Strategies Employed by Pre-service Teacher Educators in Ireland in Order to Develop Second-Order Knowledge

Abstract

The National Strategy for Higher Education to 2030 in Ireland (Hunt C. National strategy for higher education to 2030. Higher education authority. Department of Education and Skills, Dublin, 2011) recommends that academics should have access to professional development opportunities to develop their knowledge of teaching, as well as their disciplinary knowledge. Teacher educators who enter universities after careers as school teachers tend to have high levels of understanding and competence in pedagogy. But they need not only to be able to teach: they must also be able to teach teaching. Professional development needs therefore include opportunities to transmute their knowledge-in-action into knowledge-of-practice knowledge that integrates both theoretical constructs and practical knowledge. Using data from a series of case studies of teacher educators on a pre-service programme in an Irish university, this chapter describes and conceptualises the strategies employed by teacher educators in order to transmute this knowledge-in-action and to use it to teach student teachers.