Once were teachers? Australian teacher education policy and shifting boundaries for teacher educators

Abstract

Teacher educators are an increasingly diverse, occupational group due in part to the increased marketization of teacher education. Global policy reforms mean that educating teachers can now occur in a myriad of ways and across multiple learning sites. In the Australian context, recent initial teacher education reforms mean that classroom teachers are required to take greater responsibility for teacher preparation, while university based teacher educators are required to build and maintain school-university partnerships and show evidence of the impact of their programs on the graduates they produce. These changes herald significant changes for cross-sectoral collaboration and for the emergence of ‘hybrid’ teacher educators who need to work across and between the boundaries of schools, their communities and the university. Drawing from a partnership study, this paper provides insights into the professional learning and boundary crossing work of two teachers as they navigated changes in their dualistic identities, roles and places of work as teachers and school-based teacher educators.