Subject supervisors between guidance and evaluation – A reconstructive study on the professional habitus of teacher educators in preparatory service

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Carolin Rotter
• Subject Area: Educational Research on Socialization, Welfare and Professionalism
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 561124808

The outlined research project is dedicated to the second phase of teacher education in Germany, i.e., the preparatory service, and focuses on the professional practice of subject supervisors. The preparatory service is often perceived as a phase of the professionalization process that is characterized by a high level of dissatisfaction and psychological stress for teacher trainees and teacher educators. Research findings suggest different stress factors for the actors involved. These interrelated factors result from different structural conditions and associated problems, including the diffusion of guidance and evaluation role of supervisors and the unclear demarcation of examination situations, which puts a strain on the relationship between trainee and educator. Dealing with this diffusion of roles represents a major challenge for teacher educators, especially since they have the central responsibility for the subject-specific, subject-didactic and general pedagogical training of the prospective teachers in preparatory service as well as constructing a trainee-educator relationship promoting professional development. However, little attention is given to a purposeful professional development of the teacher educators themselves. Various studies find ‘professional self-concepts’ of teacher educators that might impede the professional development of the prospective teachers. From the perspectives of Mannheimian Sociology of Knowledge and praxeology, the project focuses on the ‘professional self-concept’ of subject supervisors in preparatory service. In order to further investigate the ‘professional self-concepts’ of subject supervisors, post-lesson supervisory discussionsare taken into account, because these supervisory discussions condense the structural problem of role diffusion and the associated diverging requirements for subject supervisors. Additionally, in supervisory discussions the subject supervisors are required to conceptualize the role of the trainees in this situation and position themselves, i.e., conceptualize themselves, in a complementary way. On the basis of episodic interviews with subject supervisors for different educational tracks, analyzed using the documentary method, normative expectations of themselves and of trainees as well as habitual orientations underlying the processing of the diverging responsibilites of guidance and evaluation are reconstructed and their relation to one another is investigated. The project thus makes a contribution to sketching out a typology of teacher educators habitus that underlie the actions of subject supervisors in the preparatory service, in relation to normative conceptualizations by teacher educators.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants