The purpose of this international and comparative study is to examine what professional learning activities teacher educators value and what factors affect their participation in these activities. The findings reveal that two types of teacher educators’ professional learning needs arise from the data: (i) those involving the development of educational capacities related to their day-to-day remit as a teacher educator and (ii) those required for progressing an academic career, with research and writing skills being the most salient. Furthermore, this study emphasises the ways in which teacher educators, as both teachers and researchers, want to be part of a collaborative community where they can feel supported, listened to, and share their practices and experiences.

As a teacher educator, the author shares her experiences and positioning as an apprentice, academic and administrator. While she refers to each as a ‘phase’, she suggests each overlap at varying times throughout teacher educators' careers/life, particularly if they are lifelong learners and that an element of apprenticeship is present in all that they strive to do, although not everyone perhaps acknowledges and engages with apprenticeship as professional learning and learning about oneself.

This study utilises three dimensions of identity construction (multiplicity vs. unity; social vs. individual; discontinuity vs. continuity) to examine how teachers describe their different roles, how they develop dialogical relations among multiplicity. The findings showed that all participants’ initial identity positions, except one female, have changed, either slightly or radically, during the course of this study. They experienced disequilibrium among different identity positions during the change, which confirms existing research that disequilibrium is considered essential for changes to occur. This study also showed that these teachers’ multiple Identity positions and the conflicts among them are not bounded within the classroom teaching domain or instructional and pedagogical issues.

This study intends to explore student and novice teachers’ experiences with the implementation of collaborative learning (CL) in classroom practice, after a formal training pertaining to CL as part of their teacher education programme. The findings revealed several dilemmas in the stories of student and novice teachers that illustrate the conflicting options teachers are facing in relation to their colleagues, their pupils, the curriculum and in the classroom context when implementing CL. In particular, the following dilemmas were identified: two dilemmas related to professional autonomy (student teachers: teacher autonomy vs. pre-service performance assessment and novice teachers: teacher autonomy vs. institutional conformity).

The purpose of this paper is to highlight the importance of policy-oriented teacher inquiry that is collaborative, theoretically driven, and methodologically well-grounded. The author proposes a methodological framework for policy-oriented teacher inquiry that highlights multilayered research approaches and collaborative inquiry. She situates her arguments and the proposed framework in the context of qualitative research and Marx’s dialectic method. The author introduces four study phases that can enable deeper and more detailed understandings of relations between individual experiences, political structures, and material environments.