203-022036 - e-INFO-TED). See https://info-ted.eu/ for the project website.

Conflict of Interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Acknowledgments

This article draws substantially on the work of many of our colleagues on the InFo-TED Council. We could not have written it without the input from the many publications written by those associated with the group, many of which are referenced here. All other publications from the group are cited on the InFo-TED website, as above. It has been a huge pleasure to work with this group since its formation in 2013.

JM would also like to thank her colleagues on the Teacher Education Research Network (TERN) project in England, particularly Olwen McNamara and Marion Jones, and her Dutch colleague, Anja Swennen, for their inspiration and guidance.

Footnote

1. ^Originally scheduled for summer 2020, this second Summer Academy at the University of Limerick has now been postponed until summer 2021, due to the Covid19 pandemic.

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