**1. Introduction**

This paper aims to analyse the professional status of teacher educators by first considering how Freidson's three logics impact this status. Freidson's three logics—professionalism, markets and bureaucracy—are brought into an uneasy form of enforced symbiosis and they will be increasingly joined by artificial intelligence, whose widely identified black box opacity and role in *surveillance capitalism* [1] are arguably su fficient cause to identify it as a discreet fourth logic. Freidson's [2] ideal concept of professionalism was where "the organization of, and control over work is realized by the occupation instead of by the market or by a hierarchy". Freidson saw professionalism as the 'third ideal type alongside Adam Smith's 'free market' and Max Weber's 'bureaucracy' [3] noting that all three can be regarded as di fferent ways of organizing work. Freidson [2] believes that having control over one's own work is one of the key facets for the ideal typical profession and that, in order to maintain such a status, it must be able to "neutralise ... the opposing ideologies which provide the rationale for the control of work by the market on the one hand, and by bureaucracy on the other".

Professionalism can be regarded as a chameleon term that is widely used in contexts of ambition and admiration, but is also viewed as inherently slippery, imbued with ambitions for high status and exclusivity and over-regulation, and as a product of self-serving elitism. Teacher educators have not been immune to these slings and arrows; described by a UK Secretary of State as The *Enemies of Promise* [4] and subject to *political sticks, stones and ideology* in the US [5]. Ranged across the globe, each of these loaded invectives reflects politicians' attempts to create rhetorical spaces within which to articulate reform [6]. Driven by ideology, they provide space in which to challenge the academy and to broaden choice and competition by changing the locus of teacher education from universities to schools, a phenomenon which is nested within broader attempts to combat perceived credentialism and protectionism within the professions. Once so reformed, such systems are vigilantly evaluated and publicly compared and contrasted by a range of monitoring bureaucracies, including, for example, the privately funded advocacy organisation, which has been operating across the United States. The National Council for Teacher Quality has been grading teacher education programmes from A to F.

The recognition that the logics of marketization and bureaucracy have impacted professionalism and indeed the emergence of AI as an additional threat, opens the way for an analysis of the place of teacher educators as professionals by applying Clarke's Place Model [7]. Clarke's Place Model outlines on two axes, the status (vertical axis) and the professional learning journey (horizontal axis) of professionals. The impact of marketization, bureaucracy and artificial intelligence (4th logic) are key features of the discussion and analysis surrounding the application of the Place Model to teacher educators where, in doing so, we have speculatively redeployed Doreen Massey's [8] notion of *Geographical Imagination* to reimagine the place of teacher educators.

## **2. Freidson's Other Logics, and AI**

Freidson views professionalism as a third (and superior) logic, relative to world-views governed by either markets, where consumers are in control, or bureaucracy, where managers dominate. Before examining the distinctive place of teacher educators, it is useful to explore how each of Freidson's other two intertwined logics e ffect this. The impact of AI is as ye<sup>t</sup> undeveloped, but looks set to intervene strongly in both teaching pupils in schools and in teacher education.
