Teacher educators are responsible for educating student teachers as future teachers about the complex nature of teaching and learning and help them to understand its evidence base (Smith, 2011). Though they work in their own context with differ-ences in educational systems and policies, and teacher education practices, their work is of crucial importance is a widespread agreement internationally. As a unique group, they share some similar experiences and problems while working.
For teacher educators in Finland and China, teacher education in the university context provides them with opportunities to work with multiple roles and tasks.
The external requirements in teacher education put teacher educators in a demand-ing work situation (Ben-Peretz, 2001). Finland has set up well-developed re-search-based teacher education as the main theme for teacher educators to manage their research and teaching (Toom et al., 2008, 2010). Meanwhile, their colleagues in China are facing a series of ongoing changes in the working environment be-cause of the reform of initial teacher education (Zhou & Reed, 2005; Zhu & Han, 2006). The Chinese teacher educators are being challenged to shift their educa-tional ideology and working routines in accordance with the initiatives introduced nationally and internationally (Guo, 2005; Hu et al., 2014; Li, 2010; Sang et al.,
2012; Ye et al., 2019; Yuan & Lee, 2014; Zhou, 2014). Teacher educators’ re-search-teaching integration and approaches to teaching are situational phenomena explored in the two Finnish and Chinese teacher education contexts accordingly.
The study of teacher educators used to get little attention because the teaching of teaching has not been perceived as being specialised expertise as the knowledge in other fields (Berry, 2004). Thus, teacher educators were expected to learn about themselves and their work on their own as individual endeavours. However, the arguments presented in the above sections provide a theoretical basis for exploring teacher educators’ work for the present dissertation study (Figure 3).
Figure 3. Summary of the theoretical framework of this doctoral thesis.
The situation for university-based teacher educators is that teaching and conduct-ing research are their important responsibilities. A deep understandconduct-ing of how they approach their teaching and research to further the development of teaching and teacher education is under request. Thus, teacher educators’ research-teaching nexus and practice to integrate research and teaching are the core phenomena ex-plored in this thesis, which reflect their perceptions of teaching and research, and their relationship with the students and the teaching environment. The student-focused approach to teaching is favoured in some studies (Postareff et al., 2007;
Trigwell et al., 1999), but the dissonant approaches to teaching are found in broad teaching contexts (Postareff et al., 2008; Stes & Van Petegem, 2014; Uiboleht et al., 2016). Teacher educators need to be able to apply the various approaches to
teaching to suit the different teaching situations and student groups (Chen, 2015), which is the second main concern of the study.
The changes in the approach to teaching are related to various factors. The present thesis firstly focuses on the interaction between teacher educators’ re-search-teaching nexus and integration, and approaches to teaching. Secondly, the study examines how their self-efficacy beliefs in teaching and experiences of burnout influence their approaches to teaching, which mirror their emotional and psychological aspects when teaching and interacting with students. Emotion acts as the internal link between approaches to teaching, self-efficacy beliefs in teach-ing and burnout (Bandura, 1993; Lau et al., 2005; Mameli & Molinari, 2017;
McGeary & McGeary, 2012; Trigwell, 2012).
Teacher self-efficacy beliefs and burnout have been conceptualised in several contexts with various operational definitions in previous studies, which results in different measures used to assess them (Friedman, 2003). This makes it hard to interpret the research findings across different research contexts (Tschannen-Mo-ran & Hoy, 2001). Most research on teacher self-efficacy is conducted among preservice teachers and elementary and middle school teachers. Meanwhile, though many empirical studies have explored university teachers’ burnout, few studies have focused on teacher educators (Nagra & Arora, 2013). It has been pointed out that teacher efficacy is task- and context-specific (Taimalu et al., 2010;
Tschannen-Moran & Hoy, 2007). Teachers perceive their self-efficacy in different situations differently (Malinen et al., 2013). Thus, as suggested in one study, do-main-specific research on teachers’ self-efficacy beliefs could provide teachers with context-specific suggestions concerning teaching and thus should be encour-aged (Klassen, Tze, Betts, & Gordon, 2011). Internationally speaking, Chinese teacher educators’ self-efficacy beliefs and experiences of burnout is an under-researched area, which needs further attention.
3 The aims of the study
The university-based teacher educators work in a teacher education context in which research and teaching interrelate and interact in complicated ways (Mac-Phail et al., 2019). The complexity of teacher educators’ work requires a rethink-ing of their roles and responsibilities, and how they deliver their work (McMahon et al., 2015; Vanassche et al., 2015). Therefore, the overall purpose of this doctoral thesis is to deepen our understanding of how teacher educators consider and ap-proach their research and teaching work. To be more precise, the aim of the study is to explore teacher educators’ reported research-teaching closeness and roles as teachers and/or researchers, their practice to integrate research and teaching, and how these relate to their approaches to teaching. In addition, the study investigates how teacher educators’ personal characteristics and experiences, i.e., their self-efficacy beliefs in teaching and burnout, predict their approaches to teaching.
The following research questions are addressed in three sub-studies to achieve the research aims:
1. How do teacher educators report the closeness between their research and teaching, and their roles as teachers and/or researchers? (Studies I and II) 2. How do teacher educators report integrating research into teaching?
(Study I)
3. What approaches to teaching do teacher educators report adopting? (Stud-ies I and II)
4. How are teacher educators’ reported research-teaching closeness and teacher/researcher role related to their approaches to teaching? (Stud-ies I and II)
5. How is teacher educators’ research-teaching integration related to their reported approaches to teaching? (Study I)
6. How are their reported approaches to teaching related to their self-efficacy beliefs in teaching? (Study III)
7. How are their reported approaches to teaching related to their expe-riences of burnout? (Study III)