Teacher educators play a crucial role in the educational research-teaching nexus, making it important to understand how they view research that bridges a subject discipline with school teaching, as well as how they use this research in initial teacher education (ITE). The present study contributes to this understanding by spotlighting the views of a cadre of teacher educators specialising in a subject discipline. Based on in-depth interviews with 21 teacher educators drawn from English literary studies in Sweden, this qualitative study examines how English literary scholars view literature education research and its usefulness in ITE. It shows that participants regarded their educational research literacy as limited, predominantly held a negative view of literature education research and were often disinclined to include this research in their courses. The study points to challenges of realising the close relation between educational research and teaching, offering important implications for ITE stakeholders.
This study examines how teachers in China's urban-rural borderlands create stability amid state-produced socio-spatial flux - a labour we conceptualise as pedagogical anchoring. Through critical narrative inquiry with twelve teachers, we identify anchoring as a cyclical praxis of Navigating prescribed curricula, Cultivating spaces of belonging, and Remaking professional identity. Findings reveal a paradox: this work enacts spatial justice for marginalised students while functioning as spatial-justice outsourcing, with teachers paying an agency-tax for systemic failures. We argue that anchoring constitutes vital yet exploited world-making and propose the right to anchor as a foundational ethic for spatially just teacher education and policy reform. The framework thus offers a portable lens for analysing teacher agency and its co-optation in contexts fractured by policy-reality disjunctures.
Teachers' professional identity tension (PIT) is a concept that describes teachers' struggles related to their professional identity in terms of their personal and professional self, external role expectations, and relational ideologies. This study follows the PRISMA 2020 statement to synthesise the types and coping strategies of primary and secondary school teachers' PIT, based on an analysis of 65 selected English-language articles published from 2005 to 2025. The results indicate that teachers were confronted with three main categories of professional identity tensions: tensions of identity transition, tensions of ideologies, and tensions of multiple roles. Teachers' coping strategies include self-solutions, interpersonal negotiation, support seeking, and self-authenticity preservation. Self-solutions can be further classified as constructive or non-constructive strategies. Constructive strategies, including metacognition, psychological regulation, cognitive and practical adjustments, and agency enactment, can help teachers reconcile these tensions and form their teacher identity.
Dialogical peer feedback is an important element of socio-cultural pedagogy design. However, many student teachers have unbeneficial experiences with dialogical - or collaborative - peer feedback. To advance the development of theory and pedagogical support practices for dialogical, collaborative, and exploratory peer feedback, this study combined theories of dialogical peer feedback, higher-level collaborative learning, and exploratory social thinking. Video data collected during a four-cycle educational design research study (conducted over four years in subject teacher education) were analysed to identify observable patterns in students' interaction modes. The research design involved yearly shifts in pedagogical support practices towards (a) feedback exemplars involving repetition and multiple presentational modalities and (b) demonstrations exemplifying dialogicality and the use of a feedback protocol. The results show that each yearly change in pedagogical design nudged students' interactions towards more dialogical and exploratory feedback across successive cohorts, while unilateral feedback and demonstrations of individual expertise became less common.
Computational thinking (CT) is becoming an important topic in teacher education as these skills are introduced into school curricula. Pre-service teachers (PSTs) need to learn CT, how to teach it, and how to lead a classroom where pupils are developing CT skills. In such settings, debugging is an important skill to both master and teach. To date, few studies on PSTs' learning of pedagogical approaches for CT and debugging exist. Here, we present findings from interviews with PSTs on a design-based research project involving mathematics, science and technology comprehension in Norway and Denmark. The interviews contributed to the PSTs' learning by stimulating reflections on professional practice. The PSTs focused on the new supervisory role of the teacher and on the positive characteristics of learning environments where debugging and fallibility are welcome. The PSTs recalled their own debugging strategies as involving considerable testing and re-adjusting code.
Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) is increasingly visible in teacher education, with pre-service teachers (PSTs) using tools such as ChatGPT for lesson planning and workload management. Yet prior studies treat PSTs as a homogeneous group, overlooking how year-group context and placement stress relate to perceptions and uses of GenAI during placement. This study addresses this gap using an explanatory sequential mixed-methods design, combining survey and follow-up interviews. Quantitative data were collected from 190 PSTs across four years of a Bachelor of Education programme in Ireland, and qualitative insights were drawn from eight students, two from each year. Findings reveal cohort-level profiles, where placement stress is associated with forms of GenAI engagement, linked to caution in Year 1 and Year 2 accounts and pragmatic GenAI use in Year 3 and Year 4 accounts. The study offers a cohort-based Stress - Adoption Reconfiguration Pattern and highlights scaffolded, placement-sensitive GenAI preparation across initial teacher education.
This Q study explores how student teachers conceptualize learning with GenAI and how their perspectives align with or challenge existing educational frameworks. Thirty-one student teachers sorted 44 statements derived from contemporary learning theories. The factor analysis revealed three distinct viewpoints: (1) students who view GenAI as a collaborative partner (F-1 GenAI is my sidekick), (2) those who approach it with scepticism (F-2 GenAI is here to stay & mldr; but old is gold), and (3) those who use it mainly for practical efficiency (F-3 GenAI is my shortcut to efficiency). Each factor aligned with a distinct pedagogical orientation, yet all collectively point to the inadequacy of pre-GenAI learning theories in explaining the evolving dynamics between students and agentic systems, thus highlighting the need for theoretical renewal rather than simple application or adoption. Implications are that traditional learning frameworks must be reconfigured to account for the diverse interactions between student teachers and GenAI systems.
This scoping review focuses on the concept of teacher research in primary and secondary education, a practice increasingly acknowledged for its impact on teaching and professional development. Despite teacher research's recognised advantages, consensus on its definition is lacking, and several barriers hinder teachers' involvement in research. This review aims at examining how teacher research is conceptualised in the literature, identifying its characteristics, and analysing the factors that affect its implementation. The study adhered to an established methodological framework for conducting scoping reviews and the PRISMA-ScR reporting guidelines. Following a systematic search in three databases, the included publications were synthesised through thematic synthesis and ideal-type analysis. The findings reveal that teacher research is mainly conceived as a situated and reflective activity focused on the immediate improvement of teaching practices. This review offers useful insights to guide future educational policies and support the integration of teacher research into everyday teaching.
