Teacher Educators as Agents of Change: New Tools as Enablers

This chapter explores the notion of teacher educators as agents of change against an education policy reform backdrop of greater scrutiny, standardisation and accountability than ever before. The following twelve chapters of this volume, all written by teacher educators across various parts of the world, are discussed and analysed using Margaret Archer’s perspective of critical realist social theory. This theory provided a useful framework for drawing the parts and chapters in this volume together, looking for the ways in which teacher educators have made sense of their personal, cultural and structural contexts, and analysing the types of enablements and constraints that each social context offered them. The individual chapters and collective volume offer the wider teacher educator community illustrative ways in which teacher educators have ‘‘found space in policy through agentic approaches’ and taken action, even when social structures sought to normalise or restrain their practices. The analysis revealed a variety of ways teacher educators used their knowledge of policy, partnerships and their scholarly disposition to navigate through a highly regulated space. Such agentive practices provide a hopeful stance for facing the next waves of teacher education reform ahead.