A key concept in self-study is that of congruence. Through seeking to make explicit their beliefs, intentions and actions, and looking for discrepancies between these, self-study researchers strive to enhance the levels of congruence in their practice. This is typically described as learning to “walk your talk,” or recognizing yourself as a “living contradiction.” Becoming conscious of oneself in such ways is often experienced as a challenge, yet serves as an important basis for learning and developing as an educator. The articles in this issue of Studying Teacher Education highlight the range of ways in which the authors grapple with and learn to manage congruence in their work, and offer valuable insights into both the methods and outcomes of their studies.
The first three articles examine the notion of congruence through teacher educators' efforts to enact a social justice and social consciousness perspective within their classes. In the opening article, Thomas M. Philip reports his confrontation with an unsettling paradox. While his students rated his social foundations course in teacher education very highly, these students also failed to see the relevance of this course for their work as future teachers. In his self-study, Philip uses the innovative tool of self-interview to clarify and re-construct his course purposes in order to more meaningfully connect with his students. In the next article, Kathryn J. Strom and Adrian D. Martin also utilize an innovative research approach, combining co/autoethnography with the Deleuzo-Guattarian concept of rhizomatics and rhizoanalysis in order to analyze their social conditioning and teaching practices related to neoliberal notions of schooling, education, teaching, and learning. Their article “Putting Philosophy to Work in the Classroom: Using Rhizomatics to Deterritorialize Neoliberal Thought and Practice” describes how they worked to transform their practice to more effectively facilitate an understanding of teaching as inherently political. Promoting the development of pre-service teachers' social consciousness is the focus of the third article, “Latina Professor Revitalizing Historical Memory: Resistance Politics and Transformation within Teacher Education.” Author Josephine Arce investigated how she could meaningfully engage students in a bilingual teacher education program through a social justice perspective, without proselytizing her ideas. Her efforts to live out a “liberatory educational process” within her classes met with considerable resistance from her students, thus highlighting the difficult position for teacher educators who choose to challenge the social and pedagogical norms of the classroom.
Accessing the perspectives of colleagues is an important avenue toward challenging the taken-for-granted aspects of practice and working toward greater congruence between intent and action. The next two articles focus explicitly on this aspect. In “Improving Teaching Practice through Interdisciplinary Dialog,” Fabiana A. Cardetti and M. Carolina Orgnero, two educators with very different disciplinary backgrounds, developed a collaborative relationship over a mutual interest in learning that subsequently formed the basis of their self-study. From an analysis of their interactions, they produced a model of interdisciplinary relationships which makes explicit the different stages of their work process. Next, Kimberly Logan and Brandon M. Butler analyze their collaboration as new teacher educators charged with the responsibility of teaching an elementary social studies methods course for the first time. Their article “What Do We Know about Elementary Social Studies?: Novice Secondary Teacher Educators on Learning to Teach Elementary Social Studies Methods” identifies the different facets of support they needed to better navigate the process of teaching teachers.
The final three articles examine the notion of congruence through the use of metaphor. In “‘Welcome to the Real World’: Navigating the Gap Between Best Teaching Practices and Current Reality,” teacher educator Margaret Perrow examines the “gap” between espoused and actual practices in teacher education. She decides to “live” the gap through enrolling in a teacher education program as a graduate student. Her study cleverly explores the gap metaphor with the resulting insight that the gap exists within oneself, between one's values and one's experiences, and that pre-service teachers and their teacher educators can be empowered to act from a more principled position if they recognize that “the gap is mine.” In the next article, “When Magic Becomes Art: Educating Teachers,” Mary Sowder, Teresa Leavitt, Thomas B. Smith, and Madalina Tanase analyzed metaphors about their teaching created by their preservice teachers, in order to better understand how their actions as teacher educators were being perceived. Students' metaphorical representations illustrated these professors' teaching as a kind of magical process, associated with innate characteristics of the person, rather than as a process of purposeful decision-making informed by professional experience and knowledge. Their study documents how these authors sought to demystify their teaching through making more explicit the pedagogical reasoning and knowledge sources informing their planning and practice. The final article reports a similar theme as teacher educators Linda Hogg and Anne Yates explored what it means to model effective practice in the context of a large lecture class. Their article “Walking the Talk in Initial Teacher Education: Making Teacher Educator Modeling Effective” highlights both the need and the difficulties of modeling for both teacher educators and preservice teachers and the importance of making pedagogical reasoning explicit as part of the modeling process.
We hope you find value in these articles that focus on different dimensions of congruence in teacher educators' work and the potential of self-study to better understand and productively manage congruence in enhancing learning about teaching.