Book of Abstracts

The theme of the 2022 TEPE conference provokes us to think about the value of research in and on teacher education by exploring the various dilemmas facing teacher education research and the implications that emerge for policy and practice. Although research in and on teacher education has increased over the past decade, the value of teacher education re-search continues to be questioned by other academic disciplines, policymakers and even teachers themselves. This is partly because teacher education has not yet found its footing in the landscape of higher education (Zgaga, 2013), while the understanding of what re-search-based teacher education means often differs between policymakers and teacher edu-cators (Smith, 2015).
To enhance the value of teacher education research, it is crucial to examine the dilemmas inherent to this field. It is for example one thing to speak of research as a segment of the study of future teachers, and another to speak of research as a necessary task for teacher educators. In the first case, we are talking about the value of research in teacher education, while in the second case about the need to pro-duce research that focuses on the practice of teacher education. When it comes to research on teacher education, another tension that emerges is utilising the variety of research methods available, while also paying attention to interdisciplinarity. Teacher education re-searchers have often been urged to conduct large-scale and longitudinal studies, or ensure that the small-scale studies are linked in order to systematically develop a knowledge base for the field (Mayer & Oancea, 2021). Without such a knowledge base, the potential of teacher education research to inform policy proves to be minimal (Darling-Hammond, 2016). At the same time, teacher education re-search should avoid the risk of becoming obso-lete for the practice, finding instead meaningful ways to connect with the reality of teacher ed-ucation institutions.

• Book of Abstracts