University teacher educators’ research engagement: Perspectives from Saudi Arabia

This paper examines university teacher educators’ engagement with and in educational research. Survey results collected from eighty-two teacher educators at a leading university in Saudi Arabia pointed to modest levels of research activity and also suggested that these individuals held largely technical views of what research is. Their assessments of their institutional research culture also signalled a perceived gap between the research productivity expected of them and the support they received from their university. The implications of these findings for promoting research activity among university teacher educators, where this is considered desirable, are discussed.

► We examined the research activity of Saudi university teacher educators.
► We studied these teacher educators’ views of educational research.
► We examined how conductive to research activity the teacher educators felt their workplace was.
► Reported levels of reading and doing educational research were modest.
► Teacher educators perceived a gap between expectations and support for doing research.