Who educates the teacher educator? On research, practice, and politics

Teacher educators occupy an interesting but also quite contradictory place in the educational landscape. On the one hand, they are there on the assumption that student teachers need to be educated in order to become teachers. Student teachers, in other words, need teachers to teach them to become teachers. Yet, on the other hand, there are no established routes into becoming a teacher educator – the trajectories are often quite personal and unique (see, e.g., Zeichner, 2005; see also Cochran-Smith, 2003) – and no particular requirements for being a teacher educator.1 In theory, this puts teacher educators in the uncomfortable position of having to convince their students that they do need to be educated while, at the same time, having to defend the fact that they, as teachers of teachers, do not need this