The enhancement of teacher educators’ research-teaching nexus The present thesis study provided new insights on how teacher educators consid-ered the relationship between their research and teaching and their roles as teach-ers/researchers, and how they implemented research-teaching integration. In light of these findings, researchers might reflect on how to build an intertwined re-search-teaching nexus in academic teacher education at both the institutional and individual levels.
Institutional support is critical. Besides the work teacher educators prefer to do, they need to finish the task the university assigns to them. Research-teaching conflict may occur when teacher educators’ self-positioning is different from the university’s expectations (Colbeck, 1998). The situation may get worse if the uni-versity cannot provide teacher educators with sufficient guidance and support to accomplish their research and teaching work (Lunenberg, 2010; Martinez, 2008;
Zhu, 2010). Encouraging strategies to strengthen teacher educators’ research-teaching nexus and integration could be involved in the institutional management strategies and development plans (Brew, 2010; Hill & Haigh, 2012). One of the reasons for teachers to see teaching and research as two separate tasks is that the rewards system functions separately concerning the funding of research and teach-ing (Brew, 2003; Colbeck, 1998). Accordteach-ingly, a research-teachteach-ing nexus can be strengthened, for example, by setting up a new funding system to encourage teacher educators’ efforts to integrate research and teaching. A culture of research-teaching integration needs to be built in the university context (Hill & Haigh, 2012). Teacher educators need a scholarly community that does not treat them as the ones who teach and the ones who conduct research (Brew, 2010).
Specific strategies and programmes can be organised to support teacher edu-cators’ research-teaching integration. Researchers stressed the importance of pro-fessional development programmes for teacher educators to improve their re-search capacity (MacPhail et al., 2019; Murray & Vanassche, 2019). Based on the ways research-teaching integration were revealed in the study, it is argued that these programmes could be organised more specifically on improving teacher ed-ucators’ skills to integrate research and teaching. Meanwhile, the proper workload should be arranged for individual teachers and with a flexible working timetable.
Teacher educators could then have more control and autonomy over their teach-ing, the design and organising of their courses. It is important to remember that all these measures the institutions take need to be built on what the teacher educa-tors have as strengths, and do not undermine the work they have been doing (Mac-Phail & O’Sullivan, 2019).
Correspondingly, efforts to enhance the research-teaching nexus are encour-aged at the individual level with the teacher educators. Some specific suggestions
based on the ways of research-teaching integration of the teacher educators re-vealed in this thesis study can be made. Generally speaking, research should be integrated into teaching in a student-focused approach, as suggested in Healey’s (2005a) model of designing curriculum. Moreover, in addition to teaching content, teacher educators should be encouraged more to integrate research with their teaching methods. Inquiry-based teaching should be recommended. It is important for teacher educators to be aware that high-quality guidance and instant feedback are necessary for ensuring the good learning experience of student teachers in the process (Niemi & Nevgi, 2014). Forming a supportive learning environment is vital for encouraging students to participate in research (Niemi, 2016). Further-more, besides encouraging student teachers to work on the research topics that are currently the teacher educators’ research focus, teacher educators need to relate the research to the student teachers’ future work as teachers and encourage them to explore the issues related to their own interests and problems encountered (Aspfors & Eklund, 2017). Teacher educators are interested in exploring their own teaching and more attention needs to be paid to how they can use the research results to improve teaching.
The initiatives to support an integrated research-teaching nexus at the institu-tional and individual levels need to be coordinated. A constant reflection on the roles teacher educators play and the work they engage in would be helpful for them to position themselves, and find a fit between their personal development and the university’s management plans. As mentioned above, the university is en-couraged to give teacher educators more control over their work, teacher educa-tors then are required to plan their teaching and research in organised ways to integrate the two parts. Even in one course of one individual teacher educator, the ways to integrate research and teaching vary, and multiple ways are applied. The several ways need to be linked systematically. The aims of research-teaching in-tegration should be made more explicit to teacher educators (Aspfors & Eklund, 2017), especially for those who may not have a thorough consideration of their research-teaching nexus. A strengthened research-teaching nexus is needed to avoid redundant work and improve the work efficiency of teacher educators. It is guaranteed with support from the institutions and the implementation of research-teaching integration of individual teacher educators.
The development of teacher educators’ approaches to teaching Previous studies indicate that teachers need to be encouraged to employ more of the student-focused approach to teaching (Trigwell et al., 1999). This thesis study revealed that most teacher educators reported their approaches to teaching as be-ing dissonant. They may combine the student-focused and teacher-focused ap-proaches to teaching on purpose according to different teaching situations and
stu-dents. The attention should be paid to the ones who might have unclear percep-tions of their teaching and thus revealing a vague approach to teaching. Pedagog-ical training is revealed to influence teachers’ approaches to teaching (Gibbs &
Coffey, 2004; Hanbury et al., 2008; Postareff et al., 2007, 2008; Stes et al., 2007).
The effect can be enhanced if the training is tailored to the individual teacher ed-ucators (Stes & Van Petegem, 2014), considering not only their specific teaching environments but also a wider context, such as the cultural and national traditions.
For example, teachers intending to present information to students is not neces-sarily a bad thing. The important task in the training is to improve teacher educa-tors’ skills to activate student teachers in learning to process the information.
The study found that in Finland, few teacher educators have participated in university pedagogical training programmes. It is probably because they consid-ered themselves to be teachers majoring in teaching and teacher education, and thus with sufficient knowledge and skills to teach. However, on one hand, ap-proaches to teaching are influenced by teacher educators’ perceptions, on the other hand, they are affected by the external environments (Chen, 2015; Prosser et al., 2003). Teacher educators need to be encouraged to participate in pedagogical training to join in the continuous professional development concerning their teaching. More importantly, it could provide teacher educators with a culture and learning community to reflect on their perceptions and practice of approaches to teaching. Approaches to teaching should not be fixed; teacher educators need to be sensitive to the external requirements for the change and improvement in their approaches to teaching and be prepared to do so.
The enhancement of teacher educators’ self-efficacy beliefs in teaching and reduction of burnout
This thesis provided some insights that, firstly, teacher educators can enhance their student-focused approach to teaching through improving their self-efficacy beliefs in teaching. Furthermore, by using the student-focused approach to teach-ing which relates to the students’ conceptual change and development of under-standing, teacher educators may feel effective in teaching. Thus, the use of a stu-dent-focused approach to teaching could in turn enhance teacher educators’ self-efficacy beliefs in teaching (see also Choi et al., 2019). From this standpoint, the student-focused approach to teaching should be encouraged more among teacher educators.
Previous studies indicated that pedagogical training improves teachers’ self-efficacy beliefs (Lumpe et al., 2014; Posnanski, 2002; Postareff et al., 2007). The training programmes could focus on improving teacher educators’ skills to inter-act with students. For example, how to detect student teachers’ learning needs and problems, how to react to students’ challenging behaviours, and how to connect the teaching more to their needs as future teachers. The core idea is to improve
teacher educators’ pedagogy towards a student-focused approach. Communica-tion and interacCommunica-tion between teacher educators and student teachers are necessary and unavoidable. It helps teacher educators to know their students’ learning needs and thus to adjust approaches to teaching to the students’ approaches to learning promptly (Zhu, 2017). The influence mechanism between inadequacy in teacher-student interaction and teacher educators’ approaches to teaching is unclear. Thus, caution is needed when encouraging teacher educators to interact with students.
Though this thesis study did not show how teacher exhaustion and stress influ-ence teacher educators’ approaches to teaching, precaution is necessary to avoid teacher educators’ feeling of exhaustion and stress before it actually happens (Lackritz, 2004), especially new initiatives to shift teacher educators’ routine prac-tices as teachers are initiated. Teacher educators may need to put extra time and effort to adapt to the new requirements and thus feel exhausted. The increasing workload is one of the stressors leading to teachers’ emotional exhaustion (Rajen-dran, Watt, & Richardson, 2020). Thus, having the proper workload is warranted to help prevent teacher burnout. Finally, the factors leading to teacher burnout may be different according to individuals and the specific contexts, which means that the strategies the universities adopt to support teacher educators need to target the individuals and their particular situations (Scott, 2019).