Editorial

Making Our Garden Grow: Teacher Education in Challenging Times

We live in difficult times in which many of our core beliefs are being challenged. In the United States, conservative states have prescribed narrow curricula and limited the ability of educators to address the needs of minoritized students. In Florida and Texas, teachers have been fired for address reading from anti-racist books or addressing the needs of LGBTQ students. Several African nations have passed harsh laws against homosexuality, with Uganda making same-sex activity a capital offense, while French schools ban Islamic head coverings, and years ago England shifted most teacher preparation to alternative certification. We as teacher educators tend towards optimism, but how realistic is our optimism in the face of powerful and persistent forces of disruption?

Voltaire (1759; 1966), a prominent French public intellectual, published the satire Candide as a bitingly funny challenge to popular philosophies of optimism regardless of the circumstances. Dr Pangloss, Candide’s tutor, was the embodiment of blind optimism that minimizes the existence of evil in the world. The novel ends with Candide developing a healthy scepticism and coming to the realization that ‘we must cultivate our garden’ (p. 77). Ibram X. Kendi (2019), a contemporary Voltaire, draws on his own life journey to warn against the blind optimism that causes progressives to insist that individual acts of racism are outliers, not manifestation of underlying racial policy. Kendi, like Voltaire, concludes with clear-eyed realism and a call to make our own gardens grow:

But if we ignore the odds and fight to create an antiracist world, then we give humanity a chance to one day survive, a chance to live in communion, a chance to be forever free. (p. 238)

Teacher educators are by nature optimists focussed on the world of practice as we work with teacher candidates. The six articles in this issue of Studying Teacher Education challenge us to be realistic in in the face of challenges and offer ways to cultivate our gardens in clear-sighted ways that give humanity a chance to survive.

Cultivating New Gardens in Innovative Ways

The first two articles illustrate the power of teacher educators cultivating teacher candidates through innovative and responsive pedagogies of teacher education.

In ‘Tensions of Embedding Reflective Teaching Practices in Teacher Education in Eritrea: A Self-Study on Facilitation Experiences’, Khalid Mohammed Idris employs self-study to critically examine his use of ‘facilitation approaches of collaborative reflections, supporting reflective inquiry on learning practices, explicit modelling, and consistent feedback’ in the teacher education program in Asmara College of Education in Eritrea. Framed within the conceptual notion of the tension of practices, the study explores the author’s facilitation experiences during a semester-long course. The findings revealed tensions in attending to and improving learner-teachers’ educational needs, synchronizing verbal and written reflective competencies, and language issues in learning to be more thoughtful. The self-study provides practical perspectives on how teacher educators may learn to approach their work while supporting reflective practices in challenging teacher education contexts and beyond.

Similarly, at Kibbutzim College of Education Technology and the Arts in Israel, Adiv Gal attended to the learning of her teacher candidates through her use of drawing and her collaboration with them in researching her practice. ‘Collaborative Self-Study with Pre-Service Teachers to Improve the Use of Drawings as a Pedagogical Tool’ is of pedagogical interest for its exploration of drawing as an alternative pathway to understanding. Four emergent themes that address the power and complexity of drawing as a tool are explored in detail. The article is also notable for its research methods, especially its active engagement with eight participants in assessing the impact on learning.

Together, these two articles remind us that individual teacher educators have the power to transform practice, adapt practices to new cultural contexts, and engage in continuous growth. We look forward to more studies from these authors and locations.

Engaging with Sensitively with Complex Social Issues

The next two articles address social issues with clarity of vision and sensitivity to their complexities.

In “Preparing Preservice Teachers to Teach Equitably: A Longitudinal, Collaborative Interrogation of Two Mathematics Teacher Educators’ Positionalities”, Stefanie Livers (Missouri State University) and Craig Willey (Purdue University) employ an equity lens to critically examine their practices as mathematics teacher educators in the United States. Their ‘longitudinal, collaborative self-study’ involved a ‘collaborative interrogation’ of written accounts of their ‘backgrounds, experiences, and instructional choices’ and careful scrutiny of their present practices. Rigorous coding and analysis led deeper considerations of ‘historical, sociocultural, and political contexts’ as they reflected on how to better prepare critically conscious mathematics teachers. Indeed, they conclude that it is this process of learning to see clearly and critically, more than specific strategies, that leads to cultivating instruction that is equitable and effective.

Ramona Cutri, Erin Whiting, and Eric Bybee of Brigham Young University, who prepare teachers in the conservative state of Utah, puzzle over the challenge of ‘engaging in public emotional discourses’ at a time in which ‘affective polarization’ leads people to feel considerable antipathy towards others alternative worldviews. The title of their narrative self-study, “Using Narrative Cycles to Advance Teacher Educators’ Emotional Work and Practice in an Era of Affective Polarization”, captures the focus of this inquiry. The article offers a clear-eyed consideration of their efforts to cultivate a nuance and responsive approach to teacher education in a sensitive context. The authors remind us of the ‘ineffectiveness of persuasion’ and the importance of attending to the emotions and well-being of all students. The narrative cycle model, much like the approach taken by Livers and Wiley, is a tool of critical self-reflection that helps the authors to inquire into the emotional work of ‘responding to affective polarization while enacting anti-oppressive education ideals’ as they cultivate their garden in a distinct climate zone.

Acting Collectively to Improve Teacher Education

While there is value in cultivating our individual plots, there is a need to work collaboratively and on a larger scale to improve teacher education practices and scholarship.

A fine example of responding to educational needs on a large scale is the fifth article, ‘“More than Marking and Moderation”: A Self-Study of Teacher Educator Learning through Engaging with Graduate Teaching Performance Assessment’. When the Australian government mandated that teacher educators mark and moderate a new Teaching Assessment Performance tool, Robyn Brandenburg and six colleagues from Federation University in Australia responded by establishing a professional learning community to ‘identify and examine teacher educator marker and moderator experience and expertise’. Members of the group recorded team meetings, crafted teacher educator vignettes and coded/analyzed their data in order to make explicit their collective tacit knowledge and to enact better practices through the knowledge gathered. This led them to understand issues better and to respond to the challenges of the assessment together as a program team. They learned that working as a professional learning community led to greater collaboration, growth and enactment of effective practices. Presumably their findings will inform the work of colleagues at other universities engaged in the same work. This study might also serve as a model for collective efforts to improve teacher education at the institutional level through self-study research.

Collective action can also be undertaken across university contexts, as illustrated by the final article, ‘Making the Invisible Visible: Identifying Shared Functions that Enable the Complex Work of University-based Teacher Educators’. A team of twelve North American teacher educators, including lead author Jennifer Snow, sought to engage in a broader examination of the work of teacher educators across various contexts and positionalities. In order to tackle this challenge, they each examined one day in their work then identified three key functions that transcended their positions while seeming fundamental to the work we as teacher educators enact daily. These overlapping functions of Design, Leadership, and Advocacy, they suggest, ‘highlight the movement and energy among the functions and collective purpose for teacher educator work’. Identifying and naming these key educative functions, they argue, enabled across our work enabled them to develop shared language that may help build a shared knowledge base for teacher educators to discuss our work. Hopefully others will build on this knowledge base and shared language. The study might also serve as a model for other efforts to see patterns across our contexts and positionalities as we share in the project of cultivating better education for all.

In Closing

Voltaire’ s Candide was made into a musical by Bernstein and Wilbur (1956). While sharing the original novel’s satire, the musical reframes Candide’s final words of hard-won wisdom into the beautiful song ‘Make Our Garden Grow’. Candide and his betrothed sing:

Let dreamers dream

What worlds they please

Those Edens can’t be found.

The sweetest flowers,

The fairest trees

Are grown in solid ground.

The articles in this issue of Studying Teacher Education illustrate the efforts of teacher educators to make our gardens grow. We imagine the authors joining the cast of Candide in the musical’s rousing finale:

We’re neither pure, nor wise, nor good

We’ll do the best we know.

We’ll build our house and chop our wood

And make our garden grow.

And make our garden grow!

Studying Teacher Education is nearing 20 years of publication. Launched by founding editors John Loughran and Tom Russell in 2005, this academic space has played a critical role in nurturing self-study and cultivating a thriving self-study community. It has been an honour to succeed them in this leadership role, but it will soon be time for us to pass the torch to new editors. We are pleased to announce that Brandon Butler and Adrian Martin have been appointed Associate Editors and, after short apprenticeships, will become the next co-editors. As they both bring a wealth of experience as editors of books and have made substantial contributions to this journal and to the International Handbook of Self-Study of Teaching and Teacher Education Practices, 2nd Edition (Kitchen et al., 2020), we are confident that our journal will continue to have a significant impact on teaching, teacher education and beyond.