The (im)possible mission of language teacher educators in Germany: Identity formation, development, and practice in institutionalised settings

Abstract Research on language teacher identity and its development has shown that it can be crucial for teacher education to understand how identity development takes place. The few findings to date on language teacher educators and their identities show individual negotiation processes and antinomies, particularly due to transitions from teacher to teacher educator, the parallel roles of researcher and teacher educator, and so on. The project presented here examines the language teacher educator identities of 12 professionals within a highly structured training program in Germany through narrative inquiry as a means to allow for the reconstruction of biographies, identities, and practices. The narratives illustrate the normative settings of the structured system, such as set curricular guidelines, which can rarely be fulfilled by the teacher trainees, a lack of trust and professional relationship, or the struggle of the teacher educators between advisor on the one hand and evaluator on the other. The results provide implications and recommendations for other institutionalised settings in which language teacher educators work.