Abstract
This article considers sources available to researchers interested in exploring the development of teacher education as a professional field and teacher education research as an educational science. The position of the history of education as a university subject has itself been subject to contestation (producing expansion and contraction) and illustrates aptly the precarious and contingent nature of claims to jurisdiction in specialist professional fields (Robinson, 2000). This article considers the challenge made by historians and sociologists working in a cultural mode to ‘standard’ narrative histories (Novoa, 2001; Popkewitz et al, 2001) and identifies sources for research that might be deployed in constructing a ‘genealogy’ of teacher education (Gale, 2001 ). The purpose of this article is not to offer an account from among the multiple histories of teacher education but to draw attention to the range of source material and value of retaining an historical perspective within interdisciplinary enquiry.