The first issue of Volume 12 of Studying Teacher Education offers six articles that span a broad range of teacher education contexts. As we assembled this issue, we gradually came to realize an unexpected common feature. In one way or another, each of these articles illustrates participants making sense of their situations by identifying underlying assumptions about familiar practices. Four of the articles focus on issues arising between individuals from different cultures. We hope that readers find these articles as engaging as we did.
We begin with an article by Valeria A. Allison (Susquehanna University, USA) and Laurie A. Ramirez (Appalachian State University, USA) entitled Co-mentoring: The Iterative Process of Learning about Self and “Becoming” Leaders. This article is a collaborative self-study by two friends who found themselves in positions of academic leadership before they had attained tenure. It comes as no surprise that academics who are early in their careers tend not to aspire to positions that involve management of more experienced colleagues. In their words, having survived the challenges and achieved tenure as well, “although, at times, frustration and resentment abound, we have consciously chosen to view change as an opportunity for growth and learning.” Together, they survived their early challenges and adjustments.
If formalized mentoring is absent, we encourage new leaders to find co-mentors with whom they can engage in dialogue and reflection. The safety, confidentiality, and freedom to be open and honest emerged as the most significant aspect of our self-study.
Allison and Ramirez report that a self-study focused on mentoring each other was a productive way to assume leadership and they recommend self-study and co-mentoring to all new leaders who aspire to quality in their work.
Towards Contextual Experimentation: Creating a Faculty Learning Community to Cultivate Writing-to-Learn Practices, prepared by Mary Chang, Kavita Rao, Maria Stewart, Cynthia Farley (all at the University of Hawai’i, USA), and Katherine Li (North South University, Bangladesh), is the second article in this issue. Five authors formed a Faculty Learning Community and studied their own efforts to add writing-to-learn practices to their teaching. “Engaging with the practices challenged our assumptions about our responsibility to teach writing … [and] our feelings about the practices influenced how and which practices we decided to utilize in our classes.” The authors discuss the range of responses by their students as they introduced new teaching practices; they also describe how they changed their practices and how the experiences of change affected them. Their conclusion is summed up in the statement that “collaborative inquiry improves pedagogical transfer.”
Helen Grimmett (Monash University, Australia) focuses her contribution on The Problem of “Just Tell Us”: Insights from Playing with Poetic Inquiry and Dialogical Self Theory. Is there any teacher educator who has not been asked by teacher candidates to “just tell us”? Probably not. This article reports one teacher educator’s efforts to address the issue that some who are learning to teach have difficulty adjusting to a learning environment involving active inquiry. As her title indicates, Grimmett takes a novel approach in her self-study, “focussing on examining how undertaking intensely contemplative, reflective and theoretical work through poetic inquiry and application of Dialogical Self Theory … impacts my own development of a new understanding of myself as a teacher and learner.” The combination of poetic inquiry and Dialogical Self Theory generates an engaging self-study of teacher education practices.
Judy Williams (Monash University, Australia) and Arlene Grierson (Nipissing University, Canada) demonstrate some impressive international collaboration as they use self-study methods to analyze critical incidents in their 3 years of experience as supervisors of students teaching in the Cook Islands and Kenya, respectively. Facilitating Professional Development during International Practicum: Understanding our Work as Teacher Educators through Critical Incidents explains the dilemmas of practice that they encountered as supervisors in very different cultural contexts, with particular attention to the requests that they provide professional development for teachers in unfamiliar settings with different histories and traditions. They emphasize the importance of teacher educators attending to their own learning as they also focus on and support the learning of teacher candidates. They also stress the importance of viewing such experiences from multiple perspectives to enhance sensitivity to local cultures.
Pushing too Little, Praising too Much? Intercultural Misunderstandings between a Chinese Doctoral Student and a Dutch Supervisor is written by Yanjuan Hu (Southwest University, China), Klaas van Veen (University of Groningen, The Netherlands), and Alessandra Corda (Amsterdam University of Applied Science, The Netherlands). This intriguing article analyzes the relationship between supervisor and student from different cultures with each communicating in a second language (English). The high potential for misunderstandings in their communications was realized and provides an excellent setting for self-study of practice. For example, “Klaas’s initial interpretation of Yanjuan’s silence was that she did not have any idea about what to do or any opinion about what she read, forcing him to teach and instruct.” This article offers guidance for others who may find themselves in similar situations in which misunderstandings are hidden and can only be overcome through open communication that goes beneath the surface to identify implicit assumptions about teaching and learning.
Linguistic and Cultural Appropriations of an Immigrant Multilingual Literacy Teacher Educator is the work of Patriann Smith (University of Illinois, USA), S. Joel Warrican (University of the West Indies, Barbados), and Alex Kumi-Yeboah (State University of New York at Albany, USA). Smith’s autoethnographic self-study was supported by Warrican and Kumi-Yeboah, who acted in the role of critical friends. Her study focuses on multilingual and multicultural awareness in the context of teacher education, using self-study to identify assumptions and potential biases in one’s work as a teacher educator. Driving the study are questions about how both multicultural and multilingual awareness were evident in her practice and how interaction between the two types of awareness were expressed in practice. This self-study is of particular interest in light of the fact that Smith herself is an immigrant with particular interest in how teacher educators conceptualize diversity. An elaborate coding system enabled Smith to develop a much richer understanding of her teacher education practices and the ways in which her personal background and experiences appear within and influence her teaching.
Co-Editors