A Back-Door Entrance into Teaching Teachers

This paper is based on PhD research that was carried out at the National University of Lesotho’s Faculty of Education. The focus of the study was on the sources and application of professional knowledge among teacher educators. The content of the paper was drawn from the chapter on enactment of professional knowledge. All the research participants entered the teacher educators’ world through the backdoor; that is, some were invited by their teacher educators to work as teaching assistants while others applied to an advertised position. None of them had teaching in higher education credentials, hence back-door claim. Their major source of professional knowledge is experiential. Their professional lives have been shaped by their context. However, practice-based knowledge presents numerous challenges including lack of knowledge of the pedagogy of teaching student teachers and bias towards using transmissive methods of teaching.