Kicking and Screaming: Six Teacher Educators Confront their Inherent Beliefs about Online Teacher Education

Over the last decade, colleges of education have faced increasing pressure to transition face-to-face teacher certification programs to an online platform. This pressure is prompted by student demands for greater flexibility and market forces that threaten the viability of traditional residential teacher education programs; rather than, the pedagogical or philosophical vision of teacher educators. Existing research suggests that ‘deep-seeded beliefs’ about the inadequacy of learning to teach in an online context hold sway with many teacher educators (Anderson, et al., 2011;Kehrwald & McCallum, 2015; Kraglund-Gauthier, et al., 2010). Faculty often struggle to communicate and implement their face-to-face ‘teaching style’ and specific instructional strategies when teaching online (Kraglund-Gauthier, et al., 2010). At the same time, the vitality and authenticity of the relationships teacher educators build with their students is shaken when the informal feedback students communicate in a face-to-face setting is no longer available (Anderson, et al., 2011). This qualitative cross-case, discourse analysis (Gee, 2005; Roulston, 2010) explores how six teacher educators experience the transition to online instruction, specifically the ways in which shifting to online instruction can disrupt teacher educators’ professional identity and how they respond to this disruption