Section archive - Teacher Educators

In this study, the first author deploys autoethnographic self-study to intentionally and systematically examine her practice. Specifically, she was interested in investigating how her background as a Black immigrant educator as well as a multilingual communicator affected her practice with predominantly White monolingual prospective teachers. Findings revealed that the author's practice reflected three elements of multicultural awareness as displayed by her attention to individual predispositions, cultural practices and personal stereotypes. From this study, prospective teachers are better able to understand the ways in which language, culture, and diversity intersect in the backgrounds of foreign-trained literacy instructors.

This article describes collaborative self-study details the experiences of two teacher educators, who led teacher candidates on international practicum placements. This study documents the complexities of two teacher educators’ work in unfamiliar cultural contexts and highlights tensions to be navigated as a teacher educator in an international practicum setting. The analyzes of their experiences make it clear that they as teacher educators were on a learning journey similar to that of their teacher candidates. Collaborative analysis of the critical incidents conducted during this self-study enabled them to acquire greater understandings of their academic, professional, and personal identities.

The present paper reports on a two-year study of a self-study research group facilitation. The pedagogical rationale of the facilitation consisted of four pedagogical principles that served as the theoretical background for the actual facilitating actions and interventions. This was highlighted by formulating these principles as a series of propositions providing clear guidelines for the authors' interventions. The interpretative analysis served as an analytical refinement of these propositions, resulting in a number of amendments to the original phrasing in terms of conditions for successful facilitation of professional development. The authors conclude that contextualized analyses of cases such as these provide exemplary illustrations of what the enactment of general principles from the literature in particular instances of practice might look like and what factors influence that enactment and the possible outcomes.

This study explores the role that teacher educators themselves may play in instances of limited success. The first author used self-study to explore how his framing of his facilitation role created a defensive rather than an open-to-learning professional development experience. This article has described how, despite being skilled in teaching, the first author was not skilled in helping teachers learn, at least initially. By building on the work of Argyris and Scho¨n (1974), this article describes a self-study process that involves using transcripts to infer the beliefs and values that underpin in-service educators’ decisions about how to act.