This issue of Studying Teacher Education begins the second decade of the journal and includes an innovation that we hope will increase international access to our reports of self-study of teacher education practices. Each article begins with an abstract in both English and Spanish. Like English, Spanish is one of the United Nations' six official languages. The number of Spanish speakers is growing in the USA and there are pockets of interest in self-study of teacher education practices in Spain and several countries in South America. We hope that abstracts in Spanish will enable native speakers with some facility in reading English to make an easier judgement of the potential value of the content of each article. The individuals who prepared the translations advised us that the term self-study is not easily translated into Spanish. For the time being, that term is not translated. We welcome comments and suggestions on this new feature of the journal.
Five of the six articles in this issue include collaboration as a significant theme. Recognizing the isolation experienced by many teacher educators, Susan D. Martin and Sherry Dismuke of Boise State University (USA) focused their collaboration on constructing changes to their teaching practices as they taught different sections of a writing methods course. Seeing themselves as “digital immigrants” in an era of new literacies, they collaborated to address the challenges they were experiencing. Analysis of their data identified four features that were at the heart of their collaboration: finding the best way to collaborate, being pushed by changing roles, sharing vision for new teaching practices, and supporting each other in taking risks. They conclude by celebrating their shared achievements in ways that should encourage others who are teaching different sections of the same course. This article emphasizes the value of adding planning and enactment of teaching practices to the more familiar collaboration on analysis of teaching practices.
Mary Frances Rice of the University of Kansas (USA) collaborated with Melissa Newberry, Erin Whiting, Ramona Cutri and Stefinee Pinnegar of Brigham Young University (USA) in a self-study of teacher educator identities that explores responses to experiences of non-personhood. All teacher educators are at risk in moments when students' responses leave them feeling like non-persons. Their valuable review of relevant literature introduces the analysis of compelling incidents in which each author experienced non-personhood that challenged personal identity as a teacher educator.
Svanborg R. Jónsdóttir, Karen Rut Gísladóttir, and Hafdís Guðjónsdóttir of the University of Iceland (Iceland) collaborated in the use of self-study methodology when their university's teacher education program expanded to a five-year master's program. Their goal was to understand and develop their roles as supervisors of master's projects when they organized collaborative supervisory meetings for 18 students between 2012 and 2014. They saw self-study as a way to create a third space in which to better understand how their professional identities could support educational change. Their data revealed five themes: learning communities, collective resources, collaboration, reflection in practice, and trust and collective vision. This article is a unique account of collaboration that encouraged better understanding of students' experiences while also enabling the authors to share their concerns, challenges, and search for solutions.
Judith Barak of Kaye Academic College of Education (Israel) has been a leader and participant in a collaboration of teacher educators and students over a period of 14 years. Her self-study reviews those 14 years to identify the impact of those experiences on her personal development. She brings several significant analytical perspectives to the analysis of those collaborative experiences, identifying literature that will be helpful to others undertaking such a self-study of practice. She develops the idea of augmented becoming as an interactive, relational process of intense transformations. This article encourages all teacher educators to attend to the environment in which they enact teacher education practices and to the role of that environment in their personal transformations or becomings.
Amber Strong Makaiau and Lu Leng of the University of Hawai'i at Manoa (USA) collaborated with Suguru Fukui of Hiroshima University (Japan) to offer a fascinating illustration of the use of journaling to bridge communication gaps that can arise in cross-cultural collaboration. Sharing an interest in a particular educational program, they committed to collaboration that was facilitated by electronic journaling. Analysis of their exchanges reveals how the documents they exchanged created a metacognitive space for interpreting and understanding their efforts to support each other's goals and interests. They found it particularly productive to focus on the meaning of participation in an international research collective. This final article on collaboration in this issue is a powerful illustration of the potential of journaling in a shared self-study.
Karen Ragoonaden of the University of British Columbia (Canada) uses autobiography as a methodology for better understanding her teacher education practices. Drawing on both critical pedagogy and self-study, she focuses on her personal cultural background and the influences of power and privilege. Analysis of her position as an immigrant female who had recently been granted tenure led her to a commitment to explore how structure, power and privilege are reproduced in our educational practices. Readers with an interest in the influence of personal history will find much to stimulate their thinking.