THE POTENTIALS OF A TRANSIENT TRANSNATIONAL COMMUNITY FOR TEACHER EDUCATORS’ PROFESSIONAL LEARNING AND DEVELOPMENT

Abstract

Although there has been a rising interest in the profession of teacher educators, there is still a lack of research looking at the professional learning and development of teacher educators. Taking a European perspective, we intend to contribute to the field of teacher education. At the outset we outline current literature and research findings, indicating various challenges that teacher education professionals face in today’s society, which are prominent in many contexts of language teacher education. Choosing to study a transient transnational community of 11 teacher educators as an autoethnographic case, we draw on qualitative data collected in the context of the ERASMUS+ project proPIC and use Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) to approach our data. In this article, we provide an overview of factors that teacher educators describe as beneficial and restraining when engaging in a transnational transient community. Based on our findings, we argue that through a systematically planned implementation and critical evaluation of transient transnational communities in language teacher education, professional learning can be fostered.