Teacher educators in post-compulsory education: gender, discourse and power

Recent research on post-compulsory teacher educators in England suggests that there is a high degree of feminisation of this workforce, particularly where further and higher education partnerships are concerned. This process of feminisation has taken place against a background in which English post-compulsory education has increasingly been brought under state control and direction, with profound consequences for those engaged in the professional development of teachers in the sector. Although teacher education is also highly feminised in other sectors and in many countries, the recent history of post-compulsory education in England has a number of characteristics that have strongly influenced the gender distribution of its teacher educators. This article examines the locus of power driving the gendered division of labour in post-compulsory teacher education and attempts to account for it by means of the intersection of structuralist and poststructuralist perspectives. It is argued that the trends taking place in the teacher educator workforce can only be understood through situating the subjective identities of teacher educators within the discourse of government policies on further education from the 1980s onwards.