Abstract
Given the heightened attention regarding the professional development of teachers, teacher education is regarded as a critical field to be investigated and evaluated more profoundly. While trainee teachers have been the primary foci of teacher education scholarship, the perspectives and experiences of teacher educators (in this study context, teacher trainers also), have not been explored to the same extent, particularly in developing countries like Bangladesh. This study, using a qualitative case study research paradigm, attempts to fill the gap. As a part of a doctoral project, seven English language teacher educators and ten trained English language teachers working in the secondary English language education context in Bangladesh were interviewed. The findings revealed that the teacher educators were not fully prepared for their task, expressed critical concerns regarding their professional development as well as the bureaucratic milieu within which they work, and were uncertain about career prospects. The paper, thus, reflecting on the voices of teacher trainers, concludes with a set of recommendations for improving and sustaining the quality of teacher educators/ trainers in Bangladesh.
Highlights
Students’ performance and achievement are considered to be predominantly proportionate to the quality of teachers [1,2,3,4]
The 7 SELTEs were asked to provide information about their academic and professional qualifications, evaluate their preparation for their current profession as well as their own professional development opportunities and to identify key issues they experience while playing the role of a teacher educator
The perceptions derived from the profiles facilitated to reflect on the subsequent themes and to see a coherence among them
Summary
Students’ performance and achievement are considered to be predominantly proportionate to the quality of teachers [1,2,3,4]. While the level of knowledge and performance of students is judged against that of teachers’ knowledge and performance, the same claim can be made for quality teacher education and quality teacher educators. To put it a quality teacher is a product of a quality teacher education program. The domain of quality teacher educators/trainers has been paid less attention, except some recent studies that investigated the process of becoming a teacher educator/trainer [5,6], identified what teacher educators should know about their profession and able to perform [7] and recommended ways of improving teacher educators’ work [8] respectively in the US, the Philippines and Cambodia. There has been very little attention paid to investigate teacher education in terms of the perceptions and experiences of teacher educators’ professional work
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