Conference Agenda

Teacher shortages have persisted in Iceland for several decades. Concurrently, increased emphasis on strengthening education quality led to the 2008 reform, which extended teacher education from a three-year bachelor’s degree to a five-year master’s degree programme. Although this reform aimed to enhance professional preparation, it was followed by a decline in the number of graduates (Jóhannsdóttir & Björnsdóttir, 2018). From 1998 to 2007, an average of 16.8% of teachers lacked formal teacher education. Although this proportion declined in the following decade, it has risen again since 2020, now exceeding 18%. Comparable trends have been observed in other European countries, where teacher shortages and educational reforms often result in fluctuations in the number of qualified graduates.

Teacher shortages in Iceland are linked to both a limited supply of qualified graduates and the high number of certified teachers who do not enter or remain in school teaching (Eyjólfsson & Jónsson, 2017). Policy responses have primarily emphasised expanding distance education within teacher education programmes (Jóhannsdóttir & Björnsdóttir, 2020). These alternative pathways tend to attract older students than traditional on-campus programmes. This is reflected in European statistics showing that the average age of teacher education graduates in Iceland is considerably higher than in most other European countries (Hauschildt et al., 2018). Older students are more likely to combine studies with paid employment and family responsibilities, which may limit their ability to fully engage with academic and practicum requirements (Jóhannsdóttir & Björnsdóttir, 2022).

In 2019, further measures were introduced to increase enrolment and graduation rates and to strengthen the link between teacher education and professional practice (Sigurðsson et al., 2023). One such measure allows students to undertake a paid internship during the final year of their master’s programme while simultaneously attending on-campus courses designed to ensure coherence and progression in learning (Wiese et al., 2024). Students may earn 30 ECTS credits while working as teachers in a position formally defined as having 50% employment. The internship aims to enhance professional readiness, support the transition into teaching and contribute to teacher retention (Stjórnarráðið, n.d.).

While this arrangement aligns with research emphasising the importance of integrating theory and practice in teacher education (Darling-Hammond et al., 2005; Hammerness, 2014), it has coincided with notable changes in student pathways into teaching. The number of students enrolled in the integrated five-year compulsory school teacher education programme has declined. In contrast, the share of students entering teacher education after completing a prior bachelor’s degree increased from 11% to 42% between 2014 and 2020 (Jóhannsdóttir & Björnsdóttir, 2021). As a result, many students entering paid internships have completed relatively little formal teacher education before assuming teaching responsibilities, compared with students in integrated programmes.

Recent data further suggest that, despite the internship being designed as part-time employment, many student teachers work full time during their final year of study (Gísladóttir et. al., 2023). This raise concerns that student teachers—particularly older students with family responsibilities—may experience substantial pressure as they combine full-time teaching, academic coursework and caregiving obligations.

This study draws on research on work–family balance and competing time demands in higher education. It utilises survey data from Icelandic master’s-level student teachers to examine how work and family responsibilities influence experiences during paid internships. The study investigates whether decisions to undertake full-time teaching are primarily student-driven or shaped by expectations from employing schools facing teacher shortages. It also examines whether experiences differ across student groups based on family responsibilities and programme type, such as enrolment in an integrated five-year programme or entry following a prior bachelor’s degree.

Since 2010, Teacher Educators and Education departments within the English context faced a wide range of challenges, ranging from changes to policy directives, as well as funding cuts and changes to the Teacher Education landscape via market reviews (Department for Education (DfE), 2021), as well as new requirements for accreditation processes, the rise of apprenticeships, and ongoing scrutiny via inspectorates. Teacher Educators often, due to their complex roles within this changing landscape, find that it is difficult to navigate their own career development as well as contributing effectively to the Higher Education (HE) sector, and as a result feels that they become marginalised within the HE sector.

Teacher educators play a crucial role in the educational landscape, serving as key actors in sustaining and advancing high-quality education (Meeus et al., 2018). They are widely regarded as the core of teacher education through their responsibility for designing, implementing, and evaluating curricula, pedagogical approaches, teaching practices, and educational development (Hadar & Brody, 2017). As the quality of teachers depends fundamentally on their education and training, increasing scholarly and policy attention has been directed toward teacher educators’ roles in educational practice, research, and policy since the early 1990s (Flores, 2018). Despite this attention, the profession continues to be described as hidden (Snoek et al., 2011), poorly defined (Ping et al., 2018), or insufficiently understood (Kaasila et al., 2023).

Teacher educators’ work is inherently diverse and complex, encompassing a wide range of tasks, responsibilities, and challenges that require specific combinations of knowledge, skills, and professional dispositions (Ping et al., 2018). Such diversity may generate tensions and conflicts, as individuals are required to navigate multiple and sometimes competing expectations and standards (Kelchtermans et al., 2018). One way to conceptualize and structure this complexity is through the notion of professional roles (Meeus et al., 2018).

In their influential review, Lunenberg et al. (2014) identified six professional roles of teacher educators. A professional role is defined as a “personal interpretation of a position based on expectations from the environment and on a systematically organized and transferable knowledge base” (p. 6). As teachers of teachers, teacher educators are expected to educate future teachers and support their professional development by modelling exemplary teaching and learning practices. However, their expertise cannot be reduced to practical experience alone. Consequently, teacher educators are also expected to fulfil the role of researcher, generating new knowledge for themselves and others while supporting their own professional learning through research engagement. In addition, teacher educators may act as coaches, guiding and supervising student teachers during teaching practicums; as curriculum developers, constructing coherent teacher education curricula grounded in theoretical and practical insights; as gatekeepers, monitoring access to the teaching profession through assessment and evaluation; and as brokers, mediating between teacher education institutions and schools by fostering collaboration, partnerships, and alignment between theory and practice.

This study examines how these professional roles are articulated in teacher educator job advertisements. Job advertisements are formal documents that provide insight into employers’ expectations regarding qualifications, experience, skills, and professional responsibilities (Kim & Angnakoon, 2016). The analysis of job advertisements is a well-established approach for examining professional expectations, labour market dynamics, and recruitment trends (Harper, 2012). The guiding research question is:

• How are professional roles portrayed in teacher educator job advertisements: what do the roles entail and how are they emphasized in the advertisements?

This study responds to the call to provide greater insights into what it means to be a teacher educator (Richter, Brunner, Richter 2021). By analysing professional roles in job advertisements, it contributes to a deeper understanding of the profession, illustrates the expectations placed upon it, and provides insight into how it is conceptualized. It serves as a valuable addition to the existing body of literature on teacher educators, which has primarily focused on their self-perceptions as professionals (Richter, Brunner, and Richter 2021).

In this paper, we report on data from our survey of the university Initial Teacher Education (ITE) sector in England, concerning responses to questions about perceptions of workload and research. Our survey collects responses annually (since 2021) from approximately 12% of the cohort, and includes questions on a variety of topics, with Likert scale and text responses. Here, we report on three interconnected areas with potential impacts on the future of teacher education in England, and with pertinent findings for other nations, including research expectations and opportunities, workload, and the extent to which university leaders understand ITE.

This paper focuses on the work of initial teacher educators. Initial Teacher Education (also sometimes known as pre-service teacher education) and those who work within this sector have been identified as being under-researched (Ellis et al., 2013). Research on teacher educators is limited, likely because most studies in Initial Teacher Education are conducted by ITE academics themselves, who predominantly focus on their students and educational settings rather than examining their own professional experiences. Where research does develop, it tends to take the form of ‘insider research’.

We consider three tensions in the ITE sector:

Workload: there are data to suggest that workloads for individual academics working in this sector are high and, importantly, intense in nature (Clapham et al., 2023; Murray & Kosnik, 2011). The current ITE system in England, like those in other countries, such as Australia and the USA, has high demands in terms of teacher educator workloads and accountability (Cochran-Smith, 2021).

Research: Research insights into Initial Teacher Education and the systems and people that support this vital stage in the profession are of particular importance during a decade long recruitment and retention crisis in teaching (McLean et al., 2024). Morris et al. (2023) report distinct challenges for researchers working in ITE, citing particular circumstances affecting their roles and ‘opportunities for engaging with and conducting research’ (Morris et al., 2023, p. 57).

Expectations: Ellis et al. (2013) found that teacher educators were driven to focus their time on the quality assurance of school partnerships and pastoral support of students and that workload management was generally unsuitable for taking into account the unique requirements of teacher education. Oancea et al. (2021) also found that universities may be reluctant to invest in teacher education research, perhaps through a lack of understanding of the importance and relevance of such research and possibly through a lack of funding available for this work.

To address the gap in our understanding of ITE academic work, we decided it was essential to explore the experiences of those involved in ITE in England through a longitudinal study, taking a pragmatic research approach, that began with an initial survey in the 2021/22 academic year (Wood & Quickfall, 2024) with subsequent surveys each year since. The theoretical framework for this research was based on Spencer's work (2013) on omission, trivialisation and condemnation of teacher educators and their work. From this basis, we developed our own conceptual framework of the current situation in English ITE as a perfect storm, with challenges around time and capacity to undertake research, high workloads and low expectations from some university leaders, making their own research ambitions very difficult to achieve. Issues of omission, trivialisation, and condemnation in the sector and more widely in the government add a further set of challenges to this group in terms of being heard, valued, and included.