PDS Collaboration as Third Space: An analysis of the quality of learning experiences in a PDS partnership

This article documents the self-study processes and findings of a collaborative research group that examined a professional development school (PDS) partnership. Drawing on the scholarship of self-study of teacher education practices and theoretical perspectives consistent with third space, we conceived our collaborative study group as a learning community aimed at uncovering the complexities of school–university partnerships while seeking new directions for an effective partnership. Data were collected from a variety of sources. Themes were developed based on some identified areas of focus consistent with the group's objectives, which included deciphering the state of our PDS collaboration, our preservice teachers' learning experiences, and insight into faculty as learners in professional relationship. The study revealed that experiential disparity existed within and among faculty and students in various PDS sites as a result of poor communication as well as divergent models of collaboration and philosophical goals between faculty and mentor teachers. Disparity in the learning experiences among the preservice teachers was attributed to the quality and scope of the partnership. This study resulted in better understanding of our roles as hybrid educators and recognition of mentor teachers as critical bridges in a PDS partnership.     

Establishing and sustaining teacher educator professional development in a self-study community of practice: Pre-tenure teacher educators developing professionally

This paper outlines the professional development of pre-tenure teacher educators through the establishment of a self-study group. Through reflecting on three significant events, a discussion is offered as to how members contributed to the self-study of teacher education practices and experienced enhancement as a community of scholars. Evidence is presented as to how pre-tenure faculty can work together to build a culture that links teaching practice to scholarship within an organizational framework for group interactions. This work contributes to research on the induction of new professors by providing a model of professional development that is self-directed, collaborative, and empowering.     

Grounding practice in scholarship,grounding scholarship in practice: Knowledge of a mathematics teacher educator–researcher

Despite the acknowledged complexity of the expertise of teacher educators (Cochran-Smith, M. (2003). Learning and unlearning: the education of teacher educators. Teaching and Teacher Education, 19, 5--28), there is limited research attending to what teacher educators need to know and how they develop this expertise. This self-study draws from multiple frameworks of teacher knowledge to investigate knowledge content, structure, and growth of a novice mathematics teacher educator-researcher (MTE-R) from her doctoral program into her third year of a tenure-track faculty position at a large southwestern United States university. Narrative inquiry was used to both examine past artifacts and create new data. The findings highlight how the multiple roles of MTE-Rs elicit different kinds of knowledge and how frameworks for studying mathematics teachers can be utilized for studying teacher educator-researchers.     

Supporting One Another as Beginning Teacher Educators: Forging an online community of critical inquiry into practice

Four novice teacher educators working at different universities in the USA and Canada used online journaling and dialoguing combined with feedback from their students to explore their practice and new roles as teacher educators in new contexts. Their priorities included modeling critical reflection and enacting democratic practices. They chronicle their struggles and successes over the course of an academic year. The authors' online community provided a viable and valued venue for self-study. Findings include insight into their taken-for-granted assumptions, how their instructional efforts were interpreted by others, and the impact that their collaborative efforts had on each researcher's professional development. The authors include implications for universities and colleges regarding the format and structure of mentoring of junior faculty.     

Understanding the Complexity of Becoming a Teacher Educator: Experience,belonging, and practice within a professional learning community

This article reports a literature review of self-studies by beginning teacher educators examining their experiences of the transition from classroom teaching to teacher educator. The authors conclude that becoming a teacher educator involves several complex and challenging tasks: examining beliefs and values grounded in personal biography, including those associated with being a former schoolteacher; navigating the complex social and institutional contexts in which they work; and developing a personal pedagogy of teacher education that enables construction of a new professional identity as a teacher educator. This research provides beginning teacher educators with a reference point for understanding their personal and professional transition to university-based teacher education. It also provides teacher education faculty and administrators with key information about how the transition from teacher to teacher educator can be supported and enhanced within professional learning communities.     

Constructing Our Identities through a Writing Support Group: Bridging from Doctoral Students to Teacher Educator Researchers

We are recent graduates of a graduate faculty of education in a research-based university in Canada. Our aspirations to become successful teacher educators and to write our dissertations brought us together to form a writing support group. During the 2010–2011 academic year, we conducted a self-study to better understand how the support group helped us to navigate the process of writing our dissertations as well as our endeavors to become teacher educator researchers. The results of our self-study indicate the importance of a supportive writing group in developing an identity as a teacher educator, developing research and writing skills through being a critical friend, and preparing graduate students for the complex role of teacher educator.     

Tensions of Reimagining Our Roles as Teacher Educators in a Third Space: Revisiting a Co/autoethnography Through a Faculty Lens

This co/autoethnography uses our lens as university faculty to examine how engaging in a year-long self-study with mentors nurtured a complicated third space where we could together begin to reimagine our roles as teacher educators. Two secondary faculty members and a doctoral assistant used co/autoethnography to revisit a collaborative self-study with mentors to better identify both the individual and programmatic complexities that arise when a third space is opened and we are invited to reinvent our perspectives and responsibilities as co-teacher educators. We ask two questions: What happens when faculty facilitate a third-space teacher education program with mentor teachers? How does this third space influence the teacher education practices in an urban teacher residency program? We present a series of tensions about our work together as teacher educators in the third space. They include professional into authentic relationships, authority into collaboration, collaborative agency into individual agency, and apprenticing to master teacher into apprenticing within a collective. Following findings about each tension, we discuss how we as faculty navigated each tension. Finally, we consider the implications of our work for all field-based teacher education programs.     

Self-Study Enabling Understanding of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning: An Exploration of Collaboration among Teacher Educators for Special and Inclusive Education

ABSTRACT

While teaching is increasingly being accepted as a discipline, there is a growing emphasis on teacher educators researching their own practice to advance the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL). This study sought to explore the extent to which self-study contributes to teacher educators’ understanding of the SoTL within the discipline of teaching. While self-study is generally accepted as a scholarly approach, the aim here is to address the call in the literature for self-study researchers to evince a commitment to a practice-based and theory-building research agenda by linking with public theories, in this case the SoTL. Additionally, given that self-study is collaborative in nature, findings here may help to address the dearth of knowledge reported in the literature about teacher educator collaboration. A self-study approach was adopted to explore a journey of two teacher educators as they designed, implemented and evaluated new modules in special and inclusive education within an initial teacher education programme in the Republic of Ireland. Analysis and synthesis of data from 24 student teachers and two teacher educators provide insights and understandings into the collaborative interactions and factors that enabled and hindered these interactions. This may support other teacher educators in developing a collaborative pedagogical culture to enhance greater understanding of the SoTL We argue for adopting self-study as a scholarly approach to engage with other theories, such as the SoTL, thus contributing to the broader field of teacher education research.     

Living in Plurilingual Spaces: Self-Study,Critical Friendship,and the Plurality of Publics

ABSTRACT

In this article, we engage in collaborative self-study through a critical friendship that is specifically designed to evoke our personal histories in relation to how we approach our practices as teacher educators. In particular, we focus on understanding the conceptual origins of our pedagogies of teacher education and how our identities as teacher educators were shaped, and continue to be shaped, by colleagues, teacher candidates, and by the process of self-study itself. We argue that the multiple studies that are available to any self-study research programme create a plurality of publics in which we identify, and are identified, in particular ways by particular members of the teacher education community. One significant avenue for our developing line of work concerns the ways in which our shared bilingualism plays out during our critical friendship, and how the use of multiple languages helps us to reframe our identities as teacher educators, particularly whilst engaged in translanguaging practices.     

Those Who Can Do Self-Study,Do Self-Study: But Can They Teach It?

This article describes the challenges encountered by a teacher educator and self-study practitioner as he attempted to facilitate a group of colleagues in learning about and engaging in self-study over a two year period. While competent in conducting self-study for himself, the author had never before tried to teach it to others. This led to teaching experiences in which the author grappled with his decision-making across three critical facets of his pedagogy. The findings of this self-study indicate that it is possible to broadly categorize these dilemmas in decision-making as instructional challenges, relational challenges, and methodological challenges. Uncovering and discussing these challenges gives those involved in the self-study of teacher education practices community an opportunity to consider how such dilemmas might be navigated beneficially to advance understanding and use of self-study methodology by others.     

Developing a Vision of Teacher Education: How my classroom teacher understandings evolved in the university environment

Drawing on my experiences as a former classroom teacher making the transition to teacher education, this study examines how my vision of teacher education developed over the course of my first three years as a graduate teaching assistant in a social studies education program in the United States. A qualitative self-study methodology was used to identify and describe sources of tension and growth that contributed to the evolution of my classroom teacher understandings as I forged a distinct vision for teacher education. My vision of teacher education was informed by completing graduate coursework, engaging in the work of teacher education, interacting and collaborating with peers, and studying my practice as it developed and unfolded. Throughout the article, I discuss the potential of self-study methodology to encourage new teacher educators to examine both the features and motivations behind their practice, as well as the effects of this examination on the development of a vision of teacher education.     

A University and Local School Partnership: Utilizing Tension as a Catalyst for Growth

ABSTRACT

Intending to foster a partnership between his university and a local school and to create a new identity as a teacher educator in the community, a newly hired assistant professor of English education offered support to a secondary English department and ended up working extensively with the teachers (planning, observing, giving feedback, reflecting, and modeling lessons by teaching classes). This self-study examines the experience of the teacher educator as he navigated this 2-year commitment. A systematic analysis of all data collected (detailed journal, observation notes, debriefing notes, correspondence, and transcribed interviews) reveals how the conditions that allow tensions to become productive – a need for interaction, a willingness to engage in commonalties and differences, a sense of value for various skill-sets, and a suspension of judgment for the good of the community – within an emerging community of practice offered opportunities of professional growth for teachers and a teacher educator. This research provides insight into how university professors can better recognize and understand the conditions that allow perceived tensions to function as catalysts for professional development, offering an example of how to improve collaborative relationships between teacher education programs in higher education and K-12 school districts.     

“Still Finding the Ground:” A Self-Study of a First-Year Physical Education Teacher Educator

While decades of research have documented the socialization of inservice physical education teachers, the socialization of physical education faculty members has only recently become a research focus. Self-study of teacher education practices is becoming increasingly popular when exploring the lived experiences of physical education faculty. We used self-study of teacher education practices to understand the experiences of Kevin, a beginning physical education teacher educator in a visiting assistant professor position at Northern Illinois University. Kevin’s experiences differ from those of many other teacher educators as he had not taught in school settings before moving into higher education. He did, however, have a strong background in higher education pedagogy through work in a center for teaching and learning. Data were collected through journaling, documents and artifacts, and exit slips, feedback forms, and focus group interviews completed by Kevin’s students. Qualitative data analyses resulted in the construction of three first-order themes: (1) developing appropriate pedagogy, (2) developing and maintaining relationships with students, and (3) managing an identity as a teacher educator. Kevin’s journey was non-linear and marked by both successes and challenges, but at the end of the year he felt that he had grown as a teacher educator. Further, while Kevin’s youth and lack of teaching experience influenced his teacher education practice, it was not always negative and he found ways to compensate for what he lacked in direct teaching experience. Results are discussed with reference to Kevin’s socialization and future directions for research are provided.     

Developing an appreciation of what it means to be a school-based teacher educator

The nature of partnership between schools and higher education institutions is changing in many countries, with experienced teachers taking on more responsibility for teacher education whilst remaining in their school as teachers, rather than entering the higher education sector to become teacher educators. This research considers the perspectives of these school-based teacher educators (SBTEs) in England, exploring the impact that this role has on them, their student-teachers and their schools. Some benefits and challenges that they face in the dual role of teacher and teacher educator are revealed. The research takes an interpretive perspective, listening to the meanings being constructed by the participants through use of a questionnaire, semi-structured interviews and a focus group of student-teachers who learned from these SBTEs. Possible impacts on student-teachers’ learning and implications for the development of high-quality teacher education are examined.     

Teacher Educator Identity Development of the Nontraditional Teacher Educator

The development of a professional teacher educator identity has implications for how one negotiates the duties of a teacher, scholar, and learner. The research on teacher educator identity in the USA has been largely conducted on traditional teacher educators, or those who have started their careers as public school teachers and then went on to the collegiate level as teacher educators. This auto-ethnography considers the professional identity formation of a nontraditional teacher educator, one whose professional career did not include a career as a public school teacher. Although there are common influences on professional development between the traditional and nontraditional teacher educator, such as biography, institutional contexts, and personal pedagogy, there are significant differences in the process as those influences are experienced. This research proposes an extended process for nontraditional teacher educators, including the search for legitimacy and belonging in the community of educators.     

Community,Towards Dialogue: A Self-Study of Online Teacher Preparation for Special Education

ABSTRACT

Online teacher education is experiencing significant growth worldwide. One of the major challenges accompanying this growth is that many teacher educators find themselves underprepared and under pressure to design online teacher education courses that reflect their beliefs about what constitutes high-quality teacher preparation practice. Further, teacher educators in disciplines such as special education face additional challenges in developing understandings about the legalities of writing and implementing disability service plans and performing additional testing. In this self-study of online special education teacher education practice, two collaborators worked to identify strategies and practices for professional community building in a class about teaching reading to students with disabilities. The findings highlight issues of teacher educator authority and presence online against other needs to model collegiality and promote scholarly thinking. Researchers in online teaching may find insight into both the cognitive and contextual concerns as they work to enhance online teacher education while they plan their own investigations.     

Exploring the Radical Middle between Theory and Practice: A collaborative self-study of beginning teacher educators

This article is a collaborative self-study of our development as beginning teacher educators over the course of an academic year. A focus of our self-study was our shared interest in the role of theory and of practice in teacher education programs. Theodore taught a philosophy of education course and Shawn taught a practicum supervision course. Both authors share autobiographical excerpts of their teaching contexts and the problems of practice that they encountered. Our analysis suggests that the dichotomy between theory and practice is unhelpful and unproductive for both teacher candidates and teacher educators. Theory and practice are densely interwoven aspects of teaching that can be tacitly separated by coursework in teacher education. We advocate a pedagogy of teacher education that explores the radical middle between theory and practice.