Chapter 12: The Nomadic Teacher Educator: Teacher Educator’s Emerging Role

Teacher educators are in the midst of a transformation in the recommended ways of preparing teachers. Teacher educators now find themselves participants in the collateral processes of a competition-based paradigm that strategically scapegoats alternative pathways and programs. In this process, they stand the risk of making the individual effective teacher emerging from heterogeneous pathways into teaching, the potential collateral damage of the market and competition-based system. Good teachers become obscured and mis-recognized as they are essentialized as completers of a specific pathway. Teacher educators have become adept in their acquiescence to forms of common sense and the reified categories of effectiveness promoted by the state and accreditation. They reify the territories defined by habitual ways of doing teacher preparation and development, fetishiz-ing concepts of implementation and outcomes relative to a given sense of effectiveness.