The six articles in this issue illustrate self-study methodologies in intriguingly diverse contexts: non-formal education (martial arts), deaf education, philosophy tutorials, language teacher education, modeling a listening stance in teacher education, and non-traditional paths to becoming a teacher educator. Shawn Michael Bullock of Simon Fraser University, Canada, takes us on a self-study journey through his non-formal educational experiences as a student and teacher of martial arts. Through his analysis of three significant episodes in his many years of martial arts experience (characterized as a sequence of moving from elementary school to secondary school and finally to university), Bullock provides a fascinating set of insights into a world many of us never experience. The payoff in this self-study comes in his links to his experiences becoming a teacher educator and to his practices as a teacher educator. He emphasizes the importance of understanding how our own life history has shaped what we know about teaching and the value of analyzing our non-formal learning experiences as well as our formal ones. He puts this well in his final sentence:
If, as teacher educators, it is true that we teach who we are, then it is incumbent upon all of us to explore the implications of our prior experiences in education, both formal and non-formal, for the development of our pedagogies of teacher education.
Daniel Vázquez of King's College London, UK, offers an interesting change from the journal's primary focus on self-study of teacher education practices. As a tutor for a first-year course in Ancient Greek Philosophy, Vázquez set out to evaluate both his own teaching practices as a tutor and the quality of his students' learning experiences. The result is a refreshing illustration of the possibilities for analysis of teaching and learning in the undergraduate context. Topics include understanding central concepts, the learning environment, teaching practices, beliefs about teaching, and three areas for improving his teaching. While this article may be of particular interest to those teaching philosophy and those teaching in a tutorial context, Vázquez provides an excellent list of references together with an appealing sense of openness to the self-study experience. He stresses the value of empirical data about his teaching in helping him discover that his beliefs about teaching value collaboration and collective understanding.
Teacher educators who have focused on listening to their own students will find important insights in a self-study by Michael P. Hayes of Evangelical Community Hospital, USA, and David S. McLaughlin and Valerie A. Allison-Roan of Susquehanna University, USA. The three authors, each relatively new to teacher education, collaborated in self-study of their enactment of a listening stance in the courses they were teaching. They were interested in better understanding of their students' voices, and one goal was to model a listening stance in hopes that their students would later adopt a similar stance in their own teaching. Their literature review provides a valuable discussion of literature related to listening. The authors provide excellent illustrations of awkward moments when student feedback revealed gaps between their goals and principles and their students' perceptions and interpretations of their teaching moves. Listening proved to be more complex and challenging than initially anticipated and their students' understanding of listening was at times different from their own. Readers will particularly appreciate their three different accounts of what listening meant to them and to their students.
Megan Madigan Peercy of the University of Maryland, USA, studies her teacher education practices before and after a one-year return to the school classroom as a teacher of Spanish. She places her research at the intersection of self-study by teacher educators and practice-based education for teachers. Her goal was to bring practice and theory closer together; as in many self-studies, there were challenges along the way. Her practice as a teacher educator involved a master's-level course in Literacy for Elementary English Language Learners. Course evaluations revealed several scores that were lower than when a more traditional teaching approach was used before the return to the school classroom. It is common for innovations to be less than fully successful on the first attempt, and Peercy illustrates this with refreshing openness and honesty. This self-study identifies significant issues related to the use of core practices in the context of teacher education and it will be of particular interest to those working in language teacher education.
Melissa Newberry of Brigham Young University, USA, has followed a non-traditional path to becoming a teacher educator and her self-study focuses on how that non-traditional path influenced the development of her identity as a teacher educator. The discussion of legitimacy and a sense of belonging to a community will resonate for many teacher educators who can remember the earliest years of their work in that role. This auto-ethnography was inspired by an assignment to a graduate class of experienced teachers that asked them to describe critical incidents in their own development as teachers, beginning with their decision to become a teacher. Newberry describes in detail each of the six stages in her own personal development: resisting, investigating, hesitating, imitating, participating, and seeking. She focuses particularly on the three factors of personal biography, experience in institutional contexts, and personal pedagogy. Comparing the development of a teacher educator identity via traditional and non-traditional paths generates new perspectives for all who have attended to their own identity as a teacher educator.
Karen Rut Gísladóttir of the University of Iceland takes us into the world of those who teach literacy to students who are deaf, using the perspective of New Literacy Studies. She begins by describing the contradictions she experienced as a first-year teacher between competing ideologies within the field of deaf education and the reality of how her students were actually developing literacy. Those familiar with the field of deaf education will appreciate the illustration of a range of practices while those new to the field will welcome this introduction through an engaging self-study. Gísladóttir coded her field texts with three analytic categories: events of tension or resistance, puzzling events, and events showing student engagement. A series of vignettes from her personal practice reveals the power of the process of recording and analyzing classroom experiences. “Students' increased sense of agency within the learning process enabled them to draw on multiple modes of meaning-making in their search for written signifiers that could convey the meaning that they wanted to express in writing.”