Re-conceptualizing professional development of teacher educators in post-Soviet Latvia

During the first decade of post-socialist transformation in Eastern Europe, the majority of education reform projects focused on in-service teacher education. Governments, international agencies and non-governmental organizations prioritized various in-service teacher education programs to help teachers deal with rapid changes in schools. This has consequently created a gap between school teachers, who had multiple in-service development opportunities, and pre-service teacher educators, who were largely left out of the reform processes. Using Latvia as a case study, this article examines one of the first efforts to create professional development opportunities for a group of pre-service teacher educators and explains how this short-term project had contributed to re-conceptualizing professional development for the participants involved in the initiative. Based on document analysis and in-depth interviews with 18 teacher educators, this article: examines the motives behind ongoing, voluntary professional development experiences among pre-service teacher educators; discusses the nature and characteristics of this unique initiative; and contextualizes the theory and practice of professional development of pre-service teacher educators in a post-socialist context.