Students' attitudes towards school and everyday school life are crucial to their well-being. Positive attitudes towards school serve as the bedrock for quality learning, engagement in learning, and fostering constructive involvement in school activities. These attitudes significantly shape students' motivation to learn, sense of self-efficacy, academic performance, and the quality of their social relations. The cognitive, affective, and behavioural aspects of attitudes towards school, described through various constructs (e.g. attitude, well-being, engagement), are interlinked and reflect certain similarities in the nature and content of their components, making empirical research challenging.

In order to capture the cognitive, affective and behavioural aspects of attitudes and motivational characteristics associated with schooling, one can find several different theoretical constructs in international research. A broad lexicon of terms describes students' positive or negative feelings associated with schooling and the quality of their school life.

My theoretical research aims to analyse the different theoretical constructs of studies under the umbrella of school attitudes research. This research builds upon and contributes to the existing body of knowledge in this field by comprehensively analysing the various conceptualisations and their implications.

The constructs: school connectedness (Libbey 2004; Lohmeier and Lee 2011; Stern 2012), school belonging (Alleen and Kern, 2017; Goodenow and Grady 1993), school bond (Jenkins 1997), engagement (Appleton et al. 2008; Christenson et al. 2012; Fredricks et al. 2004; Griffiths et al. 2009; Reschly et al. 2020;), school well-being (Konu and Rimpelä 2002), school satisfaction (Baker and Maupin 2009), and school attitude (Stern 2012) are all used to describe similar concepts, despite their divergent conceptualisation. This complexity adds depth and richness to our understanding of school attitudes.

Based on my theoretical studies, my empirical school attitude research studies focus on the attitudes of secondary school students and teachers towards school subjects, the interrelationships between different attitude domains, and the school-related beliefs of students and teachers.

Several studies revealed that teacher education is complex and requires close cooperation between different actors. The ambiguities of the teacher educator role have been explored by several studies, which indicate that being a teacher educator is sometimes a hidden profession (Livingston, 2014), an accidental career (Mayer et al., 2011), an uncertain process (Berry & Forgasz, 2016), and it is challenging to draw boundaries between the different roles and identities (Liao et al., 2023; Berry & White, 2023).

Our research aims to investigate the specificities of the identity and identity formation of a little-researched group of teacher educators, specifically those who work in school-based settings. Our research focuses on the professional school-based teacher educators (SBTE) community. They are often described as 'dual practitioners', as they are involved in shaping the learning of teacher candidates in addition to supporting their students' learning (White & Berry, 2023). The term captures the complexity of identity and the training context (Bullough, 2005). Although it is difficult to draw boundaries between the different actors of teacher educators due to differences in tasks, designations and contexts at national levels (Liao et al, 2023), a large body of research reinforces the need to understand school-based teacher educators as a distinct professional community.

Our research, which is unique in its qualitative, exploratory, and synthesizing nature, aims to answer the following questions. 1) What is the theoretical framework of research explores the identity formation of school-based teacher educators? (2) What characterizes the methodology of research exploring the identity formation of school-based teacher educators? (3) What are the main findings of these studies?