Teaching and Teacher Education 25 (2009) 944950

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Teaching and Teacher Education

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Research and teacher education in the UK: Building capacity

Jean Murray a, *, Anne Campbell b, Ian Hextall c, Moira Hulme d, Marion Jones e, Pat Mahony c, Ian Menter d, Richard Procter f, Karl Wall f
a

University of East London, UK Leeds Metropolitan University, UK c Roehampton University, UK d University of Glasgow, UK e Liverpool John Moores University, UK f Institute of Education, University of London, UK
b

a r t i c l e i n f o
Article history: Received 4 November 2008 Accepted 13 January 2009 Keywords: Teacher education research Research capacity-building National policy Institutional development Early and mid career researchers Network learning

a b s t r a c t
The need for capacity-building in teacher education in the UK has been raised as a serious issue by a number of commentators. Tensions about the place of research in teacher education have persisted for many decades, but following changes to the core funding mechanisms in the UK, the maintenance of education research bases within many universities has become increasingly tenuous. This paper provides an analytical account of an initiative conducted by the Teacher Education Group (TEG) to build research capacity in teacher education. With reference to a review of the national contexts for research in the UK and research on teacher educators, the article argues that, in order to build research capacity initiatives we need to provide motivation and new types of networking opportunities for researchers, as well as developing their expertise. In developing this argument, the article also explore the relationships between national policy changes, institutional research cultures and individual habitus and agency in research capacity-building. The paper also describes a new initiative in England, the Teacher Education Research Network (TERN). Crown Copyright 2009 Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction Developing research capacity as a way of strengthening teacher education communities is seen as a key factor in enhancing the long-term quality of student and teacher learning across Continental Europe and the USA (see, inter alia, Cochran-Smith & Zeichner, 2006; Erixon Arreman, 2008; Lunenberg, Ponte, & Van de Ven, 2007). The need for capacity-building in teacher education in the UK has also been raised as a serious issue (Bassey, 2003; Furlong, 2007; Menter, Brisard, & Smith, 2006; Munn, 2008). But there are distinct challenges involved in any capacity-building initiative, not least because such work will clearly be a multilayered and complex endeavour (Erixon Arreman, 2008; Pollard, 2008; Rees, Baron, Boyask, & Taylor, 2007) involving intricate webs of national, institutional, collective and individual interests. This paper gives an analytical account of the work of one ongoing research capacity-building initiative in teacher education in

* Corresponding author. Cass School of Education, University of East London, Stratford, London, E15 4CT, United Kingdom. E-mail address: j.m.f.murray@uel.ac.uk (J. Murray).

the UK, namely the work of the Teacher Education Group (TEG). This group has worked under the auspices of the Teaching and Learning Research Programme (TLRP), aiming to support the development of research capacity in teacher education in the UK through the creation of accessible research resources, which have particular relevance for teacher education. The group recently completed a mapping of a substantial proportion of UK research on teacher education, published between 2000 and 2008, and is now working on generating further resources. The resources from this initiative have yet to be fully disseminated and embedded within the many and various communities researching teacher education. Consequently, it is not yet possible to evaluate the full impact of the work and as Wolter (2007:804) states, to succeed a research programme has to take root within the research infrastructure. and help to preserve the know-how that has been created and promote the decentralised cultivation of that know-how. If it fails to achieve such purposes then the initiative becomes what Sarason (1998:5) denes as activity without change. There is general acceptance (see, inter alia, Dyson & Desforges, 2002; Fowler & Procter, 2007; McIntyre & McIntyre, 1999; Pollard, 2007) that a necessary part of capacity-building is providing the support and opportunities for researchers to develop their

0742-051X/$ see front matter Crown Copyright 2009 Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.tate.2009.01.011

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expertise by acquiring new skills, knowledge and understanding of research. Our argument in this paper reects this consensus but also identies that for the TEG initiative or any other research capacity-building initiatives to be successful, we need to consider the socio-cultural contexts for research and scholarship within the university departments of education (UDEs) where many researchers work (Rees et al., 2007:776) and the individual habitus and sense of agency of the individual researcher. In the case of capacity-building for teacher education this is particularly important since much of the research is generated by those who are also the practitioners as teacher educators, managers and policymakers in the teacher education communities (Furlong, 2007; Munn, 2008). Building research capacity for research on teacher education is therefore also inescapably about capacity-building with and for those working in this applied eld. This understanding frames the disseminating and embedding of the TEG work, as well as the continuing generation of further resources. Building on the previous studies of research capacity-building cited above, a further starting point for the analysis of the TEG work in this paper is Charles Desforges equation for research capacity (cited in Davies & Salisbury, 2008:9), as

including this emphasis in the paper we work from the assertion of Rees et al. (2007:776) that research capacity-building in the university sector has to stem from a much better understanding of the conditions under which educational researchers do their jobs and of the wider social relations within which these are situated. We have also taken note of Fowler and Procters (2007) use of the expansiverestrictive continuum (Fuller, Hodkinson, Hodkinson, & Unwin, 2005) for analysing the diversity of workplace learning settings in which researchers nd themselves. This continuum has particular pertinence here, given analyses indicating that academic learning in teacher education can sometimes take place in workplaces which provide limited opportunities for professional development (Murray, 2008). Following this analysis, we then outline a new research capacity-building initiative in teacher education, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). This new project draws on the mapping undertaken by the TEG and has as one of its aims the utilisation of all the TEG resources, as well as relevant resources from other TLRP projects. Importantly, it is also designed to take into account a number of the contextual factors which affect the development of teacher educators as researchers. 2. The work of TEG: aims, methods and mapping

Capacity expertise motivation opportunities

As Davies (2008) has identied, in addition to re-stating the three key elements of capacity-building, the use of the multiplier here means that with just one element absent from an initiative the sum of the equation becomes zero. We draw on Desforges equation to discuss how we hope that the TEG initiative, together with an interlinked project commencing in September 2008, will build capacity in the eld of teacher education research in three ways: rstly, by strengthening expertise, knowledge and understanding; secondly, by enhancing the individual and communal motivations of some of its researchers; and, thirdly, by offering increased opportunities for collaborative work between universities and research communities. All aspects of the TEG initiative from the initial work on generating the research resources, through to the completion and dissemination of the rst resources and the further development and embedding of the work are clearly framed by the discourses and practices in the eld of teacher education in the UK. It is important to note here that the groups work has been profoundly inuenced by our communal and individual understandings of the eld and by our positionings within it. Our communal beliefs about the place of research in teacher education, which have underpinned this work, can be summarised as follows: rstly, supporting the development of teacher educators as researchers is crucial to ensure thriving teacher education communities and the maintenance of research-informed teaching (Munn, 2008); secondly, being active scholars and/or researchers is a central part of all teacher educators work; and thirdly, increasing research capacity in teacher education is important in its own right, as well as a vital component of any more general research capacity-building initiatives in education. Building research capacity along with an understanding of and expertise in being critical and evaluative in respect of knowledge, understanding and practices in teacher education will also, we believe, build research capacity in the school sector in the long term, through the essential roles which teacher education researchers have in the professional development and learning of serving teachers and student teachers. In this paper, we give an overview of the TEG work to date in generating research resources, having acknowledged that this is still under-evaluated and an on-going initiative. We then focus on analysing the socio-cultural contexts within UK universities in which much teacher education research occurs and highlight issues about the teacher education researchers who work within these contexts. By

Phase 2 of the TLRP Capacity-Building Programme has worked to produce a set of on-line research training resources for use both by universities in enriching research training programmes and by individual educational researchers in developing knowledge of research processes and practices (Baron, 2005). As Rees et al. (2007:776) identify, this second phase is based on an embedded social practices model which aims to develop research capacity through engagement with already existing communities of practice within professional associations, including those in teacher education. The TEG initiative is an example of this type of engagement between TLRP researchers and representatives of three organisations with an interest in teacher education, namely the British Educational Research Association, the University Council for the Education of Teachers and ESCalate, the Subject Centre for Education within the Higher Education Academy. Specically, the TEG was established to identify how the generic research resources developed during phase 2 would need to be supplemented to ensure relevance for capacity-building in the specic eld of teacher education. From its earliest stages, the initiative was grounded in the TRLPs commitment to developing a set of on-line capacity-building resources, which together would meet the requirements of the ESRCs research training recognition exercise. The TEG resources were to be placed in cyber space as a free educational good, available to all teacher education researchers and universities for adaptation to meet user needs. Our purpose in the section below is to give a brief overview of the work of the group; full details of the rst 2 years of the project and of the other methodology used for the mapping have been given in earlier work (Murray et al., 2008). As the rst stage of the work, a steering group, composed initially of six researchers from across the eld of teacher education, was established. All six come from backgrounds in school teaching and HE-based teacher education, and all are active researchers focusing on teacher education. As a group we oversaw the formulation of the research questions, created the framework for the initiative and guided the evolution of the research approaches to be used. Members of the group also acted as liaison links with the organisations funding the study. The group also appointed two research fellows and worked closely with a member of the TLRP technology support staff. The nal group therefore had nine members. It quickly became apparent that developing this type of initiative in teacher education required a new approach to capacity-

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building resources. The work of TEG could adhere to the TLRPs embedded social practices model and work from the professional learning opportunities offered by the generic on-line research materials, but it also needed to be grounded in the existing scholarship of teacher education. Our aim therefore became to build new researchers knowledge and understanding of the eld working from the substantive ndings and methodological implications of the research already undertaken. In our work we wanted to make generativity (Shulman, 1999:162) a fundamental principle for strengthening research capacity in the eld of teacher education. This principle had particular importance, given the characteristics of the researchers, as outlined in the next section, and the number of small-scale, piecemeal, practitioner-led (ESRC, 2006:5) and sometimes under-theorised research studies already in existence. Since there were no relevant overviews of recent research on teacher education in the UK, the TEG decided on the elements of a broad framework within which the capacity-building activities were to be undertaken. This framework had three elements: rstly, the construction of a literature survey to map a substantial part of the existing research; secondly, drawing on this mapping, the development of a series of pedagogical guides (termed walkthroughs) to be placed on the TLRP web site to serve as resources for new researchers; and thirdly, a longer term summary of the contents of the mapping to identify what this body of research revealed about various aspects of teacher education. We decided that if the initial mapping exercise were to generate a pedagogical resource to be used by developing researchers, it would need to:  Constitute a comprehensive mapping of the literature in the designated elds;  Provide exemplication of specic modes of methodological investigation within those elds;  Be based on an expertise informed audit of research in the eld the material had to be UK and Republic of Ireland focused, current, of high quality and diverse. In summary, 49 journals were surveyed for articles which focused on teacher education, broadly dened as falling within the agreed selection/exclusion criteria for the mapping. In total each of the two research fellows undertook an initial screening of over 4000 articles. The selection criteria (applied to studies conducted within the UK and the Republic of Ireland) only included articles published within the given timeframe, and excluded articles, which had a specic curriculum or pedagogic focus. These criteria were applied to a long list of full text articles and subsequently a smaller short list of 278 articles (for the years 20002006) was retained for inclusion in the review. Each of these was coded under a number of agreed core themes and categories and recorded in a database developed by Richard Procter from an open-source system originating at MIT in the United States. The resulting database and userinterface were then developed into the form currently available at the TEG Bibliography, hosted at the TRLP web site (http://www.tlrp. org/capacity/rm/wt/teg/). The mapping exercise on the TLRP site will shortly be articulated through a series of walkthroughs (guided commentaries with embedded links to the mapping and other TLRP resources). The walkthroughs serve three purposes: rstly, they offer users indicative strategies for using the searchable database; secondly, they provide an overview of a key aspect methodological or thematic, evidenced in the material included in the database and accessible through the search engine; and thirdly, they give links to key research materials which act as starting points for those users new to the area being examined. Together the walkthroughs and the mapping seek to generate pedagogical tools for both new and

experienced researchers to explore and develop their understanding of debates about research in teacher education. 3. Research capacity-building in teacher education: an overview of contexts and issues Education as a broad discipline in the UK faces many general demographic, cultural and social hurdles in strengthening its research bases (Economic and Social Research Council, 2005; Furlong, 2007; Munn, 2008; Pollard, 2007). But we have argued in previous work (Murray et al., 2008) that, within this broad discipline, teacher education research is an under-developed and disadvantaged eld. Zeichner (1999, cited in Cochran-Smith & Zeichner, 2006:755) characterises it as a relatively young eld of study that draws on many different disciplines and responds to an evolving policy context. In the aftermath of devolution in the UK, the four nations England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have begun to develop differing approaches to many aspects of education policy. This variability includes the nature and extent of the constraints and opportunities for teacher education researchers and teachers to conduct and draw upon research (Hulme & Menter, 2008). But, despite this variability, some common, contextual factors for teacher education and research capacity-building across the UK remain. In the section below, we begin to sketch some of these common factors, but would stress that this is only an overview and that it cannot give details of the point of divergence.1 Tensions about the place of research in teacher education have been played out over time in teacher education institutions and departments, especially in those where pre-service courses are the dominant enterprise. Goodson (1995:141), for example, argues that, on entering the university sector, teacher education became caught up in a devils bargain whereby its mission changed from being primarily concerned with matters central to the practice of schooling towards issues of status passage through more conventional university scholarship. Some of the unintended outcomes caused by this devils bargain can be seen in published accounts of the dilemmas created for institutions and individuals about engagement in research (see, inter alia, Acker, 1996; Bridges, 1996; Deem & Lucas, 2007; Furlong, Barton, Miles, Whiting, & Whitty, 2000; Maguire, 2000; Sikes, 2006; Wideen & Grimmett, 1998). Past changes in the ways in which research activity is funded have also had signicant effects on institutions and individuals. Before 1992 in the UK, for example, the public sector institutions (the teacher education colleges and polytechnics), which provided the majority of teacher education programmes at that time, had long standing traditions of engagement in small-scale pedagogical or practitioner research. In general, however, levels of research activity among teacher educators were low (Department of Education and Science [DES], 1987). This situation changed in 1992, when all institutions were, able to compete for research funding in the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE).2 The same funding arrangement continued for the RAEs of 1996 and 2001. The core research funding received through this participation between 1992 and 2001 enabled the development of young but effective education research cultures (Dadds & Kynch, 2003:9) in many of the ex-

1 Due to restrictions of space, this section can only provide a broad overview. More information about the characteristics of teacher education and research capacity-building in each of the four jurisdictions may be found on the web site of the Learning to Teach in Post-Devolution UK web site: (www.learningtoteach.org). 2 The Research Assessment Exercises are audits of research activity which dene what counts as research activity within each discipline and who can be seen as an active researcher. The auditing process also makes judgements about the quality of research outputs and institutional research cultures.

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public sector institutions, which had by then achieved university status. Other analyses of this process of change (see, inter alia, Bassey, 1999; Bassey, 2004; Bridges, 1996; Furlong, Barton, Miles, Whiting, & Whitty, 1996; Furlong et al., 2000; Murray, 1998; Murray, 2002; Thornton, 2003) also explore the creation of these institutional research structures, the related and increased valuation placed on research activities and the differential effects of this funding stream on individual career trajectories and identities. But, following the Research Assessment Exercise of 2001, the Higher Education Funding Councils withdrew core research funding to the UDEs that had achieved grades signicantly below the 5 and 5* grades which indicated excellence. This funding change was part of a selective strategy to improve research quality across the university sector as a whole. In education this meant that only 32 UDEs across the UK (not all of which offered teacher education courses) continued to receive core research funding. In the years since 2001 this shift in funding policy has resulted in a growing differentiation between the small number of universities still in receipt of this funding and the larger group of universities without such support (Munn, 2008; Pollard, 2007). Many of this latter group of institutions, especially in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, are in the new university or post-1992 sector: they are teachingintensive institutions, and have high numbers of teacher education students on pre- or in-service courses. Edwards and Furlong (2004:2) record that in 2004 the funding change meant that nearly 80% of teacher education now takes place in universities with no core research funding. Like Dadds and Kynch (2003) and Bassey (2004), Edwards and Furlong (2004) noted the detrimental effects of the funding change on the developing research cultures in many non-elite universities where small pockets of high quality and strategically important educational research takes place. The results of the RAE of 2008, due in December 2008, are predicted to increase the differentiation between universities in receipt of core funding (the research rich) and those struggling to maintain research cultures without this support (the research poor). Analyses of the national and institutional contexts for research in teacher education indicate that opportunities are becoming increasingly restricted for teacher educators in many UDEs to become and remain researchers (Murray, 2006; Sikes, 2006). This situation is further exacerbated by the increasing bifurcation of research and teaching roles in some universities and by the uneven quality of induction in supporting research development (Murray, 2008). This national study of induction provision in teacher education suggested that some UDEs functioned as restrictive learning environments in which the fast pace and individualised nature of work resulted in pressures for enhanced productivity in both teaching and research. Fowler and Procters (2007) analysis of supportive research environments indicates that isolation, heavy teaching loads and lack of dedicated time for research are contributory factors in creating restrictive learning environments in which early and mid career researchers may fail to thrive. There are many predictions that the results of the RAE of 2008, due in December 2008, will widen the gap between the UDEs in receipt of core research funding and those struggling to maintain research cultures without the benet of such resources (Furlong, 2007; Gilroy, 2008; Pollard, 2008). We would assert that policies for growing research selectivity in the university sector are now in tension with the dispersed model of research activity that is needed to support high quality research in teacher education (Furlong, 2007; Munn, 2008). If the current situation continues then the danger is that teacher education will become divorced from the engagement with social science research which should be informing all levels of its work. Concerns about this situation and its long-term impact on teacher education in particular and on educational research in general have been raised repeatedly (e.g.

Bassey, 2004; Dadds & Kinch, 2004; Edwards & Furlong, 2004; Furlong, 2007; Munn, 2008). 4. Teacher educators as researchers: research in teacher education We have indicated above that much of the research on teacher education is generated by those who are the teacher educators working in the UDEs involved in providing pre- and in-service teacher education. The differing ways in which such teacher educators engage in research and scholarly activities have been discussed by a number of authors (see, inter alia, Ducharme, 1993; Harrison & McKeon, 2008; Hatton, 1997; Loughran, 2006; Maguire, 2000; Murray & Male, 2005). The ESRC (2005) report on education research identies one signicant factor here for capacity-building in the UK: many new teacher educators come into the university from practitioner backgrounds, often without sustained experience of research in the social sciences or signicant amounts of research training acquired through doctoral work. The identied factors which restrict the time and opportunities available for them to participate in research include heavy teaching loads in some UDEs, the impact of partnership work with schools, gendered discourses and practices of learner nurture, a lack of strong departmental research infra-structures and cultures and restricted learning environments (see, inter alia, Furlong, 2007; Maguire, 2000; Murray, 2007; Sikes, 2006). A number of these studies (e.g. Ducharme & Ducharme, 1996; Hatton, 1997; Maguire, 2000; Reynolds, 1995; Sikes, 2006) indicate that the structure and status of the employing institution are important factors in determining the research orientations of the teacher educator researchers working within it. In Reynolds ndings, for example, positive orientations to research are linked to the institutional setting; the more prestigious the institution, the more likely teacher educators were to be research active (see also Ducharme & Ducharme, 1996). Of particular relevance to this paper is Maguires (2000) argument that teacher educators in many teaching-intensive universities are effectively positioned both inside and outside the ivory towers of traditional academia. Focusing on an empirical study conducted in a teaching-intensive university, Maguire explores a range of differentiating factors, which inuence teacher educators engagement in research. These include the gendered discourses and practices of teacher education and the varying ways in which individuals position themselves in relation to these variations. Following these broad lines of argument, the higher education institutions, as the settings for teacher education work, may be seen as powerful inuences on researchers work and identities. Other studies (Harrison & McKeon, 2008; Kremer-Hayon & Zuzovsky, 1995; Murray, 2002; Murray & Male, 2005) explicitly or tacitly hypothesise that becoming research active is part of one type of career trajectory for teacher educators and imply that research identities develop with more years of experience in higher education. The Knowledge and Identity in Teacher Education (KITE) study (Murray, Davison, & John, 2006) and a recent study of new academics (Murray, 2006) suggest that some of the teacher educators identity constructions broke with such indications of institutional or temporal determinism. Both studies indicated that new teacher educators, even in the early stages of HE work, had acquired different constructions of their emerging identities as teacher educators and researchers. These differences existed even when new teacher educators enter universities from broadly similar professional backgrounds usually in school teaching to work on the same pre-service courses. Echoing some of Maguires (2000) ndings, both of these studies show new teacher educators

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positioning themselves in a variety of ways within the eld, drawing on differing discourses and practices of teacher education and of research in the eld which are instantiated within their UDEs. These include: technical-rational discourses of teaching and learning as acts of transmission and acquisition and of ITE as practical training; discourses of reective and craft professionalism and of caring professionalism. They also include discourses of research as enquiry, and RAE-compliance (and its other noncompliance). These two studies indicate that teacher educators identities as researchers, are relational, that is they are not determined solely by national, institutional or individual factors, but are formed by complex afnities and disafnities between individual habitus, agency and the immediate institutional setting, particularly the micro communities of practice (Wenger, 1998) in which teacher educators participate in research and scholarly activities. These ndings from studies about teacher educators as researchers are clearly pertinent in designing research capacitybuilding initiatives in teacher education. In addition to considering the (considerable) impact of national and institutional shifts on restricting and expanding the opportunities for research, the literature also indicates that there is a need to recognise teacher education researchers personal agency and habitus (Bourdieu, 1987), and the professional values and missions which are part of the habitus. Of central importance here, we suggest, is how individuals conceptualise the relationships between their research and scholarship and their practice as academics and teacher educators and the senses of congruence (or dissonance) they see between these various aspects of their academic work in teacher education (Murray, 2007). In the terms of Desforges capacity-building equation, then, this literature on teacher educators would suggest that we need to pay close attention to individual and micro-communal motivations in relation to being and becoming a researcher and (often simultaneously) a practitioner in the eld. In the next section we give a brief overview of a second project, which will form part of the dissemination and embedding of the TEG initiative. Drawing on relevant literature about research capacity-building in teacher education, this project has been designed to take into account a number of the contextual factors which affect the development of teacher educators as researchers. 5. Building research capacity in teacher education: the TERN project The Teacher Education Research Network (TERN) is a pilot research capacity-building project, developed originally by ve members of the TEG and funded by the ESRC from September 2008 to August 2009. The project aims to establish a regional network, with a substantive focus on teacher education research, for research capacity-building in the North West of England. The main aims of the project are to pilot a strong and sustainable model for research capacity-building in teacher education across a collaborative network of seven regional universities, and to test the potential of this model for building a coherent research infrastructure on a larger scale across England. The project aims to foster institutional networking across the region, developing collaboration between seven universities. It aspires to contribute to building regional and institutional research capacity, as well as developing individual expertise. In operationalising these aims, the project will draw on previous investments in educational research, including the TEG mapping and the ndings of relevant TLRP projects, both in teacher education specically (e.g. the work of Day, Stobart, Sammons, & Kington, 2006 on teachers identities and careers) and in related elds such as workplace learning and lifelong learning (e.g. Eraut, Maillardet, Miller, & Steadman, 2006 on early career learning in other professional groups).

As a collaborative network, the TERN project involves staff from the education departments of the seven universities in the North West of England, all of which are involved in providing teacher education courses for the school sector in the region. Regionality is a strong principle on which to base a pilot project for building research capacity in England as much of teacher education provision is already organized on this basis. Teacher education in the North West shares many characteristics with that in other parts of the UK, as identied above. Notable factors here are generally low levels of research activity in most of the teaching-intensive universities and the threat of growing disjunction between teaching and research. Only two of the project universities receive core research funding for education research. The other ve institutions are teaching-intensive with small pockets of research excellence and enduring traditions of practitioner research: core research funding supports none of these research endeavours. The seven universities have the largest concentration of teacher education students in England and the largest number of teacher education staff outside London and the South East. The region has two urban clusters of universities (around Manchester and Liverpool). One of the universities, however, has three teacher education bases at a considerable distance from both of these urban clusters. This geographical distribution pattern gives particular relevance to the use of a blended learning programme that combines face-to-face and on-line teaching approaches, within the project. Informed by an initial mapping of the research development priorities of the UDEs and the individuals within the project, this blended learning programme aims to simulate all stages of the research process, providing research training on an embedded social practices model (Baron, 2005). The planned programme consists of face-to-face meetings, workshops and use of a Virtual Research Environment (VRE) to support researchers collaborative learning. Broad structures and content for the programme will be informed by previous evaluations of research capacity-building initiatives (see, inter alia, Fowler & Procter, 2007; Gardner, 2008; Rees et al., 2007) and research-informed practice in developing blended learning programmes, but exact details will be ne tuned according to the information gained through the mapping exercise. The research development programme aims to strengthen individual and collaborative expertise. Its specic objectives are to provide well-focused research training and mentoring to early and mid career researchers; to explore the theoretical, methodological and substantive issues involved in generating high quality teacher education research; and to identify and address an underresearched issue, which has contemporary relevance and potential to inform practice in teacher education. The programme also aims to ensure purposeful dissemination and use of the TLRP research capacity-building resources, particularly the methodological resources and the mapping of TEG. Approximately 42 participants, drawn from across the seven UDEs, will work collaboratively in teams on developing well-structured research proposals to address a communally dened research question with high relevance to teacher education in the contemporary university. A mentor who is a senior researcher in the eld will support them. (This aspect of the group structure will draw on relevant characteristics of the TLRP Meeting of Minds Fellowships, adapted to working with small groups.) The collaborative work of the research groups is designed to offer enhanced opportunities for individual and communal learning. In recruiting the early and mid career researchers who will form the research teams, the Management Group suggested some broad criteria to guide institutional selection. These criteria suggested that the chosen researchers should have some existing levels of

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knowledge about research through doctoral study and/or previous involvement in projects. But the guidance stressed above all that these individuals should be research aspirant and capable of both contributing to institutional capacity-building efforts and deriving individual benet from the project. We are therefore seeking to recruit individuals who are well motivated and willing and able to take advantage of the projects learning potential. We hope that the TERN project, in working with research aspirant individuals who already have knowledge and understanding of research in teacher education, will be working with individuals senses of motivation, offering enhanced opportunities for collaborative research and the enhancement of expertise. 6. Conclusion In the introduction to this paper we quoted Desforges equation (cited in Davies & Salisbury, 2008:9) of capacity expertise motivation opportunities. In their paper on the Welsh Educational Research Network (WERN), Davies and Salisbury draw on evaluation evidence (Gardner, 2008) to argue convincingly that the work of this network provided all three elements of the equation WERNs activities . have given researchers in Wales the motivation to engage in research by providing an opportunity to develop expertise in a supportive and stimulating co-learning environment (Davies & Salisbury, 2008:9, italics in the original) In this paper we have indicated some of the ways in which we hope that both the TEG work and the TERN project will eventually be able to make similar claims. We believe that the mapping indicates the rich potential for capacity-building by drawing on the specic substantive, methodological and theoretical issues in teacher education research. We also envisage that, when the initiative has been completed and disseminated and embedded in teacher education, the TEG resources will facilitate the generation of new knowledge and scholarship in the eld; in Shulmans (1999) terms, we hope that that the mapping will enable developing researchers to ground their own research in previous scholarship, thus strengthening their individual knowledge and understanding, as well as contributing in the long term to a stronger and more coherent body of research in the eld. In addition, we envisage that the TEG will support the career development of a new generation of teacher education researchers, strengthening both individual and communal expertise and giving enhanced opportunities for collaborative learning. The TERN programme has been designed to be a successful vehicle for mediating and communicating the knowledge assembled within the TEG mapping. We also anticipate that the design of the TERN programme will enable its participants to create new forms of participation in teacher education research, both through face-to-face and on-line collaborations. The success of the programme will clearly be dependent on the ways in which it is able to build collaboratively and strategically on the particular strengths of the individual teacher educators who participate in it and on the existing cultures of research, scholarship and teaching within their UDEs. In order to be successful then the project needs to work with the existing institutional structures, interests and expertise and with the teacher education researchers personal agency and habitus (Bourdieu, 1987), and underlying senses of professional values and missions. Of central importance here, we suggest, is how the relationships between research, scholarship and teaching are conceptualised both individually and institutionally. Earlier in this article we outlined the situation across the UK in which the majority of the universities providing teacher education

programmes no longer receive core funding for their research activities. This situation casts a dark cloud over the future quality of research-informed teacher education provision, particularly in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. But there is perhaps a silver lining here too in that new spaces may be opening up for new forms of communal and intra-professional research networks and endeavours. The time may also be right for a re-framing of what counts as research activity for teacher educators whose busy day job is practice in teacher education (Day, 1995). Any such reframing of research and scholarship activities in teacher education could be part of a long term and intra-professional challenge for teacher educators, one that establishes a new language of learning and scholarship (see Rowland, 2005; Smith, 2003) around the profound relationships between research and practice as a teacher educator in university settings. As one of us has proposed in earlier work (Murray, 2005:57), this new language could be informed by an intra-professional re-articulation of the distinctive identities and expertise of teacher educators in England, together with a reevaluation of the essential contributions, which this group has to make to high quality, research-informed teacher education provision. These are long-term aims which indicate more of the complexity of research capacity-building initiatives and acknowledge that strengthening research in a eld such as teacher education is neither straightforward nor accessible to quick xes at national, institutional or individual levels. We opened this article by acknowledging that the work of the TEG is very much work in progress. We nish the article on a similar note by emphasising that the issues raised by both the TEG and the TERN projects are also in need of further exploration, within the general work on research capacity-building in education currently being undertaken by the Strategic Forum for Research in Education (www.sfre.ac.uk). The contention underlying these projects is that the condition of teacher education research has an especially signicant contribution to make to the more generic work of initiatives such as SFRE, given the low levels of research activity among many educators working in UDEs on teacher education courses. The projects reported in this paper have been designed to contribute specically to the capacity-building agenda; however, equally important is the development of quality in this area of education research and accounts relating to that will ensue in due course when more extensive evaluation and review of the work of the TEG has been undertaken. References
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