Lost in translation – production, reproduction and transformation of teacher education knowledge in teacher educators’ local practices

Abstract

ABSTRACT European teacher educations today are expected to not only be ‘close to school practices’, but also to equip their students with academic knowledge. This article analyses one year of fieldwork data to discuss how these expectations are produced, reproduced and transformed in local practices by different categories of teacher educators (lecturers/assistant lecturers). The theory of practice architectures and Basil Bernstein’s concepts of vertical and horizontal knowledge discourses are employed to analyse different practices of teacher educators, and how these practices constrain and enable different actions, understandings, and relations. Different roles are identified, and it is argued that local and distal arrangements fuel isolation and fragmentation, leading to a situation where difference becomes a burden and important discourses risk being lost in translation. Under such circumstances, seemingly tangible, applicable knowledge risks overshadowing important general, theoretical, and context-independent knowledge that are crucial for a scientific professional knowledge base in teacher education.