Abstract:
Although much is demanded of language teacher education, the relevant literature reveals very little about the educators on whose shoulders the responsibility for realising the goals of that education largely rests. In particular, there are few theoretical or empirical publications relating to how these essential contributors to the language teacher education endeavour develop their personal knowledge of educating in their contexts of practice. I therefore adopted a narrative inquiry approach to investigate the lived experiences of fifteen language teacher educators operating in various tertiary institutions around New Zealand. Both my inquiry and I as the inquirer were situated in a narrative context, amid facets of time, place and personal and social interactions (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000). In this inquiry space I gathered the educators' stories of learning through
narrative interviews and employed a socially-situated content analysis as a tool in the process of interpreting the narratives. My analysis revealed four salient learning areas or 'dimensions' of language teacher educator learning (LTEL). These related to educators' 'teachers' (or students), educators' own 'teaching', their 'professional position' in their institutions and 'currency' regarding their particular work as educators. I conceptualise these learning dimensions as the
substance of LTEL. Further inductive analysis showed that each learning dimension was connected to a particular narrative constituent deeply and complexly embedded in educators' learning stories; namely, 'philosophy', 'identity', 'work history' and 'passion' respectively. I envisage the narrative constituents and educators' personal representations of them as the narrative essence of LTEL. In light of the findings of these analyses I examined each language teacher educators' experiences in their contexts of practice and discovered that they are typically characterised by harmony and certain discordances. These narrative learning experiences constitute LTEL's contextual
reality. Thus substance, narrative essence and contextual reality form the central elements of a conceptual framework of the nature of LTEL as I now understand it. In concluding my account of the inquiry I identify several methodological implications and, in view of the apparent absence of post-graduate programmes of study for prospective language teacher educators, I also outline what I perceive
to be a vitally important theoretical implication.