Conceptualising teacher education in professional training

This thesis examines the education of people who are employed as educators in certain professional settings. It considers how such education has changed in response to academic accreditation increasingly being demanded in professional locations. Yet, the preparation of in-service trainee teachers is depicted as still being concerned with enabling compliance with prescriptive, professional guidelines that temper educational aspirations. This is shown to have implications for how professional identity is understood for the teacher educators and for the trainee teachers. This topic is considered primarily through the perspective of the author’s own recent professional engagement in police training, with some historical reference to other areas of professional training in which he has been engaged. By considering his own practice, the author conveys the educational challenges being encountered more generally as preparing those for work in professional training is recast as teacher education. A central theme is concerned with how the challenges relate to professional concepts of ‘teacher’ mediated through language associated with respective professions. The thesis considers how these restrictive definitions introduce uncertainty in relation to how professional identity is experienced by professional trainers, especially the police, when engaged in teacher education. The principal focus of this thesis, therefore, concerns not only the notions of professional teacher or trainer perceived by those who have undertaken teacher education, but also an analytical investigation into the responses made by trainee teachers in relation to the qualification content and the training experience.