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.

KEYWORDS:

• Plurilingualism
• critical friendship
• personal history
• self-study
• La didactique
• reflective practice

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.