Collaboration and Community Building in Teacher Educators' Work

This issue of Studying Teacher Education presents a range of articles from international contributors on topics that pay attention to the diverse, complex, and challenging task of teaching about teaching. Collectively, these articles highlight that being a teacher educator requires more than subject matter and pedagogical expertise; it includes a need to understand how issues of power and privilege play out in institutional and social contexts and how to teach and learn in ways that reduce oppression and marginalization and promote social justice.

The first two articles in this issue take an explicit focus on issues of social justice in teacher education through the lens of self-study. In the opening article, Julian Kitchen and Christine Bellini examine their efforts to create learning opportunities for their student teachers about issues of sexual identity and associated moral and legal duties of teachers. Through a workshop conducted within their university teacher education program, these two teacher educators sought to raise student-teachers' awareness of the significant challenges faced by lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered (LGBT) students. Their self-study examined the impact of this workshop on their students and themselves. Through student feedback and letter writing between each other, Kitchen and Bellini analyzed their pedagogical approach, the impact of their approach on their students' learning about these issues, and what the study revealed about their commitment to LGBT issues in their teacher education practices. In particular, they came to understand more about the complexities associated with creating safe yet challenging spaces for student-teacher learning. As a relatively invisible aspect of teacher preparation programs, and yet a highly visible social justice issue, it is appropriate that such self-study research is conducted, published, and built upon.

The second article continues the focus on teaching about teaching for social justice, through a self-study by Vicki LaBoskey that examines the experiences of graduate teachers following their teacher preparation program, with an explicit goal of creating positive, educative learning environments for all children, particularly those in high-need urban contexts. In “The Ghost of Social Justice Education Future: How the words of graduates contribute to self-transformation,” LaBoskey seeks to better understand and improve her teacher education practice by examining the experiences and feedback of graduates who are now working in schools. She draws on the metaphor of ghosts of present, past, and future as visitations of her teaching self, as it was, is, and might be, and also as a means of casting alternative perspectives on her teacher education work. The report of this self-study makes an important contribution to understanding how the study of graduates can be explored using self-study methodology and promote new insights into teacher education practices. LaBoskey's work also highlights the role and value of a critical friend in promoting her self-transformation as a social justice educator.

The third article offers a literature review of self-studies by beginning teacher educators about their transition experiences from school-based teacher into the role of university-based academic. In “Understanding the Complexity of Becoming a Teacher Educator: Experience, belonging, and practice within a professional learning community,” Judy Williams, Jason Ritter, and Shawn M. Bullock analyze 60 self-studies using Wenger's framework of communities of practice. Their analysis reveals several key tasks that are commonly experienced in the process of becoming a teacher educator: examining one's beliefs and values grounded in personal biography, learning to navigate complex social and institutional work contexts, developing a personal pedagogy of teacher education, and constructing a new professional identity as a teacher educator. These tasks are at the same time complex and challenging because they require individuals to negotiate and renegotiate their membership within, and between, various communities of practice. Williams, Ritter, and Bullock make clear through their research findings the importance of collegial, supportive relationships to nurture the construction of a strong, professional identity as a teacher educator. Their findings also recognize the contribution of the international self-study (S-STEP) community as a context in which such support is available. With the considerable number of transition studies by beginning teacher educators which have accumulated in self-study, this review provides a reference point for future research efforts.

In the next article, “Is This is a Meaningful Learning Experience? Interactive Critical Self-inquiry as Investigation,” Andrea C. Allard and Andrea Gallant explore some of the difficulties and dilemmas of collaborative study with teacher education colleagues. Typical of many self-studies, Allard and Gallant's research was initiated from a problematic situation that took the authors by surprise. Their concerns led them through a fine-grained analysis of the situation toward reframed understandings of their practice around previously unrecognized issues of power and marginalization. This article emphasizes the power of “the unsaid” (Brandenburg, 2008) in peer interactions and raises questions about how teacher educators working together can both challenge and support each other's learning. An important outcome of their work is the articulation of an aspect of their learning as a tension between collegiality and criticality that emerges when, “too much emphasis is placed on the affective domain of collegiality to the detriment of authentic or effective critical reflections.”

Understanding the nature of collegial relationships continues as a theme in the article by Chinwe Hope Ikpeze, Kathleen A. Broikou, Susan Hildenbrand, and Wendy Gladstone-Brown. This time, the focus is on interactions between various stakeholders within a professional development school (PDS) partnership. Drawing on the theoretical frame of third space, these authors sought to learn about the state of the partnership, their student-teachers' learning experiences within the PDS, and insights related to faculty as learners in professional relationship. While their self-study revealed considerable disparity in the nature and quality of experiences of different stakeholders in the PDS partnership, utilizing the concept of third space offered a productive means for facilitating discussion and new understandings of shared practice.

The challenge of working in a new teaching domain precipitated the self-study reported by Susan Breck and Jessica Krim. Their article, “Practice-based Teaching: A self-study by two teacher educators at the graduate level,” documents these teacher educators' efforts to develop, teach and assess, a Foundations in Education course for Master's level students. Their assumptions about the background and experiences of these students led Breck and Krim to overestimate the capacities of their students to understand and use, in practice, the theoretical ideas encountered in the program. Through analysis of student-teachers' assignments over two semesters, along with observations of their practice teaching and discussions with student-teachers, they began to recognize their assumptions and how these influenced their approach to teaching. Like the previous articles, the report of this self-study helps to demonstrate how inconsistencies encountered in practice offer rich opportunities for growth, if one is willing to take the risk to look.

The concluding article in this issue offers a big-picture analysis of the Self-Study of Teacher Education Practices group as a professional organization. Given S-STEP's beginnings as a Special Interest Group within the American Educational Research Association (AERA) 20 years ago, this study is both timely and informative. The research was developed over two years, and informed by an elaborate data set that includes responses from individual S-STEP members, position papers developed by self-study working groups, focus group reports from AERA symposia, and notes from over 50 meetings of the authors Anastasia P. Samaras, Hafdís Guðjónsdóttir, Jennifer R. McMurrer, and Mary C. Dalmau. The study took an explicit focus on themes of development, scholarship, mentorship, practice, and community, with the major goal of informing the future work of S-STEP as an organization. The findings of this study highlighted the importance of S-STEP as a community that offers members a sense of belonging through its “welcoming nature and scholarly collaboration.” This finding is consistent with the report by Williams, Ritter, and Bullock earlier in this issue. Samaras and colleagues' study presents an intriguing approach to theorizing the work of a professional organization through the collective efforts of its members and raises questions about the future development of S-STEP. Readers will find it provocative.