Transformative Pathways: Field-based teacher educators' perceptions

The perspectives of field-based teacher educators have been overlooked in much of the research literature about pre-service teacher education. In this article we begin to address this oversight by exploring field-based teacher educators' perceptions of their contribution to pre-service teachers' personal‐ professional development during field experiences. Specifically, we draw on focus group discussions with 129 field-based teacher educators associated with the early childhood pre-service teacher education programmes at two Australian universities. We identify three notions related to professional practice that these field-based teacher educators perceived as particularly valuable in their work with student teachers—wisdom, authenticity and passion—and develop a conceptual representation that locates their perceptions within a theoretical context. This representation proposes that field-based teacher educators' work with student teachers constitutes a transformative pathway through which student teachers can come to understand and experience what it means to be a teacher.