ABSTRACT
The function of some professions is more obvious than others. Tell someone you work as an applied linguist, for example, and they may well look uncertain. But say you are a teacher educator, and there is no confusion, for teacher education has a fairly obvious purpose. It exists to make people better teachers than they would otherwise have been, whether preparing not-yet-teachers for their first teaching job or already-teachers to do their job in a slightly different, and presumably better, way. Teacher education programs, therefore, are change programs (Richardson, 1996, p. 102).
