THE POTENTIALS OF A TRANSIENT TRANSNATIONALCOMMUNITY FOR TEACHER EDUCATORS’ PROFESSIONALLEARNING AND DEVELOPMENT

Although there has been a rising interest in the profession of teacher educators, there isstill a lack of research looking at the professional learning and development of teachereducators. Taking a European perspective, we intend to contribute to the field of teachereducation. At the outset we outline current literature and research findings, indicatingvarious challenges that teacher education professionals face in today’s society, which areprominent in many contexts of language teacher education. Choosing to study a transienttransnational community of 11 teacher educators as an autoethnographic case, we drawon qualitative data collected in the context of the ERASMUS+ project proPIC and useInterpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) to approach our data. In this article, weprovide an overview of factors that teacher educators describe as beneficial andrestraining when engaging in a transnational transient community. Based on ourfindings, we argue that through a systematically planned implementation and criticalevaluation of transient transnational communities in language teacher education,professional learning can be fostered.