Taking a Return to School: Using Self-Study to Learn about Teacher Educator Practice

The work of teacher educators is complex and multifaceted and requires knowledge of pedagogy and practice in both schools and teacher education institutions. This complexity, combined with calls for teacher educators to work in close partnership with schools, sees some in teacher education working in hybrid roles and across the boundaries of schools and universities. Drawing on a self-study conducted over a one-year return to teaching, I explore my return home to teach in a secondary school and I examine the continuing impact of this experience on my practice as a teacher educator. Using the concept of tensions as a conceptual framework to analyse the data I explore three tensions in this article: (1) teacher as technician versus teacher as pedagogue; (2) challenging versus being responsive to other’s views of learning; and (3) teacher versus teacher educator identity. I explore how a return to teaching in school and the tensions I experienced enabled me to develop my practice and understandings as a teacher educator. I argue that rich professional learning can result from using self-study to examine teacher educator practice, particularly for teacher educators working in hybrid roles and partnership contexts.     

[Re]considering queer theories and science education

We take Mattias Lundin’s Inviting queer ideas into the science classroom: studying sexual education from a queer perspective as a point of departure to explore some enduring issues related to the use of queer theories to interrogate science education and its practices. We consider the uneasy, polygamous relationship between gay and lesbian studies and queer theories; the border surveillance that characterizes so much of science [education]; the alluring call of binaries and binary thinking; the ‘all’ within the catchcry ‘science for all’; and the need to better engage the fullness of science and the curriculum, in addition to noting silences around diverse sexes, sexualities, and desires. We catalogue some of the challenges that persist in this work, and offer thoughts about how to work with and against them to enact a more just and compelling science education.     

Spinsters,Schoolmarms, and Queers: Female teacher gender and sexuality in medicine and psychoanalytic theory and history

This paper examines the social construction of white, female, spinster teacher personality profiles in the first half of the 20th century. Focusing on the psychological, medical, and psychoanalytic literature, I provide an overview of how white unmarried female teacher personalities were understood in order to provide a historical context for present day queer and transgender identities in North American schools. I identify four main personality profiles of the female teacher in educational historiography which were informed by Freudian psychoanalysis: the masculinity complex; moral masochism; altruistic surrender; and the tyrannical disciplinarian. I conclude that spinster teacher personality profiles can be read as queer and gender-variant and that such readings shed light on gender and sexual regulation in education historiography.     

Challenges in Enacting Core Practices in Language Teacher Education: A Self-Study

In this study, I explore my practices as a teacher educator in one course both before and after returning to the K–12 classroom to teach secondary language learners for one academic year. By examining the intersection of self-study and practice-based teacher education, I illustrate how I used self-study as a mechanism for innovation and change and focus on the challenges I encountered in implementing the use of practice-based education in my work as a teacher educator. Qualitative data analysis revealed that in redesigning my approach to my course, I stopped short of my goals to make the course more practice-centered. Although I provided students with many opportunities to practice planning, I did not provide enough focused opportunities to practice implementation and to participate in giving and receiving feedback. I learned that engaging teachers in practice-based teaching requires teacher educators to be both specific and deliberate in setting their own purposes for establishing the centrality of practice in their courses and to explain these clearly to teacher candidates. Further work in which teacher educators study their use of practice-based pedagogy would benefit from using a self-study lens. Other researchers are urged to add to the limited body of research about the use of practice-based pedagogy with teachers of language learners, particularly English language learners.     

Professional identity and educational reform: confronting my habitual practices as a teacher educator

This essay explores my role as a teacher educator within a changing policy and curriculum landscape, including managerial attempts to define acceptable educational ‘outcomes’ and other globalising pressures to regulate education. I interrogate my professional knowledge and experience as a teacher educator, raising questions about the adequacy of my support for student teachers as they enter this new landscape. I conceive the key challenge facing me at the moment as a challenge to my professional identity that requires me to find new ways of understanding and talking about my work (cf. Teaching and Teacher Education 19(1) (2002) 5). The essay might be read as a ‘self study’, in which my ‘self’ is conceived as a function of the networks or relationships in which I operate as a teacher educator and the larger structures that shape my professional world.     

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.     

Developing holistic practice through reflection,action and theorising

This article outlines how I, as a primary teacher engaging with a self-study action research process, have come to a deeper understanding of my practice. It explains how I have also come to an understanding of why I work in the way I do; of how this understanding influences my work, and the significance of this new understanding. My work as a teacher frequently includes doing collaborative digital projects with my class. As I engaged in research on my practice, I initially experienced difficulties problematising this work. I struggled to achieve clarity not only with engaging in critical thinking but also with articulating my educational values. I found Mellor’s idea about ‘the struggle’ helpful as he explains how ‘the struggle’ is at the heart of the research process. My new understanding around these collaborative projects emerged in terms of holistic practice; clarifying my ontological values and learning to think critically. I am now generating an educational theory from my practice as I see my work as a process for developing spiritual and holistic approaches to learning and teaching. I conclude by outlining what I perceive to be the significance of my work and its potential implications for education.     

SOME QUESTIONS ABOUT EDUCATIONAL POLICY AND THE SOCIAL SCIENCES

In this article I examine my struggles as a White teacher educator creating discourse around race with my preservice students. I use my own struggles to highlight how White members of a teacher education faculty do, and more often do not, address race either with our preservice teachers or among ourselves. In particular, I explore the implications of "colorblindness" for teacher education. I conclude with suggestions for ways in which Colleges of Education can support White faculty members as they move beyond colorblindness toward racial consciousness.     

Change,Changing, and Being Changed: A study of self in the throes of multiple accountability demands

Using the narrative inquiry research method, this self-study of my teacher education practices examines the influence of four simultaneous accountability reviews – a national accreditation review, a regional accreditation review, a university system review, and local campus review – on my personal experiences and identity within academia. The inquiry offers a public view of private practice, explores the hidden curriculum of the accountability phenomenon, reveals cover stories individually and collectively lived, and illuminates how my knowledge of accountability increased. Drawing on evidence excerpted from journal entries, work samples, historical documents and meeting notes, I reconstruct a series of changes concerning human subjects reviews, course syllabi requirements, student assignments, grading procedures and personal productivity. The self inquiry reveals individual and institutional compromises that were made to achieve acceptable measures of success as determined by external agencies. Most of all, hard lessons learned amid multiple accountability agendas are brought to the forefront for discussion and analysis. The accumulation of self-studies such as this helps to show the nature of the accountability phenomenon and its pernicious impact on teacher educators' work and personal images of teaching. Such studies demonstrate how desperately productive change is needed in the fields of teaching and teacher education.     

What I ‘Know’: Literary Studies and the Teaching of English

This essay unfolds through a series of juxtapositions, involving storytelling and writing of a more analytical nature. In thinking about what I ‘know’ as an English teacher, my aim has been to present my ideas in a form that might do justice to the contradictions and complexities of my professional life, including my continuing efforts to negotiate a pathway between the rich particularities of the educational settings in which I have worked and my knowledge and values as an English teacher. My primary focus is on how my literary education has shaped and been shaped by my work as an English teacher vis-à-vis a devaluing of teachers’ disciplinary knowledge that has occurred through standards-based reforms. I attempt to make the standpoint from which I am writing an object of scrutiny, thus producing an account of what I ‘know’ that arises out of my work as an English teacher and returns to it as a necessary dimension of a politically committed praxis.     

Exploring Self-Study to Improve My Practice as a Mathematics Teacher Educator

While supervising a student teacher in school, an incident occurred that highlighted a contradiction between my practice and my beliefs and prompted me to question why I do not always live the values I profess. The aim of this article is to investigate how self-study can help me to understand the complex and context-based situations of my practice. I draw on the work of other teacher educators to examine the potential of self-study to improve my practice. Through this exploration I have begun to transform the way that I comprehend teaching and learning in teacher education. I identify several tensions and challenges in implementing the methodology within my professional context. I believe that self-study can help us in our roles as teacher educators to develop more reflexive self-awareness and to problematize taken-for-granted assumptions relevant to our contexts of practice.     

How inconvenient assumptions affect preservice teachers’ uptake of new interactional patterns in mathematics: analysis and aspiration through a bifocal lens

In this paper, I highlight the inadequacies of contemporary theoretical and philosophical orthodoxies to fully address pedagogic change. The required change is in mathematics education, and it has to do with enabling preservice teachers, upon graduation, to rework extant power relations in implementing new interactional patterns that centre the mathematics and the learner in dynamic, productive interaction. I interpret data from published research and my own teaching using psychological, overlaid with poststructuralist, constructs of the relationship between knowledge and action. In data interpretation I read through the words for a psychological interpretation (meaning), and I look at the words for poststructuralist indications of subjectification and identity formation (related to how well students recognise themselves as full participants in the combined discourses of mathematics and education). I have my cake and eat it; contradictory notions of the learner and learning to teach in innovative ways are held together to demonstrate (a) how it can happen that a teacher educator’s aspirations can be held ransom to constituted assumptions that inconveniently work against change, and (b) how the recognition that humanist assumptions, mathematical proficiency and agency are discursively constituted (Davies, 1990) can suggest avenues for change in teacher education.     

A narrative inquiry of cross-cultural lives: Lives in the North American academy

In a series of three papers, I examine the identity development of three Chinese women teachers as they moved back and forth between Eastern and Western cultures and languages amid the rapidly changing events of the last four decades. This life-based narrative inquiry, situated between non-fiction, fiction, and academic discourses opens up possibilities for establishing a link between cross-cultural lives and identities, cross-cultural teacher education, and curriculum studies in multi-cultural contexts. In this third paper, I explore the three teachers' lives in the North American academy, particularly my own intellectual development at the doctoral studies level. I trace the dynamics of the interaction with my dissertation supervisor as he and I struggled to find ways for me to think in an inquiry-oriented way. I reach back to my upbringing to show how a Chinese spirit of knowing in cross-cultural teaching and curriculum-making was disruptive with the inquiry-oriented spirit of my cross-cultural studies. My story is complicated by the fact that I was trying to learn to think narratively - a way of thinking still comparatively new in the academy.     

The Oppressor Within: A Counterstory of Race, Repression, and Teacher Reflection

In this paper, I offer my own counterstory of matriculating through a teacher education program as an African American student on a predominately White campus as a reference point for thinking through how racism operates through teacher education’s dominant discourse and practice of teacher reflection. It is an important story to tell primarily because it touches on a largely unexplored dimension of teacher reflection. While the large majority of the literature has focused on how to prepare White preservice teachers to teach in a culturally and racially complex world, little qualitative attention has been given to the preparation of nonwhite students. While there are a few select and important articles that touch on some of the challenges African American students face in predominately White teacher education programs, including covert and overt racism, none focus on how teacher reflection might reproduce these dynamics. Thus what the literature on teacher reflection often suggests is that it is a racially neutral practice. In this essay, however, I suggests otherwise, by providing an intimate and critical look at my process of learning to be a reflective practitioner. The question I seek to grapple with is quite simply, “What does teacher reflection work to repress?”     

Deploying Warrants,Producing Policy: A Self-Study of Teacher Education Policy Discussions

ABSTRACT

The practice of teacher education is inextricably linked to the policy environment in which it occurs. Calls by policymakers and politicians for accountability measures, standardization and performance assessments are efforts to influence the direction of the preparation of educators. In this self-study, I examine my participation in a state-level teacher education policy decision-making body in the United States in order to illuminate how policy decisions are made about teacher education. More specifically, I discuss the kinds of warrants about teacher education practice that I deployed as I navigated the political and practical consequences of policy decisions. This study serves not only to illuminate the nature of policy discussions in teacher education, but also to encourage teacher educators to engage directly the policy-making arenas that implicitly and explicitly influence their work.     

Understanding Candidates’ Learning Relationships with their Cooperating Teachers: A call to Reframe my Pedagogy

Abstract

This self-study frames the influences of cooperating (or mentor) teachers on teacher candidates in my teacher education classroom as an action-at-a-distance on my pedagogy of teacher education; that is, a tacit set of influences and expectations that teacher candidates develop about my course before it even begins. Interviews with teacher candidates enabled me to develop two conceptual metaphors to think about the relationships candidates develop with cooperating teachers on practicum. The first, freedom with foundation, reflects the fact that teacher candidates hope to have considerable autonomy in their practicum placements while simultaneously having the support from their cooperating teacher to receive meaningful, regular, feedback. The second, power and performance, names the tensions teacher candidates feel in experiencing the practicum as a site of performance rather than as a site of learning. I offer some specific pedagogical ways in which I have responded to these issues before making a turn to self. I examined journal entries from my own experiences as a teacher candidate 20 years ago with a view to understanding the ways in which the two metaphors may have played a role in my own development as a teacher. This research compels me to attend explicitly to action-at-at-distance forces in my teacher education classroom, such as candidates’ relationship with cooperating teachers and my relationships with my former cooperating teachers.     

Culture as a Frame for Studying Teacher Education

This paper reports my efforts as a teacher educator to improve our understanding of the process of learning to teach. It illustrates how the nature of the knowledge developed by teacher educators about their practice is often embedded in complexity and ambiguity. This knowledge is explored as a source of tensions that teacher educators can learn to recognize and manage within their work. By examining one of these tensions within my practice, that of valuing and reconstructing experience, I consider how conceptualizing knowledge as tensions can enhance teacher educators' understandings of practice and contribute to the professional knowledge base of teacher education.     

Re-embodying (preservice middle years) teachers? An attempt to reposition the body and its presence in teaching and learning

This four-part story is about one teacher educator’s attempt to embody praxis as a form of academic work, emphasizing the importance of the corporeal in learning and teaching. I describe the inter-related context (1) of my embodied self, the teacher education course I constructed, and theory employed in mediating course practices. Evidence of praxis in emergence (2) is illustrated through written text and visual artefacts of the operationalized assessment. I discuss (3) using embodied subjectivities, the importance of practice/praxis, and how we operationalize discourse in education to then pose questions (4) as flows for teacher educators, preservice teachers and teachers in their classpaces.     

Assuming my Transformation: Transforming my Assumptions

As a White, middle-class, English-speaking female of the type commonly found in teacher education programs, I have had to learn how to use my perspective to challenge the assumptions of the “typical” student teachers for whom I am a teacher educator. This self-study describes how I have been transformed by this learning process. Studying my teaching has provided me with opportunities to challenge my own assumptions about teacher education and to confront my issues of control and ambiguity as they relate to teaching.     

“Welcome to the Real World”: Navigating the Gap Between Best Teaching Practices and Current Reality

Preservice teachers sometimes experience a gap between best practices that they learn in teacher preparation programs and actual practices that they encounter in classrooms as student teachers. In this self-study, I investigate the gap between best and actual practices, as experienced by a university teacher educator who spent a year as a student teacher in a middle and high school English language arts program. Occupying the identities of a student, a student teacher, a teacher educator, and a researcher, I explored the gap from these multiple perspectives, with the intent of learning how to better support student teachers' development. My findings fall into three distinct phases: (1) In “Mind the gap,” I explain the dilemma I encountered as a student teacher. (2) In “Mine the gap,” I describe the process of exploring the nature and extent of this dilemma. (3) In “The gap is mine,” I analyze a shift in my understanding of where the gap is located. I then illustrate, in a series of short vignettes, the significant impact of that shift on my practice, both as a teacher and as a supervisor of student teachers, and how a core reflection approach to teacher education has supported me in that work. Finally, I discuss some broader practical implications for teacher education programs.