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Research and teacher education in the UK: Building capacity

Jean Murray a,*, Anne Campbell b, Ian Hextall c, Moira Hulme d, Marion Jones e, Pat Mahony c, Ian Menter d,Richard Procter f, Karl Wall f

a University of East London, UKb Leeds Metropolitan University, UKc Roehampton University, UKd University of Glasgow, UKe Liverpool John Moores University, UKfInstitute of Education, University of London, UK

a r t i c l e i n f o

Article history:

Received 4 November 2008

Accepted 13 January 2009

Keywords:

Teacher education research

Research capacity-building

National policy

Institutional development

Early and mid career researchers

Network learning

a b s t r a c t

The need for capacity-building in teacher education in the UK has been raised as a serious issue by

a number of commentators. Tensions about the place of research in teacher education have persisted for

many decades, but following changes to the core funding mechanisms in the UK, the maintenance of

education research bases within many universities has become increasingly tenuous. This paper provides

an analytical account of an initiative conducted by the Teacher Education Group (TEG) to build research

capacity in teacher education. With reference to a review of the national contexts for research in the UK

and research on teacher educators, the article argues that, in order to build research capacity initiatives

we need to provide motivation and new types of networking opportunities for researchers, as well as

developing their expertise. In developing this argument, the article also explore the relationships

between national policy changes, institutional research cultures and individual habitus and agency in

research capacity-building. The paper also describes a new initiative in England, the Teacher Education

Research Network (TERN).

Crown Copyright 2009 Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction

Developing research capacity as a way of strengthening teacher

education communities is seen as a key factor in enhancing the

long-term quality of student and teacher learning across Conti-

nental Europe and the USA (see, inter alia, Cochran-Smith &

Zeichner, 2006; Erixon Arreman, 2008; Lunenberg, Ponte, & Van de

Ven, 2007). The need for capacity-building in teacher education in

the UK has also been raised as a serious issue (Bassey, 2003;

Furlong, 2007; Menter, Brisard, & Smith, 2006; Munn, 2008). But

there are distinct challenges involved in any capacity-buildinginitiative, not least because such work will clearly be a multi-

layered and complex endeavour (Erixon Arreman, 2008; Pollard,

2008; Rees, Baron, Boyask, & Taylor, 2007) involving intricate webs

of national, institutional, collective and individual interests.

This paper gives an analytical account of the work of one on-

going research capacity-building initiative in teacher education in

the UK, namely the work of the Teacher Education Group (TEG).

This group has worked under the auspices of the Teaching and

Learning Research Programme (TLRP), aiming to support the

development of research capacity in teacher education in the UK

through the creation of accessible research resources, which have

particular relevance for teacher education. The group recently

completed a mapping of a substantial proportion of UK research on

teacher education, published between 2000 and 2008, and is now

working on generating further resources.

The resources from this initiative have yet to be fully dissemi-

nated and embedded within the many and various communitiesresearching teacher education.Consequently,it is not yet possible to

evaluate thefull impactof theworkand as Wolter(20 07:804)states,

to succeed a research programme has to take root within the

research infrastructure. and help to preserve the know-how that

has been created and promote the decentralised cultivation of that

know-how. If it fails to achieve such purposes then the initiative

becomes what Sarason (1998:5)defines as activity without change.

There is general acceptance (see, inter alia, Dyson & Desforges,

2002; Fowler & Procter, 2007; McIntyre & McIntyre, 1999; Pollard,

2007) that a necessary part of capacity-building is providing the

support and opportunities for researchers to develop their

* Corresponding author. Cass School of Education, University of East London,

Stratford, London, E15 4CT, United Kingdom.

E-mail address: [email protected] (J. Murray).

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Teaching and Teacher Education

j o u r n a l h o m e p a g e : w w w . e l s e v i e r . c o m / l o c a t e / t a t e

0742-051X/$ see front matter Crown Copyright 2009 Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

doi:10.1016/j.tate.2009.01.011

Teaching and Teacher Education 25 (2009) 944950
mailto:[email protected]://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/0742051Xhttp://www.elsevier.com/locate/tatehttp://www.elsevier.com/locate/tatehttp://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/0742051Xmailto:[email protected]


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expertise by acquiring new skills, knowledge and understanding of

research. Our argument in this paper reflects this consensus but

also identifies that for the TEG initiative or any other research

capacity-building initiatives to be successful, we need to consider

the socio-cultural contexts for research and scholarship within the

university departments of education (UDEs) where many

researchers work (Rees et al., 2007:776) and the individual habitus

and sense of agency of the individual researcher. In the case of

capacity-building for teacher education this is particularly impor-

tant since much of the research is generated by those who are also

the practitioners as teacher educators, managers and policy-

makers in the teacher education communities (Furlong, 2007;

Munn, 2008). Building research capacity for research on teacher

education is therefore also inescapably about capacity-building

with and for those working in this applied field. This understanding

frames the disseminating and embedding of the TEG work, as well

as the continuing generation of further resources.

Building on the previous studies of research capacity-building

cited above, a further starting point for the analysis of the TEG work

in this paper is Charles Desforges equation for research capacity

(cited in Davies & Salisbury, 2008:9), as

Capacity expertisemotivation opportunities

As Davies (2008) has identified, in addition to re-statingthe three

key elements of capacity-building, the use of the multiplier here

means that with just one element absent from an initiative the sum

of the equation becomes zero. We draw on Desforges equation to

discuss how we hope that the TEG initiative, together with an inter-

linked project commencing in September 2008, will build capacity

in the field of teacher education research in three ways: firstly, by

strengthening expertise, knowledge and understanding; secondly,

by enhancing the individual and communal motivations of some of

its researchers; and, thirdly, by offering increased opportunities for

collaborativework between universities and research communities.

All aspects of the TEG initiative from the initial work on

generating the research resources, through to the completion anddissemination of the first resources and the further development

and embedding of the work are clearly framed by the discourses

and practices in the field of teacher education in the UK. It is

important to note here that the groups work has been profoundly

influenced by our communal and individual understandings of the

field and by our positionings within it. Our communal beliefs about

the place of research in teacher education, which have underpinned

this work, can be summarised as follows: firstly, supporting the

development of teacher educators as researchers is crucial to

ensure thriving teacher education communities and the mainte-

nance of research-informed teaching (Munn, 2008); secondly,

being active scholars and/or researchers is a central part of all

teacher educators work; and thirdly, increasing research capacity

in teacher education is important in its own right, as well as a vitalcomponent of any more general research capacity-building initia-

tives in education. Building research capacity along with an

understanding of and expertise in being critical and evaluative in

respect of knowledge, understanding and practices in teacher

education will also, we believe, build research capacity in the

school sector in the long term, through the essential roles which

teacher education researchers have in the professional develop-

ment and learning of serving teachers and student teachers.

In this paper, we give an overview of the TEG work to date in

generating research resources, having acknowledged that this is still

under-evaluated and an on-going initiative. We then focus on ana-

lysing the socio-cultural contexts within UK universities in which

much teacher education research occurs and highlight issues about

the teacher education researchers who work withinthesecontexts. By

including this emphasis in the paper we work from the assertion of

Rees et al. (2007:776) that researchcapacity-building in the university

sectorhas to stemfrom a muchbetterunderstandingof theconditions

under which educational researchers do their jobs and of the wider

social relations within which these are situated. We have also taken

note of Fowler and Procters (2007) use of the expansiverestrictive

continuum (Fuller, Hodkinson, Hodkinson, & Unwin, 2005) for ana-

lysing the diversity of workplace learning settings in which

researchersfind themselves. Thiscontinuumhas particularpertinence

here, given analyses indicating that academic learning in teacher

education can sometimes take place in workplaces which provide

limited opportunities for professional development (Murray, 2008).

Following this analysis, we then outline a new research

capacity-building initiative in teacher education, funded by the

Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). This new project

draws on the mapping undertaken by the TEG and has as one of its

aims the utilisation of all the TEG resources, as well as relevant

resources from other TLRP projects. Importantly, it is also designed

to take into account a number of the contextual factors which affect

the development of teacher educators as researchers.

2. The work of TEG: aims, methods and mapping

Phase 2 of the TLRP Capacity-Building Programme has worked

to produce a set of on-line research training resources for use both

by universities in enriching research training programmes and by

individual educational researchers in developing knowledge of

research processes and practices (Baron, 2005). As Rees et al.

(2007:776) identify, this second phase is based on an embedded

social practices model which aims to develop research capacity

through engagement with already existing communities of prac-

tice within professional associations, including those in teacher

education. The TEG initiative is an example of this type of

engagement between TLRP researchers and representatives of

three organisations with an interest in teacher education, namely

the British Educational Research Association, the University Council

for the Education of Teachers and ESCalate, the Subject Centre forEducation within the Higher Education Academy. Specifically, the

TEG was established to identify how the generic research resources

developed during phase 2 would need to be supplemented to

ensure relevance for capacity-building in the specific field of

teacher education. From its earliest stages, the initiative was

grounded in the TRLPs commitment to developing a set of on-line

capacity-building resources, which together would meet the

requirements of the ESRCs research training recognition exercise.

The TEG resources were to be placed in cyber space as a free

educational good, available to all teacher education researchers and

universities for adaptation to meet user needs.

Our purpose in the section below is to give a brief overview of

the work of the group; full details of the first 2 years of the project

and of the other methodology used for the mapping have beengiven in earlier work (Murray et al., 2008). As the first stage of the

work, a steering group, composed initially of six researchers from

across the field of teacher education, was established. All six come

from backgrounds in school teaching and HE-based teacher

education, and all are active researchers focusing on teacher

education. As a group we oversaw the formulation of the research

questions, created the framework for the initiative and guided

the evolution of the research approaches to be used. Members of

the group also acted as liaison links with the organisations funding

the study. The group also appointed two research fellows and

worked closely with a member of the TLRP technology support

staff. The final group therefore had nine members.

It quickly became apparent that developing this type of initia-

tive in teacher education required a new approach to capacity-

J. Murray et al. / Teaching and Teacher Education 25 (2009) 944950 945


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building resources. The work of TEG could adhere to the TLRPs

embedded social practices model and work from the professional

learning opportunities offered by the generic on-line research

materials, but it also needed to be grounded in the existing schol-

arship of teacher education. Ouraim therefore became to build new

researchers knowledge and understanding of the field working

from the substantive findings and methodological implications of

the research already undertaken. In our work we wanted to make

generativity (Shulman, 1999:162) a fundamental principle for

strengthening research capacity in the field of teacher education.

This principle had particular importance, given the characteristics

of the researchers, as outlined in the next section, and the number

of small-scale, piecemeal, practitioner-led (ESRC, 2006:5) and

sometimes under-theorised research studies already in existence.

Since there were no relevant overviews of recent research on

teacher education in the UK, the TEG decided on the elements of

a broad framework within which the capacity-building activities

were to be undertaken. This framework had three elements: firstly,

the construction of a literature survey to map a substantial part of

the existing research; secondly, drawing on this mapping, the

development of a series of pedagogical guides (termed walk-

throughs) to be placed on the TLRP web site to serve as resources

for new researchers; and thirdly, a longer term summary of thecontents of the mapping to identify what this body of research

revealed about various aspects of teacher education.

We decided that if the initial mapping exercise were to generate

a pedagogical resource to be used by developing researchers, it

would need to:

Constitute a comprehensive mapping of the literature in the

designated fields;

Provide exemplification of specific modes of methodological

investigation within those fields;

Be based on an expertise informed audit of research in the field

the material had to be UK and Republic of Ireland focused,

current, of high quality and diverse.

In summary, 49 journals were surveyed for articles which

focused on teacher education, broadly defined as falling within the

agreed selection/exclusion criteria for the mapping. In total each of

the two research fellows undertook an initial screening of over

4000 articles. The selection criteria (applied to studies conducted

within the UK and the Republic of Ireland) only included articles

published within the given timeframe, and excluded articles, which

had a specific curriculum or pedagogic focus. These criteria were

applied to a long list of full text articles and subsequently a smaller

shortlist of 278articles (for the years20002006) was retained for

inclusion in the review. Each of these was coded under a number of

agreed core themes and categories and recorded in a database

developed by Richard Procter from an open-source system origi-

nating at MIT in the United States. The resulting database and user-interface were then developed into the form currently available at

the TEG Bibliography, hosted at the TRLP web site (http://www.tlrp.

org/capacity/rm/wt/teg/).

The mapping exercise on the TLRP site will shortly be articulated

through a series of walkthroughs (guided commentaries with

embedded links to the mapping and other TLRP resources). The

walkthroughs serve three purposes: firstly, they offer users

indicative strategies for using the searchable database; secondly,

they provide an overview of a key aspect methodological or

thematic, evidenced in the material included in the database and

accessible through the search engine; and thirdly, they give links to

key research materials which act as starting points for those users

new to the area being examined. Together the walkthroughs and

the mapping seek to generate pedagogical tools for both new and

experienced researchers to explore and develop their under-

standing of debates about research in teacher education.

3. Research capacity-building in teacher education: an

overview of contexts and issues

Education as a broad discipline in the UK faces many general

demographic, cultural and social hurdles in strengthening itsresearch bases (Economic and Social Research Council, 2005;

Furlong, 2007; Munn, 2008; Pollard, 2007). But we have argued in

previous work (Murray et al., 2008) that, within this broad

discipline, teacher education research is an under-developed and

disadvantaged field. Zeichner (1999, cited in Cochran-Smith &

Zeichner, 2006:755) characterises it as a relatively young field of

study that draws on many different disciplines and responds to an

evolving policy context.

In the aftermath of devolution in the UK, the four nations

England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have begun to

develop differing approaches to many aspects of education policy.

This variability includes the nature and extent of the constraints

and opportunities for teacher education researchers and teachers

to conduct and draw upon research (Hulme & Menter, 2008). But,

despite this variability, some common, contextual factors for

teacher education and research capacity-building across the UK

remain. In the section below, we begin to sketch some of these

common factors, but would stress that this is only an overview and

that it cannot give details of the point of divergence.1

Tensions about the place of research in teacher education have

been played out over time in teacher education institutions and

departments, especially in those where pre-service courses are the

dominant enterprise. Goodson (1995:141), for example, argues

that, on entering the university sector, teacher education became

caught up in a devils bargain whereby its mission changed from

being primarily concerned with matters central to the practice of

schooling towards issues of status passage through more conven-

tional university scholarship. Some of the unintended outcomes

caused by this devils bargain can be seen in published accounts ofthe dilemmas created for institutions and individuals about

engagement in research (see, inter alia, Acker, 1996; Bridges, 1996;

Deem & Lucas, 2007; Furlong, Barton, Miles, Whiting, & Whitty,

2000; Maguire, 2000; Sikes, 2006; Wideen & Grimmett, 1998).

Past changes in the ways in which research activity is funded

have also had significant effects on institutions and individuals.

Before 1992 in the UK, for example, the public sector institutions

(the teacher education colleges and polytechnics), which provided

the majority of teacher education programmes at that time, had

long standing traditions of engagement in small-scale pedagogical

or practitioner research. In general, however, levels of research

activity among teacher educators were low (Department of

Education and Science [DES], 1987). This situation changed in 1992,

when all institutions were, able to compete for research funding inthe Research Assessment Exercise (RAE).2 The same funding

arrangement continued for the RAEs of 1996 and 2001. The core

research funding received through this participation between 1992

and 2001 enabled the development of young but effective educa-

tion research cultures (Dadds & Kynch, 2003:9) in many of the ex-

1 Due to restrictions of space, this section can only provide a broad overview.

More information about the characteristics of teacher education and research

capacity-building in each of the four jurisdictions may be found on the web site of

the Learning to Teach in Post-Devolution UK web site: (www.learningtoteach.org).2 The Research Assessment Exercises are audits of research activity which define

what counts as research activity within each discipline and who can be seen as an

active researcher. The auditing process also makes judgements about the quality of

research outputs and institutional research cultures.

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public sector institutions, which had by then achieved university

status. Other analyses of this process of change (see, inter alia,

Bassey, 1999; Bassey, 2004; Bridges, 1996; Furlong, Barton, Miles,

Whiting, & Whitty, 1996; Furlong et al., 2000; Murray, 1998 ; Mur-

ray, 2002; Thornton, 2003) also explore the creation of these

institutional research structures, the related and increased valua-

tion placed on research activities and the differential effects of this

funding stream on individual career trajectories and identities.

But, following the Research Assessment Exercise of 2001, the

Higher Education Funding Councils withdrew core research fund-

ing to the UDEs that had achieved grades significantly below the 5

and 5* grades which indicated excellence. This funding change was

part of a selective strategy to improve research quality across the

university sector as a whole. In education this meant that only 32

UDEs across the UK (not all of which offered teacher education

courses) continued to receive core research funding. In the years

since 2001 this shift in funding policy has resulted in a growing

differentiation between the small number of universities still in

receipt of this funding and the larger group of universities without

such support (Munn, 2008; Pollard, 2007). Many of this latter group

of institutions, especially in England, Wales and Northern Ireland,

are in the new university or post-1992 sector: they are teaching-

intensive institutions, and have high numbers of teacher educationstudents on pre- or in-service courses. Edwards and Furlong

(2004:2) record that in 2004 the funding change meant that nearly

80% of teacher education now takes place in universities with no

core research funding. Like Dadds and Kynch (2003) and Bassey

(2004), Edwards and Furlong (2004) noted the detrimental effects

of the funding change on the developing research cultures in many

non-elite universities where small pockets of high quality and

strategically important educational research takes place. The

results of the RAE of 2008, due in December 2008, are predicted to

increase the differentiation between universities in receipt of core

funding (the research rich) and those struggling to maintain

research cultures without this support (the research poor).

Analyses of the national and institutional contexts for research

in teacher education indicate that opportunities are becomingincreasingly restricted for teacher educators in many UDEs to

become and remain researchers (Murray, 2006; Sikes, 2006). This

situation is further exacerbated by the increasing bifurcation of

research and teaching roles in some universities and by the uneven

quality of induction in supporting research development (Murray,

2008). This national study of induction provision in teacher

education suggested that some UDEs functioned as restrictive

learning environments in which the fast pace and individualised

nature of work resulted in pressures for enhanced productivity in

both teaching and research. Fowler and Procters (2007) analysis of

supportive research environments indicates that isolation, heavy

teaching loads and lack of dedicated time for research are

contributory factors in creating restrictive learning environments

in which early and mid career researchers may fail to thrive.There are many predictions that the results of the RAE of 2008,

due in December 2008, will widen the gap between the UDEs in

receipt of core research funding and those struggling to maintain

research cultures without the benefit of such resources (Furlong,

2007; Gilroy,2008; Pollard, 2008). Wewould assertthat policies for

growing research selectivity in the university sector are now in

tension with the dispersed model of research activity that is needed

to support high quality research in teacher education (Furlong,

2007; Munn, 2008). If the current situation continues then the

danger is that teacher education will become divorced from the

engagement with social science research which should be

informing all levelsof its work.Concerns about this situation and its

long-term impact on teacher education in particular and on

educational research in general have been raised repeatedly (e.g.

Bassey, 2004; Dadds & Kinch, 2004; Edwards & Furlong, 2004;

Furlong, 2007; Munn, 2008).

4. Teacher educators as researchers: research in

teacher education

We have indicated above that much of the research on teacher

education is generated by those who are the teacher educators

working in the UDEs involved in providing pre- and in-service

teacher education. The differing ways in which such teacher

educators engage in research and scholarly activities have been

discussed by a number of authors (see, inter alia, Ducharme, 1993;

Harrison & McKeon, 2008; Hatton, 1997; Loughran, 2006; Maguire,

2000; Murray & Male, 2005). The ESRC (2005) report on education

research identifies one significant factor here for capacity-building

in the UK: many new teacher educators come into the university

from practitioner backgrounds, often without sustained experience

of research in the social sciences or significant amounts of research

training acquired through doctoral work. The identified factors

which restrict the time and opportunities available for them to

participate in research include heavy teaching loads in some UDEs,

the impact of partnership work with schools, gendered discourses

and practices of learner nurture, a lack of strong departmentalresearch infra-structures and cultures and restricted learning

environments (see, inter alia, Furlong, 2007; Maguire, 2000; Mur-

ray, 2007; Sikes, 2006).

A number of these studies (e.g. Ducharme & Ducharme, 1996;

Hatton, 1997; Maguire, 2000; Reynolds,1995; Sikes, 2006) indicate

that the structure and status of the employing institution are

important factors in determining the research orientations of the

teacher educator researchers working within it. In Reynolds find-

ings, for example, positive orientations to research are linked to the

institutional setting; the more prestigious the institution, the more

likely teacher educators were to be research active (see also

Ducharme & Ducharme, 1996). Of particular relevance to this paper

is Maguires (2000) argument that teacher educators in many

teaching-intensive universities are effectively positioned bothinside and outside the ivory towers of traditional academia.

Focusing on an empirical study conducted in a teaching-intensive

university, Maguire explores a range of differentiating factors,

which influence teacher educators engagement in research. These

include the gendered discourses and practices of teacher education

and the varying ways in which individuals position themselves in

relation to these variations.

Following these broad lines of argument, the higher education

institutions, as the settings for teacher education work, may be seen

as powerful influences on researchers work and identities. Other

studies (Harrison & McKeon, 2008; Kremer-Hayon & Zuzovsky,

1995; Murray, 2002; Murray & Male, 2005) explicitly or tacitly

hypothesise that becoming research active is part of one type of

career trajectory for teacher educators and imply that researchidentities develop with more years of experience in higher

education.

The Knowledge and Identity in Teacher Education (KITE) study

(Murray, Davison, & John, 2006) and a recent study of new

academics (Murray, 2006) suggest that some of the teacher

educators identity constructions broke with such indications of

institutional or temporal determinism. Both studies indicated that

new teacher educators, even in the early stages of HE work, had

acquired different constructions of their emerging identities as

teacher educators and researchers. These differences existed even

when new teacher educators enter universities from broadly

similar professional backgrounds usually in school teaching to

work on the same pre-service courses. Echoing some of Maguires

(2000) findings, both of these studies show new teacher educators



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positioning themselves in a variety of ways within the field,

drawing on differing discourses and practices of teacher education

and of research in the field which are instantiated within their

UDEs. These include: technical-rational discourses of teaching and

learning as acts of transmission and acquisition and of ITE as

practical training; discourses of reflective and craft profession-

alism and of caring professionalism. They also include discourses of

research as enquiry, and RAE-compliance (and its other non-

compliance). These two studies indicate that teacher educators

identities as researchers, are relational, that is they are not deter-

mined solely by national, institutional or individual factors, but are

formed by complex affinities and disaffinities between individual

habitus, agency and the immediate institutional setting, particu-

larly the micro communities of practice (Wenger, 1998) in which

teacher educators participate in research and scholarly activities.

These findings from studies about teacher educators as

researchers are clearly pertinent in designing research capacity-

building initiatives in teacher education. In addition to considering

the (considerable) impact of national and institutional shifts on

restricting and expanding the opportunities for research, the

literature also indicates that there is a need to recognise teacher

education researchers personal agency and habitus (Bourdieu,

1987), and the professional values and missions which are part ofthe habitus. Of central importance here, we suggest, is how indi-

viduals conceptualise the relationships between their research and

scholarship and their practice as academics and teacher educators

and the senses of congruence (or dissonance) they see between

these various aspects of their academic work in teacher education

(Murray, 2007). In the terms of Desforges capacity-building equa-

tion, then, this literature on teacher educators would suggest that

we need to pay close attention to individual and micro-communal

motivations in relation to being and becoming a researcher and

(often simultaneously) a practitioner in the field. In the next section

we give a brief overviewof a second project, which will form part of

the dissemination and embedding of the TEG initiative. Drawing on

relevant literature about research capacity-building in teacher

education, this project has been designed to take into accounta number of the contextual factors which affect the development of

teacher educators as researchers.

5. Building research capacity in teacher education: the

TERN project

The Teacher Education Research Network (TERN) is a pilot

research capacity-building project, developed originally by five

members of the TEG and funded by the ESRC from September 2008

to August 2009. The project aims to establish a regional network,

with a substantive focus on teacher education research, for research

capacity-building in the North West of England. The main aims of

the project are to pilot a strong and sustainable model for research

capacity-building in teacher education across a collaborativenetwork of seven regional universities, and to test the potential of

this model for building a coherent research infrastructure on

a largerscale across England. Theproject aims to foster institutional

networking across the region, developing collaboration between

seven universities. It aspires to contribute to building regional and

institutional research capacity, as well as developing individual

expertise. In operationalising these aims, the project will draw on

previous investments in educational research, including the TEG

mapping and the findings of relevant TLRP projects, both in teacher

education specifically (e.g. the work of Day, Stobart, Sammons, &

Kington, 2006 on teachers identities and careers) and in related

fields such as workplace learning and lifelong learning (e.g. Eraut,

Maillardet, Miller, & Steadman, 2006 on early career learning in

other professional groups).

As a collaborative network, the TERN project involves staff

from the education departments of the seven universities in the

North West of England, all of which are involved in providing

teacher education courses for the school sector in the region.

Regionality is a strong principle on which to base a pilot project

for building research capacity in England as much of teacher

education provision is already organized on this basis. Teacher

education in the North West shares many characteristics with that

in other parts of the UK, as identified above. Notable factors here

are generally low levels of research activity in most of the

teaching-intensive universities and the threat of growing

disjunction between teaching and research. Only two of the

project universities receive core research funding for education

research. The other five institutions are teaching-intensive with

small pockets of research excellence and enduring traditions of

practitioner research: core research funding supports none of

these research endeavours.

The seven universities have the largest concentration of

teacher education students in England and the largest number of

teacher education staff outside London and the South East. The

region has two urban clusters of universities (around Manchester

and Liverpool). One of the universities, however, has three teacher

education bases at a considerable distance from both of theseurban clusters. This geographical distribution pattern gives

particular relevance to the use of a blended learning programme

that combines face-to-face and on-line teaching approaches,

within the project. Informed by an initial mapping of the research

development priorities of the UDEs and the individuals within the

project, this blended learning programme aims to simulate all

stages of the research process, providing research training on an

embedded social practices model (Baron, 2005). The planned

programme consists of face-to-face meetings, workshops and use

of a Virtual Research Environment (VRE) to support researchers

collaborative learning. Broad structures and content for the pro-

gramme will be informed by previous evaluations of research

capacity-building initiatives (see, inter alia, Fowler & Procter,

2007; Gardner, 2008; Rees et al., 2007) and research-informedpractice in developing blended learning programmes, but exact

details will be fine tuned according to the information gained

through the mapping exercise.

The research development programme aims to strengthen

individual and collaborative expertise. Its specific objectives are to

provide well-focused research training and mentoring to early and

mid career researchers; to explore the theoretical, methodological

and substantive issues involved in generating high quality teacher

education research; and to identify and address an under-

researched issue, which has contemporary relevance and potential

to inform practice in teacher education. The programme also aims

to ensure purposeful dissemination and use of the TLRP research

capacity-building resources, particularly the methodological

resources and the mapping of TEG. Approximately 42 participants,drawn from across the seven UDEs, will work collaboratively in

teams on developing well-structured research proposals to address

a communally defined research question with high relevance to

teacher education in the contemporary university. A mentor who is

a senior researcher in the field will support them. (This aspect of

the group structure will draw on relevant characteristics of the

TLRP Meeting of Minds Fellowships, adapted to working with small

groups.) The collaborative work of the research groups is designed

to offer enhanced opportunities for individual and communal

learning.

In recruiting the early and mid career researchers who will form

the research teams, the Management Group suggested some broad

criteria to guide institutional selection. These criteria suggested

that the chosen researchers should have some existing levels of



6/7

knowledge about research through doctoral study and/or previous

involvement in projects. But the guidance stressed above all that

these individuals should be research aspirant and capable of both

contributing to institutional capacity-building efforts and deriving

individual benefit from the project. We are therefore seeking to

recruit individuals who are well motivated and willing and able to

take advantage of the projects learning potential. We hope that the

TERN project, in working with research aspirant individuals who

already have knowledge and understanding of research in teacher

education, will be working with individuals senses of motivation,

offering enhanced opportunities for collaborative research and the

enhancement of expertise.

6. Conclusion

In the introduction to this paper we quoted Desforges equation

(cited in Davies & Salisbury, 2008:9) of capacity -

expertisemotivationopportunities. In their paper on the

Welsh Educational Research Network (WERN), Davies and Salis-

bury draw on evaluation evidence (Gardner, 2008) to argue

convincingly that the work of this network provided all three

elements of the equation

WERNs activities . have given researchers in Wales the moti-

vation to engage in research by providing an opportunity to

develop expertise in a supportive and stimulating co-learning

environment (Davies & Salisbury, 2008:9, italics in the original)

In this paper we have indicated some of the ways in which we

hope that both the TEG work and the TERN project will eventually

be able to make similar claims. We believe that the mapping

indicates the rich potential for capacity-building by drawing on the

specific substantive, methodological and theoretical issues in

teacher education research. We also envisage that, when the

initiative has been completed and disseminated and embedded in

teacher education, the TEG resources will facilitate the generation

of new knowledge and scholarshipin the field; in Shulmans (1999)

terms, we hope that that the mapping will enable developingresearchers to ground their own research in previous scholarship,

thus strengthening their individual knowledge and understanding,

as well as contributing in the long term to a stronger and more

coherent body of research in the field. In addition, we envisage that

the TEG will support the careerdevelopment of a newgeneration of

teacher education researchers, strengthening both individual and

communal expertise and giving enhanced opportunities for

collaborative learning.

The TERN programme has been designed to be a successful

vehicle for mediating and communicating the knowledge assem-

bled within the TEG mapping. We also anticipate that the design of

the TERN programme will enable its participants to create new

forms of participation in teacher education research, both through

face-to-face and on-line collaborations. The success of the pro-gramme will clearly be dependent on the ways in which it is able to

build collaboratively and strategically on the particular

strengths of the individual teacher educators who participate in it

and on the existing cultures of research, scholarship and teaching

within their UDEs.

In order tobe successful then the project needs towork with the

existing institutional structures, interests and expertise and with

the teacher education researchers personal agency and habitus

(Bourdieu, 1987), and underlying senses of professional values and

missions. Of central importance here, we suggest, is how the rela-

tionships between research, scholarship and teaching are con-

ceptualised both individually and institutionally.

Earlier in this article we outlined the situation across the UK in

which the majority of the universities providing teacher education

programmes no longer receive core funding for their research

activities. This situation casts a dark cloud over the future quality of

research-informed teacher education provision, particularly in

England, Wales and Northern Ireland. But there is perhaps a silver

lining heretoo in that new spacesmay be openingup for new forms

of communal and intra-professional research networks and

endeavours. The time may also be right for a re-framing of what

counts as research activity for teacher educators whose busy day

job is practice in teacher education (Day, 1995). Any such re-

framing of research and scholarship activities in teacher education

could be part of a long term and intra-professional challenge for

teacher educators, one that establishes a new language of learning

and scholarship (see Rowland, 2005; Smith, 2003) around the

profound relationships between research and practice as a teacher

educator in university settings. As one of us has proposed in earlier

work (Murray, 2005:57), this new language could be informed by

an intra-professional re-articulation of the distinctive identities and

expertise of teacher educators in England, together with a re-

evaluation of the essential contributions, which this group has to

make to high quality, research-informed teacher education provi-

sion. These are long-term aims which indicate more of the

complexity of research capacity-building initiatives and acknowl-

edge that strengthening research in a field such as teacher educa-tion is neither straightforward nor accessible to quick fixes at

national, institutional or individual levels.

We opened this article by acknowledging that the work of the

TEG is very much workin progress. We finish the article on a similar

note by emphasising that the issues raised by both the TEG and the

TERN projects are also in need of further exploration, within the

general work on research capacity-building in education currently

being undertaken by the Strategic Forum for Research in Education

(www.sfre.ac.uk). The contention underlying these projects is that

the condition of teacher education research has an especially

significant contribution to make to the more generic work of

initiatives such as SFRE, given the low levels of research activity

among many educators working in UDEs on teacher education

courses. The projects reported in this paper have been designed tocontribute specifically to the capacity-building agenda; however,

equally important is the development of quality in this area of

education research and accounts relating to that will ensue in due

course when more extensive evaluation and review of the work of

the TEG has been undertaken.

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