Guerrilla teacher educators: identity considerations of school-based teacher educators in Ireland

The intense focus on teacher quality has raised questions internationally about ‘who’ should be considered as a teacher educator and ‘where’ is best suited for education across the continuum. The school-based turn has naturally focused attention on those referred to as school-based teacher educators and the work they do across the continuum in their first-order settings. However, Ireland is an interesting case as the role of a school-based teacher educator is not formally constructed at a policy level, additionally, the identification of a teacher educator has been confined to those working within the academy on initial teacher education programmes alone. Therefore, drawing on the Irish data set from an international 12-country survey, we set out to understand who may self-identify as school-based teacher educators in Ireland and what activities they engage in that provide meaning to their identities. We frame the paper from an identity perspective and given the officially unrecognised role and subsequent work, we introduce the novel idea of a guerrilla identity. The paper concludes by highlighting spaces for coherence across the continuum that may bolster school-based teacher educators’ work and, problematises the need for a teacher to act in a guerrilla capacity within so-called ‘learning organisations’.