Becoming a teacher educator during the golden age of higher education

Abstract Many are aware of that clichéd quote ‘those who can do, those who can't teach and those who can't teach, teach teachers’. Fewer are probably familiar with Caplow and McGee's (1968, p. 82) observation that some academics regard education faculties as occupying a special Siberia of their own. This article has as its focus on why teachers became teacher educators and worked in a faculty of education in a non‐elite or peripheral higher education institution (Friedman, 2000, p. 38) during the period 1965–1982. Research on the academic profession is still limited to the United States, Britain and Germany with key aspects of the profession still unexamined especially in less prestigious institutions (Altbach and Kelly, 1985, pp. 34–42). In Australia the very small number of studies undertaken rely heavily on questionnaire data which cannot yield the richness of detail provided by interviews (Powell, Barrett and Shanker, 1983, p. 298).