Active Professionalism of Teacher Educators

Abstract

Active professionalism is a modern notion in the discussion on teacher professionalism, which imposes on teachers the need to research the educational context in which they work and engage in their own professional development. Teachers are expected to inquire into their practice and reflect on their own experience, to actively direct their professional learning and deliberately go beyond their current abilities. The paper presents research conducted among 14 language teacher educators with the use of semi-structured interviews together with a study of their mind-maps and scientific and didactic publications. The target group was selected by snowball sampling. The author describes the research findings in which she finds two strategies of active learning performed by the teacher educators (remedial strategy and exploratory strategy). The first aims at improving the learning outcomes, and the latter focuses on self-improvement.