From development work to research publication: a case of Norwegian teacher educators developing research literacy

ABSTRACT

The importance of research capacity-building in teacher education is highlighted to enable teachers to be change agents who continually develop their own and the school’s collective practices, which again presupposes that the teacher educators themselves are research literate. However, teacher educators come from different backgrounds and have varying levels of experience with conducting research. They are also often challenged by competing demands from teaching and conducting research. This article examines four teacher educators who conducted developmental projects in their program while simultaneously participating in a series of structured workshops in research methods and academic writing. The article reports on interview data and logs from the participants and investigates how the workshops contributed to their development of research literacy. The findings indicate that the participants required and appreciated the structured scaffolding they were given, and they highlighted the importance of positive group support. The participants also expressed that the workshops contributed not only to building capacity for conducting research for them individually but also for building research capacity within their home institutions. Implications for teacher education are discussed, and the authors argue that targeted and individualized support beyond what is currently the case might be needed.

KEYWORDS:

• Teacher educators
• teacher education
• research literacy
• development work

Introduction

Teacher education is a diverse and complex profession (Flores, 2017; Langørgen & Smith, 2018), and research indicates that teacher educators take on a variety of roles (Lunenberg et al., 2014). Still, the formal education or training of teacher educators has traditionally received little attention (Grossman, 2013; Loughran, 2014; Lunenberg et al., 2014), and we know little about what constitutes the knowledge base of teacher educators (van Veen, 2013), and about the transition from being a teacher to becoming a teacher educator (Loughran, 2014).

However, the role of teacher educators has been the subject of increased attention in the last few years (European Commission [EC], 2013; Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development [OECD], 2019). Although most countries do not have designated programs for becoming teacher educators, a few exceptions do exist, and Kelchtermans et al. (2018) characterize this as an emerging field. For instance, programs do exist in Estonia, the Netherlands, Hungary, and Scotland (European Commission [EC], 2012), and the MOFET Institute in Israel provides professional development for teacher educators (Golan & Reichenberg, 2015).

The growing body of research on teacher educators increasingly focuses on the complexity of their professional development (Brody & Hadar, 2018; Kelchtermans et al., 2018; Meeus et al., 2018). Within this body of research, one recurrent theme is the increasing demand for teacher educators to be research literate and conduct research (Elstad, 2010). Research indicates that there is considerable mismatch in many countries between intentions and teacher educators’ current capabilities, and scholars argue that this leaves many teacher educators vulnerable (Ellis et al., 2014; Gleeson et al., 2017; Lander & Nicholson, 2020; Smith, 2022). Other scholars claim that in several countries the capacity of teachers to play a more active role in research is diminishing because of how research is situated in teacher education (Brooks, 2021). One of the trends pointed to by Brooks (2021) is that student teachers ‘do not perceive teaching as a research-based profession and therefore expect teacher education to be practice-orientated’ (p. 7).

There are probably many reasons for this mismatch. For instance, research finds that many teacher educators are not formally (or informally) research literate, and they often request this kind of competence in their positions, both internationally (Cochran-Smith et al., 2020) and in Norway (Smith, 2022). Further, some teacher educators do indeed conduct research and publish, but on pedagogical, disciplinary, or didactic issues that are not linked directly to teacher education but rather to school and education more generally (EC, 2013; OECD, 2019). Finally, teacher educators often have little allocated time to conduct and publish research, and they struggle to balance time for research activities with time for other activities in their professional lives (Langørgen & Smith, 2018). One study actually indicates that teacher educators might face cultural and institutional obstacles to conducting research because other ‘domestic labor’ within the institution is more important, such as maintaining relationships with partnering schools (Ellis et al., 2014). Indeed, some teacher educators identify more with the role of teacher than with that of teacher education researcher. Corroborating international research, Norwegian teacher educators also have diverse backgrounds and understandings of their role as teacher educators, and for some, the research part of their position is not the most important (Ulvik & Smith, 2016).

Alongside this situation, authorities in Norway have increasingly granted funding to a range of development projects in teacher education in recent years, often paying attention to the dissemination of lessons learned. Still, the results from these developmental projects seldom seem to be published as research and, as such, are less widely disseminated and less likely to be made available as learning resources for others. Teacher educator literacy might be critical in this respect, as a recent review recommended research capacity-building in teacher education and argued that this also includes teacher educators (Oancea et al., 2021). The need for support for teacher educators while taking on this responsibility is crucial (Ellis et al., 2014; Gleeson et al., 2017; Lander & Nicholson, 2020; Smith, 2022).

In this study, we therefore examine the process of four teacher educators from two teacher education institutions who had received funding for, and led, developmental projects at their individual institutions. The developmental projects were supervised and followed up by the Centre for Professional Learning in Teacher Education (ProTed) at the Department of Teacher Education and School Research at the University of Oslo from 2017 to 2019. Following the developmental project, we offered a series of three workshops on behalf of ProTed on research design and academic writing to stimulate the publication and dissemination of the lessons learned from these projects. This paper investigates these workshops and the process of developing research literacy among the participants. We do so through the following research questions:

1. What experiences and needs did the participants express?

2. What kind of support did they appreciate the most during the workshops?

3. How did participating in the workshops influence their perceived development of research literacy?

In the following sections, we first clarify what we mean by ‘research literacy’, before we outline the Norwegian teacher education context and move on to our research study and its findings.

Conceptual framing of the study: research literacy for teacher educators

Furlong et al. (2014) argue that to be research literate is to understand why research is important and what might be learned from it, and to maintain a sense of critical appreciation and healthy skepticism. Evans et al. (2017) define research literacy as ‘the ability to judiciously use, apply and develop research as an integral part of one’s teaching’ (p. 404). More particularly, Westbury et al. (2005) emphasize that autonomous teachers must be able to think and act on the basis of research. They must be able to ‘select what to read, evaluate what they read, and appropriate what is useful or significant from that reading for their practice’ (p 478). Furlong et al. (2014) use the term research literacy to describe a teaching profession that can develop schools from within. The rapid development of knowledge, society, and curriculum implies that teachers and teacher educators must be able to constantly develop their professional competence and to be agents that have the competence to change the situations they find themselves in, using resources or developing innovations ‘to break out of status quo and transform the situation’ (Lund & Vestøl, 2020, p. 1). Thus, teacher educators need to be able to promote student teachers’ self-transformation and the transformation of schools and societies (Wolff & Ehrström, 2020). Thus, research literacy is generally seen as a key aspect of teachers’ professional knowledge.

For teacher educators, this implies that research literacy for them is not only related to their own research literacy but is also closely connected to expectations of creating research literate teachers. In many countries, student teachers are expected to develop an inquiry-based stance toward their own teaching and make autonomous, professional choices based on research-informed reflection. These expectations are evident for instance in Finland (Niemi, 2016), Norway and Ireland (Conway & Munthe, 2014). Eriksen and Brevik (2022) discuss how research literacy can enrich teacher education by allowing for the development of a ‘research literacy’ way of thinking. They conceptualize research literacy as more than an engagement with research through research-based education and argue that ‘to enrich the understanding of how to develop research literacy in teaching and teacher education, emphasis should be placed on connecting research and education by actively engaging students in research’ (pp. 1–2).

To summarize, research literacy for teacher educators can be conceptualized as an overall stance towards research, and the ability to make use of (find, read, criticize, apply), and produce (conduct, write up), research. In addition, the ability to convey research literacy to student-teachers and include them in research can also be seen as part of teacher educators’ research literacy. As we, in our study, focus on academic writing, the latter aspect of teacher educators’ research literacy is less emphasized. We do, however, pay attention to aspects of research literacy beyond the mere process of writing up research, as will be evident in the outline below of the workshops investigated in the study.

Materials and methods

The Norwegian context of teacher education

Norway offers four main pathways for becoming a teacher: a one-year add-on program following a master’s degree; a five-year integrated program for teaching levels 8–13; and two five-year integrated primary and secondary teacher education programs, one for grades 1–7 and another for grades 5–10. Norwegian teacher education has been the subject of many reforms over the last few decades, and researchers argue that it is among the programs in higher education most influenced by external interests and politics (Elstad, 2020). Since 2019, all Norwegian teacher candidates who follow the main pathways for becoming a teacher have been required to complete a master’s program, and a new national curriculum for teacher education has been introduced on all levels (e.g. Ministry of Education and Research, 2016). It is a stated national goal to educate teachers who have the competence to use research-based knowledge to observe, analyze, and further enhance their teaching practice and develop their professional competence (Ministry of Education and Research, 2017). This situation has had a special impact on institutions with few faculty members with PhDs, since they typically have little capacity for supervising master’s students; the government demanded that at least half the faculty must have research competence (PhD or similar) (Ministry of Education and Research, 2017). Following these reform initiatives, ProTed was established (Lund et al., 2015), and also a national Graduate School for Research on Teacher Education (NAFOL) (Smith, 2022).

Workshops in academic writing

This study was funded by the Department of Teacher Education and School Research at the University of Oslo. It was conducted as a case study (Stake, 2006) and examines a series of three workshops in research design and academic writing for teacher educators who were involved in development projects within their own institutions. The workshops took place from June to December 2019. The workshops were led by the two authors of this paper; at the time, both were associate professors with experience in publishing as well as extensive experience as teacher educators. The workshops were based on research on effective professional development emphasizing (i) prolonged engagement over time, (ii) opportunity for active learning, (iii) opportunity for personal feedback, and (iv) opportunity to engage in collective learning environments (Darling-Hammond et al., 2017; Desimone & Pak, 2017). In addition, the workshops were conceptualized according to our understanding of research literacy for teacher educators, and we wanted the workshop participants to have opportunities to read and criticize model research articles, and simultaneously produce their own research, including the final report of research in the form of a research article. As such, the workshops were intended to introduce the participants to basic academic writing, but with specific attention to the connections between the particular sections of a research article and the research design of a project. The workshops were therefore also a basic introduction to research design and methodology. Each workshop lasted between five and six hours. Figure 1 shows more details of the design of the workshop cycle in three steps.

Figure 1. Design of the workshop (WS) cycle.

Read the detailed description of this figure

The figure illustrates the design of the workshop cycle in three steps. The first step illustrates workshop 1 in spring 2019. Preparation for workshop 1 was to prepare to present data. The goal for workshop 1 was to write up the research design for the article. Content in workshop 1 was ‘about research design’, ‘academic writing and IMRaD’ and ‘feedback on presentation of data’. The second step illustrates workshop 2 in fall 2019. Preparation for workshop 2 was to write up the methods section and the analytical approach. The goal for workshop 2 was to write up and receive feedback on the methods section and the abstract. The content in workshop 2 was ‘what is an abstract?’ and ‘feedback on methods section and analytical approach’. The third step illustrates workshop 3 in fall 2019. Preparation for workshop 3 was to write up a first draft of an article. The goal for workshop 3 was to finish the first draft. The content in workshop 3 was ‘feedback on first draft in groups’.

The first step in Figure 1 illustrates workshop 1 in spring 2019. This workshop focused on research design and academic writing and the IMRaD structure (Introduction, Methods, Results, and Discussion). The participants had prepared to present data and initial findings from their projects, and we used this information to support them in sketching out the description of their projects’ research designs. The second step in the Figure 1 illustrates workshop 2 in fall 2019, where the participants had prepared writing up their methods section and their analytical approach. The goal for workshop 2 was to write up their methods section and abstract. The third step illustrates workshop 3 in fall 2019, where they had prepared a first draft of their own article. During all workshops, we discussed different elements of the IMRaD structure by using a variety of model academic texts. We also spent time providing feedback on the participants’ texts or presentations, mirroring the review process in an academic journal, but with individual attention and several opportunities for revisions, also described as editorial work as capacity building (Reid et al., 2013).

Participants and data sources

Five projects from five different universities and university colleges received funding for their development projects, and they also received an invitation to participate in the workshops to support their academic writing process toward research publication. Eleven teacher educators from three teacher education institutions across the country chose to participate in the workshops and were asked to participate in this study. However, only four teacher educators participated in all workshops due to conflicting activities. This article reports on data from the four participants from the three institutions who took part in all workshops and activities, and who agreed to participate. Table 1 provides an overview of the study participants, their degree and position at the time, and their previous experience with academic writing.

Table 1. Study participants, their degree and position and their previous experience with academic writing.

Participant	Degree and position	Previous experience with academic writing
Lisa	Master’s degree with position as Teaching Professor^1	Experienced in doing research and writing academic papers, but on topics other than teacher education, or her own teaching
Robert	Master’s degree with position as Teaching Professor	Little experience in writing academic papers; more experienced in writing about his own teaching in other genres
Catherine	Master’s degree with position as Teaching Professor	Little experience in writing academic papers; more experienced in writing about her own teaching in other genres
Andrea	Master’s degree. PhD student.	No previous experience in writing academic papers

Before participating in the study, all participants had signed informed consent, and they were also part of member checks during the study. The study was approved by Norway’s national data protection services, approval number 708473. The participants have been anonymized with pseudonyms for this paper, and their genders may have been altered. We report on data from participants’ logs from before they started the workshops, as well as a group interview at the end of the last workshop. In the logs, we asked for information about what kind of support the teacher educators needed at early stages of the workshop cycle; the interview was conducted at the end of the last workshop and was mostly concerned with the participants’ experiences throughout the workshop process, but also their previous experience with writing and publications. We chose group interviewing as the interview method in the hope that the participants would comment on each other’s utterances, thus generating more information than we would have received through individual interviews (cf. Kvale & Brinkmann, 2009). The interview was audiotaped and transcribed by the first author. The quotes in this paper have been edited for clarity in English.

Data analysis

The unit of analysis was the workshops, using information across the four teacher educators to inform our analyses. All data were coded thematically, using the software NVivo 12 Pro, with a focus on the participants’ experiences throughout the workshop process. As a first step, we established codes according to traditional content analysis (Hsieh & Shannon, 2005). Initially, we looked for codes related to expressions of needs or deficits related to the writing process (i.e. leading us to identify the codes ‘experience’ and ‘academic traditions’); what kind of support they had used (i.e. resulting in the codes ‘peers’, ‘feedback’, ‘emotional support’); and any expressions of changes in their perceived abilities to conduct research, write, publish, or to work as teacher educators (i.e. resulting in the codes ‘credibility’ and ‘sharing with colleagues’). As a second step, from the codes, and supported by the conceptual framing of the study, we extracted themes (i.e. the theme ‘importance of positive group support and feeling part of a community of learners’).

Limitations

As this is a small qualitative study, it is not intended to generate generalizable knowledge. Rather, we hope that this study’s in-depth and detailed exploration of the experiences and perspectives of the participants can shed light on some important aspects to consider in future research and practice. Further, the reliance on group interviews in this study might have constricted our access to information the participants were afraid to share. We had the impression, however, that the group felt safe in sharing their views, and that being interviewed as a group rather contributed to a common generation of feedback and thoughts. Finally, we are aware that by reporting on data from these workshops, we are indirectly conducting research on our own practice as workshop leaders. We have tried to avoid bias in our analysis by inviting experts in the field as critical readers, as well as by conducting member checks with the workshop participants.

Results

In this paper, we investigate the process of developing research literacy among four teacher educators who took part in a workshop on academic writing. We have focused on the participants’ previous experiences with conducting research, and what kind of support they needed and appreciated – and how participating in the workshops influenced their research literacy. We outline our findings in the following, according to themes revealed through our data analyses.

Variations in experience and challenges in research and academic writing

The findings from the logs and interviews indicate that the four participants had varied experience with conducting research and writing academically. Even though Lisa was experienced in writing academic papers, she had not previously published research on teacher education or her own teaching. Her greatest challenge with this specific writing process thus was the change of thematic area, which had led to a need to create distance from her own practice in order to be able to look at it as data. Lisa emphasized the importance of the workshops in this process:

To get that outsider’s perspective from both you [the workshop facilitators] and the others—being part of this group—has helped to create enough distance and perspective to take things apart and see where everything belongs.

Two other participants, Robert and Catherine, had more experience in writing about their own teaching than Lisa, but in a less academic manner. Their main challenge with writing in the academic genre was therefore mostly connected to the traditions of their subject-specific backgrounds, where a more flexible writing style was appropriate. Catherine explained why this background had made writing in an academic style difficult for her:

I didn’t want to write anything that wouldn’t be an experience to the reader, similarly to an [artistic show]. I didn’t want the reader to be bored, and I carry that with me, and I try to work with it and say, ‘Okay, sometimes you have to take [criticism] intellectually and not emotionally’ (…) This is a barrier within myself that I need to work with.

The final participant, Andrea, had been a school teacher with specific responsibility for developmental work; she had started as a teacher educator in a shared position, where she also did developmental work in the teacher education institution:

I just stumbled into this development project without thinking about research or publications, and that’s what I’m used to—since I come from [a school background], where we have developmental work all the time, and projects, and we test things. But I really like this opportunity to connect what we’ve done to research, so that it’s no longer just a good idea (…)

Since she had had no experience in writing academically before, Andrea appreciated the workshops, and especially the opportunity to receive feedback from others, ‘with an outsider’s perspective, and not [from] insiders to all the thoughts and processes.’ She thus corroborated Lisa’s appreciation of creating more distance to her own work through an outside perspective from others.

These findings illustrate the variety of backgrounds the teacher educators had. Still, although the participants entered the workshop from a variety of backgrounds, and they had diverse experience in academic writing, they had all experienced challenges with writing academically about their developmental projects, and their own teaching. In the logs prior to the workshops, three of the four participants reported that they needed support in academic writing in general, and they all also wanted specific feedback on their own writing. All needed advice on how to describe their research design and focus for their research. These expressed needs contributed to the design of the workshops and the three principles it was based on. We decided to provide a common course with a very strict and specific focus, centered on the IMRaD structure. Combined with individual feedback on their own writing, this approach seemed to meet the needs of all participants and simultaneously illustrated that the support they needed might be quite substantial.

Importance of structured workshops with targeted, specific assignments and feedback

During the interview, all participants emphasized their appreciation that the workshops were focused and clear, with a structured approach toward publication. As Andrea put it:

For me personally, it’s very nice to have a deadline for submitting a draft. (…) The assignments you’ve given us have been specific. [We’ve worked] with the method section, in portions, which helped me a lot.

Lisa pointed to the overall design of the workshop, centered on the IMRaD structure and model texts, as being useful in this respect:

The combination [in the workshops] of having something that you wanted to present to us, that you thought was important for us to work with, when we went through the IMRaD structure [was important]. And not that we haven’t seen it before—but you were so specific on how you’d set it up and showed us: ‘This is one way to do it [referring to one model text], and here they’ve done it like that, right, and there’s another.’ And we (…) discussed it afterward and thought that was very clarifying.

Our participants argued that the structure of the workshops, and the assignments they had been given, seemed to help them focus and progress in their writing. Andrea pointed to the importance of such structure as a support for her as a novice researcher:

As a beginning researcher, for me it’s very nice to know what’s expected; this structure helps me in the writing process. It provides security.

Everyone also emphasized the specific feedback on their own writing during the workshops. As Catherine said:

The first thing that comes to mind was when [a workshop leader] said, ‘Here you have material for three articles,’ because we wanted [to include] too much. That way we’d learn, very early in the process, to be clearer about what it is that we want to highlight to the world—and why, not least.

In addition, Catherine argued that the feedback provided during the workshops had modeled a way to provide feedback that she could use in her own work as a teacher educator:

I think that [such feedback] is added value, at least for me, when it comes to supervising students who write bachelor theses, and probably master’s theses as well, so by getting this type of feedback yourself, you also learn something about what might work for them.

Even though issues of publishing research were not new to our participants, the explicitness of the course, and the opportunity to spend time discussing these issues, seemed to be important for them to grasp how they could themselves write up their own research – and also how they could support their own students, who were now expected to write master’s theses. This aspect has important implications for how, and to what extent, teacher educators are supported within teacher education institutions.

Importance of positive group support and feeling part of a community of learners

All participants emphasized the importance of a feeling of positive group support, and that the feedback was given in a constructive and encouraging way. As Lisa noted:

The way you’ve both shown interest and given feedback, it’s been absolutely crucial for this group to work, right? (…) We see that you empathize with us, you want us to succeed (…) The relational aspect is always important. And it’s about being open to taking feedback, right, and not shutting down, to brace yourself.

Catherine agreed, arguing that it was important that they met several times during the workshops in order to create a safe group feeling:

And also the fact that we’ve met several times has something to do with [the creation of this feeling]; it’s been an atmosphere where you feel that you can somehow be a critical friend and maybe even, yes, you can be very honest without being misunderstood, which can be difficult if you only get written comments like you get from a reviewer, right?

Several of the participants also pointed to the design of the workshops – where they were supposed to give and receive feedback from others, as well as to listen to the feedback given to others – as a good way to create a learning community. Lisa argued that she had ‘learned a lot from hearing, and reading, the others’ [feedback]. As Catherine put it:

The fact that you learn something about your own (…) writing, by listening to, and also giving, feedback to others, you get perspectives on your own writing.

Two of the participants also highlighted that it was not just a matter of being a community of writers, but that they had shared good practice by getting to know each other’s projects. Since they had followed each other throughout the process, from a developmental project to the research article, the interest they had in each other’s projects made it even more interesting to follow the writing process. These findings again illustrate the substantial support that might be required in institutions where faculty members have little research experience (e.g. Smith, 2022). Being able to provide substantial feedback that can bring one’s work further is one aspect; leadership is also necessary for creating a safe environment, wherever possible.

Transition from development work to building capacity for doing research on their own teaching

The findings from the interview indicate that the participants had developed a new understanding of the importance of doing research, and not only developmental work, as Andrea noted. She argued that even though she had:

this teacher’s heart, I think it’s super important that we research what we do and what we develop, so (…) that these results show that you contribute to development, that you can actually come up with something.

Catherine agreed, arguing that this was an important aspect in meeting with their colleagues at their home institutions:

[This topic] has to do with credibility, since what used to be a development project has now been implemented in business as usual, [and] they see that we’re actually doing research on something. So then they can’t say, ‘No, this is just nonsense—it should be terminated!’

Lisa added:

We come from an institution that’s done a lot of innovating, but we haven’t always managed to publish [our work]. And I paraphrased you perhaps even more powerfully than I intended [when I talked to our colleagues]: ‘We do so much good work here, but in the big world of research publications out there, if we haven’t published, then it hasn’t happened.’

Lisa stated that they would adapt the design of the workshops in their future work to support their colleagues in conducting research and publishing on their own teaching:

That [structure] is exactly what we intend to copy. That kind of structure (…) to do some of what we’ve done [in this workshop] … Those who are to join will have to [follow the structure] (…) Then we’ll see if we can get others to learn just as much from each other.

The participants thus seemed to agree on the importance of not only doing developmental work but actually doing research, and publishing research, on their own teaching innovations. As such, they seemed to be on the way to taking on the dual role of scholars (Loughran, 2013) and seeing the benefits of combining their practical, developmental work with their role as researchers in order to continue to learn about the teaching of teaching. They also seemed to appreciate the workshops not only as a way to rehearse academic writing but also as a model for building capacity within their own institutions for making this transition.

Discussion and implications

The focus of our study has been on the process of developing research literacy among four teacher educators who took part in a workshop on academic writing. We have emphasized their previous experience with doing research (if any), what kind of support they said they needed and appreciated the most, and how participating in the workshops influenced their research literacy. Our findings indicate that, even though the participants had varied experience in conducting research and writing academically, they had all encountered challenges with writing academically about their development projects due to their inexperience with the specific research genre required in the field of teacher education. This finding corroborates existing research in the field that has indicated that teacher educators require support and advice to develop expertise as researchers (Cochran-Smith et al., 2020; Ellis et al., 2014; Lander & Nicholson, 2020; Smith, 2022). Our findings indeed indicate that our participants did request and appreciate having substantial and tailored support in order for them to write about their inquiries into their own teaching innovations. For instance, all the participants appreciated that the workshops were focused and clear, with targeted, specific assignments and feedback and a structured approach toward publication. They also appreciated that the feedback was given in a constructive and encouraging way, and they emphasized the importance of positive group support and of feeling part of a community of learners. This aspect indicates that the support structures for teacher educators who take on research activities and academic writing might need to be hands-on, individualized, and targeted, to an extent beyond what is currently the case. Norwegian teacher educators have indeed expressed that research activities are what their institutions value most, and what they first and foremost need help developing as professionals (Ulvik & Smith, 2016).

Our findings also indicate that the workshops had a dual function: as a way to rehearse academic writing for the individual teacher educators but also as a model for building research capacity within the institutions. The participants underlined how they perceived a responsibility for sharing findings with a broader audience, as well as a responsibility for fostering academic writing among colleagues in their own institutions. The workshop thus functioned as a community of learning among teacher educators (Darling-Hammond et al., 2017). As workshop facilitators, we were teacher educators with publishing experience who could contribute to the development of other teacher educators’ capacity for conducting and publishing research on their own teaching practice. In addition, the participants contributed to each other’s learning during the workshops, and they intended to contribute to their colleagues’ learning after returning to their home institutions (Brody & Hadar, 2018). The hope again is that the institutions will indeed establish structures and capacities to accommodate the teacher educators’ and their colleagues’ continued development of research literacy.

Finally, the participants noted that the workshops contributed to building capacity for conducting research on their own teaching, and as such that their identity as teacher educators increasingly included an identity as researchers, and not only practitioners. This promising finding indicates that the workshop gave the teacher educators an opportunity to develop their research capacity in terms of an inquiry stance (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009) to their own teaching. This development challenges the dichotomy between research and practice – just as called for by Cochran-Smith et al. (2020) – and enables a scholarly approach to teacher educators. The existence of professional teacher educators who research and develop their own practice is a prerequisite for developing quality in teacher education (Loughran, 2013). We therefore argue, in line with Loughran (2013), that implicit in the term ‘teacher educator’ is a premise ‘that a teacher educator should be a scholar, and that scholarship itself is deeply embedded in an interactive process of research and practice that has a major focus on learning about the teaching of teaching’ (Loughran, 2013, p. 20). Taking an inquiry approach to our teaching is as such a way to model good practice to our student teachers, since doing so is also crucial to being a good teacher, and for continuing learning across a professional career (Conway & Munthe, 2014; Eriksen & Brevik, 2022).

The course in academic writing is thus one example of how to contribute to quality in professional teacher education programs in terms of teacher educators’ research literacy, but such activities demand time and resources allocated for developmental work and individualized supportive structures for teacher educators. Our data material shows indications that such structures might be implemented within teacher education institutions as communities of learning; the individual institutions should take responsibility for making such supportive structures available to all teacher educators. We thus agree with colleagues internationally and believe that the need may still exist for alternative and nationwide support structures for Norwegian teacher educators (Kelchtermans et al., 2018; Meeus et al., 2018).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the University of Oslo.

Notes

1. Academic position based on teaching development work.