The Importance of Being Aware: Developing professional identities in educators and researchers

Abstract

In a Dutch self-study project, five teacher educators studied their own practices with three experienced researchers as the facilitators of the group. These facilitators also conducted a self-study of the whole project, particularly focusing on helping and hindering aspects of the facilitation process. In this article, we report two of the teacher educators' self-studies, one in the context of foreign language teaching and the other in the context of deepening student teacher reflection. In addition, we describe the design and outcomes of the self-study carried out by the facilitators. We discuss what we have learnt from each of the three studies, but we also emphasize going beyond the story, drawing conclusions that may be of interest to the broader community of teacher educators. We work to deepen the awareness of the people we work with, but an important outcome of the self-studies is also deepening our own awareness of certain phenomena in our practices, which are elaborated in this article. Another common thread in each of the studies is the impact a self-study can have on the professional identity of the individual researchers.

Keywords:

• awareness
• facilitation
• identity
• teacher educators
• frictions

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank Paul van den Bos, Willem Hoekstra, Yke Meindersma, Joke Morshuis, Joke Rentrop and Peter Ruit for their collegial support in the self-study project.