Being a Teacher Educator in Challenging Times: Negotiating the Rapids of Professional Learning (Self-Study of Teaching and Teacher Education Practices, 22) [1st ed. 2020] 9811538476, 9789811538476

Table of contents :
Foreword
Reference
Acknowledgements
Contents
Acronyms and Abbreviations
Chapter 1: Introduction
1.1 Introduction
1.2 How This Book Came About
1.3 Structure of the Book
References
Chapter 2: Duoethnography to Explore the Work and Lives of Teacher Educators
2.1 Introduction
2.2 Wandering Towards Duoethnography
2.3 Understanding Autoethnography
2.4 Embracing Duoethnography
2.5 Ethics and Duoethnography
2.6 Creating This Duoethnography
2.6.1 The River Journey Metaphor
References
Chapter 3: Our Educational Journeys
3.1 Introduction
3.2 Early Family Influences
3.3 Kindergarten and Nursery
3.4 Primary School
3.5 High School
3.6 University/Polytechnic
3.7 Teaching
3.8 Transitioning into Academia and Becoming a Teacher Educator
3.9 Conclusion
References
Chapter 4: Becoming a Teacher Educator
4.1 Introduction
4.2 Transitioning from Teacher to Teacher Educator
References
Chapter 5: Policy and Educational Contexts of Teacher Education
5.1 Introduction
5.2 Teacher Education Policy Landscape in Australia and England
5.3 Professional Standards for Teachers
5.4 Performance Standards for Academics
5.5 Frameworks for Effective Teacher Education
References
Chapter 6: Collaboration and the Work of Teacher Educators
6.1 Introduction
6.2 Collaboration in the Journey of Becoming a Teacher Educator
6.3 Collaboration Through S-STEP Community and Becoming Teacher Educators
6.4 Collaboration Beyond the Self-Study Community
References
Chapter 7: Working with the Teaching Profession
7.1 Introduction
7.2 Teachers and Teacher Educators Working Together
7.3 Working Together to Provide Professional Experience
7.4 Learning from Working with the Teaching Profession
References
Chapter 8: Developing Pedagogies of Teacher Education
8.1 Introduction
8.2 What Is Meant by ‘Pedagogies of Teacher Education’?
8.3 Context Matters: Journeys of Evolving Pedagogies in Diverse Settings
8.4 Exploring Our Pedagogies of Teacher Education Through Autobiographical Writing and Self-Study
8.5 The Influence of Life Experiences on Pedagogy as Teacher Educators
References
Chapter 9: Constructing an Identity as a Teacher Educator
9.1 Introduction
9.2 Voice, Self and Identity
9.3 The Meaning of Identity and Constructing a Professional Identity as a Teacher Educator
9.4 The Role of Early Life Experiences in Identity Construction
References
Chapter 10: What Does ‘Becoming a Teacher Educator’ Mean?
10.1 Introduction
10.2 What Does It Mean to Have a Career as a Teacher Educator?
10.3 What Have We Learned from Undertaking This Duoethnography?
10.4 Looking Back on the Writing Process as Research
References

Citation preview

Self-Study of Teaching and Teacher Education Practices 22

Mike Hayler Judy Williams

Being a Teacher Educator in Challenging Times Negotiating the Rapids of Professional Learning

Self-Study of Teaching and Teacher Education Practices Volume 22

Series Editor Julian Kitchen, Brock University, Hamilton, Canada Advisory Board Mary Lynn Hamilton, University of Kansas, Kansas, USA Ruth Kane, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Canada Geert Kelchtermans, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Leuven, Belgium Fred Korthagen, Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands Tom Russell, Queen’s University, Kingston, Canada

Important insights into varying aspects of teacher education emerge when attention is focused on the work of teacher educators. Teacher educators’ observations, explorations and inquiries are important as they offer access to the intricacies of teaching and learning about teaching so important in shaping the nature of teacher education itself. For (at least) this reason, research of the kind found in self-study of teacher education practices (S-STEP) is increasingly pursued and valued by teacher educators. In so doing, self-study also encourages others to look more closely into their own practices. For many, self-study has become an empowering way of examining and learning about practice while simultaneously developing opportunities for exploring scholarship in, and through, teaching. Self-Study allows educators to maintain a focus on their teaching and on their students’ learning; both high priorities that constantly interact with one another. This interplay between practice and scholarship can then be quite appealing to educators as their work becomes more holistic as opposed to being sectioned off into separate and distinct compartments (e.g., teaching, research, program evaluation, development, etc.). However, just because self-study may be appealing, it is not to suggest that the nature of self-study work should simply be accepted without question and critique. There is a constant need to examine what is being done, how and why, in order to further our understanding of the field and to foster development in critical and useful ways so that the learning through self-study might be informative and accessible to others. This series has been organized in order so that the insights from self-study research and practice might offer a more comprehensive articulation of the distinguishing aspects of such work to the education community at large and builds on the International Handbook of Self Study in Teaching and Teacher Education (Loughran, Hamilton, LaBoskey & Russell, 2004). Self-study may be viewed as a natural consequence of the re-emergence of reflection and reflective practice that gripped the education community in the last two decades of the 20th century (see for example Calderhead & Gates, 1993; Clift et  al., 1990; Grimmett & Erickson, 1988; LaBoskey, 1994; Schön, 1983, 1987). However, self-­study aims to, and must, go further than reflection alone. Self-study generates questions about the very nature of teaching about teaching in teacher education (Korthagen & Kessels, 1999) and is important in conceptualizing scholarship in teaching as it generates and makes public the knowledge of teaching and learning about teaching so that it might be informative to the education community in general. This series offers a range of committed teacher educators who, through their books, offer a diverse range of approaches to, and outcomes from, self-study of teacher teacher education practices. Book proposals for this series may be submitted to the Publishing Editor: Nick Melchior E-mail: [email protected] More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/7072

Mike Hayler • Judy Williams

Being a Teacher Educator in Challenging Times Negotiating the Rapids of Professional Learning

Mike Hayler School of Education University of Brighton Brighton, UK

Judy Williams Faculty of Education Monash University Frankston, VIC, Australia

ISSN 1875-3620     ISSN 2215-1850 (electronic) Self-Study of Teaching and Teacher Education Practices ISBN 978-981-15-3847-6    ISBN 978-981-15-3848-3 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-3848-3 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-01/04 Gateway East, Singapore 189721, Singapore

To our Mums: always there

Foreword

This book is of profound importance for those concerned with teacher education. Mike Hayler and Judy Williams explore the very pertinent question of how teacher educators’ personal and professional experiences shape who they are and the courses of action that they pursue. One of the most important findings that thread through the chapters of the book is that the processes of reflective elucidation and examination should be central to the teacher education experience and practice. The book also poses the question of ‘reflection for what purpose’. Of course, the purposes are manifold – not least the way that teacher educators understand themselves and their work – and how that allows them to exhume their basic intentions, motivations and passions. So, the first and probably most crucial aspect of reflection that these authors demonstrate is the way in which it allows people to understand their ‘internal affairs’. This means the internal landscape of each teacher educator’s narrative – the passion and purpose of why they became teacher educators. This will be linked to a broader internal life narrative which has at its heart – and this may sound grandiose but is nonetheless true – ‘the meaning of life’. Without some reflection on the meaning of life, teacher educators stand in a barren landscape where all they can do is respond to external exultations, take orders and proceed down a long line drawn out by governments, organised and monitored by institutional managers. Essentially, this means an abandonment of autonomy and an acceptance of a merely technical role as a teacher educator. This would be both an abdication of professional vocationalism and an ignoring of the passions and purposes which underpin any teacher educator’s life. So, the first purpose of reflection should be some understanding and practiced reinterpretation of internal purpose. A second role for reflection is well documented by the authors in many of the chapters in this book. This is the understanding of context. We might call this ‘the external relations’ of the teacher educator’s life. We see how reflections focus upon and examine context and how, to quote the authors from their final chapter, ‘dominant global ideologies influence the national institutional structures and practices that shape meaning and influence action in the process of education’ (p194). I have written before about how every reflection on life narratives should be a story of action within a theory of context. Any reflection which then remains at the vii

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Foreword

level of an internally generated story of action without considering the external relations of a theory of context is diminished and impoverished. But as many of the chapters in this book suggest, this is no easy task. To try and understand one’s opinions, passions and purposes as part of a particular and specific time and place is a difficult undertaking. This kind of reflection requires knowledge of history and sociology and indeed philosophy. The reflective enterprise with regard to teacher educators is a complex conundrum. One of the things that become clear as you read the authors’ reflections on critical incidents and other aspects of professional experiences is that the best reflective activity focusses, at one and the same time, on personal construction and social context. To not do this is to ignore the whole facet of how a teacher educator’s life is constructed and lived. Reflecting on action and context simultaneously is a difficult skill to master. But it is vital if the social imagination of teacher educators is to be enhanced and maximised. This alone will substantially affect the way that teacher educators can broaden the social imagination of their students. As this book so eloquently attests, this type of reflection is not merely an individual and singular aspiration. What is so evident throughout this book is how reflection becomes a collective, collaborative and cooperative venture when fully embraced. One of our most valued commentators, Bob Bullough (2008, p.228), has shown how individualised reflection can ‘prove provocative professionally’ offering a milieu ‘for others to compare, criticise and perhaps reconsider their own theories and practices’. Reflection then presupposes collegiality; it enhances autonomy and professionalism and provides a much-needed boost to all our social imaginations. This book is evidence of this collective endeavour and furthers our mission to try to build an inclusive compassionate and caring world. Professor of Learning Theory, School of Education  Ivor F. Goodson University of Brighton Brighton, UK October 2019

Reference Bullough, V., Jr. (2008). Counternarratives: Studies of teacher education and becoming and being a teacher. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Acknowledgements

We gratefully acknowledge the support and contributions of the following organisations and people: University of Brighton (UK) and Monash University (Australia) for granting us both periods of funded sabbatical leave and support, which enabled us to travel to each other’s places of home and work and to research and write this book together. The nature of duoethnography requires periods of focused dialogue and collaborative writing, and while this can be achieved electronically at a distance, it was very important that we could collaborate in person. Our thanks to Professor Ivor Goodson for writing the foreword, and to Dr. Gwendolyn Lloyd for sharing her thoughts and allowing us to include them in Chap. 4. We are indebted to the following academic colleagues for their insightful, provocative contributions in the form of vignettes. We were keen to have other voices alongside our own in the writing journey, and their presence in the book highlights the importance of multiple perspectives and experiences in research about what it means to become a teacher educator. Sandy Farquhar and Esther Fitzpatrick (University of Auckland, New Zealand) Keith Turvey (University of Brighton, UK) Jennifer Mansfield, Amanda Berry, Rachel Forgasz and John Loughran (Monash University, Australia) Kathleen Pithouse-Morgan (University of KwaZulu Natal, Republic of South Africa) Anastasia Samaras (George Mason University, USA) Simone White (Queensland University of Technology, Australia) Jason Ritter (Duquesne University, USA) Many thanks to Miriam Verbeek for editing the final draft and to Springer, especially Commissioning Editor Nick Melchior and Production Editor Lay Peng Ang.

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Contents

1 Introduction����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������    1 1.1 Introduction��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������    2 1.2 How This Book Came About������������������������������������������������������������    3 1.3 Structure of the Book������������������������������������������������������������������������    6 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������    8 2 Duoethnography to Explore the Work and Lives of Teacher Educators ������������������������������������������������������������������������������    9 2.1 Introduction��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������    9 2.2 Wandering Towards Duoethnography����������������������������������������������   10 2.3 Understanding Autoethnography������������������������������������������������������   19 2.4 Embracing Duoethnography ������������������������������������������������������������   20 2.5 Ethics and Duoethnography��������������������������������������������������������������   21 2.6 Creating This Duoethnography��������������������������������������������������������   24 2.6.1 The River Journey Metaphor������������������������������������������������   24 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   26 3 Our Educational Journeys����������������������������������������������������������������������   29 3.1 Introduction��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   29 3.2 Early Family Influences��������������������������������������������������������������������   30 3.3 Kindergarten and Nursery����������������������������������������������������������������   34 3.4 Primary School����������������������������������������������������������������������������������   35 3.5 High School��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   37 3.6 University/Polytechnic����������������������������������������������������������������������   41 3.7 Teaching��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   43 3.8 Transitioning into Academia and Becoming a Teacher Educator����������������������������������������������������������������������������   47 3.9 Conclusion����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   48 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   50

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Contents

4 Becoming a Teacher Educator����������������������������������������������������������������   51 4.1 Introduction��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   52 4.2 Transitioning from Teacher to Teacher Educator������������������������������   53 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   66 5 Policy and Educational Contexts of Teacher Education����������������������   69 5.1 Introduction��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   70 5.2 Teacher Education Policy Landscape in Australia and England������������������������������������������������������������������   70 5.3 Professional Standards for Teachers ������������������������������������������������   76 5.4 Performance Standards for Academics ��������������������������������������������   79 5.5 Frameworks for Effective Teacher Education����������������������������������   85 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   89 6 Collaboration and the Work of Teacher Educators������������������������������   93 6.1 Introduction��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   95 6.2 Collaboration in the Journey of Becoming a Teacher Educator����������������������������������������������������������������������������   95 6.3 Collaboration Through S-STEP Community and Becoming Teacher Educators����������������������������������������������������   98 6.4 Collaboration Beyond the Self-Study Community ��������������������������  104 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  109 7 Working with the Teaching Profession��������������������������������������������������  113 7.1 Introduction��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  114 7.2 Teachers and Teacher Educators Working Together������������������������������������������������������������������������������  114 7.3 Working Together to Provide Professional Experience����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  115 7.4 Learning from Working with the Teaching Profession������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  123 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  126 8 Developing Pedagogies of Teacher Education ��������������������������������������  129 8.1 Introduction��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  130 8.2 What Is Meant by ‘Pedagogies of Teacher Education’? ��������������������������������������������������������������������  130 8.3 Context Matters: Journeys of Evolving Pedagogies in Diverse Settings ��������������������������������������������������������  138 8.4 Exploring Our Pedagogies of Teacher Education Through Autobiographical Writing and Self-Study ��������������������������������������������������������������������  142 8.5 The Influence of Life Experiences on Pedagogy as Teacher Educators������������������������������������������������������������������������  146 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  150

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9 Constructing an Identity as a Teacher Educator����������������������������������  153 9.1 Introduction��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  154 9.2 Voice, Self and Identity��������������������������������������������������������������������  154 9.3 The Meaning of Identity and Constructing a Professional Identity as a Teacher Educator����������������������������������  155 9.4 The Role of Early Life Experiences in Identity Construction��������������������������������������������������������������������  156 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  167 10 What Does ‘Becoming a Teacher Educator’ Mean?����������������������������  169 10.1 Introduction������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  169 10.2 What Does It Mean to Have a Career as a Teacher Educator?��������������������������������������������������������������������  175 10.3 What Have We Learned from Undertaking This Duoethnography?��������������������������������������������������������������������  178 10.4 Looking Back on the Writing Process as Research��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  182 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  184

Acronyms and Abbreviations

ADHD AERA APSTs ARC CPRT CV ERC HEFCE IPE ITE MIE NSS OfS OFSTED PAT PE PGCE QTS REF S-STEP SATS SIG TA TAPP TEF TEMAG TPA TTA

Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder American Educational Research Association Australian Professional Standards for Teachers Australian Research Council Cambridge Primary Review Trust Curriculum Vitae Educational Research Centre Higher Education Funding Council for England International Professional Experience Initial Teacher Education Mauritius Institute of Education National Student Survey Office for Students Office for Standards in Education Personal Academic Tutor Pedagogical Equilibrium Postgraduate Certificate in Education Qualified Teacher Status Research Excellence Framework Self-Study of Teacher Education Practices Standard Assessment Tasks Special Interest Group Teaching Assistant Teaching Academy of Professional Practice Teaching Excellence Framework Teacher Education Ministerial Advisory Group Teaching Practice Assessment Teacher Training Agency

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Chapter 1

Introduction

Abstract  This introductory chapter outlines the aims and rationale of the book. The authors present the argument for why it is important and timely to know about teacher educators and how such knowledge can enhance the experiences of those in the profession and, in turn, the quality of their work with students of teaching. In an era of constant change in teacher education, it is crucial for universities and other policymakers and stakeholders to know who is teaching prospective teachers in universities, why they are there and how they approach the work of educating the next generation of teachers. Keywords  Teacher educator · Professional learning · Duoethnography · Narrative inquiry

Opening the Conversation… Judy: When we were presenting our previous book on the professional ‘becoming’ of teacher educators at those two international conferences, ISATT in Auckland, New Zealand, and AERA in Chicago, I remember feeling both proud and just a little sorry that my story had been left out. These were significant international conferences, where we were showcasing the work of the various chapter authors, some of whom were also presenting as part of the symposia that we were chairing. I remember thinking to myself, what would my chapter have been if I was one of the contributing authors, rather than an editor? So many of the ideas provided by the various authors in the chapters resonated deeply with me, but apart from a brief reference to my experiences and my responses to the chapters at the beginning and end of the book, I felt somewhat frustrated that my story wasn’t among them. Did you have any sense of this, Mike? Mike: I don’t remember feeling quite that way. I think all the autoethnographic writing that I had done for my doctoral thesis and also featured in several chapters and journal articles that I’ve written over the years had satisfied my need to tell the story by the time we got to the symposia – for a while at least. I remember being very excited and nervous about taking on a new aspect of life and work in jointly editing the book, initiating and organising the symposium in Chicago and bringing it all together with you on the day. I certainly felt pleased and proud that © The Author(s) 2020 M. Hayler, J. Williams, Being a Teacher Educator in Challenging Times, Self-Study of Teaching and Teacher Education Practices 22, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-3848-3_1

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1 Introduction

we had brought these authors together for the conference and all the authors together in the book. I was fascinated by the way that the group of authors responded so positively to each other and how our discussant, Bob Bullough, seemed to know them all just from reading their chapters, which we had sent to him. I did get the feeling that I also knew their stories well but that they didn’t know mine. It was the following year, when the collection arrived and you and I decided to undertake a collaborative self-study on the process of creating the edited book and its place in our own journeys of becoming, that I realised things had, of course, moved on and I felt the need to tell my story in a new way.

∗∗∗

1.1  Introduction This book is a study and a story of the professional identity and work of university-­ based teacher educators. The study emerged from our personal and professional experiences of working as teachers and teacher educators in England (Mike) and Australia (Judy). The story developed as a duoethnography to create and examine our personal narratives of experience, informed by the key assumption that valuable knowledge of the work and identity of teacher educators can be gained by examining our own memories, beliefs and experiences and that the narrative discourses through which we understand ourselves and our work are a source of rich description and insight. These narratives raise a number of questions about what it means to be a university-based teacher educator in the first decades of the twenty-first century. For example, how do we navigate the personal and professional transition from being a school teacher to being an academic, researcher and teacher of teachers? What is the policy context that supports, shapes or hinders our work? Who do we work with and how do we negotiate these professional relationships? What does it really mean to become a teacher educator? This book examines these questions through a range of themes, including how we use memories of experience to construct and perceive our own identities as teacher educators; how this memory work influences our practice; and how we adapt our personal pedagogies in order to negotiate external and institutional requirements and constraints which often contradict or impede our beliefs about teaching and learning. We also examine the opportunities that being teacher educators gives us to contribute to knowledge about, and practice in, teacher education. We return to these areas of focus throughout the book through engagement with a variety of narratives and analytic writing in each chapter. Our wider aim for this book is to explore and to illuminate the experience of being a teacher educator in contemporary times. Teacher education remains a central and contested element in systems of education throughout the world, and our goal has been to consider the details of what it means to be a teacher educator in these shifting contexts. As we explain in more detail in Chap. 2, we draw upon various sources of data, analytic tools and research methods based around our version

1.2  How This Book Came About

3

of duoethnography. Principally, we utilise our own experiences as learners, school teachers, university-based teacher educators, educational researchers, writers and editors, in England and in Australia, as data for our study. We connect our stories of experience with documentary sources and the testimony of others to locate our individual and co-constructed narratives in time and place. Our stories of action within theories of context (Goodson 2013, 2017; Stenhouse 1975) tell a story of teacher education through several significant ‘turns’ (Cochran-Smith 2016) and changes of direction. Looking back to where we have both been before, and within, teacher education has been our way of finding our bearings and our way of contributing to the discussion of where we might and should be going. We have used a bricolage of methods to create our version of this emerging methodology, influenced by autoethnography, narrative inquiry, self-study and life history. These provide lenses through which we examine aspects of our memories, perspectives and experiences. This includes our early family and educational experience as learners; our work as teachers in schools; how we came to be teacher educators; what it is like to be a teacher educator in contemporary times; how we see our role; why we believe what we believe about teacher education; and how we think all of this affects our practice in teaching students of teaching. These themes are further explored through discussion of related literature, policy and methodology, inclusion of vignettes written by fellow teacher educators and forms of narrative analysis within each chapter.

1.2  How This Book Came About An important part of our own experience as teacher educators in the last decade or so has been our work with each other, which began when we met at the Self-Study Teacher Education Practices (S-STEP) conference at Herstmonceux Castle, UK, in 2008. To a certain extent, the beginning of this project can be traced back to that meeting, although the idea of the book itself really began to take shape in late 2016 following the publication of our jointly edited collection of narrative accounts of becoming a teacher educator (Williams and Hayler 2016a). In that book, a range of academics from various countries recounted how they became teacher educators. The organising concept of the book was transitions and transformations, a recognition that we do not just suddenly become teacher educators but that it is an ongoing process of becoming, responding to transitions in our lives and transformative events that guide the development of our work and professional identities. In the collection of 14 chapters, 12 of which were written by other teacher educators, we co-authored two chapters as the introduction (Hayler and Williams 2016) and the conclusion (Williams and Hayler 2016b) to the book. In these chapters, we briefly shared our own journeys into teacher education and our responses to the narratives presented in the book about others’ journeys and how these ‘spoke’ to our own experiences. In the conclusion, we reflected on the key messages conveyed through the various chapters in the book:

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1 Introduction From our reading of the chapters presented in this volume, and the conversation…about our own learning from these narratives of becoming, we conclude that the process of becoming a teacher educator is as much about the journey as the destination. The road to becoming a teacher educator is more often than not a winding path of diverse experiences and unfamiliar spaces, which provide opportunities for reflection on learning, both within ourselves and with our colleagues, with many of whom we have forged strong personal and professional relationships. This road helps us to re-frame our understanding of learning and teaching, and to enact a pedagogy of teacher education that sits comfortably with our philosophical stance. The foundation for this stance very often lays within our experiences as learners in school or university, and in our respective spaces as beginning teacher educators, striving to find a comfortable place within academia and the institutional structures in which we work. (Williams and Hayler 2016b: 207)

Although we were comfortable with the conclusions that we drew about other people’s journeys, we harboured an unsettling feeling that this was not enough. The thought that kept crossing our minds was ‘I wonder what our chapters would have been?’ Condensing our own journeys to becoming teacher educators into a few pages at either end of a book did not satisfy the need to explore more deeply our own experiences of becoming teacher educators. We wanted to write reflective accounts that would be interesting and insightful for others and we both believed that our stories could help other teacher educators make sense of their own journeys. But it would need to be more than a book of yet more stories of experience – how could we connect to the broader field of teacher education, to make another, different contribution to the field? Our stories would shine a light on our own and other teacher educators’ practice and ways in which it could continue to evolve. Hence the question: What would our narratives be if we had more scope to tell our stories? When we discussed this question, and we deliberated on the range of issues to consider, we wondered together if perhaps this should be a co-written book. Mike suggested that it should be a narrative inquiry of some sort, but the exact methodology was to come later, when we developed the formal proposal. We knew that self-study would underpin our work, but how? In organising the research and book proposal, we began by asking ourselves and each other the questions that we had asked the authors of the edited collection (Williams and Hayler 2016a): (a) What important changes, transitions and transformations have you experienced in your life and career? (b) How have these changes impacted upon your professional knowledge, identity and practice as a teacher educator? We set out to again take up the challenge set by Zeichner (2007) and Loughran (2010) to go beyond story-telling – to explore, examine and connect stories of individual teacher educator’s experiences and practices in order to understand how pedagogies and sensibilities of teacher education are formed, enacted and developed. Taking the initiative forward, Judy met with the Australian-based editor and discussed the idea of using a relatively new and developing methodology, ‘co-­ autoethnography’, to take a new angle on the work of teacher educators. Mike had utilised and gained understanding of autoethnography as methodology through his

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earlier work (Hayler 2011), and we were both comfortable with narrative inquiry and self-study. With encouragement from our editor, we put together a proposal to examine the various elements of what it means to be a teacher educator, broadly informed by what we had learned from the contributors to the edited collection. We wanted and needed to connect our stories to the research literature and to education policy in the UK and in Australia and to include the voices of other teacher educators in recognising and illustrating the ways in which the professional identities of teacher educators are both formed and represented by narratives of experience. Centrally, the individual stories needed to be culturally located to avoid de-­ contextualisation and individualisation in this analysis. We further consider and explain this process in Chap. 2. The proposal was reviewed favourably and contained some useful feedback that we incorporated into our planning for the book. We were on our way. Rather than follow the ‘winding road’ metaphor that was so evident in the edited book (Williams and Hayler 2016a), we imagined the metaphor of a river journey, and of negotiating rapids, to examine our respective and shared journeys to becoming teacher educators. We viewed our personal and professional histories as a combination of dipping our toes in to test the waters, enjoying smooth flows, managing seen and unseen obstacles or fast-moving rapids and being influenced by tributaries at various stages – all the while striving to keep afloat as we progressively learned and grew into the roles. While we thought we had a clear idea of what the book would look like at that point, the journey of writing a book, just like the journey of becoming a teacher educator, is not always smooth, clearly mapped out or in one direction. As we talked, read and wrote, we interrogated conceptual ideas and methodologies and changed them to accommodate our evolving ideas and perspectives. Understandings and knowledge about ourselves and the approach that we were taking to the telling of our stories deepened and shifted. We reframed the co-autoethnography from a parallel studies approach that connected at particular points to a duoethnography that reflects the intertwined, dialogic nature of our thinking and writing. All this involved more revelations and examinations of self than we initially anticipated. As Farquhar and Fitzgerald (2016, 242) found, ‘when you enter into a duoethnographic conversation you begin to share and juxtapose your stories against/alongside one another, and it can be surprising what unfolds’. As our duoethnographic research journey evolves throughout the book, our voices are sometimes, as in this chapter, combined to create a ‘shared voice’, sometimes presented separately, always in touch, to some extent in dialogue. Here we should note that while duoethnography, like autoethnography, draws upon autobiography as a genre of writing and research, it is not autobiography. It is not ‘about’ the researchers or writers as such but utilises their stories of experience as data from which new knowledge is gained. The variety of approaches that have personal experiences at the centre may look at a range of issues and phenomena through the lens of life experience. However, by using these methods, we also indicate that these experiences and these lives – whether they are our own or the lives of others, or a combination of both – do, to a certain extent, make the phenomena that are teacher education. To live our lives forward, we seek understanding through the

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articulation of experience. Seen from this perspective, what else are we other than our history, and what else is teacher education other than the individual and collective experiences of teacher educators and the people with whom they work?

1.3  Structure of the Book To capture the storied nature of our experiences, we originally intended to place individual, personal narratives at the beginning and the end of each of the chapters, alternating between opening and closing authors in each chapter. However, as the writing developed, we found that this ‘top and tail’ structure lent itself more to some chapters than to others. We have adopted this structure in the chapters that explore what we believe to be the essential themes in the teacher educator journey of becoming – entering the profession from another field (Chap. 4), policy and contextual issues (Chap. 5), collaboration (Chap. 6), working with the teaching profession (Chap. 7), exploring pedagogy (Chap. 8) and professional identity (Chap. 9). In those chapters, the opening narrative, written by one of us, ‘sets the scene’ and represents the main idea or theme of the chapter, capturing a particularly memorable or critical moment and inviting the reader into our world as well as conveying some of the thinking, wondering, challenges and emotions triggered by the event or memory. The concluding narrative, written by the other author, provides their experience of the same issue, but in a different context or from a different perspective. At the beginning of Chap. 1, we have ‘opening the conversation’ narratives; at the end of Chap. 10, we close the conversation. In all the chapters, other narratives of personal experience appear throughout, to help frame the discussion. Where an individual author is contributing to the discussion from a personal perspective, their name appears at the beginning of the narrative. In other sections, which discuss general ideas within the theme and interrogate the research literature, no name is provided, as this is shared text. In each chapter, there is also a vignette written by a colleague of ours, which contributes another perspective based on their personal experience and reflection on the theme of the chapter. By presenting and interrogating two differing national and institutional contexts through a range of perspectives and by responding to each other’s and to others’ stories of experience, we have been able to consider some of the common issues facing teacher educators today. In this chapter, we have explained how and why this book came about and the approach we have taken in presenting our stories of experience. In Chap. 2, we elaborate on the methodological approaches as we consider the strengths, limitations and potential challenges of narrative inquiry, autoethnography and collaborative self-study, which all converge in our duoethnographic approach. We also explain how we developed a version of this emerging methodology as a way of understanding the lived experience of teacher educators as they negotiate what we term as ‘the rapids’ of changing and, often, confronting times. In Chap. 3, we each provide narrative accounts of our own educational journeys from early family experiences and influences about learning and education to kindergarten/nursery

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school and through to our days as pupils in school, as students in university, then as teachers in schools, on opposite sides of the world. These journeys provide a basis for many of the discussions and explorations we present in later chapters. In Chap. 4, we continue these stories as we consider the beginning of our own and others’ journeys as teacher educators, moving from working in schools to becoming teacher educators in our respective universities. Research into the transition from teacher to teacher educator is an emerging field, particularly in the self-­study literature, and in this chapter, we interrogate our own experiences of becoming teacher educators during that initial transition phase. In surveying ‘the rapids’ that have been and continue to be negotiated by teacher educators, we consider, in Chap. 5, what Cochran-Smith (2016) identifies as several ‘turns’ in teacher education policy over the last 30 years. We consider these shifts and changes through a range of perspectives as we outline current policy contexts in England and Australia through discussion that includes governmental and institutional agendas, accountability regimes and professional standards. These have implications for the life and work of teacher educators in relation to pedagogy, curriculum, partnerships with schools and the construction of professional identities. In Chap. 6, we further explore the importance of working with others and how this contributes to the development of pedagogies and the construction of an identity as a teacher educator. The chapter frames a discussion of collaboration and community through research and teaching, research networks and school communities. We consider our own experience of collaboration throughout our careers, which includes the dialogic methodology used in creating this book and reflect upon some of the past and more recent challenges and affordances of professional partnerships and our own developing roles within them. Chapter 7 examines the points at which the work of schools meets higher education through the intersection of teacher education and professional practice in schools. We present and discuss our own and others’ experiences of working in this space in England and Australia. The issues discussed in this chapter reflect the tension and balance between the perceived needs of pre-service teachers and schools and the beliefs of teacher educators about what pre-service teachers need to know and be able to do. In Chap. 8, we consider what it means to teach pre-service teachers in university-­ based programs as we explore the notion of ‘pedagogies of teacher education’ and discuss how we have developed and continue to develop our particular approaches to teaching teachers about teaching. As ‘second-order practitioners’ (Murray and Male 2007), we grapple with the questions of how to best prepare beginning teachers to be competent, thoughtful and informed classroom teachers without falling into the trap of presenting ‘tips and tricks’ for survival in the classroom. We consider how we educate future teachers for the challenges and uncertainties they will inevitably face in their classrooms. Chapter 9 integrates the key ideas of the preceding chapters to consider the ongoing construction of professional identities. Drawing upon personal narratives of our own developing identities in conjunction with research and literature on teacher educator identity, we explore the ways in which we grapple with the fundamental

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tenets of our personal and professional identities and our ongoing attempts to understand what it means to become a teacher educator. In the concluding Chap. 10, we reflect on what we have learned from the experience of writing this book. We consider the essential elements of becoming a teacher educator through the process of responding to our research question and evaluate our experience of utilising the methodological approach of duoethnography.

References Cochran-Smith, M. (2016). Foreword. In The Teacher Education Group (Ed.), Teacher education in times of change (pp. x–xvi). Bristol/Chicago: Policy Press. Farquhar, S., & Fitzpatrick, E. (2016). Unearthing truths in duoethnographic method. Qualitative Research Journal, 16(3), 238–250. Goodson, I. (2013). Developing narrative theory: Life histories and personal representation. London/New York: Routledge. Goodson, I. (2017). Introduction: Life histories and narratives. In I.  Goodson, A.  Antikainen, P. Sikes, & M. Andrews (Eds.), The Routledge international handbook of narrative and life history (pp. 3–10). London: Routledge. Hayler, M. (2011). Autoethnography, self-narrative and teacher education. Rotterdam: Sense. Hayler, M., & Williams, J. (2016). On the journey of becoming a teacher educator. In J. Williams & M. Hayler (Eds.), Professional learning through transitions and transformations: Teacher educators’ journeys of becoming (pp. 1–12). Dordrecht: Springer. Loughran, J. (2010). Seeking knowledge for teaching teaching: Moving beyond stories. Studying Teacher Education, 6(3), 221–226. Murray, J., & Male, T. (2007). Becoming a teacher educator: Evidence from the field. Teaching and Teacher Education, 21, 125–142. Stenhouse, L. (1975). An introduction to curriculum research and development. London: Heinemann. Williams, J., & Hayler, M. (Eds.). (2016a). Professional learning through transitions and transformations: Teacher educators’ journeys of becoming. Dordrecht: Springer. Williams, J., & Hayler, M. (2016b). Learning from stories of becoming. In J. Williams & M. Hayler (Eds.), Professional learning through transitions and transformations: Teacher educators’ journeys of becoming (pp. 199–208). Dordrecht: Springer. Zeichner, K. (2007). Accumulating knowledge across self-studies in teacher education. Journal of Teacher Education, 58(1), 36–46.

Chapter 2

Duoethnography to Explore the Work and Lives of Teacher Educators

Abstract  This chapter describes the emerging methodology of duoethnography and its links to related methodologies. The authors also discuss how duoethnography contributes to their understanding of the lived experience of teacher educators who are negotiating the rapids of their changing profession in increasingly challenging times. The discussion explores how duoethnography complements self-­ study and how it takes that methodological approach to new audiences. This approach encourages new perspectives and ways of thinking about the work of teacher educators. The chapter discusses the foundations of narrative inquiry and the place of autoethnography within that methodology. It explores the methods and ethics of duoethnography and the ways in which these approaches work together to help in understanding the lives, work and identities of teacher educators. Keywords  Duoethnography · Methodology · Metaphor · Ethics · Narrative inquiry

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2.1  Introduction Even when you think you are writing on your own, you’re always doing it with someone else you can’t always name. (Deleuze 1995, 141)

In this chapter, we explain how our methodology in making this book draws upon a bricolage of narrative methods of inquiry to develop and employ our version of duoethnography. The result is a narrative created through a dialogue with each other as we explore the critical challenges and characteristics of what it means to be a teacher educator. In each chapter, we have used a life-history approach, providing narratives of the experiences and challenges of various aspects of our work as teacher educators, and the voices of other teacher educators in the form of vignettes. As with other forms of research and writing that might fall under the ever-widening umbrella of narrative and autobiographical methodologies, duoethnography shares © The Author(s) 2020 M. Hayler, J. Williams, Being a Teacher Educator in Challenging Times, Self-Study of Teaching and Teacher Education Practices 22, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-3848-3_2

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the ‘mongrel’ quality of hybridisation that Bullough and Pinnegar (2001, 5) identify as working ‘at the intersection of self and other’. Breault (2016) suggests that duoethnography can be seen as a pair of intersecting autoethnographies because it shares a number of principles and sensibilities with that methodology. Ellis (2004, 120) notes that autoethnography is a methodology that always needs ‘to go into the woods without a compass’ and takes time to ‘wander round a bit’; duoethnography has this similar need.

2.2  Wandering Towards Duoethnography The author Philip Pullman once said that after nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing that we need most in the world (cited in Gillespie 2013). Many writers have explored the methodological approach of narrative inquiry, focusing on how individuals assign meaning to their experiences through the stories that they tell and explaining how identity, learning and pedagogy are each constructed through the narratives of lived experience within all of its historical, social and cultural contexts (Bruner 1991; Clandinin and Connelly 2000; Goodson 2012; Wells 2007). As explained in the preceding and following chapters, in one way or another, narrative has been at the heart of our own growth and learning, in our work and in our research wanderings towards duoethnography that formed the substance of this book. As the next chapter illustrates, one of the things that we have in common is that, for as long as we can remember, we have both drawn upon biographies and autobiographies – stories of people’s lives – to learn about individuals and the societies in which they live and have lived. We both turned to narrative as a way of dealing with, or perhaps escaping from, the troubles and difficulties of our childhoods, on opposite sides of the world. Like many children, we both felt lonely at different times in our early years, and, like so many others, we turned to stories to connect with alternative narratives of how the world and other people (and perhaps we) might be. There is nothing unusual in this. Just like in other generations, it seems that we live in an age of narrative where stories are widely understood as the way that we make sense of ourselves and the world. Kelchtermans (2017, 10) maintains that ‘storytelling is the natural way through which people make sense of the events, situations, and encounters in which they find themselves’. While the ‘grand narratives’ that framed our childhoods have fallen from favour, personal life narratives have risen and been recognised as a source of potential insight and cultural understanding (Goodson 2012; Williams 2005). In seeking insight through reflection upon our personal and professional experiences through our individual and co-constructed narratives, we recognise there are potential problems as well as rewards. One danger is that the personal life narrative becomes individualised and detached from context and culture. However, removing our stories, or the stories of others we gather and curate from their context, deprives us and others of meaning and understanding. As Goodson (2017, 6) argues:

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The story provides a starting point for developing further understanding of the social construction of subjectivity: if the stories stay at the level of the personal and the practical, we forgo that opportunity.

In the following vignette, Keith Turvey shares his reflections, drawn from his recent examination of innovation in teacher education (Turvey 2019), about the potentially ‘humanising’ effect of narrative inquiry on educational research. Keith warns that the application of statistics without stories creates the danger of simplifying complex social and individual experiences and is therefore a hindrance to educational innovation: Vignette: Keith Turvey I see story as a fundamental way in which we make meaning of our experiences and lives as humans. This observation is not particularly noteworthy or in question perhaps to most reading this book. But I question whether the taken-for-granted familiarity of stories and telling stories is also problematic. Has the familiarity of story to us as humans become so familiar that we can no longer wonder at and critique its strangeness, richness and power? I’m sure I’m not alone as a researcher who draws on narrative methodologies, to be told ‘but they’re just anecdotes’. It often puzzles me: what do people mean when they say this? My old 1982 edition of The Oxford English Dictionary defines anecdote as: Noun. Narrative (or painting etc.) of amusing or interesting incident. So, anecdote is a story, in some form of modality, of something that amuses or interests another and presumably the storyteller. To be amusing and amused, or of interest and interested, requires the sparks of conscious intent, connection and reciprocity to construct and communicate meaning. In this sense, to story is to be human and to share in the process of making meaning. Exchanging stories is at the heart of what makes us human, but we cannot take this for granted. The familiarity of story reveals its intrinsic value as a humanising device enabling us to understand or express what matters to each other more deeply and respectfully; as Paris and Winn (2014) put it, the humanising potential of story offers us the opportunity to become ‘worthy witnesses’ in our work as educators and teacher educators. But the familiarity of story also renders it a potentially powerful dehumanising device where we see it exploited by [un]worthy witnesses such as high-profile populist manipulators to fabricate and dehumanise in the service of pernicious personal and political agendas. Whether we are talking about humanising or dehumanising, to be worthy witnesses, we need to wake up to the fact that stories are never ‘just stories’ in the way that numbers are never ‘just numbers’. I realise now that narration or story-telling as a humanising process has always shaped my work as a teacher, teacher educator and researcher because of this belief that stories are not just stories but are also woven into how we make sense of the world and our constant state of becoming within the world. Knowledge, learning and curriculum are nothing if not woven into a responsive and humanising process of education to which narrative lends itself. As a primary school teacher in several countries through the late 1980s and 1990s and early 2000s, I was motivated to help children become more knowledgeable of the world through their primary education, but I became increasingly frustrated by the constant framing of the child as a narrow and over-tested metric of acquired and regurgitated information and skills. The process of becoming a more knowledgeable person and making sense of the world was being reduced and has continued to be so in education in my view. Narrative as a humanising and meaning-making process yields not just knowledge of the world but also knowledge of one’s self within that world. This view has been central to my work as a teacher educator and researcher since 2003. I don’t believe it is enough merely that student teachers become more knowledgeable about teaching and learning, although this is no doubt a key part of our work. But what use is a knowledgeable teacher who cannot critically

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2  Duoethnography to Explore the Work and Lives of Teacher Educators reflect on the kind of teacher they are in the process of becoming? What use is a teacher who seeks nothing more than whether their students have acquired what has been taught? What use is a teacher who has no concern how their students make sense of the world and what they bring to it? As a researcher and teacher educator, I am drawn to narrative because it enables us to go beyond the superficial and instrumental framing of knowledge, teaching and learning. If we are to preserve teaching and learning as an intrinsically human endeavour and not cede these to our increasingly automated and dehumanising world, we need to recognise, understand and engage with the intrinsic value of narrative as a humanising process.



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Our method in this book attempts to be ‘worthy witness’ and recognise, as Keith puts it, ‘the humanising potential of story’ by constructing our stories in connection and in dialogue with each other and by making clear connections to contexts and with others within the contexts from which those stories emerge. These individual and co-constructed narratives can be seen as what Bruner (1990, 108) describes as a form of ‘cultural psychology’ where the individual ‘self’ is located ‘not [only] within the immediate private consciousness but in the cultural-historical situation as well’. Bruner’s recognition that the self must be ‘treated as a construction that, so to speak, proceeds from the outside in as from the inside out, from culture to mind as well as from mind to culture’ has deep resonance for us as a key aspect of our research and writing for this book. Our interest is in the lives and work of teacher educators and how professional identity is both formed and represented by narratives of experience (see Williams and Hayler 2016). The methodological ‘wandering round’ that Ellis (2004) advocates constitutes a transformative process for writers such as us who are familiar with forms of qualitative self-study in teacher education. Our growing commitment to qualitative methodology through narrative brought us separately towards self-study of teacher education practices (S-STEP). Finding, like so many others, the transition from school teaching to teacher education strange and confusing (as we discuss in Chap. 4), we sought understanding through the S-STEP methodologies and network. As experienced self-study researchers, we have both written individually, together and with other colleagues about our experiences as teacher educators in relation to making the transition from teaching to teacher education (Hayler 2010, 2011; Williams 2008; Williams and Ritter 2010, 2011); our evolving pedagogies in teacher education (Hayler 2017a; Williams 2013a); working with others in understanding the nature and practice of teacher education (Auld et  al. 2013; Hayler 2017b; Turvey and Hayler 2017; Williams and Berry 2016; Williams and Grierson 2016; Williams and Power 2010); and exploring our evolving identities as teacher educators (Hayler and Williams 2018; Williams 2014). In all of our self-study research and writing, the focus on ourselves as teacher educators and researchers made us, to some extent, vulnerable and exposed, as we documented our respective challenges and what we learned from confronting these professional learning experiences. The ‘self’ is clearly an important part of a self-study, and it takes some time to become used to being so clearly a part of the research process. Over the past ten

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years or so, we have both become more comfortable with exposing our teaching ‘selves’ as part of our research narrative, but in recent years, we have also become somewhat restless, seeking to move beyond our stories of practice and to explore more deeply the history of how we came to be who we are as teacher educators. Our mutual affinity for autobiography as a form of story-telling that sheds light not only on the protagonist but also on their context and the wider world informed our journey towards self-narrative. The focus on our own micro experiences through self-­ study as the basis for understanding teacher education at a macro level has provided us with a foundation from which to launch into an even more vulnerable and exposed form of research: what we have come to understand and appreciate as duoethnography. In duoethnography, the writing itself moves from reporting upon self-study research towards being transparently central to the actual process of research. As Richardson (2000) has taught us, writing is itself a method of inquiry, a creative analytic practice (see, e.g. Richardson 2000; Richardson and St Pierre 2005). While attempting to apply precisely defined definitions and procedures needs to be avoided for narrative methods, duoethnography should be distinguished from co-­ autoethnography, which might be shared or parallel autoethnographic accounts presented alongside but with minimal reference to each other. In moving very deliberately away from the individual ‘auto’ towards what Spry (2011, 497) describes as ‘autoethnographic ensemble’, we have embraced duoethnography as a way to provide further multiple perspectives of the phenomena (in this case, teacher education) under focus. Gale and Wyatt (2013, 305) frame this dialectical process as ‘assemblage/ethnography’ that ‘not only talks about the spaces in between ourselves and others but also the spaces we are part of and create’. As Norris and Sawyer (2012) remind us, duoethnography positions the researchers not as the subject of research, but the site of research. However, while our personal stories are central to the structure of the book, they are not the sole purpose of the book. We hope they will be an interesting read in their own right, but, essentially, they are there to provide a textual ‘location’ for examining what it means to become and to be a teacher educator in the current educational and political environment and to help us to draw on the literature and voices of others through the inclusion of vignettes. Our stories are not intended to be an end point but, rather, a starting point for discussion, reflection and critical engagement with our field of research: teacher education. We hope that readers will engage with the text and that it will cause them to reflect on their own journeys and experiences, challenges, opportunities and successes, with the aim of gaining greater knowledge of the field and of the ‘self’ within the field. ‘Assemblage’ seems an appropriate term to frame our own ‘wandering around’ in developing our version of duoethnography, in which we examine teacher education and our experience of it. Over the last ten years, we have moved from our different starting points through self-study of teacher education practices, by working together in a variety of collaborative ways, as researchers, writers and editors in a number of locations and spaces. After the publication of our edited book (Williams and Hayler 2016), we felt that we had come to a place where we were willing and

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able to make a meaningful enquiry of teacher education through a bricolage of methods linked together through duoethnography. Each of us, however, experienced a different path to duoethnography. Mike:  I was wandering in my own methodological direction when Judy and my paths met at the Castle conference in 2008. I had spent most of that year working with autoethnography and trying to make closer connections with what Anderson (2006) calls ‘voices beyond the self’ in teacher education when I discovered the American Education Research Association (AERA) special interest group (SIG) ‘self-study in teacher education practices’ (S-STEP). I subsequently signed up for their biennial conference. It was just what I needed to bring focus, connection and grounding in practice to the work I was doing through narrative and autoethnography as I brought my doctoral thesis towards a conclusion. It had been quite a methodological journey up to that point, and I had come to see the importance and significance of learning through the reflexive articulation of personal experience along the way. While the conference was full of teacher educators from far away (very few from the UK), the castle itself was very close to where I lived at the time. Almost on my doorstep, I found a community of scholars that I could be part of. I was struck by the willingness to listen and to learn from others: no keynote speeches and no apparent hierarchal structure. Everyone contributed; everyone listened. I met Judy on the first evening when we were part of the same group in a workshop discussion. Later, I attended the session that she led on the transition from teacher to teacher educator, which rang a number of bells for me and my own story. The session and the conference as a whole felt like coming home for me. What seemed like a new synthesis of understanding, a new way of knowing, still rings true for me today and seems especially relevant to research in teacher education where the affective (empathy, compassion, kindness, etc.) is clearly combined for me with the analytic (evaluation, assessment, planning, etc.) as essential elements of the enterprise. My (re)turn to narrative had come about a year and half earlier when all else seemed to be failing with my doctoral thesis. Based on my role at that time as a behaviour support specialist teacher, I had thought about examining the role of writing on self-management of behaviour in children, then considered an exploration and analysis of the course revalidation process at my university when I went to work there. I was later interested in ‘effective schools’ and forms of inclusion. I had drawn up some ideas towards proposals on these themes, but none of these ideas had lasted long and my heart was not in them. My research journal tells a story of false starts and new ideas that later come to nothing. There are long gaps and some despair, as noted in the journal: March 31st, 2006: The EdD came to an end for me around December. Realised that (a) the project I had in mind was nonsense (b) I haven’t got any idea of what to do my thesis on (c) I’ve lost interest (d) I haven’t got the time and energy to do it anyway.

I was clearly feeling despondent, and just as I had done since I was a child, I wrote about it. At some point – I’m not sure when – I realised that the journal itself

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was a form of data about the experience of being a teacher educator. The turning point for me was when, at the suggestion of my supervisor, I met with Maria Antoniou who was working in the Centre for Teaching and Learning at the university. She had used autobiographical material in her own PhD (Unpublished thesis, University of Manchester 2002) and she told me about Laurel Richardson (1994, 2000) and her work on writing as a method of inquiry and creative analytic practices. I told Maria that I would like to include some life-history narrative but did not know how to analyse it and make it ‘valid’. I wanted to include some of my own story but worried that it was too personal to have relevance for others. ‘Why not use autoethnography?’ Maria asked and explained broadly what that was. ‘How do you analyse that?’ I asked. ‘That varies’, she grinned. ‘According to Richardson, the analysis is all in the construction of the text by the author, the decisions you make, what you leave out, how you tell the story. After that, it’s over to the reader’. In coming to autoethnography in my thesis, to examine and construct my own story towards and within teacher education in collaboration with and reference to others, I continued to examine the various tributaries which feed into the autoethnographic stream. Because it was a thesis that would be examined, I was drawn in particular towards analytic autoethnography (Anderson 2006; Anderson and Glass-­ Coffin 2013) as a framework within which to examine and present my research. Learning from experience about ourselves, others and the cultures that we live and work within has also become the theme that unites the various ways in which I have come to interact with other teachers and students of education with whom I work. It became clear to me that the task of defining one category of autobiographical discourse from another is neither clear-cut nor especially useful, as the practices of writing about the self inevitably overlap at the turn of every page and are themselves part of social cultural history. My thesis told a story of teacher education which considered my own experiences alongside the accounts of others. My method was to share my narrative – my own story of my education towards and within teacher education – with six other teacher educators prior to interviews. I was interested in how the participants might respond to my story as a way of exploring how the stories that we hear and the stories that we tell influence our beliefs and our work in teacher education. So, my own story became both data and a research tool in forming a framework, or a backdrop, with points of reference and response during the interviews. Following the interviews, five of the participants sent me some writing expanding on their own stories. The written contributions varied in length, but they all carried a similar open and honest character and style, and I was struck by how intimate and trusting they appeared to be. By listening to my professional neighbours and reading their stories, I began to understand and to know my own story more deeply. More importantly, perhaps, I made connections with these teacher educators and our stories intertwined in many unexpected ways without losing their individuality. This allowed me to create the narrative analysis, to find a new context for how I understood teacher education and to discover a sense of professional community that I had not felt before. I see the way in which Judy and I have created this book as a progression of the methods that I used for my doctoral thesis – which I later developed into a book

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(Hayler 2011) – and a further development of our work in the self-study of teacher education. While pre-written narrative of my educational journey framed the discussion and interviews in my earlier research, for this book Judy and I have written our narratives in conjunction and response to each other and linked those narratives with the contributions of other teacher educators. If, as Richardson suggests, writing itself is a method of inquiry, then duoethnography is collaborative writing as a method of collaborative inquiry. Judy:  When Mike and I first began discussing the idea for this book, I had a vague sense that autoethnography (or co-autoethnography as we referred to it then) was the way to go, but my knowledge of the methodology was limited. As an experienced self-study researcher, the notion of studying my own experiences as a teacher educator, and the impact of this on my practice, was very familiar. I was comfortable with revealing thoughts, emotions, challenges and successes to the extent that they informed the self-study and led to a deeper understanding of practice. I assumed that co-autoethnography was much the same. I read Coia and Taylor’s (2009) work and saw the potential for taking self-study a step further to include a deeper exploration of the ‘auto’ (ourselves), the ‘ethno’ (social, cultural and educational contexts), the ‘co’ (in collaboration) and the ‘graphy’ (writing of narrative accounts of experience). I was excited by the possibilities of Mike and me undertaking our own autoethnographies side by side with some dialogue between us. Our individual narratives would begin and end each chapter, and, in between, we would focus on the relevant literature, policy contexts and experiences of others through the inclusion of vignettes. What struck me most about autoethnography was the value it gave to experience and to the memory of experience and how it recognised the potential for personal stories of experience to inform the wider debate about a particular phenomenon or area of human endeavour. And, Holman Jones (2005, 764) states, ‘how a personal text can move writers and readers, subjects and objects, tellers and listeners into this space of dialogue, debate, and change’. Autoethnography appeared to be a natural progression for me from self-study and an opportunity to delve more deeply into my own experiences, to shed light on some of the challenges and opportunities created by the journey to becoming a teacher educator and to learn a new methodology. However, as I began to draft some chapters and share these with Mike, I had a growing sense that I really didn’t understand the methodology as well as I thought. I was happy with the draft narratives of my experiences, but when it came to connecting to Mike’s experience and the literature in the field, it read like a clunky journal article: neither one thing (co-autoethnography) nor another (book chapter or journal article). I was disappointed and frustrated: this wasn’t what the project was meant to be. What to do? Read, of course. I returned to Mike’s earlier publication based on his doctoral work (Hayler 2011), and I was struck by the honesty and rawness of his narratives and exploration of how he came to be a teacher educator. What a gift to be working with such an interesting person and talented writer. I was embarrassed to think that I had raced ahead believing that a co-autoethnography could be written by the authors separately and then just shared to make some links between

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the stories. I also realised that one chapter that was clearly missing from our plan for the book was that which presented our own educational journeys from early childhood to teacher education – how did we each get to where we are today? That idea caused me to think about something else that was missing from our conceptualisation of the book: what exactly was our research question and how were we going to answer it? After reading Mike’s book, I turned to other writers in the autoethnography field (e.g. Chang 2008; Ellis and Bochner 1996; Holman Jones 2005) and came upon the notion of ‘duoethnography’. I realized this book was not about two people presenting their own separate but related autoethnographies but was about two researchers working collaboratively on one dialogic text in close connection with each other. I was further drawn into the work of Norris and Sawyer (2012) and Breault (2016) and felt that I had finally found what I was looking for. My attendance at a faculty research seminar on duoethnography presented by Sandy Farquhar from the University of Auckland cemented my belief that duoethnography was what Mike and I were really trying to achieve. My exploration of duoethnography and my first attempts at constructing narratives in dialogue with Mike had a big impact on me. As I approached the later stages of my career as a teacher educator, I felt that I had finally found a methodology that enabled me to be me. Why was I so taken with the idea of duoethnography? Why did I feel a sense of freedom in writing this book that I didn’t feel when writing a conference paper, journal article or book chapter? The more I read and wrote, the more I felt the shackles of my existing perceptions of and assumptions about academia falling away. Of course, our work had to be ethical, rigorous and connected to the field of teacher education practice and research, but, for the first time, I felt free to explore, through writing, those experiences in my life that I had always been aware of but that I had never before explicitly shared with others, nor consciously connected to my practice as a teacher educator. When I read Pinar’s (1994) work on Currere, it became clear to me that my life history was indeed my curriculum and data source and that this duoethnography was the first chance for me to really draw all the pieces together. Pinar (1994, 16–17) states that: We have gone just about as far as we can go in understanding the nature of education by focusing on the externals. It is not that the public world – curriculum materials, instructional techniques, policy directives – has become unimportant; it is that to further comprehend their roles in the education process we must take our eyes off them for a time, and begin a lengthy, systematic search of our inner experience.

Reading about the methodology of duoethnography and writing in dialogue with Mike (as opposed to alongside him) revealed to me why I value particular aspects of my work as a teacher educator and why other aspects frustrate and challenge me. I have always loved stories about people. This goes back to my days sitting alone in the school library – my refuge (see Chap. 3) – when I used to read biographies, usually of famous people. I was, of course, interested in what they had achieved in their lives, but these were the external trappings of their success (singing, acting, politics). What really interested me was their journey from childhood to fame: Who were they really? What was underneath the public persona? I still read these types

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of books when I have time. Also, my favourite subjects at school and later at university were history, economics and politics. How did humankind come to be who and where we are today? What stories weave together to make up human history? I wasn’t particularly interested in science or art or physical education  – probably because I was never very good at them. I never doubted their importance, but they just weren’t me. Stories of experience were. When I was researching for my doctorate, one book that had a particular impact on me was Britzman’s (2003) Practice makes practice – the stories of two pre-service teachers navigating the practicum during their teacher education degree. These students weren’t only students; they were real people, sharing their anxieties, fears, victories and growth as they battled the institutional labyrinths of university and school. In fact, my thesis explored the experiences of career change students undertaking a teaching degree (Williams 2013b). I wanted to find out what it was like to be them – their thoughts and opinions, challenges and successes. I wanted to uncover their stories of experience. But what does all this have to do with teacher education? Why does uncovering teachers’ stories of experience matter? We have discussed this briefly in Chap. 1, but I think it is important to explore the connections between the why (i.e. the need for this book) and the how (our choice of duoethnography as research method). When thinking about the use of duoethnography as a means of understanding teacher educators and teacher education, I recalled a particular assignment that stands out as a favourite of mine in my work as a teacher educator. This assignment provided powerful evidence that the who is essential in understanding the identity and pedagogy of teachers. This particular assignment was the final submission in a fourth year undergraduate unit entitled ‘Entering the Profession’. The students were required to create a multimodal autobiography in which they presented ‘who they are’ as teachers: what they value, how they got to where they are now and the type of teacher they wanted to be. They could select any media to tell and explain their stories of becoming. I remember a vast array of submissions – videos, photomontages, poems, sculptures, scrapbooks, websites, diaries and even a clown on stilts! – freely chosen by the students to represent their personal and professional selves. I used to look forward to reading these assignments, although not assessing them (how do you judge someone’s representation of their life as a mere pass or a high distinction?). These are the only pieces of student work that have brought tears to my eyes: the young woman who lost her mother only a few months before; the young man with an autistic sibling; and the mid-career dad who had returned to study. A range of life experiences influenced how (and why) they saw themselves as teachers and what they wanted to contribute to the lives of their students. They nearly all acknowledged the importance of family support and love, and the need for empathy and care in teaching, and all drew on their challenges and their achievements in life to inspire their journey into the teaching profession. They all showed how who they were as people made them who they were as teachers. This makes me think of the work of Schaefer and Clandinin (2019, 55), who claim that ‘stories to live by’ are crucial in the education of future teachers:

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While we see the importance of subject matter knowledge, pedagogical content knowledge and technical skills, we also see that our work as teacher educators begins with the lives of those who come to pre-service teacher education with intentions of learning to teach. We understand teacher education as concerned with the identity-making processes of pre-­ service teachers. We wonder not only about subject matter knowledge and technical skills but also about the identities and life making of preservice teachers.

Drawing on Palmer (1998), I firmly believe this to be the case. ‘We teach who we are; we are who we teach’. This is something that I tell each new group of students with whom I work. What we learn from lectures, tutorials, textbooks and the Internet are all important and add to our personal and collective knowledge as teachers and as a profession. Teachers need to know things. But teaching isn’t just about knowing and doing: it is about being in relation to others (our students, our colleagues and our communities) and in our understanding of ourselves. The same applies to teacher educators. An exploration of being and becoming not only helps us as teacher educators to understand ourselves but also helps us to understand our practice; it is an essential part of the work we do with pre-service teachers. As Schaefer and Clandinin (2019, 55) argue, our work with pre-service teachers includes ‘shap[ing] their forward-looking stories of who they are and who they are becoming as teachers, that is, their identities, their stories to live by’.

2.3  Understanding Autoethnography Before explaining further why we embraced duoethnography as our methodology, we share our understanding of the methodology that preceded our decision: autoethnography. There have been an astounding proliferation and variation of interpretive, narrative, autoethnographic research methods in the last 25 years. The myriad forms of autoethnography all draw upon ‘life narrative’ which Smith and Watson (2001, 3) identify as a term that includes many kinds of self-referential writing. The autobiographical components of life narrative include memory, experience, identity, embodiment and agency: ‘Life narrative, then might best be approached as a moving target, a set of ever-shifting self-referential practices that engage the past in order to reflect on identity in the present’. In the writing of this book, our own targets and practices have continued to move and shift as we have followed and developed our own methods of inquiry to present our own version of duoethnography. A central element of autoethnographic research is the recognition of how all self-­ narrative is constructed, changed and developed in relation to grand, group and individual narratives. Using the term ‘autoethnography’ to refer to the work of ‘insider’ anthropologists researching their ‘own people’, Hayano (1979, 101) argued that in a postcolonial era, ethnographers need to study their own social worlds and sub-cultures. While methodological definitions can be difficult when boundaries are intentionally crossed, blurred or erased, within all of the approaches that come under the umbrella of ‘autoethnography’, the researcher is deeply self-identified through explicit and reflexive self-observation. Denzin (2014, 26) suggests that:

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2  Duoethnography to Explore the Work and Lives of Teacher Educators The goal always is to create the conditions for a critical consciousness, one that imagines a radical politics of possibility. Autoethnography inserted itself in the picture when it was understood that all ethnographers reflectively (or unreflectively) write themselves into their ethnographies.

The versatility and flexibility of the methodology is one of the attractions for those drawn to autoethnography, described by Allen-Collinson (2013, 282) as ‘a fresh and innovative variation of ethnography – and more – where an ethnographic perspective and analysis are brought to bear on our personal, lived experience, directly linking the micro level with the macro cultural and structural levels in exciting ways’. Resisting orthodoxies old or new is part of the autoethnographic project, but some common elements between the variations can be identified. Holman Jones, Adams and Ellis (2013, 22–25) conceptualise autoethnography as the use of personal experience and personal writing to (1) purposefully comment on/critique cultural practices; (2) make contributions to existing research; (3) embrace vulnerability with purpose; and (4) create a reciprocal relationship with audiences in order to compel a response. While questioning and reconfiguring the notion of coherence, autoethnography is also an example of this type of memory work in action. Here the researcher performs the roles of both participant and researcher, stepping ‘in and out’ of the story as much as this can be reflexively achieved. In this respect, autoethnography becomes, as Reed-Danahay (1997, 6) puts it, ‘both method and text’, where autobiographical memory provides the lens for an examination and reframing of understanding of the self and the cultural, past, present and future. Goodson (2014) observes that such reflexive autobiographical memory work is especially important in exploring the learning and pedagogic capacities of narrative, with significant implications for those involved in teaching and learning.

2.4  Embracing Duoethnography While autoethnography appealed to both of us as a way in which to explore our professional becoming as teacher educators, it was duoethnography that provided the way forward for this book. Norris and Sawyer (2013, 43) argue that: A major tenet of duoethnography is using the past to reconceptualize the present, the present to reconceptualize the past and both to envision future action.

The concept of duoethnography as a ‘collaborative research methodology in which two or more researchers of difference juxtapose their life histories to provide multiple understandings of the world’ (Norris and Sawyer 2012, 9) fits broadly with our own position. We have much in common but also, inevitably, some differences. The contexts of our separate life histories and working lives in England (Mike) and Australia (Judy) offer some tellingly similar experiences of learning and teaching alongside some notable contrasts and differences. Duoethnography is said to dissolve the notion that experiences are fixed and meanings exist concretely in time because meaning is formulated through the research experience itself (Sawyer and

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Norris 2012). This dialogic process creates a third space where participants create stories to be interpreted by those reading these texts (Snipes and LePeau 2017). The readers witness the authors in dialogue with one another. As the writers create and analyse their own and their co-writer’s meanings, the reader learns and makes their own new meaning as related to their own context and experience. In Chaps. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8, we each created our own narratives and shared these with each other as the chapter developed. However, we are addressing the reader rather than each other, as we explore the ideas that emerged in our co-author’s text. We refer to each other’s writing and the ideas raised, and we often revised our narratives in response to this, but it is not written in direct dialogue. This changes in Chaps. 9 and 10, which were written at the end of the process of writing this book. We took the opportunity to work on these two chapters during Mike’s sabbatical in Melbourne, so we were able to write together and separately, in ‘real time’, to construct these chapters in genuine dialogue with each other. They are the chapters that bring everything together and where we attempt to answer our research question. They present our dialogue, engaging directly with each other, as the reader is invited to observe and ‘listen in’ and take from it whatever might help them with their own sense-­ making about the professional becoming of teacher educators. Duoethnography attempts to understand and make meaning of experiences through critical reflection and dialogue while finding spaces between our lived experiences that promote transformation (Sawyer and Liggett 2012). ‘Duoethnographies, then, are a form of praxis writing in which theory and practice converse’ (Norris and Sawyer 2012, 21). Following Pinar (1975), duoethnography examines one’s life curriculum (Currere) in gaining understanding of lived experiences through dialogue. Such dialogic practices are used to generate critical thinking. Thus, duoethnographers’ voices are distinct and retold not as one voice but as unique voices with common, divergent and related elements.

2.5  Ethics and Duoethnography Issues of ethical practice and trustworthiness are necessarily central to the methodology of duoethnography. Distinct from other narrative forms of inquiry, duoethnographers actively engage in deconstruction, co-construction and reconstruction of their experiences to critically share multiple perspectives. This facilitates dialogic change and regenerative transformation (Breault 2016) to enhance critical consciousness and must, therefore, be ethical, honest and transparent. Reflexivity and transparency are hallmarks of duoethnographic research and are enhanced by engaging in dialogue with others. For example, Madden and McGregor (2013) tapped into this dialogic engagement by exploring some of the implicit colonising practices in education and the attendant need for student voice within systems of higher education. Similarly, Wagaman and Sanchez (2017) used duoethnography to strengthen the process of participatory action research with traditionally marginalised groups to ensure that differences are both recognised and honoured by

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continuously engaging in critical self-reflection. This sort of reflexivity is integral for the trustworthiness of duoethnographic research and essential for developing trust and collaboration between and among qualitative researchers. By avoiding claims of uncontested ‘truth’, duoethnographers commit to a process of transparent self-reflexivity, allowing for possibilities that may be overlooked in more traditional forms of qualitative research. Trust between researchers is an essential element of the process. Duoethnography potentially promotes rich exploration of the phenomenon under examination, thus making it an effective mechanism for establishing safe, supportive relationships such as those needed for peer mentoring, co-research and collaborative writing. However, this does not just happen. Trust needs to be built and maintained over time. In addition, honesty and transparency are critical, but these can sometimes be confronting matters to face and to manage. Richards (2016, 171) refers to ‘autoethnographic anxiety’ when discussing the process of writing about herself and her embodied experiences. She identified several criteria for ethical autoethnography, which apply just as readily to duoethnography. These include consideration of: [H]ow I am using the methodology, how I am using narrative, how I am using artefacts – and why. The subjective emotional quality of autoethnography can open a door for unethical behaviour. Hence, I must be as transparent as possible and my research must be above ethical reproach.

Richards also points out the importance of reflexivity, flexibility, self-awareness and a willingness to change one’s mind. Autoethnographic anxiety applies just as much to duoethnography. As duoethnographers, we are not only exposing our own lives as sites of inquiry, but, inevitably, we include the stories of others in our own stories. In this book, we have included the voices of others through vignettes, but, at times, like Brandenburg and Gervasoni (2012), we struggled with the potential ethical implications of building our research, in part, on the ideas and experiences of others. Brandenburg and Gervasoni (2012, 185) maintained that ‘even though selfstudy [or duoethnographic] research may be conducted according to ethical guidelines as approved by university Human Research Ethics Committees, ethical issues remain and extend beyond those associated with the conventional adherence to ethical standards’. On this point, Mike wrote in an email to Judy: The researcher/writer/participant dynamic is an interesting one. I’ve always wondered about the tension between giving people voice by hearing and sharing their stories and inevitably exploiting their stories as we turn them into data for our research and publications. As Joan Didion (1968: xiv) said: ‘writers are always selling someone out’. It’s one of the things that attracted me to autoethnography, but the issue remains as our own stories always involve others.

In addition to explicitly including others’ voices in this book through the inclusion of vignettes, we necessarily referred to others in our lives who have impacted on our respective journeys of becoming teacher educators. Like Farquhar and Fitzpatrick (2016), we grappled with issues around identification, permission and unintended consequences. In creating their duoethnography, Farquhar and Fitzpatrick (2016, 243–4) found:

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The most problematic aspect of duoethnography for us was the potential harm of disclosing the stories of others (our families and our places of work, for example). As colleagues, who have worked together for some years, we have an established, trusting relationship. It was not so difficult to disclose and reveal ourselves to each other – because we could have (and have) changed, altered and determined what we include and exclude. But whether we talked about ourselves, our family or our faculty, we both wrestled at times with issues around disclosure, transgression and privacy – the constancy of flux; the fleetingness of time; and the contingency of interpretation became central to our ruminations.

We came across the same dilemmas as we recalled incidents, situations and responses in our past that also belonged to others who shared those experiences. We have discussed this throughout the writing of the book and made decisions together on the range of ways in which we have approached this depending on the nature of the particular stories that involve others: sometimes names and identifying details have been changed or withheld; sometimes we celebrate and identify those who have made contributions to our own learning; and sometimes we have sought permissions and shared material for clearance. In the following vignette, Sandy Farquhar and Esther Fitzpatrick share their reflections on their own exploration and use of duoethnography as part of their work as teacher educators in New Zealand. Vignette: Sandy Farquhar and Esther Fitzpatrick Reflecting on engaging with duoethnographic method, a number of things come to mind: being introduced to duoethnography; exploring how it fits within a range of collaborative autoethnographic methods; wondering about the ethics of telling stories where other people are involved; how all stories have whakapapa (which refers to the layered Māori genealogy which includes ancestry, and also spiritual, mythological and human stories. See http:// www.TeAra.govt.nz/en/whakapapa-genealogy/page-1); how the method resonates with our work with students on critically reflective practice; and how our students’ explorations of belonging are always storied in relation to others. We, Sandy and Esther, were sharing a lot back then – a network, symposium, writing projects, etc. So, when Joe Norris introduced us to duoethnography, a younger sibling of autoethnography, we kind of figured why not give it a go. All collaborative autoethnographic methods (duoethnography, collaborative autoethnography, co-produced autoethnographies) require the researcher/writers to ‘hang out deeply’, building a trusting, respectful relationship. This takes time. We’d meet at the local cafe, tell stories, write them up, take stuff out, fictionalise/factionalise, tell new stories and start again. The process could be quite uncomfortable, and we had endless discussions around the ethical issue of talking about others in our story(ies) – by implication, reference or direct involvement. In Te Ao Māori a photographic image of a person may sometimes be regarded as taking their soul (wairua, or ‘spirit, soul – spirit of a person which exists beyond death’. See https:// maoridictionary.co.nz/). Similarly, we troubled ourselves with relational ethics in our continued work with embodied and collaborative methodologies. Stories are often haunted by childhood touchstone stories too and by those whose lives are entangled with our own, past, present and future. How are stories then to be told? What stories can be retold? And which stories are not for telling. Drawing on Laurel Richardson, we engaged with writing as a method of inquiry. Telling our stories through poetry, scripted conversations, fictionalised and/or factionalised narratives, erasing, redacting names or assigning pseudonyms – protecting our protagonists while striving for the essence of the story that needed to be told. Duoethnography is a critical method: stories are written with theory interwoven in the conversation; elements of stories are juxtaposed to show differences; and stories are linked

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2  Duoethnography to Explore the Work and Lives of Teacher Educators explicitly to wider historical, social and political issues. These strategies also go to the heart of our work with student teachers: both in our teaching of reflective practice and in teaching about the importance of the storied lives of children and their engagement with learning, institutions, families (whanau, ‘extended family, family group, a familiar term of address to a number of people – the primary economic unit of traditional Māori society’. See https://maoridictionary.co.nz/) and places of belonging. Duoethnography is one method that embraces teaching as an ethical, relational and embodied activity rather than a technicist one and so contributes hugely as a method of resistance and to opening up spaces for emotional responses to being educated. In a sense, duoethnography is a small story that can be used to speak to the larger macro issues we encounter in our lives, to record the ethnographical dialogue that we humans have with ourselves, others and our places of belonging.

2.6  Creating This Duoethnography Based on our wonderings and wanderings, outlined above, the aim of this book is to explore our journey as teacher educators, drawing on our personal and professional experiences, or our Currere (Pinar 1975, 1994), taking into account the prevailing educational policy contexts, relevant research literature and the voices of others whom we have met along the way. The research question for this project was: How have our personal and professional life experiences shaped who we are as teacher educators? While our own journeys are the central thread of the book, we have aimed to provide the reader with ideas, concepts and provocations that help to illuminate the work of teacher educators, and teacher education, more broadly. There are many people around the world who navigate and negotiate the rapids of teacher education, and the details of their individual contexts and their journeys will be unique. However, there are common challenges that confront us all, no matter where we are located in the physical or educational landscape. We hope that the sharing of our personal journeys will provide an impetus for other teacher educators to look at their own challenges and opportunities and their responses to these and to take their own professional learning and practice to new levels of reflection. We recognise, of course, that readers will make their own meanings from the text and find, or not find, connections with their own contexts and identities. The intention is to share and to develop our stories with the meaning that we make of them and to leave the space for the reader to reflect upon their own journey.

2.6.1  The River Journey Metaphor As we briefly mentioned in Chap. 1, we chose the river journey as the metaphorical focus for our stories. A river journey illustrates many different aspects of our own and others’ journeys of professional becoming. Dyson et al. (2015, 2) used a similar

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metaphor to explore the professional journey of pre-service teachers navigating their practicum in schools during the final year of their undergraduate degree. They wrote: ‘our research metaphor, like human relationships, is multi-layered …The metaphor guides the telling and thinking behind the various parts of our narrative and our personal journey and relationships’. Dyson et al. (2015, 3) reminded their pre-service teacher readers that their journey down the river ‘presents a varied and challenging experience. The canoeist [i.e. the pre-service teacher] has followed the flow of the river and has encountered all that the river has to offer. There have been obstacles [and] … from time to time it has been necessary … to stop, disembark, question what they are doing on this journey and reconsider how they might proceed’. Similarly, we have identified a river journey as a metaphor for the work of becoming teacher educators, as they navigate their own obstacles and rapids. The ‘river’ that is teacher education is a significant political, economic and social institution in most countries  – a key part and the basis of a system that is tasked with educating their citizens. What happens in education matters; what happens in teacher education also matters. Sometimes the river runs swiftly, in a clear direction, energised by change and focus. At other times, it smooths out and meanders slowly, without energy and clarity. Various influences join as tributaries, either helping the river to move towards its destination or adding rapids or obstacles that slow it down. People join the journey at various points and for different reasons, travel for a distance, then disembark. It’s a river that never ends, but along the way there are billabongs or oxbow lakes that carve out quiet areas in the landscape, which create places of repose and reflection away from the flow of the main body of water. These areas are rich with life and calm but can become traps to the unwary. Stay there too long and you might end up going around in circles and never progressing downstream. At some stage, the traveller needs to re-enter the flow and, re-energised, continue on the forward journey. In our narratives and in the discussion of the literature and policy contexts, we show how the various characteristics of a river journey can be seen in the work and lives of teacher educators. Sometimes the reference to a river journey is made explicit; at other times it is less so. We wanted to avoid overuse of the language of the river journey metaphor, as this can become somewhat forced. However, to maintain the vision and purpose of this metaphor, we return to it in the concluding section of each chapter to illustrate how the issues raised are integral parts of our respective professional journeys. We reflect further and evaluate the affordances, challenges, successes and limitations of using the method of duoethnography in Chap. 10.

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References Allen-Collinson, J. (2013). Autoethnography as the engagement of self/other, self/culture. Self/ politics, self/futures. In S. Holman Jones, T. E. Adams, & C. Ellis (Eds.), Handbook of autoethnography (pp. 281–299). Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press. Anderson, L. (2006). Analytic autoethnography. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 35, 373–395. Anderson, L., & Glass-Coffin, B. (2013). I learn by going: Autoethnographic modes of inquiry. In S. H. Jones, T. E. Adams, & C. Ellis (Eds.), Handbook of Autoethnography (pp. 57–83). Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press. Auld, G., Ridgway, A., & Williams, J. (2013). Digital oral feedback on written assignments as professional learning for teacher educators: A collaborative self-study. Studying Teacher Education, 9(1), 31–44. Brandenburg, R., & Gervasoni, A. (2012). Rattling the cage: Moving beyond ethical standards to ethical praxis in self-study research. Studying Teacher Education, 8(2), 183–191. Breault, R. A. (2016). Emerging issues in duoethnography. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 29(6), 777–794. Britzman, D. P. (2003). Practice makes practice: A critical study of learning to teach (2nd ed.). New York: State University of New York Press. Bruner, J. (1990). Acts of meaning. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bruner, J. (1991). The narrative construction of reality. Critical Inquiry, 18(1), 1–21. Bullough, R.  V., Jr., & Pinnegar, S. (2001). Guidelines for quality in a of self-study research. Educational Researcher, 30(3), 13–21. Chang, H. (2008). Autoethnography as method. Walnut Creek: Left Coast. Clandinin, D. J., & Connelly, F. M. (2000). Narrative inquiry: Experience and story in qualitative research. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Coia, L., & Taylor, M. (2009). Co/autoethnography: Exploring our teaching selves collaboratively. In D. L. Tidwell, M. Heston, & L. Fitzgerald (Eds.), Research methods for the self-study of practice (pp. 3–16). Singapore: Springer. Deleuze, G. (1995). Negotiations 1972–1990 (M.  Joughin, Trans.). New  York: Columbia University Press. Denzin, N. K. (2014). Interpretive autoethnography. London: Sage. Didion, J. (1968). Slouching towards Bethlehem. New York: Farrar. Dyson, M., Plunkett, M., & McCluskey, K. (2015). Success in professional experience: Building relationships. Melbourne: Cambridge University Press. Ellis, C. (2004). The ethnographic I: A methodological novel about autoethnography. Walnut Creek: AltaMira Press. Ellis, C., & Bochner, A. (1996). Composing ethnography: Alternative forms of qualitative writing. Walnut Creek: AltaMira Press. Farquhar, S., & Fitzpatrick, E. (2016). Unearthing truths in duoethnographic method. Qualitative Research Journal, 16(3), 238–250. Gale, K., & Wyatt, J. (2013). Assemblage/ethnography: Troubling constructions of self in the play of materiality and representation. In N. P. Short, L. Turner, & A. Grant (Eds.), Contemporary British autoethnography (pp. 139–155). Rotterdam: Sense. Gillespie, E. (2013, January 28). Sustainable storytelling is a powerful tool that communicates vision. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/blog/ sustainable-stories-powerful-tool-communicates-vision Goodson, I. (2012). Developing narrative theory: Life history and personal representation. Abingdon/New York: Routledge. Goodson, I. F. (2014). Defining the self through autobiographical memory. In I. F. Goodson & S. Gill (Eds.), Critical Narrative as Pedagogy (pp. 123–146). London: Bloomsbury.

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Goodson, I. (2017). Introduction: Life histories and narratives. In I.  Goodson, A.  Antikainen, P. Sikes, & M. Andrews (Eds.), The Routledge international handbook of narrative and life history (pp. 3–10). London: Routledge. Hayano, D. (1979). Auto-ethnography: Paradigms, problems, and prospects. Human Organization, 38, 113–120. Hayler, M. (2010). Telling tales after school: Self-narrative and the pedagogy of teacher educators. In L. B. Erickson, J. R. Young & S. Pinnegar (Eds.), Navigating the public and p­ rivate: Negotiating the diverse landscape of teacher education (pp.  109–112). Proceedings of the eighth international conference on the self-study of teacher education practices. Provo: Brigham Young University. Hayler, M. (2011). Autoethnography, self-narrative and teacher education. Rotterdam: Sense. Hayler, M. (2017a). Thirty-two ways to tell a story of teaching: Self-narrative and pedagogy. In M. Hayler & J. Moriarty (Eds.), Self- narrative and pedagogy: Stories of experience within teaching and learning (pp. 1–13). Rotterdam: Sense. Hayler, M. (2017b). Always a story. In I. Goodson, A. Antikainen, P. Sikes, & M. Andrews (Eds.), The Routledge international handbook of narrative and life history (pp. 102–115). London: Routledge. Hayler, M., & Williams, J. (2018). Narratives of learning from co-editing, writing and presenting stories of experience in self-study. Studying Teacher Education, 14(1), 103–119. Holman Jones, S. (2005). Autoethnography. Making the personal political. In N.  Denzin & Y. Lincoln (Eds.), The Sage handbook of qualitative research (3rd ed., pp. 763–791). Thousand Oaks: Sage. Holman Jones, S., Adams, T. E., & Ellis, C. (Eds.). (2013). Handbook of autoethnography. Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press. Kelchtermans, G. (2017). Studying teachers lives as an educational issue: Autobiographical reflections from a scholarly journey. Teacher Education Quarterly, 44(Fall), 7–26. Madden, B., & McGregor, H. E. (2013). Ex(er)cising student voice in pedagogy for decolonizing: Exploring complexities through duoethnography. Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies, 35(5), 371–391. Norris, J., & Sawyer, R. D. (Eds.). (2012). Theorizing curriculum studies, teacher education, and research through duoethnographic pedagogy. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Palmer, P. (1998). The courage to teach. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Paris, D., & Winn, M. T. (2014). Preface. In D. Paris & M. T. Winn (Eds.), Humanizing research: Decolonizing qualitative inquiry with youth and communities. Washington, DC: Sage. Pinar, W. (1975). Curerre: Toward reconceptualization. In W. Pinar (Ed.), Curriculum theorizing: The reconceptualists (pp. 396–414). Berkeley: McCutchan. Pinar, W. F. (1994). Autobiography, politics and sexuality. New York: Peter Lang. Reed-Danahay, D.  E. (1997). Introduction. In D.  E. Reed-Danahay (Ed.), Auto/ethnography: Rewriting the self and the social (pp. 1–20). New York: Oxford University Press. Richards, R. (2016). Subject to interpretation: Autoethnography and the ethics of writing about the embodied self. In D. Pillay, I. Naicker, & K. Pithouse-Morgan (Eds.), Academic autoethnographies: Inside teaching in higher education (pp. 163–174). Rotterdam: Sense Publishers. Richardson, L. (1994). Writing: A method of inquiry. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), The handbook of qualitative research (pp. 516–529). Thousand Oaks: Sage. Richardson, L. (2000). Writing: A method of inquiry. In N.  K. Denzin & Y.  S. Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook of qualitative research (pp. 923–948). London: Sage. Richardson, L., & St. Pierre, E.  A. (2005). Writing: A method of inquiry. In N.  K. Denzin & Y.  S. Lincoln (Eds.), The Sage handbook of qualitative research (pp.  959–978). Thousand Oaks: Sage. Sawyer, R.  D., & Liggett, T. (2012). Shifting positionalities: A critical discussion of a duoethnographic inquiry of a personal curriculum of post/colonialism. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 11(5), 628–651.

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Sawyer, R. D., & Norris, J. (2012). Duoethnography (understanding qualitative research). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Schaefer, L., & Clandinin, J. (2019). Sustaining teachers’ stories to live by: Implications for teacher education. Teachers and Teaching, 25(1), 54–68. Smith, S., & Watson, J. (2001). Reading autobiography: A guide for interpreting life narratives. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Snipes, J. T., & LePeau, L. A. (2017). Becoming a scholar: A duoethnography of transformative learning spaces. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 30(6), 576–595. Spry, T. (2011). Performative autoethnography: Critical embodiments and possibilities. In The Sage handbook of qualitative research, 4, eds. N.K.  Denzin and Y.S Lincoln, 497–511. Thousand Oaks: Sage. Turvey, K. (2019). Humanising as innovation in a cold climate of [so-called-evidence-based] teacher education. Journal of Education for Teaching, 45(1), 15–30. Turvey, K., & Hayler, M. (2017). Collaboration and personalisation in teacher education: The case of blogging. Teaching and Teacher Education, 68, 42–52. Wagaman, M. A., & Sanchez, I. (2017). Looking through the magnifying glass: A duoethnographic approach to understanding the value and process of participatory action research with LGBTQ youth. Qualitative Social Work, 16(1), 78–95. Wells, G. (2007). Who we become depends on the company we keep and on what we do and say together. International Journal of Educational Research, 46, 100–103. Williams, H. (2005). Chronology of world history. London: Cassell. Williams, J. (2008). Self-study as a means of facilitating a new professional identity: From primary teacher to teacher educator. In L. Fitzgerald, M. Heston & D. Tidwell (Eds.), Collaboration and community: Pushing boundaries through self-study (pp.  318–322). Proceedings of the sixth international conference on the self-study of teacher education practices Herstmonceux Castle, UK. Cedar Falls: University of Northern Iowa. Williams, J. (2013a). Boundary crossing and working in the third space: Implications for a teacher educator’s identity and practice. Studying Teacher Education, 9(2), 118–129. Williams, J. (2013b). Constructing new professional identities: Career changers in teacher education. Rotterdam: Sense. Williams, J. (2014). Teacher educator professional learning in the third space: Implications for identity and practice. Journal of Teacher Education, 6, 315–326. Williams, J., & Berry, A. (2016). Boundary crossing and the professional learning of teacher educators in new international contexts. Studying Teacher Education, 12(2), 135–151. Williams, J., & Grierson, A. (2016). Facilitating professional development during international practicum: Understanding our work as teacher educators through critical incidents. Studying Teacher Education, 12(1), 55–69. Williams, J., & Hayler, M. (2016). Learning from stories of becoming. In J. Williams & M. Hayler (Eds.), Professional learning through transitions and transformations: Teacher educators’ journeys of becoming (pp. 199–208). Cham: Springer. Williams, J., & Power, K. (2010). Examining teacher educator practice and identity through Core reflection. Studying Teacher Education, 6(2), 115–130. Williams, J., & Ritter, J. K. (2010). Constructing new professional identities through self-study: From teacher to teacher educator. Professional Development in Education, 36(1 and 2), 77–92. Williams, J., & Ritter, J. K. (2011). Constructing new professional identities through self-study: From teacher to teacher educator. In T. Bates, A. Swennen, & K. Jones (Eds.), The professional development of teacher educators (pp. 86–101). Oxford: Routledge.

Chapter 3

Our Educational Journeys

Abstract  In this chapter, the authors present their educational journeys, from early childhood to the transition into working in teacher education. This begins the discussion of how early life experiences can have a profound impact on the work of teacher educators. They trace back to significant events in their lives, including family history, early educational experiences, their work as school teachers and their respective pathways into academia through study and work. Recurring themes from early life experiences are identified and discussed in terms of what implications these have for the authors’ work as teacher educators. These include family bereavement and growing up in a single-parent family; family commitment to education; loneliness and negative self-imaging; turning to writing and literature, especially through the study of English and History; being the first in the family to go to university; and success as teachers often tempered with feelings of being an imposter. Keywords  Life history · Educational narrative · Educational transitions



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3.1  Introduction In this chapter, we each outline our educational journeys, from our early family experiences and influences on our beliefs about learning and education, to kindergarten/nursery school, and through to our school days as students and as teachers. We then consider the beginning of our journeys as teacher educators when we commenced working as academics in our respective universities. This journey is picked up again in Chap. 4. As we explained in Chap. 1, we believe that examination of the work of teacher educators, whether in terms of policy and context, pedagogy and practice or professional relationships with others, is incomplete unless the person who is the teacher educator is present in the story. Of course, not all writing about teacher educators and teacher education can take close account of the lives of the individuals who © The Author(s) 2020 M. Hayler, J. Williams, Being a Teacher Educator in Challenging Times, Self-Study of Teaching and Teacher Education Practices 22, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-3848-3_3

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undertake this work, but we believe this book provides an opportunity to explore the idea that the who in teacher education is just as important as the what, the why and the how. The who necessarily informs the other aspects of the work; as Palmer (1998) stated, we teach who we are. When we originally planned this book, we didn’t consider including a chapter such as this. But, as we began our collaboration, it became obvious that our own personal educational journeys are, in fact, a central tenant of our experiences as teachers and as teacher educators and are a necessary part of the narrative of the book. How could we write a duoethnography without providing the personal history context of who we are as teacher educators? This understanding helps us in our exploration of how we have negotiated the rapids of our current professional lives: why we do what we do; why particular aspects of our work are valued as they are by us; and how our evolving pedagogies and identities reflect our own experiences as students and as teachers. As outlined in Chap. 2, we have approached this task in a dialogical manner, in which we take turns to share experiences throughout our journeys over the years, noting the many similarities and the fundamental differences. Judy begins by telling her story of the young child who never really considered anything other than being a teacher and how this was part of her mother’s family tradition of love for and belief in education. Mike, who, as a child and a young man, considered almost anything but becoming a teacher, frames his reflections around recent conversations with his elderly mother.

3.2  Early Family Influences Judy:  ‘And what are you going to be when you grow up?’, the time-worn question that adults seem to ask children when they don’t know what else to say. ‘A teacher’, I always replied. I don’t remember ever considering anything else. I had a love/hate relationship with my schooling (not with my education – that was different; I always loved that), but my desire to be a teacher never wavered. Even when I graduated top of my class in my final year at high school, one of my teachers asked me: ‘Why do you want to waste your marks on teaching? Why not be a doctor or a lawyer?’ Mainly, it was because I didn’t want to be a doctor or a lawyer. Perhaps I could have been something else, but I never wanted to be someone else. My sense of self was always tied up with the idea of being a teacher. One of my favourite play spaces in our backyard was an old school desk that one of the neighbours had found at the rubbish tip. I loved sitting in that desk, pretending to be a ‘big girl’ at school. There was a certain mystique about it – I didn’t really know what school was all about at that stage, but I knew that the big kids had desks at school and that I wanted to be one of those kids. I hadn’t yet experienced school for myself, but I remember feeling that that was where I wanted to be. After I started school, and like many children, I used to play ‘school’ with my dolls. I would assemble them on the lid of the piano and ask them questions, reprimand them when they were naughty, list their names

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in a notebook, take the attendance roll and even test what they had learned. I enjoyed mimicking my own teachers, wanting to be one too. My knowledge of my family’s interest and commitment to education is mixed. I know very little about my father David’s educational experiences and beliefs. He died of cancer at the age of 47, when I was 7 years old and in my second year at primary school, so I didn’t have the conversations with him that I had with my mother, Dorothy. Dad’s father, Watkin, was from Wales and he died before I was born. Dad’s mother, Alice, was a fairly remote figure in my life – she died when I was about 12 years old – and I can’t recall ever having a conversation with her or with my aunt and uncle, dad’s sister and brother. So, I didn’t learn anything about dad’s side of the family from him, his parents or his siblings. However, learning about my mother’s side of the family was a very different experience. They were a family of storytellers. Mum was a great believer in education and told me many stories about her time in a small bush school at Alberton, in county Victoria. She loved her time there, and she especially adored her principal, Mr. Mulvany. She also loved calisthenics and nature walks, but I get the impression that one of her great loves was reading. She once told me that her mother used to call out to her when it was time to do some jobs around the house or farm – ‘Get your nose out of that book!’ Although Mum loved her principal, she did bear one grudge against him: it appears that he borrowed her copy of Dickens’s David Copperfield and never returned it. She never forgave him for that, although this transgression didn’t lessen her affection for him. I look now to the bookshelf that sits behind me as I write, and on the bottom shelf are some of the books that Mum kept with her for many years after she left school; they must have travelled with her during her early adult life, and they are still here. Even though a copy of David Copperfield is missing, Mum had kept her copies of Dickens’s Sketches by Boz (which appears to be an original edition); Mark Twain’s works (dated 1875); and A. J. Evans Wilson’s, Beulah. These books contain stories about people and their journeys through life and to different places. I don’t remember discussing this with her, but perhaps Mum’s love of stories about people somehow entered my consciousness and emerged in my later school days. Mr. Mulvany had a young family, and Mum was often given the responsibility of pushing his youngest child around the schoolhouse yard in his pram during breaks or after school. Many years later, I managed to trace what had become of that baby: it turned out that he had become one of Australia’s leading archaeologists and quite famous in his field. When Mum received a letter from him confirming that he was indeed that little baby, she shed tears at this connection and the memories that it brought back of her happy days at the little country school in rural Victoria. Many of Mum’s family continued to live in the area, and I recall many happy family holidays staying at the farm just outside Yarram, the nearest large town. Occasionally, we would stop off at Alberton Primary School, which in those days was not much changed from when Mum attended. I have a photograph of us many years ago, with Mum, my sisters and I standing outside the red brick building, with

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the No. 1 sign clearly visible in the background. It was built in 1858 and given the status of No. 1 school in Victoria when the state government began registering schools – Mum was always very proud of that fact. I remember Mum pointing out a huge tree that she and her mother had planted on Arbor Day, probably in the early 1920s when she would have been about seven years old. Little did I realise at the time how important that school was to her and I now wonder what was going through her mind during those visits: how much of her early experiences in that school influenced who she grew up to be and what happy and sad memories flooded back to her as she was posing for that photo. She shared many of her experiences, but no doubt kept some others to herself. Mum was also very proud of her grandfather, Richard Moorfield, who was an English migrant and a prominent local councillor. She was particularly proud of Richard’s and other relatives’ efforts to get another little school built several years earlier, in a nearby and even more remote part of the state, and which her mother and her siblings attended. These early settlers to the region recognised the value of education and didn’t want their children to be denied opportunities just because they lived in a remote part of the state, so an informal school was created among the families. This was, no doubt, one of the reasons that they emigrated from the harsh conditions of Lancashire, England, in the late nineteenth century in search of a better life for them and for their children. Mum always wanted to be a teacher, but, due to family and economic circumstances, she never completed her secondary education and so could not go on to teacher training. I know that was always a great disappointment to her, although she never dwelt on it. She took advantage of other opportunities that presented themselves, including meeting my father during the Second World War, and, despite some ups and downs, she lived the life she wanted. I think mum was always proud of my achievements at school, and of my decision to become a teacher – I was fulfilling a dream that she was never able to achieve for herself. One of the last videos I took of Mum before she died was of her holding my PhD certificate and saying how proud she was, and that my dad would have been proud too. In fact, I was the first in my family (that I am aware of) to go to university – apart from a distant relative who combined attending ‘the little bush school’ with correspondence school and rose in the ranks of educational administration in Victoria. So, even though we weren’t a family of teachers, schools and education were always an important part of my mother’s family folklore, and these stories of her pioneering relatives still give me a sense of belonging to the idea of being a teacher. Mike:  My own narrative of education is so far from, and yet so close to, Judy’s story. While the locations are far apart geographically  – and there are certainly many differences in the patterns of our journeys – I am struck again and again by the similarities as we develop the writing in dialogue across the Internet from either end of the world. We both lost our fathers (who both died from cancer at the age of 47) when we were young; Judy was 7 and I was 10. Our mothers brought us up with our siblings and never remarried. They were great believers in education, and they

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taught us a love of reading and stories of different kinds. The books that my mother has from her childhood (alongside Dickens) are biographical stories of exploration and adventure: Dr. Wilson of the Antarctic and With Lawrence in Arabia. I think that Judy and I both turned to stories as a way of understanding and managing the worlds that we found ourselves in. We felt our mothers’ pride as they imagined the pride of our late fathers when we became the first in our families to gain degrees, become teachers and be awarded doctorates, a job well done on their part – and ours, perhaps. In fact, I think my mother was both proud and surprised by these moments of achievement on my part. I was never expected to succeed educationally; my own journey didn’t run smoothly. We were not always close in the way that Judy was with her mum. These days, I spend more time with my mum, Hazel, than I have since I was a child. She has been struggling with her memory for a while and was diagnosed with two types of dementia earlier this year. She ‘soldiers on’ as her own mother, Agnes – who lived through two world wars – used to put it. At 94, Hazel continues to live in her own home where she has been for over 60 years. I was born in this house, the third of three boys, in post-post war 1959 as the ‘black and white’ decade, when we Brits had apparently ‘never had it so good’ (Macmillan 1957), slipped towards the ‘technicolour’ 1960s. These days, I pop in for a cup of tea, check that the carer has been and done what’s needed, have a chat and do the odd job. Sometimes, we look at old photograph albums together. Spending time with Hazel brings a range of feelings, including sadness, many memories and a fair bit of shared laughter. Hazel sometimes seems far away as she mixes the distant past with more recent events. As I try to understand and share my own educational journey from my current perspective, I can see so clearly how our stories are so much part of each other’s stories. My journey is part of Mum’s journey because her story runs through mine. When we look at the photographs, she sometimes asks if her mother is still alive or whether I need to get back to school (I think she means as a pupil rather than a teacher, but I could be wrong). She remembers the details of friends she knew when she was just 16. A girl laughing with her on the beach at Hastings on the South Coast of England where she grew up: ‘Now that’s Jennie. She lived in Abbot Road. Her Father was a guard on the train’. In another picture from the late 1940s: ‘My mother planted those Hollyhocks to celebrate the end of the war’. This makes me want to go to Hastings and knock on the door in Bury Road and ask the current occupiers if the yellow hollyhocks are still there, growing tall and strong – as I remember them, each side of the path that leads to the shed – like a pathway to the future that is now the past. By the time we get to the end of the photograph album, Mum has forgotten our talk about Jennie, or the hollyhocks, and we could go back and do it all again: ‘Now that’s Jennie, she lived in Abbot Road, her Father was…’. This makes me think about memory and how we become who we think we are and how we tell those stories. As Munro (1998) suggests, there is no identity outside of narrative  – the stories we tell, the details we keep and the things that we let go of in one way, for one reason or another. While the process has become an organisational issue with my mum, perhaps we are not so different in this

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respect. It seems to me that we all engage with what Goodson (1992, 16) describes as the ‘genealogy of context’ in our own ways as we piece the story together. My parents, who met in Brighton when they were training to be nurses, believed in education. They succeeded at school, bought a house and settled down. They wanted their three boys to make good use of the relatively new opportunities of state education to 15 years of age and, perhaps, beyond. While my brother, Peter, did well at primary school and went to the technical school before beginning to train as an apprentice engineer, my eldest brother David struggled, fell at some of the early hurdles and went to a special school. Now, he would be identified as hyperactive with cognitive learning difficulties, but in the early 1960s, he was described as ‘backward’ and ‘remedial’. Our parents encouraged us to understand and support him; we all used to go to the ‘Ace of clubs’ on a Saturday afternoon, which was an early attempt at what we would now call an inclusive activity and games club. I was fine with that until I got to secondary modern school (after failing the 11-plus exam) and started to get teased about David. I got into several fights with boys who called him cruel names (something that I did myself, but I was not having it from them!). I am ashamed to say that I was embarrassed by him as a teenager, as though his difficulties somehow reflected badly on me. Later, when I started to train as a teacher and worked with children who had learning difficulties, I recognised that I was probably influenced and motivated along these routes by my big brother, David, but I had never been specifically conscious of this before then.

3.3  Kindergarten and Nursery Judy:  Unlike most children today, I only attended kindergarten (pre-school) for one day. I never pined to go to ‘kinder’ like the other kids in my neighbourhood – I was happy playing in the backyard and on the street with my toys and my friends. I didn’t know anything else. I was happy to skip kinder and go straight on to school when the time came. I was content to wait. One day, my friend Rhonda said she had started going to kindergarten and asked would I like to come along. My mother had never seen the need for my two older sisters, Robyn and Jenny, or me to go to kinder. She was happy to have us around the house with her, until the time came that we had to go to school. However, she agreed that I could go if I wanted to, just to see what it was like. I remember entering the strange building not far from home, where there were lots of children; tables with an assortment of paper, pencils, glue and scissors; and a piano with a large mat in front of it where some of the children were sitting. As I had come unexpectedly and wasn’t actually enrolled, the kinder teachers didn’t have anywhere to put me: no chair to sit on and no space that could be mine. So, one of them placed his hand on the back of my neck, not harshly but unexpectedly, and steered me into a corner. My nose was pressed in the space where the two walls met and I was told to wait there until he found somewhere for me to sit. I remember that moment with great clarity. I was scared and confused and I didn’t move. Soon after, the man returned and took me to a chair at a table where he

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told me to cut up pieces of coloured paper and stick them on the larger piece of white paper. I had no idea why I had to do this and I still remember that all I wanted to do was to go home. I can’t remember the rest of my day (or maybe it was just a morning), but that was my one and only day at kindergarten. My overwhelming feeling, which I can still remember clearly today, was one of fear and not belonging: ‘Why am I here?’ I just didn’t understand why anyone would want to be there. I just wanted to be at home where I was safe and perfectly content to play and to wait until it was time to go to school. Mike:  I started at a state nursery school at the age of 3 in 1963, and there seems to have been a bit of a problem with my behaviour from the start. The strongest memory I have of being at the nursery school is the day that a teacher gave me the job of painting something. I’m not even sure what it was but it was made of wood and I remember the praise that she gave me for doing such a good job all day and how pleased my Mum was that I had been a good boy that day. This must have been unusual, although I cannot remember the ‘bad’ days or getting into trouble at that time. Mum remembers now that I was pretty active and got easily bored. She thinks that some of the other boys may have had ‘a bad influence’ on me.

3.4  Primary School Judy:  Unlike my kindergarten experience, I looked forward to starting school in February 1963. I remember I had a new green case, a John and Betty reader (which I could already read fluently), a pink patterned art smock, a lunch box and all the other paraphernalia that was part of ‘being a school girl’. However, the day before I was due to start, I came down with the measles: no school for me just yet. I had to wait two weeks before I could join my classmates. I clearly remember that first day: class 1D (the ‘bubs’ grade as it was called then). Mrs. Samin was my teacher in the classroom at the end of the corridor on the left. I was ushered into the class by the principal, Mr. Gardiner, after my mother had taken me to the office to announce my arrival. It was after classes had begun, so everyone was already there and busy working. I am not sure why I didn’t start at the beginning of the day, and I can’t recall whether or not my mother accompanied me to the classroom, but I do remember being shown to a seat, second from the back in the row by the windows facing outwards to the playground. I was seated next to a girl who was, coincidentally, also called Judy and who uttered, with a sneer, the first word ever spoken to me at school: ‘Fatso’. Welcome to school! Thus, began my years of torment – merciless bullying because of my physical appearance. I was certainly overweight, although, at that stage, it had never been an issue or previously commented upon as far as I was aware. Although there was more to me than my physical appearance, the other children didn’t seem to think so (except, eventually, my initial tormentor who became my best friend in the latter years of primary school).

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Over the next seven years of primary school, usually with no one to play with at breaktimes, I looked for ways in which I could survive the loneliness and sadness of being ‘the fat girl’. I often took refuge in the library – no doubt sparking my love of books and reading – or wandered around the school grounds or sat by myself in the shelter shed pretending to be looking or waiting for my friends, which, of course, I wasn’t because I didn’t have any. Occasionally, a kind soul would feel sorry for me and ask me to join in their game of ‘Hey Presto’ (handstands) or swap cards, but this was a rare event. But, oh, how I appreciated their kind efforts to include me! It gave me a taste of what it felt like to have friends and to belong, but it usually didn’t last very long. It was only in my final years of primary school that I began to make some friends – perhaps I was worthy of their kindness after all. But, being the ‘fat kid’ always seemed to hang over my head and the fear of rejection continued to loom large over my life. Home was a haven where the bullying ceased until it was time to go to school again. I loved the learning at school and I liked most of my teachers (except for the ones who were bullies themselves), but I hated the experience of going to school. Even today, when I attend the same school to vote on Election Day, my heart skips a beat as I remember the feelings of fear and ostracism. I wonder how far I have really come. I’ve progressed in huge leaps and bounds in many ways, but here I am, back again in the old school yard, feeling a little anxious in response to the memories that are triggered. I somehow survived those primary school years, an average to below-average student, usually seated in the row of desks for the lower achievers  – not the lowest of the low (I managed to avoid that misery)  – but I always struggled to do well in tests on which the seating arrangement was often based. Why, I’m not sure. I looked forward to moving on to high school where I was assured by my mother the students would be kinder because they were older. I could only hope. Mike:  Mum remembers being surprised at how upset I was as she left me in the playground on the morning that I started primary school in September 1964. I was used to being at the small nursery school all day, but the primary school was old and big and made from red brick and flint with a high wall and a heavy iron gate. It was opened in 1870 and had steps and corridors and windows that you couldn’t see through. Forty years after that first day, I worked there as an adviser on classroom behaviour, and, despite the excellent staff and all the efforts of planners and builders to make it more welcoming, it still seemed to me like a place that you might be sent as a punishment. I became aware that my father was unwell in the spring of 1969. The doctor diagnosed an ulcer and then a hernia which needed an operation. He went to London for the operation, and when he came back, there was a sombre mood around the house. I must have gathered that he was very ill, although nobody ever told me this and I do not think I really acknowledged it to myself at the time. I didn’t know he had cancer or what cancer was until after he died in June of that year at the age of 47. His death did not bring our family close together in the way that such events can.

3.5  High School

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We seemed to go off into our own worlds and stay there to some extent. Mum was 44, my brothers were 16 and 14, and I was 10. My father’s death did not seem to have a dramatic effect on my education at the time. Perhaps it did, but not in the way that one would expect it to. I went into a new class with my first male teacher for the final year of primary school. Although I failed the 11-plus exam, that year remains the happiest and most successful of any that I remember at school. As for so many children, the teacher made all the difference. My hero teacher was a kind and creative young man called Mr. Marley who loved stories and poems and music. I can see now that he built up a class community which I felt part of, and I remember that last year in primary school as a happy time when I felt good about myself. I wrote stories, performed in plays and fell in love with history. Mr. Marley seemed to like his job a lot. I began to be excited by learning things in a way I never had before. While there was trouble ahead for me at high school, the discovery of the joy of learning and knowing and doing things for their own sake, and the recognition of my need to learn and grow and to express myself, saw me through some hard times. I met up again with Mr. Marley in my 30s when he was leading the PGCE teacher education course that I was about to begin, and I was able to tell him how I remembered that year in his class when I gained something much more useful than a place at grammar school. We were pleased to see each other and to work together again. He was still guided, as always, in his teaching by his own joy of learning and teaching, which was as infectious to me at 32 as it had been when I was 10. Humour and enthusiasm were his greatest resources and there was always laughter in the learning.

3.5  High School Judy:  My first day at high school (an all-girls school) almost felt like being in an adult world. We had lockers with keys and a timetable to help us navigate to different rooms for different subjects with different teachers. It was so unlike primary school, where we had the same teacher, in the same classroom all year. My mother was right – most (but certainly not all) of the students were kinder, and I became part of a close group of girls, some of whom are still friends to this day. The bullying didn’t cease, but it somehow didn’t seem to be quite as incessant, cruel and intentional as it had been in primary school. Maybe I was just so used to it by then that I was building up some resilience, but any hint of compassion from someone else – student or teacher – was embraced and savoured. To not be overtly bullied or ridiculed was a good day for me, and these increased in number over the years. Also, during my time at high school, my academic abilities started to flourish. I was awarded various scholarships and awards: some for academic achievement and others for financial support due to my family’s circumstances. This success, perhaps, contributed to my peers seeing that there was indeed more to me than my physical appearance and that I was worthy of at least some degree of respect. These

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opportunities provided by the federal government and other organisations during the 1970s (including Legacy, an organisation founded by ex-servicemen to support war widows and their children) were an incredible ‘hand up’ for me, although I wasn’t really aware of its importance at the time. I am sure my mother was appreciative of the financial support, but for me the main message was that, at last, I was good at something. One teacher, in particular, inspired me during these years (my version of Mr. Marley). I was fortunate enough to be in her classes for three years in a row for English and History. It was the early 1970s and Victoria was experiencing a chronic shortage of secondary school teachers. The situation was partly addressed by the government importing teachers from overseas. Jumbo jets (the then-new Boeing 747) full of teachers from around the globe arrived in our schools to fill the staffing gaps. We had several at our school, but one in particular stood out for me. Ms. Barkei (not Miss or Mrs., but Ms.!) was from the USA and she taught English and History. I was always interested in History, but up until my fourth year at high school, studying History usually involved copying notes off the blackboard, learning dates and facts and then regurgitating this in the regular tests that we were given. I was quite good at that by now, because I had developed a good memory and recall of information. But, with Ms. Barkei, the subject of History was transformed. We studied issues and ideas rather than dates and facts. We were suddenly challenged to think about why things might have happened and how these might relate to our lives today. We were even given options about what we could study: a choice in what aspects of the curriculum we focused on, what books to read, which countries to study and what ‘term papers’ to complete. We also had fewer, if any, tests and, instead, were asked to ‘turn in papers’ (a very American term) as our assessment. This had never happened before. Suddenly, History was not just a collection of facts to be memorised but was made up of exciting stories with interesting protagonists. I also felt that I had some control and agency over my own learning. It was around this time, in mid-secondary school, that my academic achievements really took off. Maybe it was the challenge and the intellectual freedom that was beginning to appear that enabled me to flourish. Perhaps that is why I did so poorly at primary school – rote learning and tests didn’t allow me to explore, ponder or think. I wasn’t good at remembering things until I learned how to prepare for tests at high school. I needed time to think and consider, before committing myself to a piece of work, or before taking a test. I thought to myself, one day, when I was a teacher, I would be like Ms. Barkei. The gradual shift towards acceptance among my peers culminated in my final year at high school. After losing some weight near the end of the previous year (part of a bet with my sister Jenny), I got serious about dieting. I gradually lost weight during the remainder of the school year, and the weight loss continued through the long summer break. When I arrived at school at the beginning of my last year at the school, my teachers and fellow students literally gasped when they saw me. I had lost around 15 kilograms since they had last seen me. They began to treat me differently, and, suddenly, finally, I was accepted as just another one of the girls – and a

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smart (and thin) one at that. I ended up being dux of the school that year. At last I really had something to be proud of: the fat girl no longer! Although the label had disappeared, along with the body weight, the feelings of inferiority had not. While I no longer had any reason to experience those familiar feelings of anxiety, so entrenched after 12 years of bullying, they stay with me to this day. They have never completely disappeared, and I am sure they never will. This no doubt explains my abhorrence for bullying of any sort: I see red when children or adults (or animals) are treated unkindly or with deliberate malice or derision. I know what it is like to be on the receiving end, and I am sure that the unfairness of it all influences how I now see the world, both personally and professionally. Mike:  Mum cannot remember the secondary school when we talk about it. I think she may have blocked it out long before her current difficulties set in. We have never really talked about it. We don’t have any pictures to share from the school, but she smiles at my haircut, or lack of it, when I find a close-up photo of myself at 14. I wince at the spots and remember feeling ugly and angry. To begin with, I was quite happy to be at the secondary modern school and unaware that the boys and girls who went to the grammar schools were meant to be superior or that they would be given greater opportunities. I was impressed by the facilities and took the opportunities to take part in sport. There were also opportunities for bad behaviour, and, as the year progressed, I started to get into trouble on a regular basis. By my second year, I was aware that I had turned most of the teachers against me. That’s when I met Len, or Mr. Goldman, as Mum still calls him. He was an inspirational and committed English teacher who encouraged creative writing and class debates. He seemed to like us and care about what we had to say. I wrote stories that were about getting into trouble and dilemmas of loyalty. He did not tolerate or condone any disruptive behaviour, but he encouraged us to question everything and to channel our energies into positive activities. He was in his mid-50s when I met him. He gave me a chance when I deserved it least but needed it most and I owe him a great deal. He is 103 this year (2019) and we remain friends. One of my friends, Terry, was sent to a local authority children’s home when we were caught stealing a car together. I knew, when I went to visit, that I would soon be joining him if things continued in the way they were and that I didn’t want to live there. I needed to look after myself without feeling that I was losing face or being turned into someone that I didn’t want to be. I recognised that I needed to show some real independence and think about others as well as myself and I stopped getting into trouble with the police. I discovered counter-culture writers and poets such as Kerouac, Ginsburg, Corso and Bukowski, and I started writing more of my own poems. For a while, I seemed to be finding a way to learn and study and stay out of trouble without feeling controlled by others, but things caught up with me again, and I fell into a self-­destructive depression early in my final year of school. The timing was bad. I started getting into trouble at school again and fell out with the new head teacher who suspended and then expelled me permanently in February 1975. I went to the careers office in

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town and mumbled about wanting to be a journalist, but they told me that I needed qualifications for that. I signed on the ‘dole’ for unemployment benefit for a while before starting work at a large bakery in September. Work and Night School:  Unlike Judy, who went straight from high school to teachers’ college, I worked for 10  years before undertaking a higher education degree. The distance between my first and my current jobs is close and yet so far. The story of who I am and who I might have been could be in the short mile of undulating landscape between the bakery and the university. I can look back now and see the bakery as a new start for me, but on the day I started work there in 1975, I could never have imagined that thirty years later I would find myself just down the road presenting lectures and leading seminars about inclusion in education. At the time, I was unemployed with no qualifications and no references, having just been expelled from school. I started work in the confectionary department and worked there for three years. On the first day at the bakery, I met Carol, who became my wife. We worked on the shortbreads together, sharing the job as we shared our lives for 20 years. She put the cherries on while I sprinkled the sugar and then we swapped around. We went out together a few times, fell out and got back together before we both left the bakery in 1978. We started living together in 1980 and got married in 1981. Our sons were born in 1984 and 1986. We were divorced in 1996 eventually becoming friends and now grandparents. Throughout this time, I kept in touch with Len, my old teacher. I would go to his house to see him and his family three or four times a year, and we would talk about what we had been reading, as we still do. Students from the university would take summer jobs at the bakery, and I got to know an English undergraduate called John. I was surprised by what seemed like his easy life and limitless opportunities: he told me that he might teach when he finished university or perhaps travel for a while. I will always remember the day we argued, and he said, ‘you have to remember that this is your life Mick but it’s just a summer job for me’. I could see that this was true as things stood: I would stay in this life unless I did something about it. After working in the bakery, I took a job as a store assistant in a carpet shop in town. We used to go out to help to deliver and fit carpets. It was manual, fairly heavy work. I worked at that shop for six years and then at another in the same chain in a nearby town for two more years as warehouse manager. Those eight years between the ages of 19 and 27 were a time of growth, change and key events for me: buying a flat, getting married, having children, learning to drive and being promoted. I became active in the union and local politics, read a lot and kept writing poems. I started to feel ready to communicate and I wanted someone to read my writing. I joined a running club in 1982 when I was 23. There were lots of mainly younger, usually faster, athletes who I used to train with, and they were going somewhere in their lives as well as on the track. I remember thinking very clearly that I was being left behind in more ways than one as they all pulled away from me down the track one Tuesday evening. They were going to universities or taking jobs I’d never heard of or travelling abroad. It was up to me to get fit and catch up and I now thought I just might be able to.

3.6 University/Polytechnic

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I never did catch up with them on the track of course (one of them was an Olympic gold medallist and world record holder), but I did enrol to do two ‘O’ levels at evening class in 1984. I had rising confidence and motivation by then. My wife was expecting our first child. When I think of all the people who have influenced the direction of my education and life, from my parents to my teachers to my partners, friends and students, I realise that my eldest son brought about the most change in me and my life – even before he arrived. I had begun to show Len the odd poem again and I talked about poetry and writing with a new friend I made through running. He seemed to take me seriously and shared some of the things he had written with me. The weekly writing tasks on the English and History ‘O’ level courses gave me the opportunity to write for an audience that I now welcomed. I used to go to the college after work and I seemed to soak it up like a sponge. I got ‘A’ grades the following summer and then good ‘A’ levels a year later. When I was too bored to stand the warehouse any more, I took a job as a milkman for nearly a year and then as a lorry driver, but I hated both jobs. Doing well at night school made me feel that I could do something more interesting. This was near the end of the era when you could get a local authority grant to do a degree and that’s what I did. Even with two children, it did not really feel like a big financial risk because I thought I could always go back to that sort of work when I finished the degree in humanities at the polytechnic if I had to. So, I took a deep breath and applied for a place.

3.6  University/Polytechnic Judy:  My year 12 school results meant that I could finally achieve my lifelong ambition of becoming a teacher. Unlike Mike, I progressed straight from high school to college, without any significant experience in the world of work. My mother couldn’t afford to send me to university, but, in 1975, I was fortunate enough to receive a studentship to teachers’ college. This was one of the last years that the Australian government awarded high-achieving students with a relatively generous payment to support their study in a teacher training course. It not only paid for my course, but I was ‘bonded’ to the Victorian Education Department for three years at the completion of my course and guaranteed full-time, ongoing employment for life. Benefits also accrued during my three-year course, including pension fund contributions, sick leave and long-service leave. I was secure in employment as a teacher for as long as I wanted to be (after the requirements of my three-year bond were fulfilled). For someone who had lived on the poverty line since my father died, this was a significant achievement. I threw myself into my college years, both in terms of study and social life. Unlike most of my time at school, I actually felt that I belonged here, and there was no reason to feel different or inferior. I loved campus life and

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revelled in the academic programme, the camps, dances and band nights. I had an old bomb of a car, as did most other students in those days, and my friends and I would car pool to college, paying the driver 20 cents per trip petrol money. I had a new-found sense of freedom and, finally, felt comfortable in my surrounds. However, the old feelings of not belonging often returned when I undertook my teaching rounds. Although I was living my dream, I was also ‘back at school’: How would the children respond to me? Would they become my tormentors again? Would they treat me kindly? Could the ‘fat girl’ really become the teacher? Like most of the student teachers, I had a few scary days or experiences, but my college career was generally successful, with high grades and good practicum reports. My final year practicum was at a primary school in Melbourne, not far from where I was born and where my family home still is. I finally had the opportunity to ‘be the teacher’ for extended periods of time. The principal and teachers were all welcoming and made me and my fellow student teachers feel that we were genuinely a part of the school, the staff and the teaching profession. I will never forget that feeling – this profession really was where I wanted to be and where I belonged. At the end of that year, I was posted to a primary school in the outer eastern suburbs of Melbourne – I wanted to leave home, but not go too far away – and I began my teaching career in 1979. Mike:  I started to see myself in a different way when I was attending the polytechnic, and, while I did not know what I might do when I finished, I knew I would have to work to support my family. For a while, I felt as though I was in a sort of limbo, not part of the younger student group fresh out of sixth form and no longer part of the old crowd at the pub who thought I had lost my mind going ‘back to school’. My wife and my mum were keen on the idea of education, but no one in our families had ever taken a degree, and it was not clear where a degree in humanities would lead to for a father of two. I had no idea where it was leading either. As the first year came to an end, I wondered for a while what all this study meant in my life. I found a way to connect past and present through the community writing and publishing group that I joined and helped to organise and run from 1988, which I write about at the beginning of Chap. 6. I have wondered since if being a teacher had been at the back of my mind since primary school when I could see how much Mr. Marley was enjoying his work. Teaching came up as my most likely career choice on a computer careers test, although I had been less than frank with the computer about being expelled from school. Being a student on the Post Graduate Certificate in Education (PGCE) at the polytechnic (which became a university in 1992) eventually persuaded me that I wanted to have a go at teaching as a job. It was being a teacher that allowed me to finally believe that I could do it well, make a contribution, and enjoy it. Like Judy, I did my final school teaching placement in the area where I grew up. In 2007 I wrote for my thesis: On the morning I passed my final observation and therefore the course I found myself on my own in the classroom while the children sang in assembly. I could hear them singing

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‘Forgive our foolish ways’1 in the hall along the corridor. I looked out over that side of town. I could see my old school to the south and the window I used to look out of when I was ten, and across the valley the hospital where my mother worked and my father died. I could see the house where I now lived with my own family and the school my sons went to. Above all this on the brow of the hill to the west I could see the bakery – still a bakery in 1991 I think – and then to the north, along that road, the polytechnic I was about to leave and the university I would return to in another 15 years. At the time, with the children’s voices singing of human weakness and divine forgiveness it felt like the end of a journey. All the pieces seemed to be there in front of me with a few sections out of sight, like a puzzle that had not been put together.

3.7  Teaching Judy:  After graduation from college in 1978, I spent the next 25 years as a primary teacher, teaching in all grade levels, spending several years in each of three different schools. I didn’t move around much, as some teachers did, but tended to stay in one place for several years. It usually took me that long to feel that I really belonged there and that, eventually, it was time to move on. That seems to be the pattern for me: I feel new in a place or a role for quite a long time, and I take a while to feel that I am no longer a beginner. During my teaching career, I took on various roles at each school in addition to my classroom teaching, and, by the time I left classroom teaching for work in the university, I was a ‘leading teacher’. The next logical step for me was to become an Assistant Principal, but I never saw myself in that role. I asked myself: Could I do the job, and, more to the point, do I really want to do the job? I enjoyed taking on leadership roles but only those that kept me in close contact with children, families and other teachers, such as year level coordinator. I was comfortable as a more senior colleague rather than being seen as far above them in the power hierarchy. I felt that that was where I really belonged as a leader and as a colleague: in a classroom, making decisions that supported people in their everyday lives and, most importantly, listening to them, respecting them and giving them a voice. I am sure that is where my keen sense of fairness comes from. It isn’t fair that people are judged by their appearance, that they are denied a voice and that they are considered unworthy of others’ respect just because of what they look like, where they come from or how much money their family has. In my leadership roles, I was able to support students and teachers in their day-to-day work, not supervise or manage them from some remote office. One of my favourite ‘getting to know you’ activities that I now do with my pre-service students is ‘paper bag introductions’ or a ‘me box’. Everyone is asked to bring a paper bag or box of items to share, which says something about who they are as a teacher and as a person. My example is always my Russian dolls, purchased in a Beryozka store in the Soviet Union in 1988. I tell

 Dear Lord and Father of Mankind by John. G. Whittier 1872

1

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my students that these dolls represent not only my love of travel but my attitude to teaching and life in general – everyone has layers of experience and wisdom and stories to tell. Don’t judge people by their cover, or the outside layer. There is always more to all of us than meets the eye. Take the time to find out who is inside and listen. This is not only important for teachers but for leaders as well. My school teaching career was generally successful  – a mix of mostly great years working with some wonderful children and teachers, contrasted with the few challenging years that brought me close to resignation. Over 25 or so years of teaching, it is not possible to remember every child or incident, but some of those children who are clearest in my memory are the strugglers, the outcasts and the ones who kept on trying no matter what their circumstances. Perhaps because I can see a little of myself in them – the outsider – they occupy a special place in my memories. Like little Jackson, who arrived late one morning, quietly walked into the classroom, sat down at his desk, picked up his pencil and commenced to do the spelling test that I was giving. It was only after the test had been completed that I noticed the raw marks down one side of his leg – carpet burns from where his father had thrown him onto the floor that morning. He didn’t make a fuss or a sound – just did as he was asked to do at school; goodness only knows what else happened at home. And Melanie, who went into panic mode every Friday afternoon when we had sport. She was slightly overweight with few sports skills and even less coordination. I still remember the look of relief and gratitude on her face when I said she could do ‘bin duty’ that afternoon instead of fronting up for the bat tennis team (in which all the non-sporty kids played and which I umpired). At least one afternoon of humiliation had been saved for Melanie, how well I knew that feeling of relief. Then there was Janie, a sweet six-year-old daughter of Vietnamese refugees. All she wanted to do when she grew up was to be a doctor so she could go back and ‘help my country’. And I was reduced to tears on more than one occasion by Brendan, who was a sporting hero and all-round great kid in grade 4 but ended up in a youth justice centre in grade 6. He went off the rails in a relatively short period of time: unhappy home life, runaway and increasingly violent at home and at school. I visited him one evening in his new, temporary ‘home’ and I was appalled. How did it get to this? When he saw me, he opened his arms, ran up to me and gave me a big hug, something he would never have dreamed of doing when he was ‘kingpin’ of the schoolyard and leader of the gang. He really was just a lost, lonely and desperately unhappy little boy. I wonder what these children are doing now. Did they survive? Have they realised their dreams? Has the world and life treated them kindly? Did I make any difference to their lives? I hope so. When I finally did make the decision to leave the classroom (for what was initially only 12 months’ unpaid leave), I was teaching what would have to be one of my favourite classes: a beautiful group of 16 year ones, mostly from refugee families, striving to make a new life in Australia. However, despite the fact that teaching these children was a joy, something was missing, and I was beginning to burn out. I was working hard and the job satisfaction was starting to diminish. I started to avoid the staffroom and the endless talk about the ‘dailyness’ of school life. I was beginning to get frustrated by what I perceived to be the narrowness of outlook in my

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teaching life; I wondered about the bigger ideas − what really matters in education and why do we do what we do. I fully understand now why our teachers’ world revolved around the immediacy of working with children and families every day. We didn’t have the luxury of time to step back and think about ‘the bigger picture’; we were too busy doing the important work of teaching, day in, day out. And this teaching was becoming increasingly prescriptive and assessment driven. Although not nearly as rigid as it is today, the tide was beginning to turn in the early 1990s, and some of the fun and spontaneity of teaching was beginning to fade as the era of accountability was starting to take hold. I am not suggesting that my colleagues and I didn’t think about other issues but the intense nature of our work, and the requirement to implement the latest policy initiative, often made it difficult to ‘come up for air’ and think beyond the next day, week or term. The turning point for me came one day when I received a letter from my alma mater, Monash University. I had recently completed my Master of Education degree there and received an overall high distinction. The letter was an invitation to enrol in a doctoral programme based on my Masters results. The thought of undertaking a PhD had never before crossed my mind, although I had always loved studying at university. I had already completed an Arts degree, majoring in History and Politics, part-time over six years at Monash, before undertaking my Master of Education. A PhD in Education would be an ideal opportunity to take on the intellectual challenge that I felt was missing in my work as a teacher. However, mixed in with my excitement at the prospect were the familiar feelings of not being up to the task. ‘Could I really do this? Am I smart enough?’ ‘No, stop the negative thoughts’. I wasn’t going to let those stop me now. ‘Bite the bullet’, I told myself, ‘and just do it. What have you got to lose?’ I would think about all the questions and reservations later. I just needed to get the application in and await my fate. Mike:  Unlike Judy, who knew from a young age that she wanted to teach, I could never imagine being a teacher, until I became one. Even as I was training to be a teacher when I was in my early 30s, I struggled to see myself in the role. I certainly carried on learning and became more confident when I became a primary school teacher. By the time I moved on to teach at the local infants’ school after four years at the juniors, I had developed my skills and come to believe that evaluating, reflecting upon and developing my own approach were the key skills for me as a teacher. I never did completely get rid of that feeling that someone might come into the classroom and ask me what I was doing there. My skills of critical reflection developed as I took an MA in Education, which helped me to examine my practice, but they also fed my insecurity about the whole process of school teaching and my place within it. No doubt, this was largely about me and my own experiences of school: as well as being excluded from secondary school, I had also failed in a number of ways as a learner leaving large gaps in my knowledge, skills and confidence. While teaching within a mile of where I was born and grew up sometimes gave me a sense of progress and triumph over the past, it also served as a constant reminder of that feeling of failure and some of the pain of my childhood and youth. Like Judy,

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I had mixed feelings about schools and the education system. We both had ‘mixed’ experiences at various points in our schooling. The 1990s was a time of increased regulation for teachers. In England, the national curriculum led on to the literacy hour and the numeracy hour with head teachers and local authority advisors driven to distraction by inspectors. As with Judy all those miles away in Australia, I enjoyed being a teacher in England – most of the time. I felt that it mattered and, now, it did matter– sometimes too much – that it was me. I tried to be fair and kind and gentle. I tried to encourage independence in the children, but there was something about the system that put me in a position of control. It was more than making decisions and organising the teaching; I had to exercise control over the children that did not sit well with me. Sometimes, it felt as though we were all planning and trying to control what the children thought as well as what they did. I felt a tension between the possibilities of facilitating learning in open ways and the teacher’s role and responsibilities of controlling learning in narrow ways with evermore defined outcomes. I could see the ways in which pressure and stress as well as values are passed down the line from politicians to children and the part that teachers play in that process. I was able to research, examine and write about this for a part-time MA, but I never managed to change it within my own situation as a school teacher. I took an individual approach in arguing against regimentation and formulaic curriculum content and teaching strategies, but in practice I was implementing those very things in my work and measuring myself as a teacher in a similar way to everyone else. I came back to consider this aspect of teachers’ lives in my later work as a teacher educator, but I have no easy answers to the dilemma. The issues have followed me into higher education and my work in teacher education, and I see them all over the world when I meet and talk with teachers and teacher educators from other countries. When I left the school, I worked as a teacher and adviser with children who were either outside or at the margins of the mainstream system. This gave me further opportunity to reflect upon what happens to some children and their families in the school system. Teachers often saw me as the person who would ‘deal’ with the children with emotional and behavioural difficulties. In working with children who did not fit in, trying to find ways forward through the maze of the education system, not only for children and their parents but also for me as a teacher, I found myself at the edge of the system again. It was a rewarding, if often stressful, work that all teachers should do for a while – but not for too long. The special school and support service that I worked for did not exist until 1978. I am not sure it would have helped me, but I might well have gone there as teenager if it had been around in 1975. Few of the young people who we supported were able to access and enjoy mainstream school, and there was a certain amount of expectation and dependency from both children and the teachers we worked with. I began to wonder again if I was as much part of the problem as I was part of any solution.

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3.8  T  ransitioning into Academia and Becoming a Teacher Educator Judy:  As it turned out, I was successful in my application to the university, and, after one false start where I began and then dropped out of a Doctor of Education degree, I enrolled in a PhD programme. Thus began my journey as a doctoral student and part-time casual tutor in the Faculty of Education at Monash University. I have written previously about the ‘moment’ I took the step, (no, leap), into the world of teacher education (Hayler and Williams 2016, 8), and I reproduce that account here: I sat at the study table, settling into another round of analysing data, drafting chapters and generally despairing about my ability to complete my doctoral thesis before I was due to return to the classroom as a primary teacher, and recommence my career of almost 25 years. I glanced at the newspaper sitting unread and thought that a break in my study routine wouldn’t do any harm. Just a few minutes to glean the news of the day – and my usual casual glance at the employment pages. You never know what might be lurking there. Then I saw it. An advertisement by my own university, asking for classroom teachers interested in tutoring in classes in the Faculty of Education. After much thought, and internal deliberations – ‘Could I do this? I’ve never taught adults before. Maybe it will be just sitting around a big table, talking about how to teach. No big deal, I could do that’. After preparing my application, I attached it to an email, hovered the arrow over the ‘send’ button and clicked. My official career as a teacher educator had begun.

I spent the next three years studying full time and tutoring part time, still on unpaid leave from my teaching position, reluctant to give it up. I’d had the luxury of secure, full-time employment since I was 18 years old, and I was fearful of giving that up for the little-known world of academia. I enjoyed the challenges sent my way as a doctoral student, although the old fears and anxieties crept back on a regular basis. Every time I climbed the stairs to my supervisor’s office, I felt my legs turning to jelly. ‘I’m in over my head and will never be part of academia’. (Now, as a supervisor of PhD students, I know that I was far from alone in these feelings.) ‘When will the people around me see me for who I am – a fraud? Who do I think I am?’ (another common feeling among new and not-so-new academics, I have since come to learn). If I can just be successful in obtaining my PhD, I will slip back unnoticed into the world of school teaching. It would be just like before, the only difference being the PhD certificate in my desk drawer. My fate as a teacher educator was sealed by the arrival of another letter – this time from my principal, asking me to decide whether or not I was going to return to school the following year. She had very generously granted me three successive years of leave without pay, but the time had come to make a decision: return to the school or resign from my secure, ongoing ‘job for life’. Was I really going to give up my teaching job for an uncertain future as an academic? As fate would have it, just before this letter arrived, a position as a lecturer at Monash had been advertised. I had applied for the same position 12 months earlier, but I had not been successful, largely because I was not far enough into my PhD candidature. Now, 12 months

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later, I had decided to apply again and see what happened. When my principal finally pressed me for an answer, I realised that I really had moved on from being a classroom teacher and that I was ready to take the leap of faith and become a full-­ time teacher educator. The problem was that the decision to resign had to be made a couple of weeks before I knew the outcome of my job application. I remember sitting on my local beach looking out to sea for some inspiration. Staring out on the gently lapping waves, I realised that I had reached the point of no return: I needed to cast my fate to the wind or be like the debris floating in front of me and trust that the universe will look after me wherever I ended up. I resigned from the Victorian Education Department after 29 years of service, and, two weeks later, the day after attending the job interview, I received a phone call informing me that I had been successful. Would I like to accept the position as lecturer in primary education at Monash? ‘Yes please!’ Mike:  I signed up for a Professional Doctorate in Education at the university and like Judy, took on some part-time initial teacher education work at the university, teaching a module about inclusion, which I really enjoyed. It seemed to offer the perfect opportunity of putting ideas into practice that I had been struggling with as a teacher. It felt strange and exciting to be back in the same rooms that I had worked in as an undergraduate and where I did my own teacher training. I felt very positive and authentic and knew what I wanted to do for a job at last. When I started a full-­ time job in the school of education at the university, it felt like coming home. And, so it was. As shown in Chap. 4, coming home can be difficult. You always have to be ready for the unexpected and to do your best. My mother taught me that.

3.9  Conclusion Our educational journeys presented in this chapter go some way towards illustrating how our personal family and education experiences shape and guide us towards our work as teacher educators. Those of us who have the privilege of teaching teachers in university and at schools haven’t come from nowhere. We haven’t just ‘dropped’ into our programmes and courses: we bring a multitude of experiences that consciously and subconsciously influence who we are and what we do as teacher educators. This, of course, applies to everyone, in all walks of life and careers, but, in this book, we are keen to make connections between these experiences, how they have impacted on us and how we have individually (and at times together) responded to the demands, challenges and opportunities (the rapids of our journey) that have presented themselves over the past decade or so. We both find it difficult to see our work and identities as teacher educators without the frame of our own lives and influences. They hover over us like guides, provocateurs and, in some ways, comforters and supporters. Exploring our educational journeys together has shown us just how much we have in common, just as it has highlighted some of the significant differences. These

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similarities and differences provide us with opportunities to probe and to challenge each other and to enable us to each delve more deeply into the significance of particular events or relationships that influence our current work and lives as teacher educators. Creating the text for this chapter has uncovered how our family backgrounds still shape us in our work, beliefs and responses to education and teaching. We both lost our fathers while we were in primary school, and our mothers sometimes struggled with raising three children on their own. We also both struggled academically at school until a particular teacher sparked our imagination and encouraged our intellectual development. These teachers were an inspiration. It wasn’t just what and how they taught but the relationships that they developed with us that let us see that we could succeed in school and, perhaps, elsewhere into the future – we just needed the encouragement and support to do so. It is interesting that, for both of us, the academic areas in which we found this inspiration were History and English – stories and writing – a love that started at school and continues to this day, up to and including the writing of this book. Despite our successes, another common characteristic we share is a susceptibility to the imposter syndrome and a lack of confidence in our ability to undertake new challenges. Where does this come from? Perhaps our struggles early on and the rejection of our peers and/or teachers, in one way or another, have given us both a deep-seated anxiety that failure and ridicule are not far away, bubbling under the surface ready to humiliate us again at the slightest chance. We both now live and work and have taught in places very close to our early family lives and school experiences. Perhaps these places provide a sense of comfort and familiarity as well as feelings of anxiety and fear – the familiarity overcoming any uncomfortable memories that the landscape evokes. These places help us to see how far we have travelled yet how close we remain to our backgrounds and early influences. We both left teaching for similar reasons, including the changes that were beginning to take place in schools. We felt that the teaching profession was changing and becoming less what we wanted it to be, and we began to lose the sense of why we wanted to do the work in the first place. Our beliefs about what we were achieving as school teachers were being challenged, and we both came to see (although not always clearly) that there was something missing and that surely there were new things to explore. Our journeys into academia were triggered by events that could so easily not have happened, so our turn to university teaching and research was by no means inevitable – the arrival of a letter, the passing comment of a colleague and the advertising of a job – triggers that we could have responded to in different ways. As our lives would have it, we responded in ways that led us to where we are today: beginning and continuing our journeys to becoming teacher educators. The early experiences that we have presented in this chapter are akin to the early stages of a river in the high country as it forms from springs, streams and pools – to start a journey that inevitably contains rough patches, with places to disembark, to refocus and to look for new directions and to find new challenges that enable us to set off on a new stage of the journey.

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References Goodson, I. (1992). Studying teachers’ lives. London: Routledge. Hayler, M., & Williams, J. (2016). On the journey of becoming a teacher educator. In J. Williams & M. Hayler (Eds.), Professional learning through transitions and transformations: Teacher educators’ journeys of becoming (pp. 1–12). Cham: Springer. Macmillan, H. (1957, July 20). Speech in Bedford. BBC. http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/ stories/july/20/newsid_3728000/3728225.stm Munro, P. (1998). Subject to fiction: Women teachers’ life history narratives and the cultural politics of resistance. Buckingham: Open University Press. Palmer, P. (1998). The courage to teach. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Chapter 4

Becoming a Teacher Educator

Abstract  In this chapter, the authors continue their personal narratives with a focus upon their experiences of making the transition from teacher and doctoral student to teacher educator. This is discussed in relation to the growing field of literature on this professional transition and the ways in which teacher educators negotiate professional, institutional and personal barriers and opportunities afforded by an academic career. The chapter explores the range of ways in which people become teacher educators and the ‘rapids’ that they may encounter on the journey. Keywords  Professional transitions · Teachers · Teacher educators · Professional learning



∗∗∗ Judy: April 2011. The room was filling fast – standing room only by the time we began our presentation. I had arrived in New Orleans late the night before, so I was still in a state of jetlag but feeling excited and nervous about my first presentation at the American Education Research Association (AERA) annual meeting. I was presenting with my relatively new colleagues, Shawn Bullock and Jason Ritter, whom I met at my first Castle conference in 2008. My paper at that conference was about making the transition from teacher to teacher educator, and it was my first attempt to explore what that process actually meant. Like so many others, including Jason and Shawn, I had become an ‘accidental’ teacher educator during my doctoral studies and was encouraged by self-study colleagues at my university to utilise the methodology to help me understand that transition. Now, 3 years later, we were presenting a symposium at one of the biggest education conferences in the world, about our own respective transitions from teacher to teacher educator. The paper was well received, and after our presentation, several people came up to me to say how much our session resonated with their own experiences. One woman’s comment in particular sticks in my mind. She related how she had just taken on a role as a teacher educator after being a teacher in a school for many years. She explained how strange she felt being a ‘beginner’ again after so many years’ experience as a teacher. She wondered how relevant that experience was now that she was a teacher educator. Surely, it must count, but how and by whom? A colleague standing nearby commented that of course her teaching experience was extremely important but the challenge was how to make it relevant in this new teaching context. After the session, Jason, Shawn and I met together to discuss what might come next. We brainstormed a few ideas and, as a result of that conversation, we went on to co-author a journal article about the nature of this transition, not only for us but for the

© The Author(s) 2020 M. Hayler, J. Williams, Being a Teacher Educator in Challenging Times, Self-Study of Teaching and Teacher Education Practices 22, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-3848-3_4

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4  Becoming a Teacher Educator many other beginning teacher educators out there (see Williams et al. 2012). I spent the next 6 years or so exploring what it means to be a teacher educator – making the transition from teacher to teacher educator; understanding pedagogy in teacher education; and in the process, continuing to construct my professional identity as a teacher educator. Fast forward to April 2017. I am standing in the stairwell at my university talking to colleagues about our next book editing project. We had just submitted the draft of our first co-edited collection (Fitzgerald et al. 2017), and the publisher had asked whether or not we were interested in working together again to produce a follow-up book (see Fitzgerald et al. 2018). We agreed that we would meet to discuss the next steps again soon. As I was turning to leave, I said to my colleagues: ‘Do you know what date it is today?’ ‘No, why?’ ‘Today is 7th April.’ ‘So?’ ‘I have been here for 10 years. My long-service leave ticks over today!’ Congratulations all round – 13 weeks paid leave for my ‘long service’ to the university. As I was driving home, it dawned on me that this is about more than clocking over 10 years of service: I had officially been a teacher educator for a decade. Where had the time gone? How did I get here? I have done so many wonderful things in that time – things I would never have dreamed of doing when I was at that AERA conference in New Orleans 6 years ago, when I was still a beginning teacher educator making the transition from being a school teacher. After 10 years in this career, was I supposed to ‘know it all’ by now? I certainly wasn’t a beginner and was no longer considered an early career researcher, but, somehow, I still felt new and, in some ways, unsure of myself. When I was researching and writing about becoming a teacher educator, especially in those early years of my career, I assumed that this was something that people did, completed and then moved on into the remainder of their working lives. But I was still feeling like a learner (as opposed to a beginner) in a constant state of wondering about what there was that I still needed to know and be able to do. At the time, I was working with Mike on a journal article (Hayler and Williams 2018), and the notion of ‘constant becoming’ was a clear theme emerging in our work: trying to understand what it means to be(come) a teacher educator. I realised that, although I had made the official transition from teacher to teacher educator over 10 years ago, I was still becoming a teacher educator. This isn’t something that happens and then passes. It may involve different phases, but it continues for as long as you refer to yourself as a teacher educator. So, what does ‘becoming a teacher educator’ actually mean?

4.1  Introduction As we explained in Chap. 1, the genesis of this book was our experience of editing a book about other people’s journeys of becoming teacher educators (Williams and Hayler 2016). As we read our colleagues’ stories of becoming, we wondered what our stories of becoming would be if we had each written a chapter in that book. The shape of the current book was greatly influenced by the wisdom and experiences that the authors shared in the edited book. They had collectively highlighted that the journey to becoming a teacher educator involved a combination of personal biography and characteristics, the importance of collegiality and collaboration, responding to the political climate and the quest to develop pedagogies of teacher education and to forge an identity as a teacher educator. Most of the authors wrote about the exciting but challenging transition from school teaching to teaching pre-service teachers in a university, the importance of mentoring from others and learning from mistakes and missteps.

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Because this current chapter is about becoming a teacher educator, it is clear that all these themes reappear here in the narratives of our own journeys as teacher educators and in those of others we include in this and subsequent chapters. It is not possible to become a teacher educator without transitioning from a previous role and without the need to engage with the prevailing policy and institutional contexts. Becoming a teacher educator also involves the development of personal qualities such as resilience, problem-solving and critical reflection and reflexivity. The essence of the process of becoming is to develop pedagogies and identities as teacher educators in collaboration (directly and indirectly) with others who help us along that journey. Wood and Borg (2010) likened the journey of becoming a teacher educator to a ‘rocky road’ on which the journey was neither good nor bad but rather involved a range of personal and professional peaks, troughs and bumps. As beginning teacher educators, Wood and Borg experienced a mix of highs and lows, pleasure and surprise and exciting challenges coupled with uncertainty and doubt. They went through periods when they questioned their professional identities, especially when their initial euphoria was replaced by a recognition that first-­ order practice (Murray and Male 2005) was not sufficient in teacher education. Just as Murray and Male’s study revealed, Wood and Borg also experienced conflict between their situational (role-specific) and substantive (personal) selves. Until these disparate dimensions of their professional work were to some degree aligned, Wood and Borg felt that they had not completely made the transition from school teachers to teacher educators. This dissonance was clearly evident in many of our own experiences of making this transition.

4.2  Transitioning from Teacher to Teacher Educator Judy: My entry into teacher education was briefly alluded to at the end of my narrative in Chap. 3, where I wrote about my educational journey up to the point of being employed by the university and thereby entering the academy. My beliefs about learning and teaching and about being a teacher had been evolving over many years working in schools, but I really didn’t have a clear understanding of what being a teacher educator involved as I transitioned into the university context. As I mentioned in Chap. 3, my initial image of a teacher educator was of a teacher (me) sitting around a big table talking to pre-service teachers about how to teach. I really had no idea what the work involved on a day-to-day basis or that teacher education was about exploring beyond the ‘how to’ of teaching. Also, the idea of being a researcher as well as a teacher of teachers didn’t really enter into the picture. I wasn’t aware of the difference between a teacher and a teacher educator other than the context of the work (a university as opposed to a school). Although I was studying for my PhD, I also didn’t connect the work of research with the work of a teacher educator – that was the work I did as a research student, rather than as a teacher educator. When I first embarked on my doctoral studies, I genuinely believed I would return to teaching in a school, although with a PhD certificate in

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the drawer (or maybe on the wall, although I didn’t want to alienate myself from my teaching colleagues by displaying something that so clearly separated me from them). I didn’t undertake my studies to affect a career change but to satisfy my thirst for knowledge, new ideas and a break from classroom teaching. As it turned out, I never did make it back to the primary school classroom, at least not in the same way as I had been there before. My career move from full-time primary school teacher to full-time doctoral student to full-time teacher educator is not unusual or unique, but I think that everyone’s experience of this transition is different and very much a personal journey. Much of the literature that Jason Ritter, Shawn Bullock and I reviewed for our paper (Williams et al. 2012) had common elements, and we all nodded our heads in recognition of the challenges that others experienced moving from school teaching into teacher education. They all had many obstacles to navigate as well as great opportunities and rewards to savour. There were, however, many fascinating and deeply personal experiences shared in the literature which illustrated how different contexts, personal circumstances, beliefs and assumptions make this journey into teacher education a unique and, in some ways, a solitary endeavour. Our collaboration, which arose from the Castle conference in 2008, led to the AERA symposium in New Orleans, described in the opening narrative of this chapter and, after that, to our oft-cited literature review on becoming a teacher educator. It is interesting to note that at the time of writing (September 2019), the article we wrote (Williams et al. 2012) has been the second most cited article in the journal Studying Teacher Education over the past 3 years. This suggests a strong interest in the phenomenon of making the transition from teacher to teacher educator in the field of teacher education research. Working on the article enabled Shawn, Jason and me to identify some common themes in the experiences of beginning teacher educators even though the particular contexts and academic careers of the authors often differed markedly. We concluded that becoming a teacher educator is: [C]omplex and multilayered and influenced by three key factors: personal and professional biography; institutional contexts and the nature of community; and the on-going development of a personal pedagogy of teacher education. Becoming a teacher educator involves examining beliefs and values grounded in personal biography and dealing with the inherent tensions that arise from overlapping and interrelated personal and professional identities. Beginning teacher educators have to navigate the complex social and institutional contexts within which they work, and many strive to develop supportive collegial relationships that enable them to examine their beliefs and practices in these contexts. Central to these factors is the need to develop a personal pedagogy of teacher education, through personal reflection and collegial relationships, which enables them to gain a sense of self as a teacher educator, and as a member of the teacher education community. (Williams et al. 2012 256–7)

While the literature shows that there are plenty of others who share our pain and our triumphs in the journey to becoming teacher educators, we all need to draw on our inner resources to help us navigate the journey to understanding who we currently are and to become who we want to be as teacher educators. Mike: During my first 3 years of working as a teacher educator at the university, I had the disconcerting experience of feeling less and less confident the longer that I

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worked there. The further that I got away from the school classroom, the less and less authentic I felt as the months went by. It was as though I had left one profession and not properly arrived in another. My practical experience and classroom ‘know-­ how’ seemed to be less and less relevant and my hard-won identity as a school teacher seemed to be withering on the vine. My identity as a teacher was built on my pedagogy of teaching: what I believed, knew and did as a school teacher. Like Judy, this recent experience and knowledge was pretty much all I had to offer to student teachers at first because I was yet to begin the process of developing a pedagogy of teacher education. I didn’t know what I believed, needed to know or really do as a teacher educator as it became clear to me that it was about more than sharing my experience as a teacher. Further, there seemed to be no way of finding out about this other than through my own research. The school of education had no system of induction or training for teacher educators. We learnt informally from others. It seems that teacher educators get the job because they are good at another related but significantly different school-based job. It could be that the better you are at the first job, the harder the transition might be to the new job because you need to let go of a well-grounded identity to some extent (Ritter 2011). As this difference became clear and the old job moved into the distance behind me, I was faced with what seemed like a pedagogic vacuum that I needed to fill. One element of the job that I felt least prepared for was the management of others, which seemed to be an integral part of the system. Minor management roles, such as module leader or subject coordinator, involved making decisions about my colleagues’ work allocations, something I felt unqualified for and uncomfortable with from the start. Over the 3 years that followed, some of my own emotional and behavioural difficulties re-emerged, and I felt increasingly as though I was acting, pretending to be someone else, saying one thing and doing another. Alongside these issues of leadership, I increasingly felt that my professed pedagogy did not match my actual practice, which contradicted some of my deeply held beliefs at certain points. I felt like a fraud and as though everyone could see straight through me. Though I felt my own confidence as a teacher draining away in what could be explained as professional menopause or a midlife crisis as I approached 50, it was my growing self-doubt and questions about the enterprise of teacher education itself that seemed to be feeding this most actively. My feelings of not being authentic and doubts about the authenticity of my profession led to anxiety and confusion and brought memories and feelings to the surface that had been buried some time ago. This feeling of dissonance was further compounded by the difficulty I was having in ‘getting back to’ my work on the EdD, which seemed to be slipping further and further away from me. I felt the need to step away from the job to regain a sense of equilibrium through completing the EdD and working out what to do next. I wanted to read, listen, talk and write myself out of trouble – as I had as a teenager – and regain a sense of authenticity in my work. As explained below in more detail, after 3 years, I knew I had to leave. It was during that year that I came to self-study while working on my doctoral thesis, and, when I found Laurel Richardson’s work on writing as a method of inquiry (2000) and Russell and Munby’s collection on

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self-study (1992), I started writing my own story, made connections with others and began to find my way back to teacher education via the conference at the castle and the community of S-STEP scholars. These writers and scholars often shared similar stories of change and dissonance in teacher education, and, while none offered easy answers, they all recognised teacher education and the pedagogy of teacher education as distinct from teaching in school. There were no claims of hierarchy here: teaching children and young people was not seen as better or worse, more or less important than educating teachers, but it was understood and explained as a different, if related, profession and pedagogy. Self-study in teacher education avoids oversimplification and places forms of reflective analysis at the centre of developing pedagogies of teacher education (Russell and Loughran 2007). ∗∗∗



As the extensive field of literature shows, we are not alone in our struggles to become teacher educators. Jennifer Mansfield shares her experience of coming to know what she didn’t know she didn’t know and of learning to live with uncertainty through her research as a secondary science teacher educator in Australia. Vignette: Jennifer Mansfield My entry into teacher education (similar to my previous career transitions before it) was a mixture of purpose and happenstance. Having worked initially as a scientist, I transitioned into secondary school science teaching after the birth of my first child. I enjoyed working as a secondary science teacher but came to realise that it was far more complicated than I had realised. It did not take me long to experience feelings on unrest as I came to appreciate that there was so much about teaching that I did not know. With the busyness of the school day, I seldom had time to purposefully reflect and problematise my practice in meaningful ways. After the birth of my second child, I seized the opportunity to undertake my PhD part time, which provided me space and time to think more deeply about teaching and balance that with the care of my family. Soon after I commenced my PhD, I took on sessional teaching work in teacher education units. Similar to Mike and Judy, I was not aware of the difference between science teacher and science teacher educator. However, as I had done previously, I tried to adapt to the challenges of my new role and accepted the inevitable feelings of uncertainty and unrest as I again tried to understand and develop my new identity. I tried to use my uncertainty productively by drawing on my study to inform my teaching and vice versa. In so doing, I recognised a number of things. Firstly, I was living the Meno paradox – coming to know what I did not know I did not know (Plato et al. 1982). This was difficult, as finding out that there are things you don’t realise you don’t know means the goal posts you thought you were aiming for move further away (and, at times, they change in shape and size!). This was unsettling but, recognising that this was the case, added some degree of comfort. I started to adopt the mantra that I need to be comfortable with uncertainty because, once the fog clears, new knowledge abounds. It was, and is, difficult to maintain this outlook. The second thing I realised was that my knowledge base for teaching science and my identity as a science teacher were not readily transferable when teaching about teaching science. The further away from teaching science I moved, the less credibility I felt I had. This was, in part, due to the awareness that the knowledge base and identity I developed as a science teacher were not always useful for teacher education in ways I had anticipated. I also felt I did not yet have a sufficient understanding of teacher education to draw a sense

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of credibility from that identity. I was straddling two identities and did not quite fit either. As a secondary school science teacher, I placed a lot of value on acquiring content knowledge. The more I had, the more competent I felt. This knowledge and outlook were not useful to me as a teacher educator because teaching about teaching is more than just content. To support myself through my transition, I drew on the framework I was developing through my PhD research, which focused on moments that challenged teachers’ sense of pedagogical equilibrium (PE) (Mansfield 2019), that is, the feelings of unrest that arise when we don’t know how to act in a given situation (which, at the time, was quite often). I started applying this lens to myself through self-study as a way of naming and framing aspects of my practice where I did not know how to respond. As Mike highlighted, there is no formal preparation for teacher education. Therefore, I decided to utilise my PhD framework as a way to better understand my role, developing my identity and articulating my developing professional knowledge for teacher education. A couple of years on, I still use challenge to my sense of equilibrium as a frame for better understanding and articulating my developing knowledge. I presented the idea of articulating professional learning through the search for PE at the Castle conference (Mansfield and Loughran 2018) and was overjoyed to find a supportive community of educators with whom I can discuss the nature of knowing and identity as a teacher educator. At present, my main source of unrest is feeling like a living contradiction (Whitehead 1989) as I come to realise the difference between what I understand is important in teaching about teaching and how I model (or fail to model) that to my pre-service teachers. I look forward to continuing to learn what I don’t know I don’t know.



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Judy: When I first entered the academy, I was in the last stages of my doctoral thesis, the topic of which was the professional learning journey of career change teacher education students (see Williams 2013 for the published account). Even though I was successful in gaining the position of teacher educator, I struggled to really feel that I belonged in academia because this career progression had occurred serendipitously or, like Jennifer Mansfield’s experience, through happenstance. It certainly wasn’t a long-term plan or goal, and the familiar ‘imposter syndrome’ was very much a part of my experience. Although I had a job and a role as a teacher educator, I didn’t really have an identity as a teacher educator. In fact, the literature suggests that this struggle is quite common among beginning teacher educators. In one of the few studies undertaken in Australia into the careers of teacher educators, Mayer et al. (2011) suggest that, for many teacher educators, the transition into their new profession is often, like mine, ‘accidental’. Mayer et al. explored the ways in which teacher educators come into the profession, and they found that, for most if not all beginning teacher educators, it is not a conscious career choice. Participants had quite different views about the value of their teaching experience before entering the academy as a teacher educator, and many appeared to struggle with the tension between their allegiance to the field of teaching and their newly acquired status in academe. Many felt a close connection to teaching and the teaching profession, particularly those (like Mike and I) who had been employed in the university mainly because of their experience as teachers in schools. Others identified more strongly with the ‘ivory tower’, especially those who identified themselves

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as primarily researchers. In between, there were many individuals with experiences in, and loyalties to, both the university and the school. Mayer et  al. (2011, 248) argued that understanding why and how teacher educators ‘become’ is an important area of research. There is: [A] need to understand [teacher educators’] pathways into teacher education, their work experiences, and their aspirations and career trajectories. Such interest is derived from acknowledgement that in similar ways to how teachers and teacher quality affect school students’ educational success, teacher educators are increasingly being seen as key to the successful preparation of future generations of teachers. In addition, increasing concern about the ageing nature of the teacher educator workforce and the need for renewal has prompted research into the nature of the work of teacher educators and their professional identities.

When I first started working in academia as a teaching associate (TA), I was completing the final draft of my doctoral thesis. As I wrote the draft, it occurred to me that I was undergoing a similar career transition to that of the participants in my study. While they were transitioning from a range of career backgrounds into teacher education (and into teaching), I was transitioning from school teaching into another related but very different field of teaching: teacher education. I was also in the process of becoming a researcher as well as a teacher of teachers. I was not only expected to teach pre-service teachers but also continue my research agenda beyond my doctoral studies. This was in addition to the growing expectations in terms of service, administration and leadership. Although the people around me were all very supportive, I was experiencing similar feelings to those I encountered in my previous educational transitions: Do I belong here and am I up to the task? Do I really know what I am doing? How am I ever going to learn what needs to be learnt? These were some of the rapids that I needed to negotiate as I made my transition from teacher to teacher educator. These are no doubt common challenges for anyone making a professional transition, but the challenges that these questions provide to new teacher educators are important because the ways in which we respond to them will impact how the next generation of teachers is educated. In Chap. 3, I wrote that just before submitting my doctoral thesis for examination, a full-time, permanent position as a teacher educator was advertised at Monash. I was successful in gaining the position, and, within a couple of weeks, I had resigned as a school teacher and began my career as a full-time teacher educator. It was now time to explore just what that meant. As a novice teacher educator, I was no longer a TA but responsible in my own right for units of study. As a TA, I had been able to rely on the permanent staff to do all the administrative work, plan the lectures and workshops, handle problematic student issues and make decisions about assessment. These tasks had involved some input from me, but it was limited, and I was happy to sit back and leave it to the ‘experts’. As a casual member of staff, I focused on teaching the workshops and sharing tips and tricks about my teaching experience in a primary classroom and my current (at that time) casual relief teaching in local schools. Students loved the stories and up-to-date experience of a ‘real’ teacher; but how does that real teacher become a real teacher educator? This was the overriding question in my mind as I entered the academy on a full-time basis.

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Skills and experience as a classroom teacher are, no doubt, an essential ‘cornerstone’ of beginning teacher educators’ practice (Ritter 2007), but, for most, it is not enough to underpin a pedagogy of teacher education. Teaching teachers is not the same as teaching children or adolescents. Murray and Male (2005) identified a particular conundrum for beginning teacher educators, that is, making the transition from a ‘first-order’ practitioner (i.e. a teacher of children) to a second-order practitioner (i.e. a teacher of teachers, where the content and the mode of delivery are essentially the same thing: teaching). According to Murray and Male, beginning teacher educators need to align their substantial self (their core ideals and identity) with their situational self (their new workplace context). They concluded: [T]here was a considerable and often stressful transition time for the [new teacher educators], as they made the change from first order practitioner in school to second-order practitioner in [Higher Education] HE … In terms of forming these new identities, this study shows the alignment of the substantial and the situational selves of teacher educators to be a long and sometimes difficult process during those early years of HE work. (p. 134)

Developing a pedagogy of teacher education is core to the process of becoming a teacher educator, and we explore this in more detail in Chap. 8. Saito’s (2013) review of the literature about the challenges faced by ex-­practitioner teachers as teacher educators revealed similar issues to those discovered by Jason, Shawn and me (Williams et al. 2012). Saito highlighted the importance of mentoring for novice teacher educators, something that we also identified as often lacking in teacher education workplaces. In terms of my own transition into the academy, my mentor appeared in the form of Amanda Berry, who was a senior lecturer in the faculty at the time and well known and respected in the self-study community. I am not sure how the conversation came about, but I do remember sitting with Amanda in the staffroom at Monash during her lunch break and her talking to me about the ‘incredible’ conference that she was involved in, which was held in a castle in England every 2 years. She suggested that I think about writing something for the next conference about my experiences of becoming a teacher educator, and she referred to one of the papers in the proceedings of the previous conference written by Jason Ritter about that very topic (Ritter 2006). As it turned out, my paper about my transition from teacher to teacher educator was accepted for the Castle conference in 2008, and it was there that I met some of my future collaborators, including Jason and Mike, who attended my session. I continued to do self-study research about becoming a teacher educator, and the AERA conference referred to in the opening narrative was my next major step in forging a research agenda around this experience. I can honestly say that becoming part of the self-study community has been a pivotal experience for me and was an important part of my professional transition. Undertaking self-studies about my evolving identity and practice as a beginning (and now more experienced) teacher educator, and becoming involved in the S-STEP special interest group (SIG) at AERA, has led to knowledge, understanding, mentoring, collaborations and friendships that almost certainly would not have eventuated if I had taken a different research direction, or if I had not taken advantage of that seemingly incidental first conversation with Amanda.

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Mike: Like Judy, I think about the rapids that need to be negotiated in the journey of becoming a teacher educator. There are elements of ‘escape’ as well as ‘success’ in the stories of my own career trajectory, as I outlined in Chap. 3. The ‘narrative of success’ takes me fairly smoothly from working in the carpet warehouse to the local polytechnic as a mature student via night school and from ‘good degree’ graduate to the PGCE course; to primary school teacher for 10 years – with an MA in education along the way; to specialist behaviour support teacher; and to university-based teacher educator with a doctorate. What’s not to like? Or, indeed, to respect? It looks good on the CV and it’s all true. Not too many rapids in the gentle flow of that river. There is something ‘natural’ and familiar in this narrative. I am struck by how many other teacher educators share a broadly similar pattern of progression, even if the personal details and timing are significantly different: the carpet warehouse may be less common than the other elements of our stories, but the narrative of educational and professional progression is almost, by definition, a way that we see ourselves as teacher educators. The student learns and becomes a teacher; the teacher learns, contributes and moves on to academe or, more specifically, to teacher education. A film of the story might show me floating or paddling with the gentle current towards a new challenge having put the last one neatly behind me. However, another film shows a man on the run. Hanging on by his fingertips as he almost comes apart on the rapids of change. Struggling to cope with the day ahead, looking around for a way out and wondering how long it will be before he gets found (or thrown) out. As always, there’s another way to see things. Part way through reading Judy’s narrative of her own journey to teacher education I decided to look at my diaries. I have written a diary entry for every day since 1988. There are some older, incomplete diaries from my childhood and teenage years, but I have an entry for every day (although not always written on that day) since January 1988 when I was 29 and in my first year of undergraduate humanities degree. I found them in a box in the cupboard and it struck me that this is research data. While I have written about my education and working life before, I have never consulted the diaries themselves in relation to these as data to explore my educational journey to becoming a teacher educator. I’ve never been sure why I started writing them, but it would seem to follow the pattern I developed of needing to write to understand something and mark the moment. They are a way of ‘thinking out loud’ at a time of change (and it is always a time of change if you think about it). Perhaps the entries in the diaries are also a guide through the rapids travelled, a record of the journey in case I have to find my way back one day. Like the breadcrumbs through the forest in Hansel and Gretel – although we all know what happened there …. The diary entries (in italics) tell parts of a number of stories: About being a student teacher 24 September 1990: Started my PGCE at M school. Sat in on three classes of 10-year olds. Staff not that helpful bar Mr S. Kids OK. 14 October 1990: Very low today, felt frightened and fed up ... Don’t think I can make it as a teacher. Confidence is low.

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19 June 1991: Felt very nervous this morning but it went very well indeed. I was pleased with my three strands. AT (external examiner) seemed pleased and wished me luck with my career. About being a newly qualified teacher 4 September 1991: Big day tomorrow. Start of a new era. I need hope and strength, courage and confidence. 5 September 1991: It was a good day. Calm and controlled. The class seem very nice. There’s lots of work to do and a long way to go. A good start, keep it up. Reading these entries after nearly 30 years, I am struck by how I seem to be telling myself to be brave. As though writing down and then reading it – a very physical reflection on my thoughts and feelings – will make it so. Inner thought becomes, to some extent, external here on the page as I appear to be coaching myself – or perhaps it is the older me coaching the younger me? The man encouraging the boy into the world of grown-ups. There are lots of ups and downs in the diaries that follow. They present a personal record of my inner thinking at the time, or at least a record of what I wanted to record for myself at that time. This is not always the same as how I remember those times. Overall, the entries show a familiar pattern of the ‘professional life cycle’ of a teacher (Huberman 1993; Sikes et al. 1985): excitement, anxiety and progress in learning to be a teacher for 3 or 4 years (with a few setbacks and important breakthroughs) and growing confidence followed by a sort of ‘plateau’ where progress and enthusiasm seem to level out and sometimes stall. Different teachers respond in different ways: some leave the profession, others seek and gain promotion away from the class, and others, like Judy and I, return to study, as we did with Masters in Education. I began mine in 1995, and it transformed the way I thought about my work and opened the way for me towards teacher education. About an experienced teacher by now looking elsewhere 14 May 1999: Letter came today from the University. They are going to interview me on 25th May – oh boy. I really would like that job. Need to prepare. 25 May 1999: Dressed up smart and went to university .... quite a pleasant day really. Sunny too. I like it there. Presentation and interview went alright .... mixed feelings. 26 May: Didn’t get the job. Later that year I got a different sort of teaching job at an alternative centre for special education (ACE), working with children identified as having emotional and behavioural difficulties. My job was to prevent exclusion in school and to work in the pupil referral unit with those who had been excluded. Often rewarding work but never easy. By 2003 I was looking at a job at X university; 2 May 2003: 44 today. Decided to apply for the S job. 22 May: Interview went well but no uni job for me. Not pushy enough.

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In 2004 I was enrolled at my old university on the EdD, still working at the ACE and doing some part-time undergraduate tutoring in teacher education. 3 March 2004: Education Studies session was really good. They (the students) worked hard, I taught well (I think), they seem a nice crowd. Bumped into PK who mentioned that there would be a job coming up in education studies  – I want it. 24 March: I did the big lecture today. Feel I did well .... pottered at the uni this afternoon. I’d love to work here. Time I moved on. I do hope I get an offer soon. I feel pretty much at home here. I’d love to have the chance to work here all the time. 21 April: I came here to room B110 (part time lecturers’ room) and wrote my diary. This is a nice place – Falmer. This is where I want to work. This is what I want to do – lecturing and research. Now I’m ready to do it. Now I can do it. I hope a job comes soon. This month. I hope I get it soon. Next month? Not sure I can face ACE again in September. 17 May: Session at ACE survivable. Mad as ever. Interview at uni was great. Got the job. Senior lecturer. Start in September. Everyone over the moon, especially me. I can hardly believe it myself. 12 June: Conference day at university. Morning preparing/reading. Went into uni about 1 pm and did it! Gave a paper. Talked to 20 people about ‘my research.’ Felt great. Everyone very friendly and kind. I’m so glad I got the job. I’m really looking forward to starting there in September. 16 July: Went in around 8 am for my last ever session at ACE. Hooray. It was pretty shit too. Kids fighting each other – having a go at me. Swearing and winding each other up. I’m very glad to be moving on. Got there in the end. We all did our best, I guess. Presents cards and speeches. What a place to say goodbye. With the exact science of hindsight from 2019, I am struck by how desperate I was to leave ACE. I don’t remember it as being that bad and yet it reads like somebody sinking. Linked to this struggle is the now clearly unreasonable and unrealistic set of expectations that I had of the job at university. The ‘me’ of 2004 reads like a boy seeing all his wishes come true in this fine place on the hill outside of town. He seems to think that being a teacher educator at a university will be rather like being a student again. I did see the university as a place to grow, to learn, to share my ideas and get paid for it too. What could go wrong? While I recognise also that there was some truth in this vision then, as there is now, and that all those things have actually happened to some extent, in the spring of 2004, I was clearly seeing and hearing what I wanted and, perhaps, needed to. The ‘other’ stories were there for me to see on my visits and in conversations with people who worked in the school of education at the time, but I focused on the positive and recorded the almost idyllic image in my diary. About beginning my career as a teacher educator 1 September 2004: Brand new day – a new dawn on a new day. My timetable looks busy. So, pleased to be at Falmer. I have such a lot of positive feelings

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about this place. Memories of success, change, happiness. It all feels good indeed. So glad I’m here. I’m going to get this right. 13 September: PGCE has started. 14 years ago, I was there (or here) myself. Tomorrow, I’ll be lecturing them. 14 September: ‘Conference’ for PGCE students all day in the old hall. Rain and wind came, and it was cold and dark. 150 students. The whole thing was like an evangelical meeting. Very mixed messages about not being trained but having to fit in ... (I think I meant the students when I wrote that in 2004, but it could equally have applied to me). My bit was pretty awful. I went through the stuff, but I was tense and nervous, and my mouth went dry. I couldn’t think straight and felt panic rising. Mumbled a bit – stumbled a bit – got through it in an amateur sort of way. After that it all got more and more strange and my heart sank slowly ... Came home feeling depressed and angry and inadequate. Like I wanted to break something. Not really sure why – my own lack of confidence I suppose. So – back down to Earth with a bump. Another mountain to climb, another person to make myself into, another thing to be worried about. I will have to address some of the issues raised in the lecture. How can we reconcile personal beliefs and feelings with being a teacher/lecturer? Can we be ourselves within that work? I thought this job would make that easier, but I think it might be even harder now. 26 September: Trying to finalise my plans for tomorrow and wondering how I got into all this. Nothing has gone wrong exactly. Things are fine but I feel frightened all the time. Felt like a panic attack in the afternoon but I came around later. Feeling out of my depth now and then. 27 September: I took the PGCE seminar group this afternoon. Got through it. Felt a bit painful  – some of them can see that I’m nervous. But I came on stronger later in the session. After all I know what I want to say (mainly) and I know my (old) job. I’ve got something to offer if they want to take it – even if I’m not very smooth. 1 October: Day at uni was calm and civilised. Started planning next week which should start to look a lot better now. This mad start has been a bit hellish – big lectures and a solid week – all a bit in the dark. 3 October: I sorted things and wrote my diary and resolved to take steps to calm down and get a grip and hold my nerve and show some faith and belief in myself. 12 October: Lecture for 200 BA students. Felt OK. Things seem much better than they were. A more settled and positive pattern of progress emerges in my diaries from this point. I appear to have cleared the turbulence for a while at least until the autumn of 2006 when another wave of dissonance arose in response to changing circumstances: being rather pushed into a minor management role, referred to above, before I felt ready to do it and with no time to study or write. There was to be

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another chapter in my own story before I returned to teacher education. The dream job slipped away. I just couldn’t be myself. Certainly, the journey of becoming continues. The ongoing challenge for me is always how to be the teacher educators that we want to be in the context that we find ourselves in. I think that first we need to know what sort of teacher educators we want to be. The question is simple, but it remains a challenge – perhaps the challenge for anyone who wants to study, develop and improve their own practice; Judy and I have both been asking that question of ourselves for some years now. It was not until I began studying myself as a teacher educator as part of my doctoral thesis that I really began to gain an understanding of teacher education. I took the narrative turn in coming to agree with Ricoeur (1984) that we actually are the stories that we tell about ourselves and others. I do not think that this is a straightforward or linear journey that comes to an end. I do not think that you reach a destination where you know everything there is to know about yourself or about teaching and learning. The process brings challenges and difficulties as well as insights and progress, but you need to be on that journey if you want to be, or want to keep being, any sort of teacher. Judy: As Mike says, the narrative ‘turn’ and process of writing brings new insights for both of us as our journeys of becoming continue. As I work on this duoethnography, new understandings continually emerge during the writing process about where I am at the moment on my professional journey. Mayer et al. (2011, 257) found that, while beginning teacher educators’ experiences as classroom teachers were the main reason they entered teacher education, as their careers progress, ‘many begin to reject the teaching and administrative tasks they had so willingly taken on to embrace research, sometimes moving out of the field of learning to teach as their focus of scholarship’. As my career as a teacher educator has progressed, I find that I am also increasingly moving towards a greater focus on teaching research and undertaking research supervision, with less and less inclination to teach undergraduates about teaching. As I will discuss in more detail in Chaps. 8 and 9, I have always held on tightly to the notion that I am a teacher as well as a teacher educator and have always highly valued my links to teachers and schools (see also Chap. 7). However, since my experiences of co-teaching (see Chap. 8), I have started to reflect more deeply on where my teaching past fits with my teacher educator future. I don’t believe that I am no longer relevant to today’s pre-service teachers, as my struggles with the notion of ‘currency’ have ultimately led me to see (see Williams et al. 2018), but I do sense a change in what I want to do as a teacher educator. As I work on this duoethnography, I am beginning to feel that my grip on the world of school teaching is starting to slip away and that my future in teacher education lies with mentoring teacher researchers who are driven to explore their practice and identity as teachers. The links to teachers, teaching, schools and children will never be broken, but I am coming to see more clearly how these links are beginning to change and are likely to continue to change into the future. Just as a river has numerous tributaries, which feed into it and enable the traveller to take a different turn and explore new opportunities, my professional life seems to be entering a new

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phase. My school teaching days were a necessary foundation to the work I am doing now and represent an essential part of my journey. However, the sight of new branches of the ‘river’ fills me with excitement and anticipation as I begin to explore what opportunities await me ahead.

∗∗∗ Mike: It was May 2016 and it had been a long day at work. Teaching my PGCE Education Studies group in the morning, which went well, and then a long, large meeting about the Research Excellence Framework (REF) in the afternoon, which didn’t. I came out of the PGCE session in the morning impressed by the positive ‘can do’ attitude of the students. We looked at some lesson plans in various subjects and then shared out some brief descriptive ‘thumbnail sketches’ of children with particular characteristics who might well be in the class. How would they adapt the plans, the environment and the resources to ensure that all the children were included? It’s a standard approach; I’ve been doing it for years with my students. It brings up all sorts of things as we discuss the principles, the issues, the aims and the practice of inclusive teaching through a fairly practical lens. Today, the students led the discussion about the ways in which teachers need to plan for all learners, not plan for most and then adapt for some, as I have suggested by introducing the task in the way I have. I am pleased to be put right on this. We talk about what the children in the ‘sketches’ might need based on good assessment. When we get to talk about the 10-year-old boy whose father has recently died, the group who were considering this scenario are very aware of the need to be open and supportive, to bear the situation in mind without making assumptions and imposing unnecessary differentiation. I’m moved by their thoughtful approach and their early recognition that trusting relationships are at the heart of well-being in teaching and learning. The groups considering the 6-year-old boy with ADHD and cognitive learning difficulties are equally thoughtful and offer some useful ideas for inclusion and allowing him space for learning in his own way. Easier said than done, of course, but their commitment is clearly genuine. The other groups are similarly positive and realistic, and there is a general consensus about how a diversity of learners can be a great resource as well as a challenge for teachers. As the session ends, I feel very pleased that people like these students are going into teaching, and I’m glad to have been part of the changes in attitude and practice that have happened since my brothers and I were at school. The meeting on the REF is disheartening and seems a long way from the meaningful engagement of the PGCE students. Lots of PowerPoint slides and emphasis on ‘impact’ and ‘outcomes’. It all seems a bit odd because the stated aim of senior management in my institution is to extend teaching-only contracts and to reduce staff costs by restricting research activity to externally funded projects. While contributions to the REF assessment exercise are encouraged, there is little management support for making this happen. There seems to be an assumption in the meeting that the only reason to write anything is to get it into the REF at ‘three star’ or above so that the university can be given research funds for the next 6 years. I can see the argument, but the REF criteria seem to be increasingly narrow in this meeting with ‘impact’ becoming a sort of repeated mantra. I go home after the meeting wondering if I ought to give up on writing altogether. Does anybody even read it? The next day: I’m in early, teaching at 9 am so need to check emails and get set up. The email I open first is from somebody I do not know in Pennsylvania. It answers the question that I drove home asking myself the night before: ‘I’ve just completed your book and wanted to send a quick note to say that I found it tremendously engaging and thought-provoking. Although I’m not new to research, I am new to self-study (in the past year or two) and I’ve been exploring various published examples of autoethnography and duoethnography - particularly those in teacher education.

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4  Becoming a Teacher Educator I found your stories about your and other teacher educators’ experiences to be so compelling. I got chills reading the paragraph about the children singing “Forgive our foolish ways.” Particularly unique about your book is how it/you invited me to join in the written conversation so to speak — As I read your text, I made notes in the margins, adding some of my own university/school/teaching/learning/childhood experiences to those you describe. Some of these notes were of memories that I hadn’t thought of in years! Thank you for a greatly enjoyable and meaningful reading experience! I will be looking up your recent papers listed on your webpage as well. I will also, hopefully, be able to incorporate your book into a future doctoral seminar on self-study in teacher education. With gratitude, Dr. Gwendolyn M. Lloyd Hermanowicz Professor of Teacher Education Penn State University College of Education’ My skin has that tinging feeling as I read the message. I read it more than once before I go off to teach my group. Smiling, ready to teach, with something to say, walking on air. Later that day I write an email to Gwen: ‘Thanks for taking the time to write to me and many thanks for your comments on the book. Very rewarding and good to hear. Just what I needed after a bit of a rough afternoon here yesterday. I’m always interested in how particular parts of people’s stories evoke particular responses in those who hear or read them and draw us into a sort of conversation, as you put it ...’ Looking back, apart from the immaculate timing, I can see that Gwen’s message confirmed a whole range of things for me about my role as a teacher educator – just as the PGCE students had the day before. In March the following year, I heard from Gwen’s students at Penn State who wanted to share their ‘reactions, connections, differences and questions’. There was a document with their writing attached: narratives in response to the book. Students telling their tales of education, highs and lows, struggles and triumphs ending ‘Thank you for providing us with the opportunity to connect with another reflective educator’s experience and to learn more about ourselves in the process’. I was really moved when I read the document, and I thought ‘if this isn’t impact, what is?’ so I sent it to our head of research. I met with him later in the week and asked him what he thought, but he wasn’t too impressed  – wrong sort of impact. That made me smile as well.

References Fitzgerald, A., Williams, J., & Parr, G. (Eds.). (2017). Narratives of learning through international professional experience. Singapore: Springer. Fitzgerald, A., Parr, G., & Williams, J. (Eds.). (2018). Re-imagining professional experience in initial teacher education: Narratives of learning. Singapore: Springer. Hayler, M., & Williams, J. (2018). Narratives of learning from co-editing, writing and presenting stories of experience in self-study. Studying Teacher Education, 14(1), 103–119. Huberman, M. (1993). The lives of teachers. London: Cassell. Mansfield, J. (2019). Pedagogical equilibrium: The development of teachers’ professional knowledge. Abingdon: Routledge.

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Mansfield, J., & Loughran, J. (2018). Pedagogical equilibrium as a lens for understanding teaching about teaching. Studying Teacher Education, 14(3), 246–257. https://doi.org/10.1080/1742596 4.2018.1541274. Mayer, D., Mitchell, J., Santoro, N., & White, S. (2011). Teacher educators and ‘accidental’ careers in academe: An Australian perspective. Journal of Education for Teaching, 37(3), 247–260. Murray, J., & Male, T. (2005). Becoming a teacher educator: Evidence from the field. Teaching and Teacher Education: An International Journal of Research and Studies, 21, 125–142. Plato, Hamilton, E., & Cairns, H. (1982). The collected dialogues of Plato, including the letters. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Richardson, L. (2000). Writing: A method of inquiry. In N.  K. Denzin & Y.  S. Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook of qualitative research (pp. 923–948). Sage: London. Ricoeur, P. (1984). Time and narrative (1). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ritter, J.K. (2006). The difficulties forging a teacher educator pedagogy: Transitioning from classroom teacher to teacher educator. In L. Fitzgerald, M. Heston & D. Tidwell (Ed.), Collaboration and community: Pushing boundaries through self-study (pp. 216–292). Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on the Self-Study of Teacher Education Practices [Herstmonceux Castle, UK]. Cedar Falls: University of Northern Iowa. Ritter, J.  K. (2007). Forging a pedagogy of teacher education: The challenges of moving from classroom teacher to teacher educator. Studying Teacher Education, 3(1), 5–22. Ritter, J. K. (2011). On the affective challenges of developing a pedagogy of teacher education. Studying Teacher Education, 7(3), 219–233. Russell, T., & Loughran, J. (Eds.). (2007). Enacting a pedagogy of teacher education. London: Routledge. Russell, T., & Munby, H. (Eds.). (1992). Teachers and teaching: From classroom to reflection. London: Falmer Press. Saito, E. (2013). When a practitioner becomes a university faculty member: A review of literature on the challenges faced by novice ex-practitioner teacher educators. International Journal for Academic Development, 18(2), 190–200. Sikes, P.  J., Measor, L., & Woods, P. (1985). Teacher careers: Crises and continuities. London: Falmer. Whitehead, J. (1989). Creating a living educational theory from questions of the kind, ‘How do I improve my practice?’. Cambridge Journal of Education, 19(1), 41–52. Williams, J. (2013). Constructing new professional identities: Career changers in teacher education. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers. Williams, J., & Hayler, M. (Eds.). (2016). Professional learning through transitions and transformations: Teacher educators’ journeys of becoming. Dordrecht: Springer. Williams, J., Ritter, J., & Bullock, S. M. (2012). Understanding the complexities of becoming a teacher educator: Experience, belonging and practice within a professional learning community. Studying Teacher Education, 8(3), 245–260. Williams, J., MaRhea, Z., & Barrie, F. (2018). Co-teaching as pedagogy: Negotiating pedagogical spaces in university classrooms. In D. Garbett & A. Ovens (Ed.), Pushing boundaries and crossing borders: Self-study as a means for researching pedagogy. Proceedings of the 12th International Conference of Self Study of Teacher Education Practices. Herstmonceux, UK. Wood, D., & Borg, T. (2010). The rocky road: The journey from classroom teacher to teacher educator. Studying Teacher Education, 6(1), 17–28.

Chapter 5

Policy and Educational Contexts of Teacher Education

Abstract  This chapter provides an overview of current policy contexts of teacher education in Australia and England. In a time of significant change in these countries, issues discussed include government policy, university teaching and research agendas, reviews and priorities, accountability mandates, the call for increased professional experience in schools, the shift to school-based teacher education and issues of teacher quality. All these forces have clear implications for the work of teacher educators in terms of teaching and accountability demands, teacher education curriculum and partnership/relationship building with stakeholders. Standards for teachers in Higher Education are also discussed, including how this is becoming manifest in international teacher education policy. Keywords  Educational policy · Accountability · Professional standards

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Mike: January 2020. Like everyone else around here I am a bit sick and tired of politicians and their policies following the recent general election in the UK. The 2019 election campaign was so dominated by BREXIT and the UK’s relationship with the European Union that the education policies of the various parties were hardly discussed. In fact, not much at all was ‘discussed’. There wasn’t much evidence of anyone listening to anyone else: people shouting in the street, politicians shouting in parliament. Lots of bickering on TV, point-­ scoring, what sounded like short-term policy rhetoric to win votes. So now that it’s all over with a large conservative majority I should take a look at the new government’s ‘Initial Teacher Training (ITT) Core Content Framework’ which was published in a rush in November 2019 ahead of the election. I didn’t even notice at the time and now I open the email that my friend and colleague, Keith Turvey sent to all the staff in our school of education a few weeks ago. There is a link to the framework1 with 5 core areas and links to the eight teaching standards. It has been developed by the eight members of an expert advisory panel, endorsed by the Education Endowment Foundation and will be inspected by OFSTED. I read through the eight sections thinking that it is long and detailed, feeling increasingly tired, and rather glad that I won’t be training to be a teacher next year. Keith has also provided a link to the British Educational Research Association (BERA)

 https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/initial-teacher-training-itt-core-content-framework

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© The Author(s) 2020 M. Hayler, J. Williams, Being a Teacher Educator in Challenging Times, Self-Study of Teaching and Teacher Education Practices 22, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-3848-3_5

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5  Policy and Educational Contexts of Teacher Education blog2 where eight specialists in teacher education, including Keith, have come together to voice their concerns about the new ITT framework that now represents the biggest shift in what those learning to teach in England will themselves be taught, since 1998. They are most concerned by the framework’s emphasis on ‘what works’ and the overly-simplistic memory-based learning outcomes. I agree with their point that the new framework appears to ignore the personal, emotional-affective and sensory-perceptual dimensions of learning, memory and recall, which is a practical as well as theoretical flaw with some potentially serious consequences for teachers and the children that they teach. The BERA blog argues that the new framework sets future teachers towards a ‘cul-de-sac of cognition’ and that it demands the close scrutiny of educational researchers as well as the teaching profession. I read some of the responses to the blog and the online article3 with the Department of Education statement that the biggest reform in a generation will ensure the ‘training new teachers receive is consistent, evidence-based and of the highest quality across each and every training provider.’ Later, I thank Keith for helping to create the blog and share it with staff. There hasn’t been much reaction, but someone in the school management team had seen it and agreed that there were some good points but it was time to move on and the new framework was the way forward: ‘There’s nothing we can do about it anyway’ they said, ‘we’ll have to implement the framework whether we agree with it or not. It’s a fait accompli.’ I couldn’t help wondering how it had come to this.

5.1  Introduction In this chapter we reflect upon some of the key shifts in policy that have influenced and shaped our experience of teacher education during our time in the profession. As Menter (2016, 3) argues, analysis and understanding of the changes in teacher education policy in any state system are ‘deeply revealing of the currently dominant values within that society’. We consider these changes through a range of perspectives beginning with our own experiences. The connections we make between policy and a number of narratives of experience, including our own, highlight what Stenhouse (1975) identified and Goodson (2013, 31) described as stories ‘of action within a theory of context’.

5.2  T  eacher Education Policy Landscape in Australia and England Judy: When I first began working in the university as a teacher educator, I was immersed in the policy discourse of schools and teaching, but not that of teacher education. I had no idea what framed my new occupation in terms of government

2  https://www.bera.ac.uk/blog/total-recall-the-ite-content-framework-research-and-teachers-understandingsof-learning 3  https://www.tes.com/news/teacher-training-framework-sets-bar-worryingly-low

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policy, university strategic goals and outcomes, nor had I yet encountered in schools the idea of professional standards for teachers. When I left primary teaching in the mid-1990s, the era of accountability was just beginning to encroach on the work of teachers, but I had no idea how this accelerating trend applied to teacher education. I cannot recall even consciously thinking about this or seeking the information out. Now, however, many of my conversations with colleagues and my leadership roles seem to revolve around our responses to the various accountability frameworks of teaching and research – in particular, the Australian Federal Government’s Teacher Education Ministerial Advisory Group (TEMAG) in 2014 (see TEMAG 2014), Australian Professional Standards for Teachers (APSTs) (see AITSL 2017), faculty performance standards and the Excellence in Research for Australia (ARC 2015) (see ARC 2015). Nowadays, these accountability measures are significant rapids to negotiate in the daily work of teacher educators. Whenever I read reports, journal articles or book chapters, or when I attend conference presentations about the state of teacher education in Australia, the discussion is often framed around these challenges and the implications they have for teachers and teacher educators. Even if the discussion is not based on these documents, reference is usually made in some way to these policy frameworks, particularly TEMAG (see below). For some reason, Australian education policymakers seem to look to our colleagues across the seas in the USA and the UK, like what they see, and before we know it, we are adopting ‘best practice’ from these countries. Mike: In contrast to Judy, educational policy was increasingly to the fore and eventually dominant in my time as a school teacher in England. The national curriculum was being written, rewritten and rolled out when I did my PGCE. The 7-year-olds in my first class in 1991/1992 were part of the first school cohort who were due to complete all stages of the formal curriculum throughout their schooling. As a newly qualified teacher, the appraisal of teachers through a particular framework of standards, which became compulsory in my first year, felt like a continuation of the course I had not long completed. The discussions with my head teacher in those days were never based on the Standard Assessment Tasks (SATS) or projected results for my class, but during the time I taught in schools, there was a growing prescription and proscription of content and methods of teaching and assessment from above as trust in schools and in teachers as decision-making professionals was undermined through a discourse of distrust and derision (Ball 1990). Forms of assessment became tools of control and surveillance as we all seemed to move towards the narrowing vision of test scores, achievement targets, league tables and accountability. A series of Acts that were passed in the UK in the 1990s demonstrate an intent to steer schools and teachers towards becoming a technical workforce that could be tightly managed and controlled rather than respected as autonomous professionals. The structural shift in schools continued to be from teachers’ accountability to ourselves, our pupils and their parents towards external bodies such as the Teacher Training Agency (TTA) and the Office for Standards in Education (OFSTED). Individual and collegiate creativity were framed more as a problem than an asset for schools in this scenario. But, as Whitty and Menter (1989) put it while considering

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the paradoxes of earlier neoliberal intervention in educational policy in England and Wales, the policies themselves illustrate a curious combination of moral authoritarianism on the one hand and economic libertarianism on the other through policies such as ‘local management of schools’ and ‘parental choice’ leading later to free schools and academies. Although several student teachers came to work and study in my class over the years, I was never very aware of what was happening in teacher education when I was a teacher in school. I made the students welcome, gave some advice and appreciated the chance to catch up with things while they shared the teaching. The university advisors came into the school to observe, assess and provide feedback in detail as they had when I had been a student teacher myself. The advisors seemed happy enough. They asked my opinion, but it was they who made the decisions about whether the students passed or failed the placement. I was even less aware of changes that were happening in policy in teacher education and how this was shaping teacher education during this period. From the outside, the university seemed like another world with more freedom and choice of pedagogy than the school environment. It looked like somewhere that would lead and frame educational policy rather than be told what to do by politicians. Later, I was to learn how deceptive appearances can be and to know that the previous 25  years had seen increasing political involvement in teacher education as the changing face of education had an increasingly direct effect upon it. This was accelerated in the 1990s with some of the most significant and challenging educational reforms of the decade taking place in the framework for teacher education itself in the shape of the introduction of a statutory national curriculum for the training and education of teachers (DfEE 1998). DfEE Circular Number 4/98 stated the standards that all ‘trainees’ must achieve to be awarded Qualified Teacher Status and the circular contained sections on ‘Pedagogical knowledge and understanding required to secure pupils’ progress’, ‘Effective teaching and assessment methods’ and ‘Trainees’ knowledge and understanding’ (DfEE 1998, 66). When I went to work at the university in 2004 and began to teach on the PGCE that I had taken as a student in 1990/1991, it became clear to me that this had been a period of significant change in teacher education. ‘You won’t recognise the PGCE’ said my former tutor, who was now a colleague. I could see the trace of the old course, but it was very different from what I remembered, and there was a lot more change to come. My colleague, Jan, remembered some of the problems and pressures that she had felt in schools pursuing  her into teacher education during the 1990s: Lots of the changes that happened in schools in the 80s and 90s seemed to filter through into teacher education … Over the next 18 months or so (following DFEE circular 4/98) things really turned on their head. We re-wrote the course and I found myself teaching the teachers to teach the literacy hour which I had run away from (Interview with Jan, 2007 quoted in my doctoral thesis 2009, 106).

Judy: As Mike has outlined, the accountability regime appears pervasive in both the UK and Australia, although I would argue that Australia is about a decade behind

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our UK colleagues. When I think about the accountability frameworks in which we are increasingly working, I am drawn to the work of Amanda Berry and Rachel Forgasz (2016, 2018), who examined the implications of this trend for teacher educators. I was pleased to learn that this exploration began for them in our edited book (see Berry and Forgasz 2016) and to see that their collaboration in the area continues today. Drawing on the work of Clandinin and Connelly (1996), they argue that frameworks such as professional standards for teachers (which have implications for the work of teacher educators) force teacher educators to present to the world in one way and to keep their alternate forms of knowledge about teaching and teacher preparation, which is always contextualised, situated, lived and relational (i.e. their secret stories), to themselves. They express fears about ‘increasing external accountability and control measures within our education work and that our tasks as [teacher educators] appeared more akin to those of service providers than professional educators’ (Berry and Forgasz 2018, 236). The metanarrative about the value of professional standards for teachers (the sacred story) is enacted in teacher education classrooms, even while teacher educators may provide a counternarrative based on their own professional judgement (their secret stories). The ‘cover story’ refers to how teacher educators construct a view of themselves as enacting the sacred story, even if they are also enacting their ‘secret story’. According to Berry and Forgasz (2018, 236), ‘This sets the scene for our argument about the increasing marginalisation of teacher educators’ own perspectives and voices in the (re)production of knowledge about teaching (the flattening of the landscape) and our challenge to teacher educators to publicly participate in articulating and sharing their professional knowledge of practice through self-­ study (the reshaping of the landscape)’. I find that the more I read about the idea of secret stories, the more troubled I become. I actually started working with Amanda, Rachel and others on their project, but withdrew because I was struggling with the notion of secret stories. What was my secret story in relation to teaching about the Australian Professional Standards for Teachers? I was immersed in teaching final year Bachelor of Education students at the time, and the unit I was teaching revolved around these very standards. Looking back, I am starting to see that, because of this immersion and the very rational and reasonable justification given to pre-service teachers for meeting these performance standards, I didn’t really have a strong objection to the work I was doing. There didn’t appear to be a secret story to discuss. Maybe I was comfortable with the sacred story. I am now starting to see that, perhaps, I was acting more as a teacher than a teacher educator. I was immersed in the language of schools and I was keen to help my pre-service teachers to complete their assignments, their practicum placements and their course successfully and to be in a good position to gain employment in a school (most job interviews for teaching are now based on their knowledge of and proficiency in the Standards). But, was I being critical enough of the Standards to enable them (the pre-service teachers) to take a critical stance on the world of teaching that they were about to enter, with all its accountability measures? Was I being too compliant and an unwitting accomplice to what Berry and Forgasz (2018, 238) describe as a:

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5  Policy and Educational Contexts of Teacher Education [V]iew of teacher education, [where teacher educators] are positioned as technicians, delivering externally prescribed outcomes, and kept accountable to these outcomes through externally imposed assessment measures. As a consequence, [their] knowledge becomes increasingly deprofessionalized, standardized, and deprivatized, leaving few private spaces and few opportunities for teacher educators to exercise either autonomy or professional judgment.

My struggle, when teaching about classroom practice, has always been between the desire to create spaces for critical dialogue with students and the need to ensure that they are adequately prepared to enact the sacred story at university and in their schools as they enter the teaching workforce. I try to do both but perhaps I had become more focused on compliance than on critical examination. This is the very dilemma articulated by Shuck et al. (2018, 16) when they lament the situation in Australia and the UK, whereby: Acquiescence is an inevitable result of a profession deprived of an appropriate discourse to challenge centralized control and the demise of autonomy its corollary. The tensions evident perhaps summarize the unenviable dilemma of teacher educators. Pre-service teachers, in order to be successful in their training, have to be taught using the Teachers’ Standards and produce evidence against these criteria … At the same time, teacher educators are academics and researchers, and as such are unlikely to hold a view on professionalism which excises critique and autonomy.

The work of Amanda and Rachel has prompted me to think more critically about the place of professional standards for teachers and their impact on my teaching. It has also given me the momentum to push back and not feel obliged to only do what the university and regulatory bodies require me to do. I will still teach what I need to teach but be less hesitant to question the sacred story and to empower pre-service teachers to push back too. I have come to see, through Amanda and Rachel’s research and my own self-study (see Williams et al. 2018), that critical conversations are essential in pre-service teacher education classrooms. Amanda and Rachel argue that one way in which teacher educators’ secret stories can be shared and valued, and seen as a process of knowledge production, is through self-study research. Perhaps duoethnography is another way in which the secret stories of teacher educators can be illuminated and acknowledged and become sites for research. Vignette: Amanda Berry and Rachel Forgasz Increasingly, our work argues for the re-valuing and public dissemination of teacher educators’ secret story knowledge about teaching and teacher preparation. While ‘sacred story knowledge’ comes from external sources such as policymakers and education researchers, ‘secret story knowledge’ comes from within; from the lived, experiential, localised, situated understandings of practice developed by teacher educators in the contexts of their work. In this sense, we propose that teacher educators’ secret story knowledge makes a unique contribution to the field of teaching and teacher preparation. Mike’s reflections on beginning work as a teacher educator confirmed our sense that, in Australia, teacher education policy follows the lead of the UK. The scenarios he encountered in the early 2000s mirror the current imperatives driving our programmes some 15 years later. Assuming this trend continues, today’s UK landscape promises a dystopian future in which teacher education is reduced to on-the-job-training of teacher-apprentices

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in schools. When teacher education is located entirely in schools, different forces determine what counts as knowledge about teaching and what kind of knowledge matters most. For example, learning to develop strategies for effective behaviour management and classroom ‘control’ can take precedence over learning to understand the complexities of classroom dynamics and the students who inhabit them. Self-study of teacher education practices (S-STEP) research by beginning teacher educators consistently reveals that transitioning from school teacher to teacher educator often transforms thinking about the nature of teacher professional knowledge and, consequently, about what matters most when learning to teach. These findings suggest that assigning practising school teachers to the concurrent role of teacher educator [in universities] may inhibit the development of this specialised, secret-story knowledge about teaching and teacher preparation, which might be described as teacher educator expertise. But, as Judy’s vignette powerfully demonstrates, locating teacher education in the university does nothing to safeguard teacher educator expertise either. Judy’s courageous questioning of her recent practice reflects several of our fears about the deprofessionalisation of teacher educators’ work in tightly surveilled, quality assurance contexts. First, as teacher educators, we may not even realise that our secret story knowledge is being squeezed out of the landscape. We may become so accustomed to the ways things are, that they feel normal, as though that is how things are. Second, because of a limited sense of agency and/or lack of space within our programmes, we aren’t able to change things even if we wanted to. Finally, Judy’s story gives rise to a crucial consideration for the future. That is, if today’s accountability imperatives are so insidious that an experienced teacher educator like Judy doesn’t even realise the impact on her professional judgement about how best to teach about teaching, new teacher educators are unlikely to understand the profession as anything other than accepting and reproducing sacred story knowledge about teaching and teacher preparation. Given all this, we wonder about the survival of teacher educator professionalism and expertise and about the implications for the future teaching of teachers.



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Mike: As the above vignette by Amanda and Rachel so clearly illuminates, we may not even recognise that our choices are being narrowed. Academic freedom seems far away for someone who is teaching a method and a philosophy that they profoundly disagree with but cannot change. In the past, there seems to have been more flexibility, although it could be argued that, like teachers, those working in teacher education were never very autonomous individually and that pressure has always been exerted by students, by institutions, by local authorities and by society as a whole. Indeed, as Maguire’s (2000) examination of UK teacher education in the nineteenth century demonstrates, state regulation of this area was not invented in the 1980s. When I came to study this in 2007, I was able to relate very closely to Peter Gilroy (Edwards et al. 2002, 1) as he concluded that his own professional life ‘consisted of negotiating a series of ambivalences – and indeed outright contradictions’ between what he professed in his teaching and writing and his actual experience and practice within teacher education. He describes an academic life, familiar to me and that Judy also notes above, that was at least partly shaped by the need to accommodate the fact that teacher education was being fixed into apparent certainties alongside work on the contingent and shifting nature of knowledge in professionalism and teacher education. Such sensations of dissonance arise in all professions in times of change but are rarely as apparent as they can be in teacher education where

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the articulation of beliefs about teaching and learning is (arguably) a central feature of the job. The sense of dissonance was further increased at my institution as we reorganised and rewrote a number of previously successful teacher education courses and modules to fit more comfortably within the ‘national framework of accountability’ (Furlong 2000, 15). Teacher education became ‘teacher training’ as students became ‘trainees’ in these documents, in accord with the official memos. The ‘culture of compliance’ that was identified by Menter et al. (2006, 50) was best exemplified for me in a staff meeting about changes to PGCE provision where a senior member of staff told us that we could ‘no longer hold onto’ our ‘principles’ and that we all needed to accept and implement the required changes. I’m still not sure that this is what she meant to say but it summarised the situation for me. At the same meeting, the leader of our English teaching team expressed strong disagreement, based on research and knowledge in the field, to the exclusive use of synthetic phonics for teaching young children to read while simultaneously explaining how the English team would be including the use of synthetic phonics in the new programme for students preparing to be teachers. When somebody asked why we were teaching the students a strategy that we had so little confidence in – and many argued was counter-­ productive – the head of school intervened to remind us that we had no choice as we could lose our government-agreed allocation of students if we failed to comply. It is true that these policies have been ‘de-coded’ and ‘refracted’ (Rudd and Goodson 2017) in differently complex ways through individual and institutional prisms. While the structures and documents changed significantly towards compliance, forms of resistance, accommodation and adaptation shaped the implementation of these changes in our own practice. Creative subversions notwithstanding, the overall effect of these policy interventions over time has been to fundamentally reshape teacher education in England into a largely school-focused enterprise. I realise now that my own appointment to the university in 2004 was part of this change because I benefited from the earlier policy specifications that emphasised the importance of ‘recent and relevant’ knowledge of schooling through experience in the recruitment of teacher educators. Like Judy, I was part of the generation of teacher educators who came straight from working in school. Murray and Mutton (2016, 61) remind us that while ‘the recent and relevant’ legislation has fallen into abeyance ‘the need for all teacher educators to have had experience of working in schools has become part of the “common sense” of recruitment in teacher education’ as practical and contemporary knowledge of teaching became central.

5.3  Professional Standards for Teachers Judy: The introduction of the APSTs has had a dramatic effect on how teachers in Australia are educated and assessed in both pre-service teacher education and once they enter the teaching profession. While I no longer have to meet these standards

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myself because I am not a practising teacher in schools, my teaching at the university is never far away from the permeating influence of the standards. As I discussed above, in our pre-service teacher programmes (undergraduate and graduate), all units of study incorporate learning outcomes that align with the professional standards for teachers, as do the practicum reports. Our ‘capstone’ assessment task, the Teaching Performance Assessment (TPA), involves final year students demonstrating how they meet the graduate standards (more on this below). Like Amanda Berry and Rachel Forgasz, I have no objection to the general idea of standards for teachers and teaching, but, after thinking more about the sacred, cover and secret stories, I am struggling with the idea of capturing these and codifying them in practice, especially in such a high-stakes assessment as the TPA. On the surface, they look relatively straightforward; for example: Standard 1 states that teachers should ‘know students and how they learn’ – of course, who could argue with that? Standard 3 states that teachers should be able to ‘plan for and implement effective teaching and learning’ – yes, surely this is the ‘bread and butter’ of teaching, but what does this actually look like in practice, when different teachers and learners are involved, in different contexts? I remember leading an activity several years ago with a group of graduate pre-­ service teachers in which we examined the APSTs and what they meant in terms of their practicum report (which was framed by the Standards). There was general agreement that they were reasonable and what most teachers would aspire to achieve anyway. But, as we looked more closely, I posed the question: Is anything missing? This was a real challenge for the students but, after a while, they started asking questions such as: Where is the focus on emotional, creative and ethical pedagogies? Well-being and welfare? How does demonstrating some of the standards ensure quality of learning (e.g. 3.3 ‘Use a range of teaching strategies’)? Is it even possible to codify the work of teachers, including what happens beyond the classroom in families and communities? Although this was a lively discussion, we soon moved back to looking at how the pre-service teachers were required to demonstrate their teaching ability against all 37 descriptors within the graduate standards – no room now for asking what was missing but, rather, the need to focus on evidence, data and compliance (and passing their upcoming practicum). As my career as a teacher educator has progressed, I have come to see how differently these standards are enacted by different people in different places. The premise for this book is that who is doing the teaching/educating in teacher education matters, as it makes a difference to what, how and why they teach. Surely, the same is the case for pre-service teachers. How do we reconcile the existence of professional standards and our need to assess pre-service teachers accordingly with the knowledge that each individual teacher enacts these standards in their own unique way in the various contexts in which they end up teaching? Is this perhaps my secret story emerging? And I wonder how long it will be before there are Professional Standards for Teacher Educators? Mike: ‘Anytime now’ would seem to be the answer to Judy’s question if we think about the curious way that educational policy seems to arrive in Australia after about 10  years of implementation in England with what appears to be a lack of

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critical scrutiny into how it is working in the UK. Among the key aims of the Higher Education and Research Act (DfE 2017), which set out a range of policy reforms in the UK’s Higher Education landscape, was the creation of a single regulator, the Office for Students (OfS), tasked to operate the new ‘Teaching Excellence Framework’ (TEF), with the stated aim of raising all undergraduate teaching standards in ‘recognising and rewarding excellent teaching’ (HEFCE 2016, 7). Based largely on evidence from sections of the National Student Survey (NSS), universities are given a ‘gold’ (outstanding), ‘silver’ (high-quality) or ‘bronze’ (satisfactory) rating in the TEF to be used as a public indicator of teaching standards and, from 2020, to determine whether they can raise their tuition fees. The TEF applies to all tutors in universities and presents a de facto set of vague teaching standards for all university teacher educators alongside those that apply to their students of teaching. This has already made a significant difference to the way things are being managed in my institution and, given the perceived consequences for schools of education of receiving a poor result in the TEF, it is likely to have an increasing influence on the organisation of all teacher education courses and teaching in the near future. The (school) Teacher Standards for England and Wales that were first introduced in 2012 have certainly had a dramatic effect on the structure of programmes and the assessment of students of teaching in my institution, but I am less clear on how this has directly influenced my own practice. As a new teacher educator, I was very concerned to model ‘good practice’ in my own teaching. For a while, this meant demonstrating approaches and techniques that could be used in the classroom and organising my lesson plans in a similar way to how I did it in primary school. Looking back, this seems both patronising and somewhat ridiculous but, to some degree, I had little else to offer at the time. I still think that modelling is important, but the key element to be modelled is the appropriate teaching for the appropriate learners. After all, as Korthagen et al. (2005) illustrate, as well as supporting student teachers’ learning about teaching, teacher educators also need to model the role of the teacher through their own teaching. I became increasingly uncomfortable with a ‘tips for teachers’, sharing of anecdotes and techniques approach and found that my own school-based experience was inevitably less recent and seemingly less relevant as time moved on. I had little to replace it with at that point. Working with a number of colleagues and beginning to study theories of learning and teaching in some depth helped, but I lost confidence, felt like a fraud and, as explained earlier, eventually quit my job. As also discussed earlier, completing a Doctorate gave me confidence to return to teacher education in 2008 with an applied theory approach that involves resistance to the increasing infantilisation of teacher education. The Teachers’ Standards and policy initiatives such as The importance of teaching (DfE 2010) and Education, excellence, everywhere (DfE 2016) have had a definite effect on the way that my institution presents itself, on where students are based, and the structure of courses. The university tutors’ input on the PGCE was reduced by 50 per cent in 2014, but we developed new ways of being ‘creatively subversive’ (Myhill 2008) or developing the ‘secret stories’ in the quality of our content. As Myhill argued, while subject knowledge

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and intellectual ability are important for all teachers, they are not sufficient in themselves because the crucial ingredient is the ability to reflect on one’s own practice and then to change it. Like many others, I have adopted a healthy scepticism towards national policy initiatives and advise my pre-service teachers to neither passively comply with government initiatives nor directly refuse to implement them: they should be creatively adapted to allow us all to be as near to the teachers that we want to be in the contexts in which we find ourselves.

5.4  Performance Standards for Academics Judy: Performance standards do not only apply to teachers in schools. In regular meetings with my professional development supervisors, my goals and achievements in Education (teaching) increasingly have to be framed by the University and Faculty’s academic performance framework in research, teaching and service/leadership. I have no objection to the notion of high professional standards, but I find it challenging to explicitly articulate my work in relation to these. While I can easily talk the language of teacher professional standards, I find it more challenging to capture the complex nature of my academic work in terms of ‘evidence’ and ‘outputs’ – what do these standards look like in practice? Perhaps it is the language of accountability and compliance in the context of teacher education that creates the real difficulty for me. As we have discussed in previous chapters, the literature illustrates how complex the work of teacher educators is and that they (we) have a broad range of roles and responsibilities that require a diverse and sophisticated set of knowledge, skills and dispositions. Ping et al. (2018) remind us that not only do we have to know about teaching as a discipline (the content) but also how to teach it (our distinct, personal and communal pedagogies). This teaching is not only undertaken in the classroom, but in our roles as mentors, supervisors and leaders. We need to be constantly mindful of our own practices and learn to develop these through reflection and collaboration. Just as the APSTs could be interrogated in relation to what was missing, perhaps the same can be said about the academic performance frameworks within which we work. Do they capture the entirety of our work, including our specific knowledge base and expertise as teachers of teachers? The latest development in performance assessment of education (teaching) standards is the instigation of peer review of our teaching. As part of our new performance metrics in relation to promotion and applications for sabbatical, all teaching staff in the university have to undergo a peer assessment which will involve formative and summative evaluation of their teaching. The criteria have been established, but those who have undergone this evaluation recently have not been provided with these criteria. Also, I am not sure what ‘summative’ evaluation means in this context – a mark out of 10 perhaps? I almost laugh at this idea until I recall a recent conversation with a teacher who is subjected to this type of evaluation in her current school. As someone who has been a teacher for the best part of 40  years in one

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context or another, I find this slightly insulting. It is presented as a professional learning opportunity and I have no issue with that concept. However, as usual, the devil is in the detail. The best form of professional learning that I have participated in is self-study of my practice, and conversations and collaborations with others in our quest to continually improve our teaching. I am comfortable with formative discussion of my teaching, but I am wary of the evaluation by others who know little or nothing about what makes me, me. The readers of this book will know more about me than my future evaluators will, as they attempt to ‘tick boxes’ in regard to the ‘standards’ I display. I wonder if they will take into account my Dean’s Award for Teaching Excellence from a few years ago. Another challenge for me is the idea of long-term goals: Where do I want to be in 3–5 years’ time? What is my research ‘narrative’ for the next 3 years? The university seems to assume that all its employees frame their future professional lives around a carefully constructed vision. For someone who is goal-orientated and has a clear view of their professional future, this is no doubt an exciting challenge to set themselves. However, I find that most of my career trajectory has been more or less serendipitous (as I have outlined in previous chapters) and that much of my research agenda has been exploratory and often the result of casual conversations, of taking advantage of unforeseen opportunities and of thinking and reflection on what has past and how this can be developed into the future. As Mike and I shared in Chap. 1, this book was the outcome of reflections and conversations between us and with others, rather than a long-term plan. Such developments are hard to present in a performance plan about strategic goals – I can say where I have come from, but not always where I am going. Just as teachers in schools are increasingly subjected to accountability regimes, the accountability of academics and academic programmes appears to be on an ever-increasing upward trajectory, and each time I engage with it, I feel a little more energy seep away from me as I consider the implications of this for my work. Am I undertaking a particular research project or approach to teaching because it is essentially good and useful or because it fits comfortably with the current metanarrative about what effective teacher education should be? The journey of becoming a teacher educator is one of navigating and reconciling the ‘should dos’ with the ‘want and need to dos’ – not that they are always in conflict, but how much of our professional lives are now dominated by the need to satisfy imposed standards rather than our own standards of practice developed over years of experience as teachers and teacher educators? This is perhaps another example of Berry and Forgasz’s (2018) ‘flattening of the landscape’. Mike: The UK’s school results of recent years were described by the OECD director as ‘flat in a changing world’ (Schleicher cited in Pells 2016), and it can certainly be argued that this is the result of teachers and schools responding to externally imposed measures and ‘teaching to the test’ in order to provide required results (Rudd 2017), and it can also be argued that we are in danger of seeing a similar pattern in the pedagogy and practice of the HE sector, including teacher education, if the TEF becomes the central determinate for ‘excellence’ and the distribution of funding to universities. However, we have choices to make in teacher education.

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With the sector under pressure, if not, as Berry and Forgasz warn above, erasure through the various waves of reform, we need to decide where we stand and what we believe in. As further discussed in Chap. 8 on teacher education pedagogy, my analysis of my own experience brings me to stand by the belief that my intention must be to generate a dialogic approach in my teaching and assessment that promotes critical reflection. Such an environment of learning has the potential to encourage students of teaching to examine their own contexts and to make progress in developing their own critical pedagogy. The approach creates challenges and discomfort but also opens up creative possibilities for the renewal of my work. As I write, we are between visits from OFSTED (Office in Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills) in the school of education where I work. The inspectors came earlier in the year. They visited schools, met with students, left a largely positive report with points for improvement and will soon return to see how we have implemented these points into our work. There is a team of people who have been taken off teaching to coordinate this process full time. They contact and speak with individual staff members as necessary and tell them what they need to do. I keep wondering if they will call me in and ask me about what I teach and how I teach it, and I wonder how I will respond. How will I share my own ‘secret story’ about the Contemporary issues in teaching and learning module that I have been co-leading and teaching? I can make the academic case and the pedagogical case; student evaluations are very positive. But the teachers’ standards? How am I negotiating those rapids? I’ll need to trace and follow a channel through the rocks of statuary requirements where the broad statements of the standards can be an advantage. I can argue that the ‘high expectations which inspire, motivate and challenge pupils’ (Standard T1) are best encouraged by the problem-solving self-study approach; the ‘good progress and outcomes’ (T2) need to be understood and applied in a variety of ways that go beyond the SATs and the other summative tests and examinations. I also have what currently seems like the advantage of working outside of a particular curriculum subject area; my area is education studies, and pedagogy. As we saw in Chap. 2, Pinar (1994) explains that curriculum (Currere) is essentially an issue of life history and identity: we are shaped as teachers by our values and ideas because we find and form and develop our pedagogy through our interaction and engagement with our students and the subjects that we teach. I will argue that our module promotes and helps to develop this essential element of becoming a teacher (T3). Part of the ‘what happened’ section of the module brings students back to lesson plans to consider the structure of a session (T4) and how the plans can be adapted and reshaped to include all learners in a classroom (T5). Perhaps T6 ‘make accurate and productive use of assessment’ is the standard that is most closely related to the module and to the self-study approach as the module aims to encourage meaningful self- and peer formative assessment. We aim to encourage students to focus on their own learning trajectory rather than continually compare themselves with others, which can promote a learning-orientated rather than performance-­ orientated sensibility (Dweck 2000). The students learn through their own experience that when assessment is formative it has the potential to contribute to a learning

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identity for students of all ages, which moves away from the fixed mindset and a view of learning as being about tests alone. This offers a potential way out of the downward spiral for many learners as something that can refocus attitudes towards assessment because it becomes something that can help one learn rather than a process that highlights difficulties alone. As Judy puts it ‘what’s not to like’ about the teachers’ standards? Judy: In addition to the standards and other ‘outputs’ that we have to achieve is a somewhat surprising rapid we have to negotiate: the value placed on student evaluations of our teaching. I discuss this in more detail in Chap. 8, but recent experience (see Williams et al. 2018) has provided me with a powerful reminder of how destructive this system can be. I have usually received ‘very good’ to ‘excellent’ teaching evaluations, which often include constructive critique about how a unit could be improved. However, I was horrified to receive negative personal feedback for a unit that was central to a collaborative self-study that I undertook with my teaching colleagues, Zane (a fellow teacher educator) and Fiona (a school teacher). Some of the students commented that my pedagogical relationship with Fiona was ‘uneven’, ‘controlling’, made them ‘uncomfortable’, and was even ‘disrespectful’ to her, whereas the evaluation of the co-teaching of Zane and Fiona was ‘outstanding’. One student wrote that the co-teaching arrangement for the first 6 weeks of the unit was ‘awkward for all pre-service teachers in the class’. They suggested that I ‘overpowered’ Fiona and that ‘we related better to [Fiona] who was being cut off and wasn’t getting a say’. This student wrote that the second half of the unit, when Zane took over from me, was ‘already outstanding’. They were enjoying the classes much more and ‘gaining a better pre-service teacher/uni lecturer relationship’. There was apparently a much better classroom environment ‘rather than a “classroom/overpowering” vibe’. This student concluded by recommending that if the co-teaching arrangement was to continue, then I need to give Fiona ‘equal say and respect and not treat all the pre-service teachers in the class like they are in a primary class’. Much has been written about the efficacy of student evaluations of academic work (e.g. Hornstein 2017; Stark and Freishtat 2014), but my recent experience of negative feedback from students in relation to my co-teaching demonstrated just how powerful an effect these comments can have. I likened my reaction (as opposed to response) to the seven stages of grief. It really did feel like I was going through a grieving process, trying to make sense of what was happening. Perhaps this goes back to my fear of judgement and ridicule explored in Chap. 3, but the comments had an impact that surprised and concerned me. No doubt there are several versions of the grieving process, but this one captured my feelings very accurately (Recover from grief.com. n.d.): 1. Shock and denial. When I first read comments that stated I was ‘disrespectful’ and ‘controlling’ in relation to Fiona, I was really shocked and quite defensive. I have never thought of myself as controlling and have always been mindful of showing respect to others. The suggestion that the students would have preferred to listen to Fiona more than me was also a shock. I re-read the comments

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3.

4.

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n­ umerous times, hoping to see them differently – maybe I had misread or misinterpreted them? But every time I read them, the blow seemed to be harder. Pain and guilt. I am not sure about guilt, but I definitely felt pain. I was also embarrassed to think that I had been the instigator of the co-teaching arrangement, only to end up being the least successful participant (at least in the eyes of many of the students). Anger and bargaining. As the pain continued to bubble under the surface, the anger began to grow, and I started to justify my teaching. I tried to contextualise the situation: ‘Yes, but the students weren’t aware of …’ ‘It’s not as easy as they seem to think …’ ‘I had a different perspective to that of Fiona …’. Depression, reflection and loneliness. I wasn’t depressed, but certainly unhappy, and the pain lingered for longer than I expected. Each time I thought about the comments, I felt sick in the stomach. I tried to reflect but kept these thoughts to myself, too embarrassed to share them with my co-teaching colleagues other than on a very superficial level. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. At the beginning of our co-teaching arrangement, Zane mentioned that she was afraid of becoming the ‘third wheel’ because Fiona and I already knew each other. As it turned out, I became the third wheel and felt somewhat lonely and ostracised within the triangle. The upward turn. It took around 6  months before I could approach thinking about my experience with any sense of clarity. I began to ask myself ‘What can I learn from this?’ Undertaking the self-study brought some issues to the surface, and these are documented in our paper, but my personal feelings of grief were still kept below the surface until I presented the findings at the Castle Conference in 2018. This was the first time I had publicly expressed my pain, and, fortunately, I received some comforting support from several people at the session. Reconstruction and working through. I continued co-teaching with Fiona in the semester after I received the negative feedback and tried to put in place some changes to avoid any suggestion of control or disrespect. I elaborate more on this in Chap. 8. When I received the semester 2 evaluations, I was pleased to receive positive feedback with no mention of me being the lesser teacher in the co-­ teaching arrangement. Acceptance and hope. I have made some changes to my pedagogy in relation to the initial feedback, and I genuinely think that these are good changes to make (see Chap. 8). However, I still get an uneasy feeling when I think about how anonymous student evaluations are valued by the university and the effect they can have on some academics. As a course leader, I have counselled many staff who have received demeaning and judgemental comments from students. I was recently informed by one staff member that she doesn’t look at the evaluations until the end of the teaching period, and then only after someone else has read them for her. Her fear is palpable. Why? To what extent can we be judged by students as effective when they are responding to university-designed questions that purport to sum up what quality teaching looks like? There must be better ways to interrogate – in a more collegial and constructive way – our pedagogy with our students.

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Mike: I can relate to all of Judy’s points in reaction to student evaluations and the NSS. They seem to have grown in value and importance since I first joined the university, especially so in the last few years. This is understandable in the context of neoliberalism and marketisation of higher education. Because students are now being positioned as consumers, it surely follows that faculty staff become ‘providers of services’ who need to know ‘what the customer wants’. This shift in emphasis and shift in power has been one of the biggest changes in my time working at the university. By way of an example: senior management worried that the Year 2 undergraduates might not like being told to do any reading and concerned that they might respond with negative evaluations, followed by negative comments on the NSS, which would push our institution further down the league table. Or, another example, when, several years ago, the tutors decided and agreed to move from providing printed readers to online reading material for all students. It made sense on many levels: environmental, technological, accessibility and equity. There were some disadvantages, but that’s what we decided to do, and it became the agreed policy. A sizeable amount, but by no means all students, did not like online reading and objected to the expense of printing things out. The students got together and coordinated evaluations and feedback to reflect this dissatisfaction. The policy was changed. Rudd (2017, 66) challenges the claims that the NSS itself gives students any meaningful ‘voice’: [T]the approach taken overlooks a rich body of research and literature that explores and explains that meaningful engagement requires student involvement in agenda setting and co-constructed and fully participatory activities. Student voice activities should also result in outcomes that are valued and useful to the students themselves, not merely provide an opportunity to respond to a limited, structured set questions based on agendas devised and set by others, especially those which have not been endorsed by the wider HE community. Clearly the potential outcomes arising from participation in the TEF and NSS may actually be seen as detrimental to students.

‘You said … we did’ reads the by-line on one area of each of our Student Central course webpages. This is where the course management team shows how they have responded to past student feedback and comment. It reminds me of when I worked in the carpet shop and the manager told me that ‘the customer is always right’. I worked hard over the years to get to a place where those sorts of sentiments were less prominent. I try to avoid being holier than thou, pompous, or too old fashioned, but I can’t help feeling the corrosive effect of all this on my own work. At certain times of the year, for example, students always asked me and other tutors for copies of last year’s assignments to help them to write this year’s submission. We have always agreed, as a staff, not to provide these to students. We are not being mean; we discuss the assignments, share some extracts, consider the criteria and possible structures and help students to make plans to write their own. This seems like an appropriate approach in higher education. We were recently told that we should provide full-length, anonymised, examples of a ‘poor’, ‘good’ and ‘very good’ assignment, written by students from previous years of the course with feedback from tutors for each module on the course. We were told that this would allow

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students to ‘do their best work’. This does not sit well with me, and I do not think that it will allow students to do their best work. I have made these points a number of times as we wait for a final decision from the school management ‘board’ – as they are now called. The student evaluations also increasingly seem to be linked to performance management of staff in the name of rigour. But the validity of this as a method of measuring teaching competence and effectiveness has been examined, challenged and shown to be weak for decades across the world (Adams 1997; Hornstein 2017; Kelly 2012; Stark and Freishtat 2014; Wright 2006). The evaluations are shaped by particular questions that commonly define ‘effective teaching’, despite the absence, as Judy describes so clearly above, of any consensus of what ‘effective teaching’ actually is. I think student voices matter – no really, I do. We need to know how students are responding to the way that we are working with them; but this needs to go beyond the ‘trip advisor’ survey, encapsulated by the spin of ‘you said, we did’ to engage through a genuine dialogue and discussion. I have tried to do this through formative assessment that includes reflection and discussion of the module itself. Part of the ‘what’s happening/what happened?’ approach that I encourage includes ‘what’s happening/what happened to me?’ Various forms of self-study are certainly the best way forward with this. The aim in this context is not just to find out what the students think but also to explain my reasons for doing what we are doing in the way that we are doing it. From there, I can try to explain, to listen and to adapt what I do  – at least to some extent. Isn’t that what good teachers do?

5.5  Frameworks for Effective Teacher Education Judy: As mentioned above, in Australia, the TEMAG (2014) report has provide a significant jolt to teacher education providers across the country. It has since become one of the most challenging areas to negotiate in Australian teacher education. It is a wide-ranging report that sets out the parameters of where the government believes the provision of teacher education should or aspire to be. Some in teacher education, no doubt, consider the TEMAG report as a long-awaited blueprint; others consider it as yet another intrusion into the freedom of universities and academics to provide the education that they believe is best suited to their pre-service teachers. I sit somewhere in between. I don’t object to governments setting out broad objectives for publicly funded education, and I don’t have a problem with a certain level of accountability on the part of universities (or schools) or academics and teachers. I do, however, object to education providers, whether they be schools or universities, and their staff, being instructed on how they should be undertaking their complex and demanding work. Broad frameworks are fine, but let the professionals make the local decisions about how these goals should be achieved. Sameness and uniformity don’t necessarily lead to higher levels of performance. And is teaching and learning about ‘performance’ anyway?

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Many would say it is now. At first glance, it is hard to disagree with the recommendations of the advisory group (another sacred story?): national accreditation of programmes (fine, as long as differences between the six states and two territories of Australia are acknowledged); rigorous accreditation requirements (yes, we all want high-quality courses); appropriate entry standards (again, yes, we want the most suitable people to become teachers, but how do you define and identify who is ‘suitable’ for teaching? Should they be suitable before they enter the course or when they leave it?); an integrated system in which universities and schools work together in the education of teachers (agreed, but the challenge is in how to do this); graduate teachers need to be ‘classroom ready’ (of course children in schools need to have competent and well educated teachers, but, again, how is this defined and assessed?); and high-quality research about learning and teaching should underpin all programmes (yes, but whose research matters and why?). As university academics, it is our role to undertake this research, and this is a central focus of our work. The TEMAG report (2014, xiii) states: ‘Better evidence of the effectiveness of initial teacher education in the Australian context is needed to inform innovative programme design and delivery, and the continued growth of teaching as a profession’. No argument there. Mike and I have spent almost a decade working in and studying teacher education, but I am not sure that the self-study community’s uncovering of the complexity, diversity and collective expertise in the teaching of teachers is exactly what the authors of the TEMAG report are wanting to see. The neoliberal agenda of the early 2000s is clearly evident in the TEMAG report, with measurement and accountability at the heart of the document. This mirrors the trend in schools, where the national assessment programme – literacy and numeracy (NAPLAN) (see NAP 2016) – has been adopted to ensure an improvement in student learning. Predictably, this has not been the outcome, with Australia’s performance in many areas stagnating or even declining. As some have observed, ‘you can’t fatten the pig by weighing it’. The TEMAG (2014, xii) report states that ‘there needs to be greater assurance that all initial teacher education programmes are being rigorously assessed to guarantee the quality of graduates’. Quality assurance mechanisms are now in place in universities to undertake these accountability measures, but I wonder to what extent this enormous shift of resources into measurement actually takes resources away from the teaching programmes that are supposed to lead to improvement in outcomes? Assessment of programmes, and of student learning, is essential, but to what extent are we going through tick the box exercises to show compliance, rather than putting the energy into developing and teaching high-­ quality programmes and effective assessment and feedback? The TEMAG report heralded a significant shift in the responsibility for the education of teachers from universities to a shared responsibility with schools. The tone of the document is that teacher education programmes in Australia had to ‘lift their game’ and provide a greater connection between theory and practice. The only way they could do this was for universities to work much more closely with schools in ‘structured and mutually beneficial partnerships’ (TEMAG 2014, xiii) to ensure the classroom readiness of graduate teachers. The centrality of professional experience (practicum) was highlighted, and other opportunities for integration of theory and

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practice were encouraged. Again, it is hard to argue with this premise. We discuss this in more detail in Chap. 7, but the move to work more closely with schools and teachers creates an interesting tension for us as teacher educators. Mike and I are both former primary school teachers and have extensive years of experience in that role. Now, as teacher educators, we are being told that our experience is not enough and, perhaps, no longer relevant – we need to work with ‘real’ teachers in order to adequately prepare our students for their entry into the teaching profession. What does this say about the currency of experience of teacher educators and the tension between our experience as teachers and our expertise as teacher educators (pointed out so clearly above by Amanda Berry and Rachel Forgasz)? There are extensive programmes in a range of universities that attempt to bridge the apparent divide between schools, universities and other educational contexts (see Chap. 7). Are these partnerships not good enough? How do we measure these programmes and compare their effectiveness in relation to each other? The TEMAG report mentions, on more than one occasion, that there is a lack of public confidence in teacher education and the quality of teachers in our schools. However, it doesn’t present any actual evidence of this, other than to say that ‘it is clear that there is significant public concern over the quality of initial teacher education in Australia. This concern is intensified by both media comment and political intervention’ (TEMAG 2014, xi). Media comment and political intervention are certainly part of the educational landscape in Australia – both in relation to the ‘not good enough’ agenda, but also, surprisingly, increasingly in defence of teachers, as some media commentators begin to expose the complexity and value of the work of teachers. Mike: So much of the Australian TEMAG report echoes the various reports and initiatives that emerged from The Importance of Teaching (DfE 2010). In this UK government white paper, Michael Gove, the Secretary of State for Education, made the position and intention of his Department of Education clear: We know that teachers learn best from other professionals .... We will reform teacher training so that more training is on the job, and it focusses on key teaching skills including teaching early reading and mathematics, managing behaviour and responding to pupils’ special educational needs. (DfE 2010, 19-20)

From here a number of DfE circulars and OFSTED advice instructed university schools of education to make changes to the structure and content of teacher ‘training’ courses. This led very directly to the change in the PGCE course that I have been part of for 14 years in moving from approximately 40 per cent to 70 per cent student time based in school. The students would now complete three rather than two school-based practicums (or placements), and school-based mentors, rather than university tutors or advisors, would take the lead on the assessment of their success or otherwise. My own work on the PGCE course had previously involved an Education Studies module in two parts: a combination of lectures and seminars for 10  weeks prior to placement, followed by another 10 seminar sessions when the students returned from placement later in the year. Themes for the sessions included ‘how children learn’, ‘building relationships’, ‘teaching and learning in a social context’, as well as sessions with a more practical, though still theoretically

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informed, emphasis, such as ‘assessment for learning’, ‘including all learners’, and ‘managing behaviour’. The team I led saw these as key elements that were needed in the education of teachers. As Lewin (1952, 169) said, ‘there is nothing more practical than a good theory’. We didn’t promote one theory in any of these areas in an unquestioning or detached-from-practice way but, rather, introduced a number of ideas and discussed how these could and have influenced schools, curriculum and pedagogy. At the heart of this work was the notion of developing a reflective pedagogy that included thinking, feeling and action (theory, reflection and practice). On the new version of the PGCE from 2011, the education studies part of the course was significantly reduced to just seven sessions and more tightly directed through the course leader. The argument (and there was an argument) was made by management that following introduction from us, ‘follow-up’ was best pursued in school where students could ‘make sense’ of some of the ideas and apply them in practice. We were given some very specific areas that needed to be addressed and ‘guidance’ on what must be covered in the module. There was very little space for theory of any sort in this ‘turn’ to the practical (Cochran-Smith 2016). The ‘secret stories’ of teacher educators’ expertise and professional knowledge were squeezed out, as explained above by Amanda Berry and Rachel Forgasz, and further illustrated through Judy’s narrative and discussion of her own experiences. Exploration and discussion of theory now belonged in either the BA (Hons) Education (non-­ Qualified Teacher Status – (QTS)), which could be a precursor for teacher training on the PGCE, or the post-graduate MA (Ed) modules that many practising teachers came back to do while working part-time (as Judy and I had in previous years). Colleagues who noticed and cared found it difficult to resist these changes that were being made in the name of ‘conformity’ (with national policy and legislation), ‘consistency’ (with other institutions and across our own provision) and, often, ‘reality’ (theory and critical reflection were indulgences that we could no longer afford).

∗∗∗ Judy: I am the Courses Leader for the Bachelor of Education (Primary) and Master of Teaching (Primary and Early Childhood/Primary) specialisations. I have held this role for nearly five years, and this is the second time I have been involved in course rewriting and accreditation. The four-year degree course barely has time to run a full cycle before we are obliged by the government to review, revise and rewrite it in order to satisfy the latest iteration of criteria developed to ensure ‘best practice’ in teacher education. I hate the term ‘best practice’ and never use it in my own discussions of education. Who determines what is ‘best practice’? And, if it is ‘best’ practice, then it suggests there is no room for improvement. I am sitting in a meeting with a small group of key staff (academic and professional), and we are going through the proposed course maps for the new course to ensure that they are compliant in terms of overall course objectives, that assessment tasks match the unit objectives, that every graduate standard has been ‘taught, practiced and assessed’ and that there is some degree of coherence across the whole course. Worthy aims, no doubt, but my mind goes back to a team meeting I had that same morning with staff who teach in the Primary education courses. One staff member asked about the reaccreditation process and commented that he had not been involved in the development of new courses for over ten years. He lamented that we used to have whole staff discussions and input into these things, but not anymore. Now, most staff know little to nothing about it other than to write unit

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outlines in ridiculously short periods of time without much knowledge of the other units are being written at the same time. Another staff member in the meeting asked to see a copy of the new course map. I couldn’t show him because it is still in draft form and subject to change. I felt like I was keeping some sort of state secret. The people attending this meeting have a huge amount of experience, expertise and knowledge to contribute to the course rewrite, but the main focus is on just getting it done and making sure we are ‘compliant’ with accreditation requirements. Relatively few staff are directly involved in the process. The faculty even employs a full-time accreditation manager as well as a data analyst – both excellent in their work, but a sign of the times, perhaps? The input of academic staff, who are all former teachers, appears to be utilised less and less, and, as a course leader and member of the decision-making group, I feel in some ways a bit of a traitor to my peers. I too remember when we used to have full-day workshops, with lively discussions about what our courses were about (the ‘vision’), what should be taught and how. Now, it is increasingly a tick the box exercise. Another example, perhaps, of a ‘flattening of the landscape’ in teacher education?



∗∗∗

As we have both acknowledged and illustrated in this chapter, the policy contexts of our work as teacher educators have a significant influence on our professional lives and selves. Sometimes policy frameworks can provide a useful compass and become a strong current to help us along our journey; at other times they become rapids and obstacles that need to be negotiated, worked with and, sometimes, pushed back against. However, they are always there, sometimes clearly seen in the distance; at other times, lurking underneath to surprise us. As we (and others) have argued, the challenge is to identify these obstacles, reflect on what they mean for us personally and as a profession, and to make choices wherever we can, to ensure that the direction and purpose of our journey remains as authentic to our values as possible.

References Adams, J. V. (1997). Student evaluations: The ratings game. Inquiry, 1, 10–16. AITSL. (2017). Australian Professional Standards for Teachers (APSTs). In We’re here for teaching. https://www.aitsl.edu.au/. Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACRA). (2016). Home. National Assessment Programme (NAP). https://www.nap.edu.au/. Australian Research Council (ARC). (2015). Excellence in Research (ERA 2018). Australian Government. https://www.arc.gov.au/excellence-research-australia/era-2018. Ball, S. (1990). Politics and policy making in education: Explorations in policy sociology. London: Routledge. Berry, A., & Forgasz, R. (2016). Becoming ourselves as teacher educators: Trespassing, transgression and transformation. In J. Williams & M. Hayler (Eds.), Teacher educators’ journeys of becoming (pp. 95–106). Cham: Springer International Publishing. Berry, A., & Forgasz, R. (2018). Disseminating secret-story-knowledge through the self-study of teacher education practices. Studying Teacher Education, 14(3), 235–245. Clandinin, D. J., & Connelly, F. M. (1996). Teacher stories – Stories of teachers – School stories – Stories of schools. Educational Researcher, 25(3), 24–30.

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Cochran-Smith, M. (2016). Foreword. In Teacher education in times of change, The Teacher Education Group x-xvi. Bristol/Chicago: Policy Press. Department for Education. DfE. (2010). The importance of teaching. White Paper, London: DfE. Department for Education. DfE. (2016). Education, excellence, everywhere. White Paper, London: DfE. Department for Education (DfE). (2017). The Higher Education and Research Act (HERA). Department for Education and Employment (DfEE). 1998. Teachers, meeting the challenge of change. Green Paper, London: DfEE. Dweck, C. (2000). Self-theories: Their role in motivation, personality and development. Philadelphia: Psychology Press. Edwards, A., Gilroy, P., & Hartley, D. (2002). Rethinking teacher education. London: Routledge Falmer. Furlong, J. (2000). Higher education and the new professionalism for teachers: Realising the potential of partnership – a discussion paper. London: CVCP, SCOP. Goodson, I. (2013). Developing narrative theory: Life histories and personal representation. London/New York: Routledge. Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE). (2016). Teaching excellence framework: Year two specification: Year two additional guidance. http://www.hefce.ac.uk (September, 2016). Hornstein, H.  A. (2017). Student evaluations of teaching are an inadequate assessment tool for evaluating faculty performance. Cogent Education 4. https://doi.org/10.108 0/2331186X.2017.1304016. Kelly, M. (2012). Student evaluations of teaching effectiveness: Considerations for Ontario universities. Toronto: Council of Ontario Universities (COU #866). Korthagen, F., Loughran, J., & Lunenburg, M. (2005). Teaching teachers: Studies into the expertise of teacher educators. Teaching and Teacher Education, 21(2), 107–115. Lewin, K. (1952). Field theory in social science: Selected theoretical papers. London: Tavistock. Maguire, M. (2000). The state regulation of United Kingdom teacher education in the nineteenth century: The interplay of ‘value’ and ‘sense’. International Studies in Sociology of Education, 10(3), 227–242. Menter, I. (2016). Introduction. In Teacher education in times of change (The Teacher Education Group) (pp. 3–16). Bristol/Chicago: Policy Press. Menter, I., Brisard, E., & Smith, I. (2006). Convergence or divergence? Initial teacher education in Scotland and England. Edinburgh: Dunedin Academic Press. Murray, J., & Mutton, T. (2016). Teacher education in England: Change in abundance, continuities in questions. In Teacher education in times of change (The Teacher Education Group) (pp. 57–54). Bristol/Chicago: Policy Press. Myhill, D. (2008). What makes a good teacher? Paper given at the Third Cambridge Assessment Research Seminar ‘What makes a good teacher? An overview of teaching effectiveness research.’ University of Exeter, England. Pells, R. (2016, December 6). UK schools falling behind leading countries, new global rankings reveal. The Independent newspaper. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/educationnews/pisa-oecd-rankings-uk-schools-falling-behind-leading-countries-global-internationalsingapore-a7458751.html. Pinar, W. F. (1994). Autobiography, politics and sexuality. New York: Peter Lang. Ping, C., Schellings, G., & Beijaard, D. (2018). Teacher educators’ professional learning: A literature review. Teaching and Teacher Education, 75, 93–104. Recover from grief.com. (n.d.). Seven stages of grief: Through the process and back to life. https:// www.recover-from-grief.com/7-stages-of-grief.html. Rudd, T., & Goodson, I. (Eds.). (2017). Negotiating neoliberalism: Developing alternative educational visions. Rotterdam: Sense.

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Rudd, T. (2017). Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF): Re-examining its logic and considering possible systemic and institutional outcomes. The Journal of Critical Education Policy Studies, 15(2), 59–90. Schuck, S., Aubusson, P., Burden, K., & Brindley, S. (2018). Uncertainty in teacher education futures: Scenarios, politics and STEM. Singapore: Springer. Stark, P. B., & Freishtat, R. (2014). An evaluation of course evaluations. https://doi.org/10.14293/ S2199-1006.1.SQR-EDU.AOFRQA.v1Stark. Stenhouse, L. (1975). An introduction to curriculum research and development. London: Heinemann. Teacher Education Ministerial Advisory Group (TEMAG). (2014). Action now: Classroom ready teachers. Available online at: https://docs.education.gov.au/system/files/doc/other/action_ now_classroom_ready_teachers_accessible.pdf. Whitty, G., & Menter, I. (1989). Lessons of Thatcherism: Education policy in England and Wales 1979-88. Journal of Law and Society, 16(1), 46–64. Williams, J., MaRhea, Z., & Barrie, F. (2018). Co-teaching as pedagogy: Negotiating pedagogical spaces in university classrooms. In D.  Garbett & A.  Ovens (Eds.), Pushing boundaries and crossing borders: Self-study as a means for researching pedagogy (pp. 425–431). Self-Study of Teacher Education Practices community. https://www.castleconference.com/. Wright, R. E. (2006). Student evaluations of faculty: Concerns raised in the literature, and possible solutions. College Student Journal, 40, 417–422.

Chapter 6

Collaboration and the Work of Teacher Educators

Abstract  In this chapter the authors discuss the importance of collaboration with others in the work of teacher educators, including academic collaboration in research and teaching, research networks and work in  local and school communities. The authors consider their own experience of collaboration throughout their careers, reflecting upon some of the more recent challenges as well as the affordances of professional partnerships and their own developing roles within them, as they make further connections with examples provided by other teacher educators. Keywords  Collaboration · Networking · Collegiality · Self-study community



∗∗∗ Mike: I was a bit late for the meeting, but Al was still there in the small basement office, packing his bag ready to cycle home. ‘No worries’ he said in that friendly Australian way when I apologised in that awkward English way. ‘So why do you want to be a volunteer with us here at QueenSpark Books?’ I told him about the undergraduate degree I was doing and the small-scale study we had to do, that I was a local and that I knew that QueenSpark specialised in local working-class history. ‘You’re a local guy?’ He seemed very interested in this. ‘How long have you lived in Brighton?’ ‘All my life’ I said, ‘twenty-nine years.’ That seemed to seal it. I was welcome to come and join the local writing and publishing group as a volunteer. In fact, there were a few jobs I could get started on right away. That was over 30 years ago. It was the beginning of my time as an unpaid worker at QueenSpark Books, which lasted for 6 years. It was also the beginning of my friendship with Al Thomson, which lasts to this day despite (or perhaps because of?) the fact that he now lives in Melbourne, Australia, while I live just a few miles from that office in Brighton, England, where we first met on that November evening in 1988. I also think of it now as the beginning for me of a new way of seeing myself: a paradigm shift in my own identity. Although he is a year or so younger than me, I count Al as one of the most influential people on my learning journey. I learnt a lot from Al, but the thing I learnt most with him and the volunteers at QueenSpark, was the meaning and value of collaboration. I had worked in teams before in the big bakery and the carpet warehouse. Everyone must play their part in a manual working situation, but it always felt as though we were all easily replaced cogs in the machine and that anyone could take my place without much

© The Author(s) 2020 M. Hayler, J. Williams, Being a Teacher Educator in Challenging Times, Self-Study of Teaching and Teacher Education Practices 22, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-3848-3_6

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6  Collaboration and the Work of Teacher Educators inconvenience or delay in the process. Also, as a mature student at the Polytechnic, in that winter of 1988, I was now learning about seminar discussion on the humanities degree and sharing knowledge and opinion, but this often seemed very individual and sometimes competitive. As students we learnt from each other, but we were assessed individually and had no joint aims or tasks that called for us to collaborate as such. At QueenSpark, however, everyone took on roles that called on us to make distinct contributions as part of the whole. Al made full use of the volunteers, utilising the particular experience, skills or knowledge that he did not have. He was able to recognise and exploit this by working with people to the benefit of all. We all learnt a lot, discovered talents and interests we did not know we had. The organisation went from strength to strength and still exists doing good work today (see https://queensparkbooks.org.uk/). For that first piece of ‘independent research’ which I turned into my BA Honours thesis at Brighton Polytechnic, I traced the history of the group as it emerged from local campaigns and handmade leaflets into a publishing collective, making books of local stories and autobiographies which illuminated a history of Brighton constructed from the memories of working people. I worked alongside some of the authors as part of book-making groups, learning skills in desk-top publishing and collaborative editing. Working together, Al and I devised a system for sharing and reviewing manuscripts sent in by local authors to be considered for publication. My role was to organise and chair the monthly meetings of the manuscripts group, which I now realise was very good preparation for managing some of the challenges that can arise in the everyday work of the primary school teacher that I became in 1991. In the spirit of the organisation and the national federation of which it was a part, we wrote together (Hayler and Thomson 1995), sharing different experiences, bringing different styles and skills and learning from each other. It was during a book launch at a primary school when we went with a local author who had attended the school in the 1920s, that I first realised I might like to be a teacher; the children seemed so positively enthusiastic and engaged with us and with the author. Looking back, I think it was around that time that I began to understand teaching as a form of collaboration. My own understanding of pedagogy is very much based on this approach: the teachers and the learners have different roles, and they all bring different things to the learning environment. It is the form of collaboration between them that we call teaching and learning. I have brought this more explicitly into my work as a teacher educator and developed my understanding of ‘pedagogic encounters’ (Goodson and Gill 2011; Hayler 2019), which is where learning happens. When Al moved on to take a full-time job at a university, he was replaced by a new part-­ time paid coordinator. She was more experienced in this sort of work than Al had been and was able and willing to take on a wider range of roles on her own. I suppose, in some ways, she was more efficient. She seemed to be able to manage without much help. It took a while and some engaging discussion before she came to see that the collaborative element of the work within the group was not just a by-product of the activity to produce the publications: it was one of the main requirements and purposes of the organisation. I feel similarly about education, teacher education and educational research at all levels and phases: the process needs to be seen as part and parcel of the product. Writing this helps me to see not only the importance of this collaborative and influential time for me but also the essential elements of collaboration itself. Trust is central here. Trust based on respect and honest dialogue. Centrally, for collaboration to form and thrive, there must be, as Bullough (2016, ix) put it, ‘receptivity and reciprocity’. For me, the key skill and, sometimes the biggest challenge, is to give others the space to contribute, to grow and to learn in their own way while finding the space to do so myself as we move forward together.

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6.1  Introduction In this chapter we discuss the importance of collaboration with others in the work of teacher educators, including academic collaboration in research and teaching, research networks and work in local and school communities. We consider our own experience of collaboration throughout our careers, reflecting upon some of the more recent challenges as well as the affordances of professional partnerships and our developing roles within them, as we make further connections with examples provided by other teacher educators.

6.2  C  ollaboration in the Journey of Becoming a Teacher Educator In Chap. 1 we outlined how our inspiration for this book developed from our work together editing the book Professional Learning through Transitions and Transformations (Williams and Hayler 2016a). Working on that book and the subsequent journal article that explored our professional learning from the process of editing (Hayler and Williams 2018) emphasised for us how important working with others is in the professional journey of teacher educators. All the authors of chapters in the book discussed, in some way and in some detail, how their interactions, collaborations and professional relationships in general helped to shape them into the teacher educators they are today. In the last chapter of that book, we captured some of the key learnings that we personally derived from editing the various narratives of becoming: Perhaps one of the most important conclusions to be made from this collection, and one that would have helped us when we first embarked on our journeys of becoming, is that while individual experiences are unique to those involved, teacher educators are not alone. They are part of a wider network of colleagues, some known, some still to be encountered, that are there to guide and support them on this exciting journey. Collegiality and collaboration is at the heart of becoming a teacher educator, and it is up to individuals to seek out and embrace the connections they are fortunate enough to discover…It is not enough to get a job as a teacher educator – it is essential that we seek out our colleagues, learn from experience (theirs and ours) through deep reflection, direct our own performance, and develop and enact ethical pedagogies that ensure that the education we provide for teachers is based on sound morally grounded principles. (Williams and Hayler 2016b, 207–8)

In the book, Susan Elliott-Johns (2016, 93) writes about ‘the significant influence of positive, rich, collegial relationships in my research and practice as a teacher educator’, while Julian Kitchen (2016) argues that relational knowing and community sit at the heart of his (and all) teacher education. Respect and empathy are foregrounded for Kitchen through collaboration based upon open and honest relationships that require a teacher educator to be as much listener and learner as teacher and leader of learning. Dawn Garbett (2016) acknowledges the influence of significant people past and present, not only in her early days as a student and as a teacher but also

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during her doctoral studies and transition to, and progression within, teacher education. She recognises these collaborations with students and colleagues, supervisors and administrators as being active and dialogic partnerships about learning and doing teacher education. Rodrigo Fuentealba Jara and Helena Montenegro Maggio (2016, 194) argue that ‘teacher education programmes must be regarded as a learning community’ and that they should be sites for collaborative learning between teacher educators. In reflecting on 37 years as a teacher educator, Tom Russell (2016) highlights the ways in which collaboration with his students and colleagues became two of the central pillars of his pedagogy and self-study of teacher education practices. From early in his career as a teacher educator, Tom collaborated with his students by asking them to help him to better understand how his classes and the overall programme in which he worked was contributing to their performance in practicum placements. This brought challenges as well as rewards: As I came to value the importance of listening to those learning to teach, and as I improved my skills as a listener, I confronted the tension between what teachers think they are doing and what their students are actually learning. (Russell 2016, 15)

Through collaborating with his students to find out whether or not he was meeting their needs, Tom encouraged them to focus and reflect more deeply on what they did need. Tom also writes of the importance of his team-teaching collaboration, almost 30 years after becoming a teacher educator, with critical friend, colleague and PhD student Shawn Bullock, which provided rich conversations about learning, teaching and learning to teach that influenced his pedagogy and research in teacher education: Those four years were a unique and valuable period of consolidating and extending insights and practices developed previously and they generated a strong and shared commitment to learning from experience and self-study of teacher education practices. (Russell 2016, 24)

Bullock (2016, 41) likens his own approach in teacher education to that of a theatre director negotiating the inevitable tensions in ‘setting and maintaining a course for my work as a teacher educator while simultaneously opening myself up to ideas offered by critical friends and by the literature’. Bullough (2016, ix) suggests that remaining open to ideas offered by the literature, theory and research can itself be seen as a form of collaboration between teacher educators and, what John-Steiner (1985) describes as, ‘distant teachers’ – those teachers who may no longer be living but who continue to guide thinking and inspire the courage to believe that things can be different from how they are. Avril Loveless (2016, 71) emphasises the importance of her own collaborations as a teacher educator with those from outside the traditional teacher education settings, such as artists, musicians and experts, in the use of digital technologies, and with academics from other fields including sociology and literature: As creative role models and mentors they offered alternative pedagogies to learners for developing and improving their capabilities through critical review and engagement.

Avril sites friendship as a key element, and often an outcome of successful collaboration, as for her the acts of friendship in collaboration ‘have transformed ways of

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knowing in practice’ (Loveless, 73). Like Russell (2016), Loveless includes the growth of intellectual friendship and collaboration between the supervisor and the doctoral student as potentially one of the most gratifying and rewarding aspects of being a teacher educator. Ovens (2016, 128) emphasises the importance of ‘we’ over ‘me’ in becoming a teacher educator and acknowledges how the ‘social’ influences his individual thinking and pedagogy: I see teaching as a creative act where each situation unfolds in quite novel and unpredictable ways. Your skill rests in the ability to manage the complexity of the events in a lesson setting by knowing strategically what you want to accomplish, being able to read the situation, make good decisions, adapt and create action and affect good outcomes. To do this is not a singular act. It means working collaboratively with others.

In our article about our experience of editing the book Professional Learning through Transitions and Transformations together, we recognised that ‘we don’t become teacher educators on our own’ (Hayler and Williams 2018, p.  116). We concluded from this collaborative self-study that ‘the value of collaboration, collegial support, self-study and taking risks, as exemplified in the co-editing process, appear to be hallmarks of a career in teacher education, no matter how long you have been working in this field’ (115). Although we had been collaborating with others in one form or another for over a decade, it was during the process of editing the book and conducting a self-study about the editing process that we really became acutely aware of the value and supportive nature of working closely with colleagues, as well as some of the challenges that are inherent in this relational work. As we explore the collaborative nature of being a teacher educator, we are not positioning this as a challenge or an obstacle to be overcome, although we recognise that creating and nurturing productive and rewarding collaborations can be difficult at times. Rather, we see those we interact with in our work as river guides, helping us to navigate both the smooth and the rough patches of our respective journeys. Our colleagues and collaborators help us to get around obstacles together; new knowledge and perspectives gained are like tributaries and flows that work with us to reach new destinations  – a project, a publication, or a teaching partnership. Our colleagues may be in the office down the hall or at an institution on the other side of the country or the world; they may be unknown to us personally but well known to us through their work in the field; they might be our own level of experience and able to share many similar stories, or they might be new to teacher education and desperate for some advice and/or guidance. LaBoskey (2004) reminds us that self-study, as a methodology of inquiry, is collaborative by nature, although she prefers to use the term ‘interactive’, arguing that the multiparty nature of self-study where interactions are part of the data set goes beyond collaboration. She claims that ‘interaction within self-study for the purpose of studying our professional practice settings takes many forms, in addition to collaboration among researchers’ (LaBoskey 2004, 848). Engagement in self-study, or any deep reflection on practice, contributes not only to improvement in practice but to a reconstruction of the practitioner’s/researcher’s identity. ‘We teach who we are,

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so learning to teach is not just about coming to know a series of behaviours or accumulating subject matter knowledge: it has to do with construction of an identity of self as teacher [educator]’ (LaBoskey 2004, 829). In the following sections, we each present some of our experiences of collaboration to illustrate how working with others (locally, nationally and internationally; in scholarship, research and teaching) has enabled us to progress in our journeys as teacher educators. We have also included a vignette contributed by Kathleen Pithouse-Morgan and Anastasia Samaras – two of the most prolific collaborators in the field of self-study research. Our own collaborations with others have helped us to see ourselves and our roles in new ways and have been particularly significant at certain stages of our careers. These by no means represent the full extent of our collaborations over the past decade or so. Many of our other collaborations have been included in other chapters, and it is, of course, impossible to write about a career as a teacher educator without referring to others with whom we have worked along the way. However, in this chapter we have selected particular collaborations that were important in our developing knowledge, practice and identities as teacher educators, and inherent in these stories is our gratitude to those who feature (named and unnamed) for the role they played and, in some cases, continue to play in our ongoing journey.

6.3  C  ollaboration Through S-STEP Community and Becoming Teacher Educators Judy: As I mentioned in Chap. 4, one of the most important influences on my transition from school teaching to becoming a teacher educator was my introduction to the self-study of teacher education practices (S-STEP) community and their biennial Castle Conference in England. Being introduced to this community at my first Castle Conference in 2008, and presenting my paper about my transition from teacher to teacher educator (Williams 2008) enabled me to begin thinking more deeply about my new role as a teacher educator and to see that such personal reflections could make a contribution to knowledge beyond my own experience. I had attended and presented at two conferences in Australia during my PhD candidature, but I had felt like a very small fish in a very large pond. People listened politely as I presented my research and my supervisor was there to lend her moral support, but I felt very much on the margins – I suppose because as a doctoral candidate, I was on the margins of academia. The Castle Conference, however, was different. I immediately felt welcomed and supported, even though it was still early days in my academic career. I made connections at that first Castle Conference which I have maintained since, and I have continued to make connections during each subsequent conference I have attended. These connections have led to numerous self-studies, conference presentations and publications (Williams and Berry 2016; Williams and Grierson 2016; Williams and Hayler 2016a; Williams and Ritter 2010; Williams

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et al. 2012). However, perhaps more importantly than these ‘outputs’, the collaborations that have emerged from my participation in the S-STEP community have contributed to my understanding of and progress through my journey of becoming a teacher educator. While sometimes connections are sought out, most of the collaborations that I have been involved in have evolved out of serendipitous meetings or through informal conversations that led to shared experiences, interests and a desire to pursue greater understanding through self-study. One such meeting occurred at AERA in New Orleans in 2011, when I attended the S-STEP SIG dinner, and happened to sit next to Arlene Grierson, from Nipissing University in Canada. We had a good chat, and at the end of the evening said that we hoped to catch up again sometime. That time arrived at the SIG meeting in Philadelphia in 2014, when we again crossed paths and shared what we had been up to since we last met. It transpired that we had both been leading international professional experience (IPE) groups to Kenya (Arlene) and the Cook Islands (me) and we were surprised at the similarities in our experiences despite the very different international contexts. This chance meeting led to a presentation at AERA the following year (Williams and Grierson 2015) and a publication the year after that (Williams and Grierson 2016). When I met Arlene in 2014, I had already been undertaking a self-study of my experiences leading the IPE to the Cook Islands and had collaborated with Amanda Berry and Nathan Brubaker in a self-study about our experiences of working in new international contexts. In fact, I had presented at AERA that year (Berry et al. 2014) and was a non-attending author of a related paper at the Castle Conference a few months later (Williams et al. 2014). However, Amanda and Nathan were examining their experiences of relocating to another country and teaching in a teacher education program in a university, a very different situation from my own. When Arlene and I began sharing our IPE experiences, the similarities were striking. One challenge that stood out for both of us in our work as IPE leaders was our relationships with the local teachers in our respective locations. My own self-study data had recorded this, but, in my collaboration with Amanda and Nathan, this challenge was rarely raised because our conversations revolved around other aspects of working in new international contexts. While I had some uncomfortable experiences in my early days of working with the Cook Island mentor teachers, the reasons for this discomfort were not clear to me. I had made some tentative explanations for this in my data, but these reflections didn’t really lead me to any deep understandings. Enter Arlene. We agreed to begin a collaborative self-study about our shared (and unique) experiences as IPE leaders, focusing on our relationships with the local mentor teachers, in particular the provision of professional development (PD) sessions for them (another form of professional collaboration). Although we were working on different sides of the world, our email and Skype conversations and shared data generation helped me to reframe my understanding of why I felt uncomfortable in some of my interactions with the local Cook Islands teachers when presenting a PD session. Arlene shared a possible theoretical framing for our paper, and, as soon as I read about Seidel and Hancock’s (2011) notion of ‘double image’, I realised why I had felt so uncomfortable in the PD session that I

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had delivered to the Cook Island mentor teachers in 2013. The term ‘delivered to’ summed up my concerns. After examining our data and sharing ideas, I realised that my discomfort was grounded in the notion that I was imposing my perceived ‘expertise’ on the mentor teachers rather than going into the situation as a sharer of knowledge and practice. I realised that, although I had framed the experiences of the pre-service teachers in this way – that they were there to learn with and from the local teachers, as well as providing new ideas about teaching and learning that might be useful for them in their practice – I had not framed my own practice (providing PD) in the same way. Our article (Williams and Grierson 2016) explores these issues in much more depth, but one outcome from the collaborative self-study with Arlene was a change in my practice in the next IPE that I led, later in 2014. Rather than present a formal PD session, as I did in 2013, I hosted an after-school meeting for interested mentor teachers where we sat around a large table and shared ideas about good mentoring practice; a very different scene to the year before and much more collaborative in nature. Undertaking this collaborative self-study with a like-minded colleague, Arlene, opened up ideas, understandings, uncertainties and assumptions that I was struggling to uncover for myself. It led to a change in practice and a deeper understanding of my role as a leader of IPE. Our collaboration continued after this particular self-study ended, when Arlene wrote the forward to a co-edited collection about learning from participating in IPE (see Fitzgerald et al. 2017). Being a member of the S-STEP community has had a profound influence on how I see myself as a teacher educator and on my journey through the academy. As LaBoskey (2004) pointed out, self-study plays a part in identity (re)construction – I wonder who I would be if I had not made that fortuitous step into self-study after my first conversation with Amanda Berry (see Chap. 4). An important part of being a member of the S-STEP community is having an intellectual ‘home’. My research is by no means limited to self-study but reflecting deeply on practice is never far from my mind. Self-study and reflective practice are not just what I do but are really a disposition or a state of mind, an instinctive lens through which I see the world. When I am teaching, I often think to myself ‘that would make a good self-study.’ I don’t always pursue the idea because I just don’t have the time, but the thought is always there. I find myself constantly challenging my thinking, asking questions, attempting to overcome my default positions (see Hayler and Williams 2018) and trying to see things more clearly from the students’ perspective. I have tended to do this informally for many years in my teaching, but I did not have a clear ‘frame’ or a critical lens through which to understand my context and, importantly, to make improvements. Self-study, and the support of self-study colleagues and collaborators, has given me a useful ‘guide’ to the river and, on many occasions, an extra oar with which to paddle. Mike: Like Judy, I have thought and written about the sense of community and collaboration that I found at the S-STEP Castle Conference in 2008 and about some of the collaborative work, such as this book, that later flowed from being part of that network (Hayler and Williams 2016; Hayler and Williams 2018; Ritter and Hayler 2019). While I did not know it at the time, in retrospect I think that it was that sense

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of community and collaboration that I was seeking from S-STEP. For all the talk of teamwork, being a teacher of any sort can, ironically, be a rather lonely business: you find yourself in a room with 25 or 30 people, and yet you can feel fundamentally separated from them by the distinct nature of your role and responsibilities. Similarly, research and writing can add to feelings of physical and psychological isolation when the rest of humanity can seem far away. So, it seems most plausible to me now that, at one level or another, I was looking for an intellectual and professional home of sorts when I arrived at the Castle in the English summer of 2008 as I tried to complete my doctorate and return to work in teacher education after a year in the wilderness of unemployment and intensive study. I found what I was looking for. In so many ways this was a turning point moment for me because I made fruitful connections and friendships that have led to collaborative work of different sorts. As we discussed above, making connections with others is a central aspect of the journey for many of the authors in Professional Learning through Transitions and Transformations (Williams and Hayler 2016a, b). In his foreword for the book, Bob Bullough (2016, ix), one of the great collaborators of teacher education, observed: The importance of learning and especially unlearning of mentoring and collegial and caring relationships runs across every chapter. Bullock was led to Russell and Russell engaged Bullock. Jara engaged Russell. Berry sought out Forgasz, and after a bit of hesitation, a shared journey began. Ovens and Garbett married and walk their dogs and talk about teaching. Kitchen and Bob Fitzgerald, a teacher, formed a ‘collaboration’ and as a result Fitzgerald’s teaching was dramatically improved and Kitchen’s understanding of teaching was transformed.

The importance of collaboration and interaction in nurturing the self-study community and the wider teacher education and academic communities, is highlighted by the work of Kathleen Pithouse-Morgan, Anastasia Samaras and others (e.g. Pillay et al. 2016; Pithouse-Morgan and Samaras 2015). Kathleen, Anastasia and colleagues have utilised ‘polyvocal’ approaches to research, where multiple voices are heard in relation to diverse professional interests. Such transdisciplinary self-­ study research ‘offers a broader inclusiveness of practitioners inside and outside of teacher education, dialogue between multiple fields of professional expertise and diverse disciplinary backgrounds [and] offers varied perspectives and can result in innovative ways of conceptualising and undertaking research’ (Pithouse-Morgan and Samaras 2015, 2). Polyvocal professional learning and research doesn’t just involve ‘many voices’ but enables a richness of ideas and perspectives to enable us to see practice differently. In their experience of transnational, polyvocal collaboration, Samaras et al. (2015, 247) found: Communicating our insights with each other enabled those insights to deepen and mature. Furthermore, by discovering the why through bricolage self-study, we were walking our talk as advocates of transdisciplinary scholarship, which offers a diverse range of possibilities for learning from and with each other. We experienced the potential and value of bricolage self-study as a powerful method for dialogic meaning-making across geographical, cultural, and disciplinary contexts. Our collective engagement with the emergent and responsive nature of bricolage self-study heightened our awareness that personal and professional learning is always possible and that it can happen in unexpected and enlivening ways.

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The collaborative nature of learning about our lives and work as teacher educators across borders of all sorts, particularly through self-study, is made clear in the following vignette provided by Kathleen and Anastasia. Vignette: Kathleen Pithouse-Morgan and Anastasia Samaras A Poetic Mapping of Collaborative, Transcontinental Learning About Our Transdisciplinary Self-Study Facilitation We began the process of developing this vignette by choosing and drawing together some of our co-authored pieces of writing in which we had reflected publicly on our ongoing self-study research collaboration. Next, we inserted the text of these pieces (our data sources) into an online vocabulary visualisation tool, Word Sift (http://wordsift.org), which produced a word cloud that showed our 50 most frequently used words (Fig. 6.1). We then decided to select words from the word cloud to make a renga poem, which is a traditional form of linked-verse Japanese poetry characteristically created by two or more people as a poetic conversation. Kathleen composed the first stanza. Then Anastasia responded with a second stanza and so on. In this way, we created an eight-stanza renga to illuminate aspects of our collaborative, transcontinental learning about the transdisciplinary facilitation and growth of self-study methodology: Transcontinental Collaboration across Self-other-sharing Generated learning growth Across university Learning culturally Ongoing intersection Reciprocal growth Sharing facilitation Network opportunity Communicating Educative dialogue New understanding Research methodology Aim-professional impact Conceptualise Transdisciplinary frame Portray new insight

Fig. 6.1  A self-study collaboration word cloud

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Study facilitation Research intersection worked As illustrated by what follows, each stanza of the renga then served as an entry point for mapping and expressing our collaborative learning. Transcontinental Collaboration across Self-other-sharing We are teacher educators involved in facilitating and teaching transdisciplinary self-­ study research in our respective home countries of South Africa (Kathleen) and the USA (Anastasia). We have worked individually and collaborated with others to support and guide communities of university educators and graduate students who are interested in learning and enacting self-study research as their common task, regardless of their practice. Resonances between our experiences first brought us together in 2012 with the aim of learning from each other. Digital technologies presented new modes of connecting and sharing across the continents in which we live and work, between our individual, yet complementary, professional interests and between the work we are currently enacting in transdisciplinary groups through self-study research methodology. Generated learning growth Across university While university educators traditionally work in an individualistic and separated manner replicating the ‘different vocabularies’ of diverse disciplines, we have learned that exchanges across specialisations, institutions and continents can create openings to generate a new, shared language that can be negotiated and reviewed through ongoing dialogue. Learning culturally Ongoing intersection Reciprocal growth Transcontinental collaboration has generated manifold stories and new insights that might not have been easily produced by culturally homogeneous research teams or by us as individual researchers. Our international dialogue has inspired mutual learning about how facilitating self-study can be adapted and extended to address the experiences and challenges of different worlds. Sharing facilitation Network opportunity Sharing our work in facilitating and teaching self-study has contributed to a network of reciprocal self-study research learning across continents and contexts. Our transcontinental network is underpinned by shared understandings of the intersections of individual and collective cognition in professional learning and within a community of engaged scholarship. Networking in and through self-study research offers multiple possibilities for university educators and leaders imagining pedagogies and collaboration in new ways. Communicating Educative dialogue New understanding Our international network of self-study colleagues who have enacted openness in using and generating various methods and tools to explore their inquiries and re-envision their practice inspires us. We have welcomed this openness and flexibility of how self-study research can be performed using multiple methods, including renga poetry, and with many voices as we have dialogued in educative ways with colleagues from diverse disciplines and contexts. Research methodology

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Aim-professional impact Collaborative creativity across the network has advanced understandings and impact of self-study methodology in culturally relevant and pluralistic ways that echo the increasingly rich diversity of the international self-study community. Conceptualise Transdisciplinary frame Portray new insight We have come to conceptualise our transdisciplinary, transnational and transcultural interaction and reciprocal learning through self-study research as polyvocal professional learning. Our conceptualisation of polyvocality has made visible how dialogic encounters with diverse ways of seeing, knowing and doing can generate new insights for professional learning through self-study research. Study facilitation Research intersection worked For over 7 years, we have consistently worked together and with others to conceptualise and portray the transdisciplinary facilitation and growth of self-study methodology in various contexts, with the aim of communicating its educative value and impact for others. Our continuous collaborative conversations and writing certainly have been generative. We have come to see how collaborative research writing is similar to playing music or dancing or playing football: the more regularly you do it, the more likely you are to ‘get into flow’.

6.4  Collaboration Beyond the Self-Study Community While much of our collaboration has occurred within the self-study community, not all of our experiences as evolving teacher educators have been with members of that community. We both have found that working with other teacher educators, professional staff and teachers in schools has all helped us to navigate particular challenges in our professional lives. Mike: The PGCE that I had taken in 1990/1991 had focused almost entirely on the skills and requirements of working with children. Despite my collaborative experiences at QueenSpark, one of the many things I felt unprepared for as a newly qualified teacher was the need to work closely with teaching assistants in the classroom. I now see this as one of the key skills of the classroom teacher, and it has become a central part of my work with students who are preparing to become teachers. However, in that first school teaching post, I only found out that I would be working with another adult in the classroom each morning when Fran introduced herself to me on the first day of term. I was unsure of how I should be communicating with Fran. I felt awkward and uncertain with another adult in the room, unsure of my way forward as a teacher and fearful of ‘getting it wrong’. She was an experienced teaching assistant and I was a novice teacher. We developed a pattern early on of having a quick chat before she listened with the children as I introduced the first lesson each day. Then she would just ‘join in’. I got to know Fran well, and she became a key part of the work I did with that first class and a key part of my own learning as a teacher. We helped each other and developed our system of communication, as we

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both developed our skills in our different yet connected roles. I came to plan particular activities for Fran to lead with groups, creating a draft that I would share with her a few days before, so that she could adjust and adapt and prepare. It was time-consuming but paid great benefits for the learning environment. Fran often knew things about the children that I did not, and she made important assessments that helped me to develop the next phase of learning or to revise and replan when something had not worked out too well. Fran had experience and relationships with the children that allowed insights and information about the children that were not available to me, while I had education/training and skills in planning, teaching and assessment and knowledge of the curriculum that she had not had access to. We learnt from each other and came to be partners in the classroom – a pedagogic team, although her pay and conditions and career prospects were considerably less favourable than mine. From a highpoint in the late 1990s, when there was a move to train and pay teaching assistants properly (Burgess and Shelton-Mayes 2009), increasing financial constraints have meant that many schools in the UK have reduced the number of teaching assistants and some primary schools have none. As well as being a great loss to children’s education, this is also an issue for the education and learning of teachers, with implications for teacher educators as the skills of working with other adults in schools have become a central feature of successful and effective teaching and teacher education over the last two decades. Judy: I wrote above about the importance of the S-STEP community in my journey as a teacher educator, but it is not only self-study research that has enabled me to learn important lessons about being a teacher educator. A collaboration that was significant in the early days of my career was a project funded by the Australian federal government titled the National Mapping of Teacher Professional Learning project (Doecke et al. 2008). One of my PhD supervisors, Jane, was working on the project and suggested that I be invited to join the team to assist with data collection and with the write up of the final report. When she asked me whether or not I was interested, I really had no idea what would be involved. I also wondered (again) whether or not I would be up to the task but assumed that I would be; otherwise Jane would not have put my name forward. Without thinking too much more about it, I said yes. I remember attending my first meeting with the research team – a large table in the Dean’s conference room around which sat numerous academics and professional staff, each with their own particular area of expertise. And then there was me. I felt very much out of my depth but ready for the very steep learning curve that was awaiting me. I felt I was up for the challenge. Joining that team of very accomplished and experienced researchers was like entering the river at a key point – a clear landing platform, all the equipment there, ready to go and a supportive team guiding me along the way. They’d been this way before, so they knew what to expect. I think the greatest challenge that I faced was my own sense of inadequacy. Not that I thought I was incapable of doing the work (I wouldn’t have accepted it if that was the case), but I had a sometimes-overwhelming sense that there was so much more that I had to learn.

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Contract research was a new world for me, far away from my experience of teaching in a school, and yet, as the project unfolded, it took me into many schools, and, although new, they also felt familiar. However, this time I was the visiting researcher from Monash rather than a teacher. This was a significant shift in my sense of professional self – somehow caught between these two worlds: one that I was the most experienced in but moving away from (schools); the other, where I was a novice but becoming a part of (university). My task within the project team was to undertake interviews with various stakeholders (teachers, principals, administrators) in Victoria and Tasmania about their views on teacher professional learning. By this time in my budding academic career, I had attended two conferences in Australia and was getting ready to attend my first Castle Conference, so my experience of travelling for work was quite limited. Travel such as this never happened when I was teaching in a school, so one of the defining features of my journey as a teacher educator was beginning to emerge – travel to locations outside my daily workplace. My teacher friends were amazed that this was actually part of my job. I was also amazed at how much of the preparation was done for me by the professional project manager. I had never had a manager or assistant before – someone who took care of all the logistics for me. I felt slightly uneasy that I wasn’t doing that work myself. The project manager made all the phone calls, created and photocopied documents, booked flights, arranged hire cars and accommodation and provided me with anything else that I needed. I was beginning to see a whole new world of work opening up, and I was considered important enough to have someone help me to do my job. I was also learning that to really engage with others, it was sometimes necessary to go to where they were. I felt myself grow with every place I visited and every person I interviewed. I even began to feel that there was some status that went with being a ‘researcher from Monash’. Working on the project, I went from familiar settings such as sitting with teachers in the staffroom talking about their professional learning experiences, to the less familiar setting of formally interviewing the head of a Catholic diocese and a senior manager in the state Education department. I was moving through spaces between schools and research and beginning to adopt the persona of ‘academic researcher’. Mike often writes about time and space as features of our journeys as teacher educators, and I think that my experiences on the Teacher Professional Learning project was a good example of how navigating time and space contributes to that evolving professional sense of self. The moves between spaces in two different states of the country – chatting with teachers in a staffroom, to formally interviewing leaders in their large offices – felt like a physical change. Is it possible to ‘feel’ yourself growing, learning and changing? It seemed like a shift of consciousness that has a physical manifestation. I clearly recall that feeling of movement ‘down the river’, my confidence growing all the time. I was also shifting from undertaking research more or less on my own (my PhD and early self-studies) to contributing to a significant joint national project that had eight co-authors’ names on the final report. I was tasked with writing up the sections of the report that covered Victoria and Tasmania, and these were well received by the team. I had done well. After

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12 months or so, the project ‘pulled into’ another landing, where I disembarked, but with so much more in my canoe bag than I had when I first entered upstream. Mike: It took some time and a crisis while working as a teacher educator, before, nourished by the S-STEP sensibility, I found the quality and patterns of collaboration and co-learning that I sometimes knew as a classroom teacher. I should say that it hadn’t always been as it had been with Fran in school, and I had far less successful partnerships with colleagues at other points in my school-teaching career. I had expected to find this as a given at the university. On the surface it seemed that collaboration was central to work in teacher education: we used to meet regularly, agree on aims and objectives, and take it in turns to prepare materials for sessions we all taught, but ‘surface’ is what it was. The central dilemma for me during my first 3 years in teacher education was linked to my views on pedagogy and a feeling that I was not teaching in a way I believed in, but the focus of anxiety was often more upon my feelings about working relationships with colleagues. Management structures were often semi-formal in that apart from the head of school there were no other line managers or heads of department as such. Course leaders, subject coordinators and phase and activity coordinators such as ‘partnership coordinator’ or ‘ITE (initial teacher education) coordinator’ abounded. Appointments were sometimes made without application or interview and, sometimes, as in my case, against the wishes of the appointee – after some resistance. I tried to avoid becoming subject coordinator after only a year in ITE but to no avail. It seemed that I was the right person in the wrong place at the wrong time depending on how you looked at it. I now had a ‘management’ role to perform with no experience of management or administration outside of my own classroom experience, which felt like responsibility without power. I was profoundly uncomfortable about organising the work of my colleagues, assigning courses and modules to staff and organising teaching schedules and timetables. Not only did it contradict many of my own beliefs and concerns about workers being positioned so as to exploit each other; it also made me feel personally vulnerable to criticisms of betrayal and being personally ambitious. As discussed in Chap. 4, it was my inability to resolve these feelings that led to my resignation the following year. When I returned to the institution 14  months later, it was without a management role that I have avoided ever since but with a confidence to seek genuine collaboration in the work of teacher education. A good place to see the ‘before and after’ effect of my own research and engagement with S-STEP colleagues, such as Judy, on my work in teacher education is in the development of my collaborative teaching with colleagues at the Mauritius Institute of Education (MIE). Knowing more about Judy’s experience of learning on IPE in the Cook Islands as she moved towards collaboration with local people rather than a colonialist view, which we both expand on in Chap. 8, has helped me to see this more clearly from my own personal and institutional perspective. From earlier visits, when a small team would arrive to teach the students as part of the Brighton university/MIE partnership, with ‘pre-packaged’ teaching materials, lesson plans and PowerPoints based very much on what we knew about teaching in England, we have developed a dialogic planning process with colleagues at MIE that incorporates

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their knowledge and understanding of local culture, educational systems and structures and relevant pedagogy. We now team-teach with colleagues, sharing planning, teaching and assessment. As MIE colleagues take on more and more of the teaching, our role becomes less central, and this seems appropriate in a post-­colonial international environment. It seems odd to me now that it took us so long to get the message and begin the process through genuine collaboration where colleagues from Brighton have also learned so much, not least about collaboration itself.

∗∗∗

In this chapter we have shown how important it is for teacher educators to work collaboratively with others. While this does not necessarily ensure that the journey of professional becoming will always be smooth, the guidance, support and advice that others give to us along the way helps us to navigate the inevitable rapids, to savour the successes that we achieve and to steady our craft when things get bumpy.

∗∗∗ Judy: It was 2011. I had completed my PhD a few years earlier and had been working in the position as teacher educator in the Faculty of Education at Monash since 2007. I remember that when I was studying, one of my research methods lecturers told us that a PhD was like an apprenticeship, learning the ropes (methods, language, skills) after which we would have our ‘licence’ to be full-fledged researchers. However, I was still finding my feet in the university, trying to work out what my research future might be. I was gaining a reasonable understanding of my teaching responsibilities, but how was I going to become a researcher? I had begun to engage with the S-STEP community, and I had gained some experience as a member of the large research team working on the Teacher Professional Learning project. It was a wonderful experience from which I learned a great deal, but I was still hesitant to break out and undertake what would be my ‘own’ research agenda, other than my fledgling self-study focus. Even if I had the confidence to do my own research, what would it be about? I didn’t want self-study to be my only focus. I had met a few times with my performance development supervisor and outlined the areas of research that I was interested in pursuing. It was all about teacher learning in one form or another, and her words still ring in my ears: ‘You have a scattergun approach! You can’t do everything, so decide what it is that really interests you, and follow that’. Working on the Teacher Professional Learning project opened up so many possibilities, all around teacher learning, but what about teacher learning did I want to research? An email popped into my inbox. It was an invitation to attend a seminar about a new research project on rural education that had recently been launched online. One of the speakers was a Professor newly appointed to the Faculty: Simone White. Although rural education was not a particular interest of mine, I decided to attend the seminar. I was keen to participate in as many faculty activities as I could, not only to learn something from the sessions but also to establish a sense of belonging. You never know who you might meet and what tips you might uncover. Little did I know that Simone would become a close colleague and mentor in the years ahead. As I listened to the presentation, I was struck by how ‘un-­ professor-­like’ Simone was. She did not fit the stereotype that I had in my head: male, nearing the end of his career, slightly intimidating and someone who certainly wouldn’t be interested in talking to me about my professional journey. I liked the way Simone talked with passion about her research and I was impressed with the collaborative nature of her project. She talked about ‘us’ and ‘we’ rather than ‘me’ and ‘I’. She seemed to have a genu-

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ine interest in people as well as research. I remember thinking: ‘wouldn’t it be wonderful to work with someone like her!’ The presentation finished, and, as usual, I didn’t ask any questions during the Q and A session, but something inside me made me keen to talk to Simone about her work. Normally, I would leave such a presentation at this point but, for some reason, I hesitated. I really wanted to talk with Simone but, being a Professor and such an experienced researcher, would she want to talk to me? I waited until others finished their conversation with Simone then I approached her. I told her how impressed I was with her work, especially with the project she had showcased online. I can’t recall the exact nature of our conversation, but I do remember how supportive and encouraging Simone was as I grappled with what my own research agenda might be in the future. She listened and seemed to be genuinely interested in what I was saying. I felt that I had made an important connection. That connection could have been so easily missed if I had not stayed and had the courage to approach her. I learned that while many people will be supportive, they don’t always come to us. There are times when we have to reach out and take a chance. It may not lead to anything but, then again, it may lead to a career-changing direction. My first meeting with Simone did just that. It led to several collaborations, including the TAPP project (discussed in Chapter 7) – a project about teacher learning that was published online (White et al. 2017), in the same format as the rural education project had been. Simone’s care, compassion, genuine interest and mentoring has been a significant part of my journey as a teacher educator – she arrived like a tributary from another institution, helping to guide me (and others) along the river, to negotiate the obstacles and rapids that inevitably appeared in our path, to learn about working with people in research and to see a clearer way forward. As Mike and I have written before, we don’t become teacher educators on our own, and my collaborations with Simone and the others in the ‘TAPP team’ certainly bear that out. Simone turned out to be one of my most invaluable river guides.

References Berry, A., Brubaker, N. D., & Williams, J. (2014). Transitioning to new worlds: Challenges and opportunities of becoming international teacher educators. Paper presented at the Annual meeting of American Education Research Association. April 2–8. Philadelphia. Bullock, S. M. (2016). Directing the action: Learning to focus on the self to develop my pedagogy of teacher education. In J. Williams & M. Hayler (Eds.), Professional learning through transitions and transformations: Teacher educators’ journeys of becoming (pp. 29–44). Dordrecht: Springer. Bullough, R. V., Jr. (2016). Foreword. In J. Williams & M. Hayler (Eds.), Professional learning through transitions and transformations: Teacher educators’ journeys of becoming (pp. v–x). Dordrecht: Springer. Burgess, H., & Shelton Mayes, A. (2009). An exploration of higher-level teaching assistants’ perceptions of their training and development in the context of school workforce reform. Support for Learning, 24(1), 19–25. Elliott-Johns, S. (2016). The long and winding road: Reflections on experience of becoming a teacher educator. In J.  Williams & M.  Hayler (Eds.), Professional learning through transitions and transformations: Teacher educators’ journeys of becoming (pp. 79–94). Dordrecht: Springer. Doecke, B., Parr, G., North, S., Gale, T., Long, M., Mitchell, J., Rennie, J., & Williams, J. (2008). National mapping of teacher professional learning project. Melbourne: Monash University. Fitzgerald, A., Williams, J., & Parr, G. (Eds.). (2017). Narratives of learning through international professional experience. Singapore: Springer.

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Fuentealba Jara, R., & Montenegro Maggio, H. (2016). A process of becoming: Continuing change in the practice of teacher educators. In J. Williams & M. Hayler (Eds.), Professional learning through transitions and transformations: Teacher educators’ journeys of becoming (pp. 183–198). Dordrecht: Springer. Garbett, D. (2016). Becoming a teacher educator: The rise of Crusader Rabbit. In J.  Williams & M. Hayler (Eds.), Professional learning through transitions and transformations: Teacher educators’ journeys of becoming (pp. 107–122). Dordrecht: Springer. Goodson, I., & Gill, S. (2011). Narrative pedagogy. New York: Peter Lang. Hayler, M. (2019). Holding on: Perspectives of working class identity in Goodson’s life and work. In P. Sikes & Y. Novakovic (Eds.), Storying the public intellectual. Commentaries on the impact and influence of the work of Ivor Goodson. London: Routledge. (In press). Hayler, M., & Thomson, A. (1995). Working with words: Active learning in a community writing and publishing group. In J. Mace (Ed.), Literacy, language and community publishing: Essays in adult education. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Hayler, M., & Williams, J. (2016). On the journey of becoming a teacher educator. In J. Williams & M. Hayler (Eds.), Professional learning through transitions and transformations: Teacher educators’ journeys of becoming (pp. 1–11). Dordrecht: Springer. Hayler, M., & Williams, J. (2018). Narratives of learning from co-editing, writing and presenting stories of experience in self-study. Studying Teacher Education, 14(1), 103–119. John-Steiner, V. (1985). Notebooks of the mind. Albuquerque: The University of New Mexico Press. Kitchen, J. (2016). Looking back on 15 years of relational teacher education: A narrative self-­ study. In J. Williams & M. Hayler (Eds.), Professional learning through transitions and transformations: Teacher educators’ journeys of becoming (pp. 167–182). Dordrecht: Springer. LaBoskey, V.  K. (2004). The methodology of self-study and its theoretical underpinnings. In J. J. Loughran, M. L. Hamilton, V. K. LaBoskey, & T. Russell (Eds.), International handbook of self-study of teaching and teacher education practices (pp. 817–869). Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Loveless, A. (2016). Bewitched, bothered and bewildered: ‘A small heroic everyday epic’ of teacher education in a digital age. In J. Williams & M. Hayler (Eds.), Professional learning through transitions and transformations: Teacher educators’ journeys of becoming (pp. 61–78). Dordrecht: Springer. Monash Casey. (n.d.). The Monash Casey TAPP. http://www.partnershipprojects.info/. Ovens, A. (2016). A quest for a pedagogy of critical theorising in physical education teacher education: One physical educator’s journey. In J. Williams & M. Hayler (Eds.), Professional learning through transitions and transformations: Teacher educators’ journeys of becoming (pp. 123–136). Dordrecht: Springer. Pillay, D., Naicker, I., & Pithouse-Morgan, K. (Eds.). (2016). Academic autoethnographies: Inside teaching in higher education. Rotterdam: Sense. Pithouse-Morgan, K., & Samaras, A. P. (Eds.). (2015). Polyvocal professional learning through self-study. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers. Ritter, J. K., & Hayler, M. (2019). Challenges in engaging in self-study within teacher education contexts. In The second international handbook of self-study of teaching and teacher education. Dordrecht: Springer. (forthcoming). Russell, T. (2016). Narratives of the power of experience in a teacher educator’s development. In J.  Williams & M.  Hayler (Eds.), Professional learning through transitions and transformations: Teacher educators’ journeys of becoming (pp. 13–28). Dordrecht: Springer. Samaras, A. P., Pithouse-Morgan, K., Chisanga, T., Conolly, J. L., Constantine, L. S., Meyiwa, T., Smith, L., & Timm, D.  N. (2015). Breathing under water: A transcontinental conversation about the ‘why’ of co-facilitating transdisciplinary self-study learning communities. In K.  Pithouse-Morgan & A.  P. Samaras (Eds.), Polyvocal professional learning through self-­ study (pp. 231–251). Rotterdam: Sense Publishers. Seidl, B., & Hancock, S. (2011). Acquiring double images: White preservice teachers locating themselves in a raced world. Harvard Educational Review, 4(81), 687–709.

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Chapter 7

Working with the Teaching Profession

Abstract  When former school teachers transition into working in universities, issues of confused identities, allegiances, power and valued knowledge arise. The intersection of the work of the university and schools opens up both challenges and opportunities for teacher educators, pre-service teachers and supervising teachers in schools. In this chapter, the authors build on the ideas presented in the preceding chapter about collaboration in teacher education and present their own experiences of working collaboratively with the teaching profession as well as an overview of the literature on school-university partnerships. Keywords  Teachers · Teacher educators · Collaboration · Third space · Professional identities · School-university partnerships



∗∗∗ Judy: I was attending the first of two, two-day retreats at a beautiful country house in the hills outside Melbourne. I was part of a research group for a new initiative, the Teaching Academy of Professional Practice (TAPP) led by Professor Simone White, which involved working with a small group of Monash teacher educators and teachers from a group of local schools to develop and implement a new approach to professional experience. This retreat was the first time that we had all spent a substantial amount of time working closely together. One of the aims of the retreat was to establish a shared vision of professional experience and what the TAPP programme might involve. It was also an important time to learn about each other’s school and university contexts. I was very aware of the similarities and differences between us: the university-based teacher educators and the school-based mentor teachers. Our challenge was to overcome these differences and to unite around our shared vision of professional experience, and our desire to provide the best possible experience for our pre-service teachers. Could our similarities and, most importantly, our shared history as classroom teachers help us to overcome the challenges? My presentation to the group was entitled ‘Building a supportive learning community for mentor teachers in the TAPP’, and it focused on the potential for our collaborative work to contribute to the mentor teachers’ professional learning and the development of their professional identities. I talked about third space theory and about my own experience and research as a beginning teacher educator joining the academy after a near 30-year career as a classroom teacher.

© The Author(s) 2020 M. Hayler, J. Williams, Being a Teacher Educator in Challenging Times, Self-Study of Teaching and Teacher Education Practices 22, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-3848-3_7

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7  Working with the Teaching Profession As I was sharing my research, however, I started to wonder about how the teachers were perceiving me. At that time, I saw myself very much as a teacher, just like them, but having taken a different direction in my career. Much of my early academic research had been about understanding the move from teaching to teacher education because it was important to me to understand my own career transition. It was this aspect of my research that I was sharing at the retreat; but did this make any sense to the teachers in the room? Did they see me as one of them? More to the point, was I really still one of them? Did this talk about shifting professional identities, new perspectives on learning to teach, negotiating relationships, communities of practice and the like really resonate with them or were they more concerned with how their classes back at school were coping without them? This retreat, while successful in so many ways, raised several challenges for me – I still saw these teachers as my colleagues, but there was something fundamentally different about us. Can teacher educators claim that they are still ‘teachers’ in the same way that teachers in schools are teachers? And, how do (or should) we relate to school teachers in our work as teacher educators?



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7.1  Introduction In this chapter, we build upon the ideas presented in the preceding chapter about collaboration in teacher education and present our own experiences of working collaboratively with the teaching profession alongside an overview of the literature on school-university partnerships.

7.2  Teachers and Teacher Educators Working Together While we are required to fulfil a range of roles as teacher educators and it is many years since either of us were primary school classroom teachers, we both continue to identify, in many ways, with teachers in schools. We are teachers who teach teachers, teachers who research and teachers who write. Perhaps teacher identity is more about who you are than what you do. We unpack these ideas more fully in Chap. 9 but, in this chapter, we reflect upon our evolving professional relationships with colleagues in schools. We explore some of the changes and continuities in the shifting currents of this area of our work and consider if we really are ‘teachers’ in any way near the way we were when we worked in primary schools. As university-based teacher educators, we have played our part in the educational chain that connects our former and our current roles as we work with pre-­ service and in-service teachers. The changes in our roles could be defined simply by changes in context and location, but they have also raised questions about the nature of our relationship with school teachers now that we no longer share their daily practice and have left for the academy. We have both experienced a sense of guilt and loss that we no longer do the difficult, ‘front-line’ work of school teaching, but

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rather, one step removed, we stand on the sidelines and provide learning experiences and research-informed commentary about what pre-service teachers might and might not do. Are we in a position to lecture (actually and metaphorically) pre-­ service and in-service teachers about work that we no longer do ourselves? We may, if we are not reflexively alert, as Goodwin and Darity (2019) suggest, be preparing teachers for classes that we ourselves have not experienced. This tension and existential question – are we ‘real’ teachers or not? – provides one of the keenest challenges that we have experienced as teacher educators, and a rapid that needs to be navigated with our academic and school-based colleagues. Our relationship with the teaching profession is essential to our identity as teacher educators – after all, the fact that we were school teachers was the main reason that we both began working in academia. However, as time passes, this relationship changes, and, after a decade or more, we no longer refer to ourselves as primary school teachers. Perhaps this is a moot point and it does not really matter what label we give ourselves or are given by others. Rather than concern ourselves with an externally imposed professional label or role, the more important challenge is clearly to find ways of working with the teaching profession to provide the best education for pre-­ service teachers that we can, given our respective professional contexts, knowledge, experience and expertise. What Fullan (2010) describes as ‘collective capacity building’ in education can only really happen effectively if all elements of the chain of education are involved.

7.3  Working Together to Provide Professional Experience One of the most fundamental and common ways in which teacher educators work together with the teaching profession is in professional experience. The nomenclature alters over time and across geographic regions, but whether it is labelled as ‘clinical’ or ‘field experience’, ‘professional experience’, ‘practicum’, ‘teaching placement’, ‘school – partnership work’ or something else, the school-based components of pre-service teacher education courses are clearly and have long been a central component of becoming a teacher (e.g. Darling-Hammond and Lieberman 2012; Lunenberg et al. 2014; Murray et al. 2019). Whatever the level, structure or length of the course, practicum experience provides opportunities for pre-service teachers to begin to know themselves as teachers through practice. The quality, timing and duration of the school-based practicum can be a determinant feature of pre-­ service teacher education for students. When it works well, students have opportunities to connect their university course work to practice in the classroom. Darling-Hammond and Lieberman (2012) highlight the particular effectiveness of teacher-education coursework that follows the practicum experience as opposed to the ‘front-loaded’ courses where theory is taught prior to placement in school. Bullock’s (2011) study focused on the need for teacher education to challenge prior views on teaching and learning as a way to develop reflective pedagogies. He

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argues that the practicum offers the potential for students to be supported in the examination of the ‘gap between intended and enacted pedagogy’ (Bullock 2011, 160), but, as he discovered, this can be limited as well as facilitated by the culture and practice of schools. Disrupting what Lortie (1975, 67) famously called ‘the apprenticeship of observation’ would seem to be a central task of teacher education and something that can only feasibly happen effectively in school/university partnerships where it is seen as a central aspect of learning about teaching. A growing body of research examines the work of teachers and teacher educators in the so-­ called third space of professional practice, where schools and universities come together to develop and enact professional experience programmes (Kriewaldt et al. 2018; Williams 2013). Hammerness et al. (2012) describe the ‘reality shock’ that is very deliberately incorporated into the Dutch programmes of teacher education, where ‘carefully supervised and supported students’ learn to move through the ‘shock’ of practice to emerge with new knowledge and understanding of its application in teaching. The extent of the careful supervision and support may vary between national and indeed local contexts, but the ‘practice shock’ (Hammerness et al. 2012, 54) has long been a common feature of becoming a teacher. Teacher educators and their students are keenly aware of the need for high-­ quality placements where learning takes place, although we do not always mean the same thing when we talk about this. Murray et  al. (2019) show that pre-service students value particular sorts of ‘practical’ know-how in their teacher educators based upon classroom experience above theoretical or research-based knowledge. Darling-Hammond and Lieberman (2012, 167) conclude from a review of international research on teacher education that ‘the integration of high-quality clinical work in settings where good practice is supported’ is a key feature of successful courses of teacher education. Universities in Finland, the Netherlands and some states of the USA have created models for student teaching through ‘training schools’ or residencies where school-based and university-based teacher educators work closely together in planning, supporting and assessing progress for pre-service teachers (see, e.g. Taylor and Klein 2015). The proportion, nature and role of school-based learning stands out among the many significant changes identified in Murray et al.’s (2019) analysis of how policy change has played out internationally for teacher educators over the last ten years. The overall effect of alterations to patterns and programmes has certainly been to make teacher education more practice and school-based with consequent movement of the ‘boundaries around membership of the occupational group of teacher education’ as school teachers now often adopt ‘hybrid roles as both teachers and teacher educators’ (Murray et al. 2019, 204). We both recognise that this pattern of change is reflected in our own work as university-based teacher educators because we now spend less and less time supporting and assessing pre-service teachers in schools compared to when we first began our careers as teacher educators. In broadening the scope of who is considered to be a ‘teacher educator’, White (2019) argues that mentor teachers in schools need to be reconceptualised as school-­ based teacher educators and that their professional identity and learning

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requirements need to be acknowledged and addressed. She states that ‘it is timely for all teacher educators to name and claim their identity so that they can have a more pro-active role and voice in responding to and critiquing teacher education reform policies that do not best serve the needs of all students’ (White 2019, 201). This presents a challenge for university-based teacher educators, as they are forced to see themselves differently in relation to their colleagues in schools. The usual pathway to becoming a teacher educator is for school teachers to purposefully or, in many cases, accidentally, move into doctoral study and pursue an academic career (see Mayer et al. 2011). However, while not all teachers in schools want to become academics, they are, nonetheless, educators of pre-service teachers, and, as White (2019) and others have suggested, they are, therefore, ‘school-based teacher educators’. This label can be problematic because it begs the questions: What exactly makes someone a ‘teacher educator’? Is it a job or role description? Does the very act of accepting a pre-service teacher into your classroom make you a teacher educator? How does research distinguish the work of university-based teacher educators from those mentoring pre-service teachers in schools? What expertise do university-based teacher educators have that teachers in schools don’t have? In Australia, the role of the mentor or supervising teacher is central to the practicum experience, but there is relatively limited understanding about what this experience provides for those mentors in terms of their identity and practice both as classroom teachers and as teacher educators. Do they even see themselves as teacher educators? In an extensive literature review about the work of mentor teachers, Clarke et al. (2014, 174) found that school-based mentor teachers/teacher educators saw themselves as ‘providers of feedback, gatekeepers of the profession, modellers of practice, supporters of reflection, gleaners of knowledge, purveyors of context, conveners of relation, agents of socialisation, advocates of the practical, abiders of change, and teachers of children’. It is clear that the work of mentoring pre-service teachers in schools is complex and multifaceted and blurs the boundaries between school-based and university-based educators of teachers. However they might perceive themselves, and are perceived by their university-­ based colleagues, mentor teachers in schools are an essential part of the education of pre-service teachers, so working with them is an important part of the work of teacher educators, increasingly so in Australia since the publication of the TEMAG report (2014). The report states that: [T]heory and practice in initial teacher education must be inseparable and mutually reinforced in all programme components. Pre-service teachers must develop a thorough knowledge of the content they will go on to teach, and a solid understanding of teaching practices that are proven to make a difference to student learning. Professional experience placements must provide real opportunities for pre-service teachers to integrate theory and practice. To accomplish this, providers, working with schools, will be required to establish structured and mutually beneficial partnerships. These partnerships will set criteria for professional experience across a range of classroom situations and include mentoring and support for pre-service teachers to continually reflect on their own practice. (TEMAG 2014, xiii)

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Since the release of the TEMAG report, universities that provide initial teacher education in Australia are required to establish formal partnership agreements with schools and other providers of professional experience, as in the UK. While partnerships between schools and universities have long been acknowledged as important, they had not previously been mandated. This has led to huge investments in the development of partnerships, particularly in the provision of professional experience, with flow-on effects to the academic and professional staff working in teacher education programs. Their work with pre-service teachers has now become much more of a partnership with the profession than it has been in the past (see, e.g. Kriewaldt et al. 2018). Interestingly, in Australia there is a long history of attempts to influence the education of teachers through partnership arrangements (see Mockler 2013), so this latest direction in policy is not a surprise, although the mandating of it is a new development. At Judy’s university, in a similar way to the university where Mike works over recent years, some of this investment has also been in the form of employing professional staff (teachers recruited directly from schools) to do the work of professional experience, effectively sidelining academic staff in this area of the teacher education programme. During the 2-year TAPP project in which Judy was involved, it was clear that many of the mentor teachers who worked closely with the university team started to see themselves differently in relation to the work of educating future teachers. Research emanating from the project (see www.partnershipprojects.info) showed that the collaboration led to some of the school-based mentors beginning to see themselves as colleagues of the university staff rather than merely ‘supervisors and assessors’ of pre-service teachers in schools. They began to collaborate as ‘fellow teacher educators’ who had an equal but different status with the university-based teacher educators (see Grimmett et al. 2018). The research found that university and school-based staff working so closely and collaboratively together, gaining greater understanding of each other’s practice and work contexts and participating together in a range of professional learning opportunities levelled the power structures to a significant extent and encouraged the mentor teachers to understand their (and the university staff’s) work more deeply: The repositioning of school-based personnel as teacher educators encouraged expansive, continuous, generative learning across both sites, leading to more reflective, integrated, nurturing and educative experiences for the pre-service teachers. The mentor teachers’ recognition of this shift in role empowered them to create different types of teaching/learning/ working relationships with the pre-service teachers … By reconsidering themselves as fellow teacher educators, mentors began to understand their pre-service teachers’ development and well-being as part of their responsibility, and, as committed educators, they recognised that they were already well equipped to enact this role. A sense of confidence in their own ability to make a difference and contribute to the development of the next generation of teachers was clearly an outcome of their involvement in the TAPP project. (Grimmett et al. 2018, 351)

Judy:  When I was interviewed for the research about my involvement in the TAPP project, I recall saying that working with schools and teachers gave meaning to my work as a teacher educator. The interviewer responded, ‘You’re unusual! Most

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teacher educators see their future in research, not teaching’. That link to schools and teachers was essential in my early days as a teacher educator, and during the TAPP project. However, in recent years, that connection to schools has started to diminish as my teaching and leadership roles have changed. I am no longer directly involved in professional experience, and I no longer visit schools to work with mentor teachers and pre-service teachers. I have completed my term in the role of Director of Professional Experience, and as a course leader, I only have input from an administrative perspective. I still lead units that are concerned with classroom practice but the actual mentoring of pre-service teachers in schools is now undertaken by professional rather than academic staff, in tandem with the school-based mentor teachers. Also, my research is no longer directly linked to work in schools, as my involvement in the TAPP project has now ended, although it continues to be led by others. In other words, I no longer have daily interactions with pre-service teachers, teachers and children in schools. These changes are not merely at the university level, but partly in response to the shifting policy context. As discussed above, there is a strong trend in Australia to increase the nature and extent of partnerships between universities and schools in the education and assessment of pre-service teachers and to have a greater role played by schools in the education of the next generation of teachers. As outlined in Chap. 5, one of the challenges that we in Australian teacher education have to navigate is the influential TEMAG report (2014), which clearly states the importance of links between universities and the teaching profession in improving the quality of teacher education. As White et al. (2018, 14) state, there is ‘an ever-increasing level of scrutiny with initial teacher education [and it is] now a national policy focus like never before’. While there are positive aspects to this shift in focus, it also provides challenges to teacher educators themselves as we struggle to establish where we ‘fit’ within this new policy and educational landscape. I, therefore, ask myself: who am I as a teacher educator if I don’t work directly with teachers and pre-service teachers in schools, at least in some capacity? As my work with pre-service teachers is increasingly becoming detached from the daily realities of schools, it challenges me to think about the purpose and focus of my work as a teacher educator. As I have stated before, being connected to the teaching profession in real and meaningful ways has always been a significant part of my professional identity and, indeed, underpinned my early self-study research (Williams 2008, 2013, 2014; Williams and Ritter 2010, 2011). As our courses become more compliant with government accountability and accreditation requirements, and as the number of practising school teachers working in the Faculty to support pre-service teachers during professional experience increases, the scope for academics to have critical engagement with schools, teachers and pre-service teachers on practicum lessens. Now, my work in relation to the practicum is about ‘tick the box’ compliance and evidence-based assessment – inevitable in this world of accountability, but the collegiality and shared vision that was so apparent during my TAPP years is now, for me, a thing of the past.

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This has significant implications for the work that I do as a teacher educator. I find that my interest is now shifting to teaching about research, although I can’t be certain that this shift wouldn’t have occurred anyway (perhaps I am not so unusual after all – I just took a bit longer to get there). I still oversee units about primary pedagogy, but they are now taught by someone else. I help to plan the workshops and develop the assessment tasks, but the actual teaching is done by a teaching associate, a teacher who has recently been teaching in a primary school classroom. This change is, in some ways, a regret, but it is also an opportunity to explore new avenues that open up for me as my career progresses. Another issue that arises with the lack of engagement of teacher educators with schools is the vexed question about the currency of practical experience – how long is too long out of school teaching for a teacher educator? Does our experience as ‘real’ classroom teachers really matter anymore? Mike:  Earlier this year, one of my PGCE students, who was on school placement, appeared at the classroom door to let the children out of class at the end of the day and looked shocked to see me standing in the playground. She was puzzled by my presence and relieved when I told her that I was there to collect my grandchildren: ‘I thought, “oh what’s Mike doing here?”’ she laughed. She was right to wonder. These days, the most likely reason that a tutor from our university would be in school would be to discuss a ‘cause for concern’ where a student is at risk of failing the school-based placement – and this student was doing just fine. The incident reminded me that things have changed. Like Judy, school visits to support and assess our students had been a large part of my work as a teacher educator when I began work at the university in 2004. While the particular schools and the number of visits had varied over the years, the pattern had remained similar until around 2010. I find it hard to be precise as the changes happened in stages over two or three years. My own experience with university-based tutors while I was learning to teach as a PGCE student had been very good. While I had also learnt a lot from the class teachers with whom I worked in the schools, I remember the visits from the university tutors as giving me the opportunity to keep clear connections with my course studies and draw upon theory and ideas as resources for managing the demands of practicum. I welcomed the chance to stand back a little from the necessarily intensive cycle of planning, teaching and assessment in the classroom. The discussions with the university tutors allowed me to take a wider perspective, to recognise that I would not always ‘get it right’ as a student teacher, and that learning came from reflection and analysis of experience in context. As a primary school teacher in the 1990s and the early 2000s, I do not remember feeling that the university tutors who came to the school to observe, support and assess the pre-service teachers on practicum were out of touch with reality, or that the knowledge that they brought to the role was more or less valuable than my own as a class teacher. As far as I recall, I thought we had different, complementary roles and perspectives in supporting the students. As I worked in schools in the town where I grew up and trained to be a teacher, I often knew the university tutors who came to the school. Some of them had taught me at university and, by and large, I

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did not feel any sense of competition with them. I enjoyed the change of emphasis, and the tutors seemed to listen and take account of my views about the students’ strengths and areas in need of development. I remember being glad that I did not have to pass or fail the students who were there on placement. While we were not known as such in those days – and the head teacher would have formal responsibility for observations and assessment of the students – the class teachers were school-­ based mentors in all but name. Class teachers’ feedback to the student, to the head teacher and to the university tutor was an important element of the process. So, I did not feel that I was leaving the profession when I moved on to become a teacher educator at university. It was more that I was joining another part of the same chain of education. By then, I had been a pre-service student teacher, a primary school teacher and a school-based mentor (in all but name). I saw the combined experience of the roles as coming together with the academic and research areas of the work in university to allow me to feel most confident in supporting pre-service teachers in university and in school. Initially I would make a first visit to the school early in the student’s placement, meet with them, look at their lesson plans and watch them do some work with the children – whole class or group teaching of some sort. I would talk with the class teacher and the school-based mentor (often the same person in those days), to see how things were going so far, and discuss expectations of the course and teaching placement. Then I would give the student feedback on the earlier observation with suggestions for next steps, things to build on and any issues to address. I would leave them with a short, written report which they copied for the school-based mentor. Depending on which stage the student was at on their course, I would make either one or two further visits to the school following a similar pattern with more formal assessments and a final joint observation with the school-based mentor, and then a three-way meeting with myself, the student and the mentor followed by a final jointly signed report with a pass or fail assessment of the teaching placement. I developed a wide range of skills in this role that involved coaching, assessment, mediation and a fair amount of counselling when needed. It was very rewarding if time-consuming work, and it could be stressful when students were struggling and sometimes failing to develop the necessary confidence and skills to succeed. It was sometimes, but not often, difficult to reach agreement with the school-based mentor. During that period, it was the university tutor who had final call on whether a student passed or failed the placement, but it was important to maintain good relations with colleagues in school and to recognise that they had usually spent more time observing and working with the student during the period of placement than we had. At some point around 2010, linked with policy shifts discussed in Chap. 5, there was a change of emphasis to school-based mentors taking the lead on assessment of the students coupled with a changing role towards ‘quality assurance’ or ‘relationship management’ (Ellis et al. 2011) for the university tutors. I think it happened in stages at a time when my own teaching load in university increased considerably. The shift became most apparent to me with the revalidation of the Primary PGCE in our school of education in 2012. Students were now to be in school for 65% rather than 35% of the course, with school-based mentors leading and assessing. I still

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visited schools but only observed the students once, then later met with the school-­ based mentor to discuss all the students who were placed in that school. The university began paying the schools to mentor and assess the students and we provided twilight sessions for mentors to become familiar with the procedures and administration of the mentor role. From 2014, we were no longer required to observe the students. The liaison on progress or problems could be covered by email, so there was no need for university-based tutors to visit schools unless a face-­ to-­face meeting was needed to discuss difficulties. The following year, it was agreed that progress reports and assessments should be sent directly to the school office and that university-based tutors would take the role of Personal Academic Tutor (PAT) for a group of 25–30 students throughout the course. The PAT system involves meeting the students in a group each semester, individual meetings by arrangement, including one ‘release’ day from each placement when the students come into university to meet with the PAT tutor to discuss progress if they want to. While the administration departments of the university and schools work in partnership as part of this system, the university-based tutors and school-based teacher/ mentors have very little direct contact with each other. Our institution has not been involved in the equivalent of the Australian TAPP project as discussed by Judy, with the aim of developing closer links and working relationships. This river flows a different way. To fill the gap between university and school, a number of retired teachers have been employed as ‘university school advisors’ on part-time hourly paid contracts to ‘troubleshoot’ when problems arise for students in school. When a cause for concern arises, the advisors visit the school to either organise adjustments to the programme that will allow the student to continue or agree with the school that they be removed from the placement. When I first stopped visiting the schools, I saw it as a change of role rather than an end to my part in the partnership. It had always been my role to help students to prepare for practicum, support some of them on the school placement and then work with them reflecting on the experience when they returned to university. With the new course, part 2 of that process was removed as I no longer went into schools, and part 3 (reflecting and analysing) was reduced to two sessions. We made up for this, to some extent, through the introduction of the professional knowledge enquiry, where the students needed to design, follow and report on a small-scale piece of research that they followed on their second placement in term two. My area of work with pre-service teachers in university continues to be Education Studies, which includes some elements of theory into practice. We cover sessions on lesson planning, creating and maintaining positive learning environments and managing behaviour and assessment, with the theme of including all learners running throughout the sessions. In the last two years, we have organised conference days for the final year undergraduates and the PGCE students when we invite teachers from local schools to lead and participate in sessions throughout the day. Organising and planning these sessions is the only time that I now work directly with colleagues in school as part of my work – unless you include teaching on the part time MA that many local teachers take.

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7.4  Learning from Working with the Teaching Profession As former primary school teachers, we both have very strong personal, professional and emotional bonds to the work of teachers in schools. When we started working as teacher educators at our respective universities, we had regular contact with teachers, pre-service teachers and children in schools in our capacity as university advisors and supervisors for field experiences. As she has mentioned, Judy was also Director of Professional Experience for three years, which meant she regularly visited schools locally and abroad and met with principals and teachers to develop partnerships and to further extend the professional experience programme and opportunities. Our direct involvement with the teaching profession has reduced significantly in recent years, and this creates a challenge to navigate in our work – if there are limited connections to the real world of school, how does that impact on the work and identity of university-based teacher educators? Mike hardly noticed when the responsibility for assessment of the school-based placement was moved to school-based staff. He did not know, at the time, that this was happening for all teacher educators in his institution and that this was part of a national and soon-to­be international trend towards school-led teacher education. However, as the work undertaken by Simone White and others (see, e.g. Monash Casey n.d.) illustrates, while the structure and focus of the work might change, the underlying principles of school-university partnerships remain strong and important. Vignette: Professor Simone White In being asked to reflect on the topic of ‘working with the profession’, I am surprised by my own existential response to the task. Perhaps this is a reflection of my particular stage of life or my ‘academic’ schooling to deconstruct (a big shout out to the Deakin University diaspora), but I cannot help but seize this opportunity to turn the statement into a question and explore the task further, and commencing my inquiry with a set of questions: Who is the profession? Does ‘working with’ imply that I/we are thus separate to the profession? And what does ‘working’ mean? What does work entail? Where are the boundaries of work within and across the profession and who is positioned where? I suspect my current musing on what could be viewed as a simple task is a result of quite a lot of reading I am doing lately about who defines the profession with regard to being a teacher educator (see, e.g. White et al. 2018), and I am heavily influenced in my response by the different roles I have occupied over time, including my current role as Associate Dean (International and Engagement). As part of my own self-inquiry, I ruminate that my response now is vastly different to my thinking 20 years ago. I take this opportunity to go back in time and briefly consider what would have been my reply and the influences and thinking that have changed my shifting understanding at different stages of my career. Twenty years or more ago, when I first started working at a university, I was teaching as a casual relief teacher, doing some literacy consultancy work with schools and teaching part time in a university literacy course. I think I would have defined the profession at that time, by those who teach – myself most definitely included, of course – to view us all as largely the same: a big happy profession. I would have defined any differences to those located in the site of learning, that is, some teaching at school and some teaching at the university, but teachers all the same. I was very particular, at that point and crucial to my own identity, to define myself as a teacher who was now teaching at a university: a teacher educator. I think I began every work and even dinner party conversation with the fact that I taught for six

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years full time and that I was still teaching now as a way to legitimate myself – if only to myself. My family used to scratch their heads at my ten-minute monologue trying to explain what I did! My work with the profession involved talking to teachers and pre-service teachers as well as my colleagues at the university about teaching and its many aspects. I saw the role of working with the profession as being an insider but slightly removed, working to help bridge theory and practice and explore teaching together. Understanding our similarities was crucial to working with the profession. About ten years ago, I think, I would have responded somewhat differently and highlighted more of the differences as part of considering my experiences in working with the profession. By that time, I had become more aware of a broader and diverse set of stakeholders who I saw as part of, and instrumental to, shaping the profession, particularly of leaders in all their forms because a lot of my work was then involved in supporting leaders (particularly in rural locations) and also in working with people in the various education sectors, policymakers and people located in the departments of education. I would have included them all in the notion of working with the profession. The profession had, to my understanding, become a concept of all of those who educate students and the many networks and influencers who were crucial as part of this endeavour. I think I would still have defined my work as an insider and a bridge: a connector. My knowledge had expanded to a greater understanding of thinking about the importance of multiple perspectives. Understanding our differences had become essential to working with the profession. From the particular vantage point of now, I think I have a greater global perspective as well as a finer understanding of the granular of working with the profession. I see now more realistically the importance of acknowledging the similarities and differences of the profession, adding the importance of seeing the possibilities and history of our profession as crucial to rethinking its future and the importance of writing, reading, reflecting and thinking with the profession. I see, at this point, that working with the profession is inclusive of a connected (and disconnected) global set of players and actors (and they are not always human) as key to enabling (and disabling) the potential of working with the profession. I now have a greater understanding of taking not just a connector-bridge role but an advocacy role, recognising the importance of voice, power and stance in working with the profession. I seek now to try and work with marketing and media as part of my work with the profession. I acknowledge now the many different stages of development of the profession and the need to work differently and be willing to reinvent, according to stages and professional learning needs. I see my own identity now as one on a continuum of learning and development like others as part of the profession. I fear I still take ten minutes to try and explain my role and work to others!



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As this chapter illustrates, our journey to becoming teacher educators would never have eventuated if it were not for its origins in the teaching profession. We outlined in Chap. 3 how the beginnings of this journey lay in our early family and school experiences, and how we were surrounded by teachers and teaching, in one way or another. As we have journeyed along this professional ‘river’, teachers have never been far from our sides – either on the journey with us or supporting us from the banks. We are both aware that these professional colleagues are beginning to recede into the distance, as we work less and less directly with teachers and schools. However, they are never far from our minds, and always there in our ‘backpacks’ of experience, to draw on whenever we find we are meandering off course. They

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remind us what the work of a Faculty or School of Education is really about – the education of teachers. That keeps us focused on the way ahead and determined to contribute to that as well as we can.

∗∗∗ Mike: At the time, for a while at least, I saw the change in role in relation to mentoring pre-­ service teachers on placement as potentially positive because it coincided with the work that we started to do with local schools following the Cambridge Primary Review Trust (CPRT), which built on the most comprehensive review of primary education in England for over 40  years (Alexander 2010). The report, which was eventually rejected by the Labour government that commissioned it in the first place, offered an inspiring research-­ based vision of how primary education should be in the 21st Century, offering a persuasive argument for the empowerment of teachers and school leaders in the design and practice of relevant, inclusive curriculum and pedagogy based upon educational research and the needs of contemporary communities and wider society. For me, this report indicated, among many other things, a new form of partnership between universities and schools for initial and continuing teacher education. Several of my colleagues were involved in the review and in organising the CPRT, which aimed to disseminate the findings and recommendations directly to schools, bypassing the politicians. As the report put it in the final sentence: The Cambridge Primary review … is not just for the transient architects and agents of policy. It is for all who invest daily, deeply and for life in this vital phase of education, especially children, parents and teachers. (Alexander 2010, 514)In March 2011, the school of education where I work hosted one of the CPRT conference training days attended by senior staff from the local education authority, 300 primary school teachers and head teachers from all the local schools. Our own timetable was suspended for the day to allow all teacher educators to attend and ensure space for on-campus breakout sessions. It was going to be quite a day. Robin Alexander opened the morning with a signature lecture of brilliant logic and passion framed by the findings and conclusions of the review. He is speaking our language. He speaks calmly and softly, and I am deeply moved by his words. Robin is like a poet or a great orator and my skin tingles as he makes his points from the review. I feel as though I have been waiting for someone to stand up and say all this for so long. I am trying to take in as many facts as I can so that I can take the argument with me wherever I go and say to anyone who will listen ‘you see, now we have the evidence of what we have always known; this is how schools should be and this is what we should do to make them so’. At the end of the keynote, there was time for some questions. The questions are relevant and challenging: what about OFSTED? SATS? Funding? In response to each question, Professor Alexander draws back on the review report to highlight the research that systematically covers the issues that are central to children, parents, teachers and head teachers. Towards the end, I ask a question about teacher education and the move towards school-based training, away from universities like the one we are in now. How can we maintain meaningful partnerships? Robin Alexander smiled and shook his head just a little. I remember his words exactly: ‘Oh, that old chestnut … This debate is an old chestnut that makes education academics very uneasy. I think the main point is that students learning to be teachers need to be in school classrooms, and that what they learn there needs to be informed by the best research alongside the knowledge and skills of experienced teachers. It’s always been that way really.’ Next question.

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I’m feeling like an old chestnut, or some sort of disciple who has been told that he needs to get back on message and stop living in the past as I try to absorb the implications of this less than ringing endorsement of my professional identity. Later, I joined the assigned breakout session where we all agreed that the keynote lecture had been inspiring. Our task, led by a CPRT facilitator, was to discuss which of the recommendations from the report we might, in particular, begin to incorporate into our practice. A colleague school teacher mentioned the problem of national policy moving in a different direction, and I highlighted, I soon realised rather clumsily, Alexander’s point that while policymakers come and go, we are in for the long haul and we are the experts on education: we need to make the decisions about school, teaching and learning. I remember a short gasp in the room and being surprised that the teachers and head teachers were taken aback by what I had said. ‘That sounds a bit arrogant Mike’, says an old friend who is now deputy head teacher. ‘You can’t really claim to be an expert on teaching and learning when you don’t teach in schools – and haven’t for … some time.’ I feel I’ve been misunderstood. I try to explain that I meant ‘us, all of us’ (moving my arms in inclusive circles), ‘teachers, heads, teacher educators, researchers. I mean not politicians.’ ‘Well’, says someone else, ‘politicians are democratically elected.’ ‘But not to make decisions on pedagogy and the education of teachers,’ I say. ‘Nor are we, and nor are you’, says a head teacher who I never have liked very much. I remember feeling isolated, as though I was defending the old regime, the keeper at the gate of the ivory tower, which is not what I had in mind. I didn’t say much after that. I went back to my room, then later to the lecture theatres and the seminar rooms where I often use the ‘Alexander Report’ (Alexander 2010) with the pre-service teachers, highlighting the data, the conclusions and the recommendations. But I never went back to school – except to collect my grandchildren.

References Alexander, R. (2010). Children, their world, their education: Final report and recommendations of the Cambridge primary review. Abingdon: Routledge. Bulllock, S. M. (2011). Inside teacher education: Challenging prior views of teaching and learning. Rotterdam: Sense. Clarke, A., Triggs, V., & Neilson, W. (2014). Cooperating teacher participation in teacher education: A review of the literature. Review of Educational Research, 84(2), 163–202. https://doi. org/10.3102/0034654313499618. Darling-Hammond, L., & Lieberman, A. (2012). Teacher education around the world. Abingdon: Routledge. Ellis, V., Blake, A., McNicholl, J., & McNally, J. (2011). The work of teacher education (Final research report). Strathclyde: The Higher Education Academy/Subject Centre for Education. https://strathprints.strath.ac.uk/31809/1/WoTE_Phase_2_Final_Report_10062011.pdf. Fullan, M. (2010). All systems go. Thousand Oaks: Corwin Press. Goodwin, A. L., & Darity, K. (2019). Social justice teacher educators: What kind of knowing is needed? Journal of Education for Teaching, 45(1), 63–81. Grimmett, H., Forgasz, R., Williams, J., & White, S. (2018). Reimagining the role of mentor teachers in professional experience: Moving to I as fellow teacher educator. Asia-Pacific Journal of Teacher Education, 46(4), 340–353.

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Hammerness, K., van Tartwijk, J., & Snoek, M. (2012). Teacher preparation in the Netherlands: Shared visions and common feature. In L. Darling-Hammond & A. Lieberman (Eds.), Teacher education around the world (pp. 44–65). Abingdon: Routledge. Kriewaldt, J., Ambrosetti, A., Rossison, D., & Capeness, R. (Eds.). (2018). Educating future teachers: Innovative perspectives in professional experience. Singapore: Springer. Lortie, D. C. (1975). School-teacher: A sociological study. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lunenberg, M., Dengerink, J., & Korthagen, F. (2014). The professional teacher educator: Roles, behaviour, and professional development of teacher educators. Rotterdam: Sense. Mayer, D., Mitchell, J., Santoro, N., & White, S. (2011). Teacher educators and ‘accidental’ careers in academe: An Australian perspective. Journal of Education for Teaching, 37(3), 247–260. Mockler, N. (2013). The slippery slope to efficiency? An Australian perspective on school/university partnerships for teacher professional learning. Cambridge Journal of Education, 43(3), 273–289. Monash Casey. (n.d.). The Monash Casey TAPP. http://www.partnershipprojects.info/. Murray, J., Swennen, A., & Kosnik, C. (2019). International research, policy and practice in teacher education: Insider perspectives. London: Springer. Taylor, M., & Klein, E. J. (Eds.). (2015). A year in the life of a third space urban teacher residency. Rotterdam: Sense. Teacher Education Ministerial Advisory Group. (2014). Action now: Classroom ready teachers. http://www.studentsfirst.gov.au/teacher-education-ministerial-advisory-group White, S. (2019). Teacher educators for new times? Redefining an important occupational group. Journal of Education for Teaching, 45(2), 200–213. White, S., Tindall-Ford, S., Heck, D., & Ledger, S. (2018). Exploring the Australian teacher education ‘partnership’ policy landscape: Four case studies. In J.  Kriewaldt, A.  Ambrosetti, D. Rorrison, & R. Capeness (Eds.), Educating future teachers: Innovative perspectives in professional experience (pp. 13–32). Singapore: Springer. Williams, J. (2008). Self-study as a means of facilitating a new professional identity: From primary teacher to teacher educator. In L. Fitzgerald, M. Heston & D. Tidwell (Eds.), Collaboration and community: Pushing boundaries through self-study (pp.  318–322). Proceedings of the sixth international conference on the self-study of teacher education practices [Herstmonceux Castle, UK]. Cedar Falls: University of Northern Iowa. Williams, J. (2013). Boundary crossing and working in the third space: Implications for a teacher educator’s identity and practice. Studying Teacher Education, 9(2), 118–129. Williams, J. (2014). Teacher educator professional learning in the third space: Implications for identity and practice. Journal of Teacher Education, 65, 315–326. Williams, J., & Ritter, J. K. (2010). Constructing new professional identities through self-study: From teacher to teacher educator. Professional Development in Education, 36(1 and 2), 77–92. Williams, J., & Ritter, J. K. (2011). Constructing new professional identities through self-study: From teacher to teacher educator. In T. Bates, A. Swennen, & K. Jones (Eds.), The professional development of teacher educators (pp. 86–101). Oxford: Routledge.

Chapter 8

Developing Pedagogies of Teacher Education

Abstract  One of the most significant challenges for beginning and experienced teacher educators alike is to determine what it means to teach pre-service teachers about teaching: What is the content knowledge when teaching about teaching, and how should this be taught? In other words, what are the most appropriate pedagogies to reflect the needs of pre-service teachers, teachers in schools, and teacher educators’ own beliefs about what teacher education should be? This chapter explores the authors’ experiences of grappling with, and continuing to grapple with, these questions alongside others’ research into what effective teacher education might be. Keywords  Context · Pedagogy · Research sensibility · Enactment · Teaching · Teacher educators



∗∗∗ Judy: It is that time of year again: preparing proposals for the self-study of teacher education practices Castle Conference. I notice that the theme for the Castle in 2018 is ‘Pushing boundaries and crossing borders: Self-study as a means for knowing pedagogy’. Great, a perfect fit for my current self-study, which is exploring my pedagogy while co-teaching a unit about pedagogy. This unit was taught with a teacher from a local school, who is not a teacher educator in the usual sense, although a very experienced primary school teacher. How does teaching pedagogy, especially co-teaching about it, help me see my own pedagogy in new ways? As I begin to frame my proposal, and re-read the data that I have generated for this collaborative self-study, I start to wonder about some unsettling questions: What exactly does a ‘pedagogy of teacher education’ mean, and what does it look like in practice? After more than ten years as a teacher educator, I feel that I should know the answer to those questions, but as I become more immersed in the literature about pedagogy in teacher education, the more confused I become about just what it means. Many of the articles and chapters I have read explore philosophical and pedagogical approaches to teacher education in diverse contexts, and by a great many teacher educators; but what is, or should, a pedagogy of teacher education be? Is it even possible to be explicit about this, or does it depend on the particular context? I find that I am going back to some of the seminal authors about pedagogies of teacher education that I first read a decade ago – Loughran, Russell, Korthagen, Berry, Brandenburg – many of the names of scholars whom I now consider to be colleagues and collaborators. As I read, I recall how inspiring I found

© The Author(s) 2020 M. Hayler, J. Williams, Being a Teacher Educator in Challenging Times, Self-Study of Teaching and Teacher Education Practices 22, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-3848-3_8

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these writers’ ideas when I first read them, and I assumed that, as a beginning teacher educator, I would learn from their wisdom and, over time, develop my own pedagogy of teacher education. But here I am ten years on and still doing self-studies about this very thing. I like the ideas of Ruth Kane (2007: 60) who refers to reflection on developing her pedagogies of teacher education as a process of ‘productively irritat[ing] both my practice and research’. Like Ruth, I find myself still exploring what I do as a teacher educator, how I do it and why. I know what I believe in, as far as pre-service teachers’ learning about teaching goes, but how do I enact that in my own classroom? Ruth wrote about her pedagogy as her current pedagogy, something that she is always reviewing. Perhaps that is the key to my dilemma: it isn’t a matter of finding a definitive pedagogy that fits neatly with my beliefs about teachers and how they learn but, rather, a constant process of (re)constructing approaches and strategies that are appropriate to the time and place in which I happen to be working but are nonetheless consistent with my underlying beliefs. I embrace many of the broad principles of practice that are articulated in the literature, such as the importance of relationships in teaching; making our tacit professional knowledge explicit to our students; learning about teaching as a site of inquiry and problem-solving; acknowledging the affective dimension of learning; and demonstrating care for our students, but the challenge still remains: how do I enact these principles in my own teaching? Anyway, back to my conference proposal, which explores just that question…



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8.1  Introduction To determine what it means to teach pre-service teachers about teaching is one of the most significant challenges for beginning and experienced teacher educators alike. What is the content knowledge when teaching about teaching, and how should this be taught? In other words, what are the most appropriate pedagogies to reflect the needs of pre-service teachers, teachers in schools, and teacher educators’ own beliefs about what teacher education should be? This chapter explores our experiences of grappling with, and continuing to grapple with, these questions alongside others’ research into what effective teacher education might be.

8.2  What Is Meant by ‘Pedagogies of Teacher Education’? One of the greatest challenges for beginning (and more experienced) teacher educators is the development of their pedagogies in teacher education, which build on but are different from their pedagogies as school teachers. Much has been written about this as teachers becoming teacher educators reflect on their work in the academy (Brubaker 2012; Butler et al. 2014; Forgasz and McDonough 2017; Loughran 2006, 2007; Russell and Loughran 2007; Ritter 2007; Russell 2016). Jason Ritter, in particular, has examined his transition from teacher to teacher educator (see Chap. 4) in terms of the challenge of finding and developing his own pedagogy of teacher education, which appropriately serve both himself and his pre-service teachers.

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Jason identifies the challenges that he had to overcome in order to forge his new approach to pedagogy – in particular, the long ingrained ‘banking’ model of teaching, in which teachers deposit the requisite knowledge into compliant students’ heads. For Jason, forging a new pedagogy of teacher education involved a growing sense of dissonance and soul-searching as he grappled with an emerging recognition that his pedagogy (and identity) as a classroom teacher was not enough to sustain a career as a teacher educator. More recently, in providing a vignette for this book, Jason has shown how the quest to identify or develop a pedagogy of teacher education is an ongoing challenge. Interestingly, questions that he asked himself at the beginning of his career as a teacher educator still trouble him today. Vignette: Jason Ritter I was compelled to begin explicitly thinking about developing a pedagogy of teacher education in 2004 after I left my classroom teaching position and began working with teacher candidates as part of my graduate assistantship during my doctoral studies in education. This was an abrupt professional change, to say the least. For that reason, I decided to engage in a self-study focused on my transition from classroom teacher to teacher educator. Below are questions abstracted from a research journal I kept throughout my first year of working with teacher candidates. They were consequential to me then and continue to be important to me 15 years later. While hardly exhaustive, I believe these kinds of questions serve to highlight how developing a pedagogy of teacher education involves overlapping and interrelated cognitive, affective, representational and practical dimensions: Why do I feel the need to defend certain teaching practices and beliefs? Am I sometimes too set in my ways, without good reason? Then again, for what reasons and under what conditions should I change? How do you get teacher candidates to overcome their own biases so that they are willing to explore all of the educational options open to them? Why didn’t I realise some of this when I was teaching? Did I not know any better? Or did all of the extraneous circumstances surrounding teaching, and more broadly life, make such active reflection close to impossible? What do I really know anyway? Am I causing these teacher candidates to think in new ways, or have they merely figured out what I want to hear? Do I, in fact, want to hear certain things? If so, how does this help/hinder my work with teacher candidates? Can you make someone put in the time necessary to teach well, and to constantly reflect on that teaching, if they do not really have that desire? How do you know that the student knows? And is it worthwhile that they know it? What is the purpose? Are there forces that act on teachers that are simply so powerful that they dominate any attempts to combat them? Why the hell bother to talk if nobody is listening? Where is the balance? Do some teacher candidates just not care as much? Am I emotionally invested enough to carry on in this work of teacher education?



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It seems that the questions Jason developed in response to his initial doubt and confusion still characterise his pedagogy as a teacher educator today, more than a decade after he made the transition from being a teacher in a school. These questions became the tools he developed in recognising and learning to, as Jennifer Mansfield puts it in Chap. 4, ‘be comfortable with uncertainty’. Dewey wrote that true reflection always starts with an inner discomfort and feelings of dissonance and leads a person towards a balanced state as it ‘gives an individual an increased power of control’ (Dewey 1933, 21). As with Jennifer, in response to his discomfort, Jason found a way of naming and framing aspects of his practice where he did not know how to respond and then to utilise the framework as a way to better understand his new role, and to articulate his developing professional knowledge and pedagogy as a teacher educator. While the different sets of tools were developed by both Jennifer and Jason in response to their initial doubt and confusion about their pedagogies in teacher education, these tools then became a central aspect of their continuing becoming as teacher educators and, perhaps, the key element of their developing pedagogies. While we have both been through comparable processes of pedagogic self-inquiry in response to our own feelings of discomfort in the last 15 years, and have also learned to live with uncertainty to some extent at least, as we write this chapter in the latter stages of our careers as teacher educators, we are also continuing to examine, question and generally grapple with the notion of pedagogy as it relates to teaching pre-service teachers about teaching and learning. While the experiences of others help us to frame our own thinking about the pedagogical approaches that we have developed and are continuing to develop as teacher educators, it still presents an ongoing professional challenge. We have both examined our pedagogies as they have evolved throughout this journey of becoming, and we have been strongly influenced by the self-study movement of the last two decades; our regular attendance at the biannual Castle Conference attests to this important connection. The conference is where we first met and began to understand the many similarities and differences in our professional histories, as noted in previous chapters, and it is where we have both made other invaluable connections with other scholars in the self-study community. As self-study as a research methodology was gaining ground, Loughran (2006) cautioned against using the word ‘pedagogy’ to simply mean ‘teaching’. He stated that pedagogy is ‘about the relationship between teaching and learning and how together they lead to growth in knowledge and understanding through meaningful practice … A teacher’s norms and values, and the extent to which they are enacted in practice, influence the manner [in] which students might develop their own’ (Loughran 2006, 2). He also stated the need to make the tacit explicit, acknowledging that while this is an essential aspect of a pedagogy of teacher education, ‘there is an inevitable vulnerability that accompanies making teaching about teaching a site for inquiry; placing one’s own teaching on the table for dissection and analysis’ (Loughran 2006, 5). A reading of many of the articles in the self-study journal, Studying Teacher Education, will reveal just how vulnerable self-study researchers make themselves in their quest to uncover and analyse their pedagogical approaches to teacher

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education (see, e.g. Allen et al. 2016; McGlynn-Stewart 2010; Perrow 2013; Solle et al. 2019). Uncovering challenges, difficulties, so-called failures as well as successes shows that examining and advancing pedagogies in teacher education is very often a deeply personal and emotional process in which beliefs, prior experiences and identities are laid bare and made publicly accessible to colleagues and fellow researchers and educators in the hope that they will learn from the experiences of others. Loughran wrote about enacting a pedagogy of teacher education and argued that pre-service teachers, as students of teaching, should be given opportunities to ‘see into teaching’ (Loughran 2007, 1) rather than be taught how to teach. By taking an inquiry stance to learning about teaching, Loughran argued that teacher educators are in a position to engage pre-service teachers in the processes of ‘questioning, probing, reflection and critique that goes way beyond the technical. Enacting a pedagogy of teacher education matters so that practice is not simplistically viewed as just “doing teaching”’ (Loughran 2007, 1). At a time when self-study of teacher education practices was beginning to emerge as a force in the literature about learning to teach, Loughran’s challenges to the teacher education profession resonated with many teacher educators, including us, who, over the past two decades, have engaged in research into their own practices to examine what enacting a pedagogy of teacher education means to and for them. Contributors to Russell and Loughran’s 2007 collection presented a wide range of ways in which they enacted their pedagogy of teacher education, clearly showing that, although there are broad principles that might underpin teacher education, there is no one way in which to do teacher education. Pedagogies are founded on teacher educators’ contexts and on their knowledge, beliefs, values, experiences and assumptions about what good teaching is and what learning about teaching means for student teachers. If this is the case, then there can be no one pedagogy of teacher education, but an enactment of broad principles in local contexts depending on who is participating in the teaching-learning relationship and where. Kosnik (2007) explains that her continually evolving pedagogy is based on an inquiry stance ‛that values community and encourages pre-service teachers to be thinking, inquiring and decision-making professionals’ (Kosnik 2007, 18). Crowe and Berry (2007) articulate a set of five interrelated principles that underpin their pedagogies of teacher education: (1) that student teachers need to see teaching from the perspective of the learner; (2) that student teachers need to see into the thinking of experienced others; (3) that student teachers need opportunities to practice thinking like a teacher; (4) that student teachers need scaffolding to help their learning; and (5) that developing responsive relationships is at the heart of learning about teaching. Bullock (2007, 93) outlines how reflection-on-action and action research sit at the heart of his pedagogy, which ‘develops from my desire to offer my knowledge, assumptions and practices to the critical scrutiny of myself, my students and my critical friends’. Judy:  As I noted in the opening narrative, when I first read the work of self-study researchers early in my career as a teacher educator, the work of Loughran, Russell,

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Korthagen and others resonated greatly with me. I remember sitting in a local coffee shop reading their work and feeling excited by the opportunities that these ideas offered to me as I pursued my new career as a teacher educator. At the time, I was nearing completion of my PhD and working in the faculty as a teaching associate. I was teaching in a unit about teaching and learning, and my school teaching experience was very recent and familiar. I was even doing casual relief teaching while I was studying and tutoring, so I would come into my classes and be able to tell the students about what I had done as a primary school teacher the day before. The students loved listening to these stories and enjoyed sharing teaching activities and ideas. As my narrative in Chap. 4 illustrates, when I first entered the academy, I thought that my job was to tell the students about how to teach, using my own recent and extensive teaching experience as the basis of our discussions. However, I soon came to realise that this was not actually the case and that teaching about teaching in a university classroom was something quite different. For one thing, much of the content of those early lectures and workshops was new to me. I understood most of the concepts, but the language was very different from how teachers in schools talk about their practice. Even the word ‘pedagogy’ was not in my teacher lexicon. Although my experience as a primary school teacher was the reason I was offered the tutoring position, it gradually became clear to me that this wasn’t enough. The students loved the stories of my experience and examples of activities and strategies that they could use in their own classrooms, but couldn’t they get this from their supervising teachers in schools? What did I have to offer that was not available on Google or Pinterest? This is about the time that I became aware that what I was doing in the faculty was not teacher training, but teacher education. This called for a significant shift in my thinking. My reading of Loughran and others helped to open my eyes and my thinking to new possibilities, although this did not come without its challenges. I have been teaching teachers now for over a decade, but writing this duoethnography has challenged my thinking about what I have been doing over those years. Have I been teaching my students how and what they wanted to be taught, or have I been teaching them as I believe they should be taught? A mixture of both, I am sure. This dilemma has been discussed in Chap. 5 in relation to sacred, cover and secret stories. Have I been challenging my student sufficiently or merely providing the answers that they were seeking? I am forced to consider what principles have underpinned my pedagogy up until now and to ask whether or not they are sufficient to take me into the future. I believe that the purpose of teacher education is to provide a sufficient knowledge base about teaching to enable pre-service teachers to be confident and competent in their ability to teach their own students. But, critically, I want them to not only know how to do teaching, but how to think about teaching and to challenge the prevailing discourses about education – not an easy task in the current policy climate of measurement and accountability and short-term contracts for beginning

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teachers (see Chap. 5). Ask too many questions, especially as a beginning teacher, and they might be putting their job on the line. But, if all my students know is how to enact teaching, how will teaching as a profession, and as a way of educating society, progress? The challenge is to provide my students with the concrete experiences and examples of practice that they are crying out for while also encouraging them to think more deeply for themselves, as teachers, and to explore and to question practice. I also wonder what use these dispositions are if they gain employment in a school or a system that gives them little control over their working lives. All these questions and wonderings still swirl around in my head, even after a decade of teaching teachers and researching teacher education. Perhaps there are just too many variables in teacher education to say that any one approach or philosophical basis is ‘right’ or ‘appropriate’. We can learn a great deal from published research, conference presentations and in conversations with our colleagues down the hallway or across the world, but, in the end, it comes down to ourselves, our students, our close colleagues and our institutional and policy contexts to decide what is best (and possible) for our particular classrooms and groups of students. Mike:  Like Judy, I worked part-time in schools and in the university for a while at the beginning of my time as a teacher educator. Doing the two jobs simultaneously felt like a real advantage at the time, and the students responded well. Looking back, I realise that I saw myself as ‘authentic’ during this short period: I was a doctoral student researching in education, and at the same time, I clearly had my feet ‘firmly on the ground’ as a practitioner in school. While this image of the practitioner who passes on the wisdom of experience was and remains a persuasive mix for students, teachers and teacher educators alike, I came to understand that it also masks and, in many ways, reinforces a range of problematic issues in teacher education. Many of these issues emerged early in my work as a teacher educator. For a start, the ground that I had my feet firmly upon was a particular sort of terrain in a particular part of a particular town in England. I could tell a story or two about my travels there, but the pre-service teachers that I was now working with were heading off to work in very different contexts. Further, l had learnt to teach and had developed my own pedagogy in a quite different educational climate from the one that was developing in the mid-2000s when I started working as a teacher educator at university. There were some useful ideas and many abiding principles in the stories I told, but, increasingly, I began to see that while sharing my individual experience had a part to play, it might also lead to training my students to teach in one school, or at least similar schools to those that I had taught in, when what they needed was the education to be able to teach in all schools. Like most primary teacher educators, I had been appointed to teach pre-service primary classroom teachers in the university because I was a successful primary classroom teacher, but it became clear to me as I began to see the limits of, and gaps within, my own experience that I needed to provide more than stories of what I had done and how I did it as a teacher. I had always known that you cannot impersonate pedagogy. I had been inspired and learnt much from my mentor and first head

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teacher, Kevin Fossey, when I began teaching in 1991. He was six feet six and, wonderfully, gently extrovert when he taught. I knew I couldn’t teach in just the same way; I am five feet nine and no extrovert. Much as I admired him, I couldn’t put Kevin’s personality on like an overcoat or wear his pedagogy as though it were mine, but I did learn about teaching and learning from watching him work, and I took versions of those key principles and ideas in crafting my own. During my first year as a teacher educator at university, I began to see that the stories I told of teaching were about me and my teaching and that, while they could contribute to my students’ knowledge and ideas, the main task for me was not to invite them to impersonate me but to help them to develop and enact their own pedagogy. A certain amount of panic accompanied this realisation as it dawned on me – in a similar way as Jason Ritter describes above – that I did not know how to do this and that my previous experience as a teacher had not prepared me to be a teacher educator in any meaningfully sustainable way. Judy:  When I read Mike’s narrative above, I was struck by the phrase ‘you cannot impersonate pedagogy’. I hadn’t heard this before, but it resonated straight away. We can learn from others about good practice in university classrooms, but, in the end, we can’t become others. We have to be true to ourselves, and to be ourselves, as teacher educators. This also applies to our students. They need to become who they are as teachers and not try to impersonate us or their mentor teachers in schools. That doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t continually reflect on what we do and why and, like Ruth Kane (2007), ‘productively irritate’ our practice, but this reflection must acknowledge the person who we are. Mike recognised that he couldn’t put on another teacher’s personality ‘like an overcoat’, and, perhaps, that was my challenge early in my career as a teacher educator and perhaps also more recently. I was too busy trying to find the overcoat that fitted to really be confident to just be me. Or maybe it was a coat of armour that I was looking for – something to protect me from the inevitable criticism that I assumed would come my way if I didn’t adopt the ‘right’ way to teach teachers. Perhaps the questions I asked myself when I first distinguished teacher ‘training’ from teacher ‘education’ were the beginning of the career-long process of finding my own pedagogy rather than thinking about how to imitate the pedagogies of others. Consideration of relevant and appropriate pedagogies also has to take into account the context in which we are teaching. When I first started teaching at the university, it involved weekly mass lectures and follow-up small group workshops. The students had an 80% attendance requirement; if they were absent, they were required to complete make-up tasks so that they didn’t miss out on key content. The students were mostly school-leavers with a sprinkling of older students who were returning to study. In fact, my encounter with one particular mature-aged student provided the trigger for my doctoral studies (see Williams 2013). Also, there were very few international students in the mix, and studying online was not an option in the course in which I taught. The diversity of students and study modes that are available today were on the far horizon at that time.

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When I look at the teaching contexts in which I work now, with the diversity of students and modes of learning, and the lack of attendance requirements, I can see that it isn’t just a matter of developing a pedagogy that suits a relatively homogenous group of students, as it was when I first started teaching at the university. I now need to actively develop appropriate pedagogies that suit the particular context and cohort of students whom I am teaching, including online and ‘flexible’ classes (online teaching with regular on-campus optional classes). I remember one phrase articulated by the teacher educator in one of those early lectures: ‘Context matters’. Of course it does; but I didn’t understand how much at the time. This phrase has stuck in my mind ever since, and I return to it frequently: there is no one best way to teach teachers about teaching; it is a matter of being flexible and intuitive, and constantly adapting your practice to suit the needs of the learners and the learning context. However, this doesn’t mean merely doing what seems a good idea at the time. These flexible and evolving pedagogies must be underpinned by a carefully considered philosophical basis that reflects the values, beliefs and experiences of the teacher educator. Like Crowe and Berry (2007), we have to reflect over time on just what these principles are – something we return to in Chap. 10. Mike:  Losing the confidence that comes from the recent familiarity of the classroom and finding yourself in a very different role is a challenge for many early career teacher educators (Allen et al. 2016; Bullock and Ritter 2011; Williams et al. 2012). It certainly was for me in the first years of working at university (Hayler 2011). It also, conversely, forced me into the space where I could recognise that teacher education is and should be a very different if related job that requires a very different if related set of skills and sensibilities from school teaching. Letting go of well-established professional and personal identities is both disconcerting and necessary if new contextually related understanding is to be developed. There may be some truth in the widely held view that a good teacher is a good teacher whoever they are working with, but if, as Judy and I have learnt, ‘context matters’, the key element of being a good teacher must be the ability to recognise and respond to what is needed in the context in which you find yourself working. This clearly requires more than being around successful teachers. As Dewey (1916, 13) argued, some experiences can be ‘miseducative’ and can potentially impede learning and growth. Labaree (2004) highlights how the chronic uncertainty about the effectiveness of teaching itself stems from the fact that there are no practices proven to work independently of a given context. He also highlights the vast array of intervening variables that mediate the relationships within any teaching and learning environment. Ritter and Hayler (2019) recognise the complex and often contradictory purposes inscribed to the whole enterprise of education that make it extremely difficult to investigate teacher education through traditional research methods because there are few causal relationships and no generalisations to be found. At some point early on in any course or module that I am teaching, I always tell the pre-service teachers that the task at hand for them is to become the teacher they want to be in the context in which they find themselves. The statement sounds rather

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obvious, of course, and it could apply to any professional role. It certainly applies to the role of teacher educator. But it also raises some fundamental questions for those students who are ready to ask them: What sort of teacher do I want to be and why? And what are the characteristics of this or that context in which I find myself? My pedagogy of teacher education springs from this statement and flows through these questions as I encourage my students to embrace the research sensibility towards becoming teachers. The task at hand for me, as with my students, is to continue to become the teacher educator that I want to be in the context in which I find myself, and I need to continue to ask myself the same questions as they do about myself and the ever-shifting context of teacher education.

8.3  C  ontext Matters: Journeys of Evolving Pedagogies in Diverse Settings As we have discussed above, developing pedagogies of teacher education is not only for those who are in the early stages of their journey into teacher education; it is a challenge that presents itself throughout a teacher educator’s career. No doubt expertise, confidence and wisdom increase with time, but the search for effective pedagogies in and of teacher education continues as teaching contexts and student cohorts change, and the demands on the profession intensify and evolve. As we discussed in Chap. 5, the changing policy and educational contexts of teaching and learning continually provide new challenges for teacher educators to navigate, so that their understanding of how to teach pre-service teachers is constantly under review and challenge, by themselves and by others. Teacher educators are now often expected to work in unfamiliar contexts as the internationalisation of education continues apace. For example, many pre-service teachers now undertake professional experience and study abroad programmes in distant locations, which provide them with challenges of working in new and unfamiliar contexts, sometimes with language barriers, cultural differences, under- or differently resourced schools and a colonial history that looms large over the curriculum and pedagogical approaches encountered (see, e.g. Fitzgerald et al. 2017). Universities today are under increasing pressure to create international networks and collaborations. These all present learning opportunities for pre-service teachers and for teacher educators. Both of us have had the privilege of working abroad as teacher educators in very different locations, but, nonetheless, we have been challenged to continue to explore and adapt our university-based pedagogies into these new environments. As we wrote in Chap. 6, working in international contexts provides interesting and sometimes challenging opportunities for collaboration, but they also offer opportunities to examine our pedagogies and how context shapes what we do. Judy:  My work in the area of IPE has certainly taught me about the need to be constantly aware of pedagogy and what this means in different contexts. I found that

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developing pedagogies in unfamiliar places often involved working outside my comfort zone and a preparedness to be the learner as much as the leader of the group (Williams 2017; Williams and Grierson 2016). In many ways, being the teacher educator in this context is a parallel experience to that of the pre-service teachers: learning about new places, cultures, languages and approaches to education and building relationships with a range of people, including students, fellow teacher educators, local teachers, families and communities and government representatives. It also involves being exposed to some confronting situations that are the antithesis of what would be experienced in Australia. In my role as IPE leader, I have had to support and counsel students who have been upset by some of their observations and experiences, as I have also had to do on occasions at home. However, being away from their usual family and community supports is an added challenge for pre-service teachers working in a foreign country, and, as a teacher educator, I have had to take on different responsibilities in the role that would not be required at home. My pedagogy in this context has involved having difficult discussions about cultural and educational experiences that the pre-­ service teachers have found confronting or confusing. Sometimes, they have to grapple with being exposed to practices that are commonly accepted in other countries but that challenge their fundamental beliefs about what is right and wrong in teaching. To what extent can we, as outsiders, judge or criticise approaches that we see? It is a difficult conversation to have with pre-service teachers, who have high ideals about teaching but who also need to accept that ‘this is how it’s done here’. Although accepting doesn’t mean condoning, it is a valuable lesson in cultural understanding and how they (and I) have to navigate the so-called pedagogies of discomfort (Zembylas 2015) with which they are faced on a regular basis. Despite the challenges, relationship building has been identified as a central plank in my experience on IPE. My self-study (Williams 2017) shone a light on how important this is, both at home and abroad. I have come to see that building and sustaining appropriate personal and professional relationships with my students and with local school communities is central to the rewards and the challenges I have faced in these contexts and, indeed, in all my work as a teacher educator (see Chaps. 6 and 7). In writing about my experiences on IPE, I concluded: Reflecting on who I really was as a teacher educator on IPE, and capturing this in a self-­ study, was an important part of my professional learning and growth. I learned to look deeply and critically at myself, and like many of the pre-service teachers, I progressively gained more confidence to undertake the challenges, and to gain the rewards, of being involved in such an important professional experience. I learned that I can do this work, and do it effectively, and although I am not on IPE to change the world, I am there to make a contribution. Negotiating relationships and working out not just how to do teacher education on IPE, but how to be a teacher educator in this context, is an ongoing, complex but highly rewarding part of my work. (Williams 2017, 181)

Mike:  As with Judy, I learnt a lot about myself and my own context from working with students and teachers in another context far from home. As mentioned in relation to collaboration in Chap. 6, my work with colleagues at the MIE has been a key

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element in the development of my pedagogy of teacher education. While the team from Brighton were always well received in the earlier visits based upon what we knew about teaching in England, I came to see that to support the Mauritian students of teaching to see into teaching, I needed to also make my own pedagogy a site of inquiry in context rather than a point of delivery. As noted earlier, collaboration with colleagues at MIE was central to this process as we began to develop a dialogic planning process that incorporated their knowledge and understanding of local culture, educational systems and relevant pedagogy. Team-teaching with colleagues, sharing planning, teaching and assessment eventually moved the programme away from what now seems like a starkly colonial structure. I have been wondering why it took us so long to get the message and begin the process of genuine collaboration and co-teaching. The programme had been going for ten years before any real change took place. What made us eventually realise that much of what we were doing, or at least the way that we were doing it, was of limited relevance to the practice of teachers in Mauritius? I had been teaching on the MA programme at MIE since 2005 and been to the island five times before I went to visit a school in 2008. I had arrived early to prepare the programme and do some evaluation work before the Easter break in 2008, so we managed to arrange a visit to a school where two of our MA students were teachers. The students were experienced teachers in the second year of the part-time MA, and watching them work with large classes was an education for me. It made me see that so many of the taken-for-granted assumptions about ‘good’ teaching that underpinned the materials and ideas that I had been using with the students at MIE were drawn from and focused towards my own culturally informed professional context. There were principles and ideas that could be understood and applied between contexts, but I had done none of the work needed for this to happen. I had clearly not learnt much from the experience of teaching at MIE. The pedagogy had not been dialogic. I had not been listening. My approach had been, to some extent at least, to share the ideas and approaches developed in England as though they were ‘correct’ or somehow universal, with the tacit assumption that students would return to their schools and apply the ideas in practice. What I saw in the classrooms on that first visit to a Mauritian school was good, contextually informed teaching and learning but not in the way that I had been espousing for some time at MIE. There were no classroom assistants, and teachers called children to the front of the class for small group, paired or individual work with them, making notes on assessment and adding small tasks for follow-up and homework in their exercise books. What struck me was that, although this was what I would have termed as an overtly hierarchical structure, the relationships seemed very good within the class. While there were elements that made me feel uncomfortable about the organisation of the school, there was, for example, a ‘remedial’ department, and children with

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learning difficulties were taught together here in a way that had been familiar to me as a child in England but had gone by the time I became a teacher; I could see that the teachers themselves were doing good work within this context and that much of my discomfort has to do with my own personal, professional and culturally informed context of experience. When I spoke with the teachers the following week, they told me that they did find the work at MIE useful for examining the way they worked within the schools and that, while some of the ideas were also useful, they needed to adapt and adjust them considerably within the schools that they worked within. It was also clear that the top-down nature of school administration from the ministry of education to the classroom left the teachers with very little room to play with, publicly at least, and that any changes in pedagogic approach needed to be introduced carefully and with some caution, as in the ‘sacred’ and ‘secret’ stories of teaching that Berry and Forgasz illustrate through their vignette in Chap. 5. Considering this aspect made me both appreciate and question my assumption that teachers in England were able to make relatively autonomous professional choices based upon their own pedagogic principles. One of the things that was reinforced by the visit for me was that societal expectations of what schools should be like and what they are for are, like everything else, formed and shaped by history and culture. While appropriate change and development within context are important, these need to be informed by the context. They cannot be imposed from outside, from ‘above’ or from ‘the north’. The potentially valuable contribution from ‘outside’ needs to be dialogic, collaborative and largely led by the locals – however ‘correct’ we think our principles and ideas about pedagogy might be  – to avoid repeating the patterns of the past. The visit took place at a time when I was consciously developing my pedagogic approach with a research sensibility informed by self-study. While I did not take this on as a formal self-study, I can see the influence of the self-study approach in the review of our work at MIE. The visit must have been a key element in making me realise and then argue that if we were serious about encouraging the pre-service and experienced teachers to be the teachers that they wanted to be in the context they found themselves in, then we needed to respect their values, even if they differed considerably from our own, and we needed to recognise and know more about the contexts within which they worked. Planning and co-teaching with the Mauritian tutors and listening to the Mauritian teachers was central to the redevelopment of our work at MIE. I think this also had a considerable influence on the way that I worked with pre-service and experienced teachers back in England as I tried to develop a more dialogic, less imposed, tutor-led pedagogy of teacher education to make my teaching about teaching more of a site of inquiry.

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8.4  E  xploring Our Pedagogies of Teacher Education Through Autobiographical Writing and Self-Study As self-study researchers, we have each taken on the challenges issued by John Loughran, Tom Russell and others. We have created data, collaborated with each other and with others, and examined the particular obstacles and rapids that we have faced during our careers as teacher educators in relation to our pedagogies. In the next section, we present self-studies and reflections about transformational moments and contexts in the development of our pedagogies. These moments have helped us to gain greater insight into what, how and why we teach the way we do. Judy  – Co-teaching About Pedagogy:  Making practice explicit is a common thread that emerges from many of the accounts of personal pedagogies of teacher education. While this might appear to be a necessary teaching strategy in the teacher education classroom, it requires a certain degree of honesty, courage and willingness to uncover one’s own vulnerability to pre-service teachers. Perhaps this is a unique characteristic of those who undertake self-study (and those who write duoethnographic accounts of their own experiences). My own collaborative self-study about the pedagogy of co-teaching (Williams et al. 2018) revealed some interesting and, at times, confronting findings. This self-study was about teaching in a new and unfamiliar situation: co-teaching in the university classroom with a teacher from a local primary school. The process of undertaking the self-study sharpened my focus on essential elements of my pedagogy and reinforced the notion that ‘context matters’. As discussed in Chap. 5, some of the student feedback about my co-teaching in the unit was surprising and unusually hurtful, and it took me many months to overcome the initial shock and discomfort. The feedback for the co-teaching unit highlighted the significance of a central aspect of pedagogy that I have long recognised and which was taught in the first week of this unit: relationships sit at the heart of teaching. What I underestimated at the time was the importance of not only my pedagogical relationships with my students but also with my co-teacher, Fiona. As I stated in Chap. 5, the feedback from the students had me in a state of shock for some time. While I considered some of the comments unfair, as I relive this experience for the purposes of this book, I can see that the co-teaching experience was a clear example of how pedagogies need to be examined and adapted when the context changes. I had assumed that it would be business as usual and that I would teach the classes in much the same way as I did on my own. Fiona would be there as an experienced teacher to provide input about the practical side of teaching while I was the experienced teacher educator guiding the class and supporting Fiona as she learned what it meant to teach pre-service teachers in a university classroom. This appears to have been perceived by the students as me being ‘controlling’ and ‘disrespectful’. I see that now, but the dilemma remains. When an experienced teacher educator co-teaches with an experienced school teacher in a university

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classroom, they are not peers working collaboratively as might be the case if, for example, Mike and I co-taught together. Coming into the role with little or no background knowledge of contemporary university-based teacher education, but with a wealth of practical experience as a primary school teacher, Fiona was essentially in the same position that I was when I first transitioned into the academy from teaching. Despite this, I neglected to provide Fiona with enough context and the ‘big picture’ that was informing each class and to help her in her transition. I also spent too much time guiding the workshop in the way that I had planned it, rather than giving Fiona space to share her experiences of teaching and learning, even if that meant diverging from my teacher educator ‘script’. I should have given more thought to the pedagogical relationship between Fiona and me, and how we could have incorporated her extensive knowledge and experience more effectively into our teaching. I learned that I needed to be more aware of the imbalance in experience and expertise, and in the institutional knowledge between us, and to be more proactive in addressing this challenge. Data from the self-study indicated that I was becoming aware of this at the time but didn’t seem to have the answers to these challenges of co-teaching. I noted in my reflective journal that: Fiona’s experience and first-hand accounts are really valuable, and of interest to the students, but I am cautious about her input becoming a ‘tips and tricks’ session, and her being my ‘sidekick’. How do we integrate her professional knowledge into an academic course?

On reflection, I should also have been more explicit to the pre-service teachers about our co-teaching arrangement. Fiona and Zane (the other teacher educator with whom Fiona co-taught in the second half of the semester) explained this when they began co-teaching. They told the students that this was the first time they had co-­ taught with each other, and they opened up their own pedagogy (including the co-­ teaching arrangement) to scrutiny. Their co-teaching became a basis of discussions about effective pedagogy and what it might look like. They based their pedagogical approach on the facilitation of ‘professional conversations’ in which the pre-service teachers were positioned as colleagues rather than as students. However, I failed to be transparent about co-teaching with Fiona and to take advantage of the opportunities that professional dialogue with Fiona and with the pre-service teachers would have provided. Make the tacit explicit – one of those early understandings of teacher education that I had been excited by but, in this unit, failed to do. This turned out to be the self-study that probably had the most impact on my thinking and my practice as a teacher educator. The shock, pain and embarrassment all combined to challenge me to look much more carefully at how I establish and maintain professional and pedagogical relationships with my students and with fellow teacher educators when the opportunity arises. Interestingly, when I taught the same unit the following year, without a co-­ teacher, the student evaluations were very different and more or less back to normal. The teaching context had changed, again. There was no mention of either me or the other teacher educator who taught half of the workshops (we shared the unit but didn’t co-teach it), so no comparisons were made between us. Most of the students

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who responded to the evaluation survey described the unit as ‘engaging’, ‘relevant’, ‘useful’, with ‘really good discussions’. While I made some changes based on my learning from the previous experience of co-teaching the unit, particularly in terms of building positive relationships with students and engaging in professional conversations, in other ways, my pedagogy didn’t differ greatly from how I usually teach. Was it more successful (in terms of the student evaluations) because I spent more time in the first week getting to know the students and sharing my own stories of teaching? Maybe. Were my attempts to enter into collegial and meaningful discussions with the students more successful? Perhaps. Despite these changes of focus, I still provided lots of hands-on experiences and activities for the students, as I usually do, so that the conversations and critique of pedagogy were directed by them, rather than me. I feel more comfortable when the students are engaging with each other to explore their developing ideas about pedagogy, although I realise that my input, based on my own experiences, is something that they look for and respect. As I found out many years ago, and from my more recent experience of co-teaching, the balance between ‘tips and tricks’ and providing critique through sharing experiences is a challenging one to maintain and always needs to be open to reflective thinking. What I have learned from the co-teaching experience and the resultant self-study is that while pedagogy is very context-specific, the idea of building respectful and trusting relationships with those with whom you work (students and colleagues) is fundamental to establishing an environment in which learning can thrive. The aim of pedagogy is to facilitate learning, and, as teacher educators, we need to consider the relationships that are present and develop strategies that harness these to further the learning of our pre-service teachers. Co-teaching with Fiona sharpened my focus on my own pedagogy, and the fact that the unit we were teaching was about pedagogy, the irony was not lost on me. The experience highlighted the importance of modelling and teacher experience in teacher education; not necessarily modelling the ‘right’ way to teach but using our own practice to open up critical conversations about teaching with our pre-service teachers. Our own teaching is a teaching resource, but we also need to be aware that while transparency and pedagogical conversations about our own pedagogy can be challenging, we have to embrace that vulnerability if we are going to learn from the experience. Mike  – Renewing Assessment as Part of a Critical Pedagogy in Teacher Education:  Relying too heavily on the falling currency of my own experience as a teacher, my own confidence certainly slipped away over the first three years that I worked as a teacher educator. The place where I had succeeded as an undergraduate and as a PGCE student became a site of confusion, anxiety and what I felt was failure as I struggled to find or adapt a new pedagogy for myself as a teacher educator at the university. Leaving the university was both a low point and a new start as I focused on writing my doctorate while visiting pre-service teachers on practicum in schools on a part-time hourly paid basis. As discussed in Chaps. 3 and 4, that was the year that I came across S-STEP and met Judy and others at the Castle Conference. Change often comes through

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struggle, as light follows the dark, and I returned to teacher education with a research sensibility informed by self-study methodology and feeling that I was part of an international community of scholars in teacher education. I came to realise that pedagogy is made up of our feelings and beliefs, our knowledge (subject knowledge and knowledge of the way that people learn) and our actions, through what Stenhouse (1975) originally conceptualised as stories of action within theories of context. Therefore, as Loughran (2007) argues, and Judy recounts above, enacting a pedagogy of teacher education requires teacher educators to ‘create opportunities for students of teaching to see into teaching’ (Loughran 2007, 1). The set of ideas and actions that encompassed and carried this forwards for me in working with my students of teaching was the research and enactment of assessment for learning (Black and Wiliam 1998, 1999; Black et  al. 2002). Formative assessment became and to some extent remains the central focus of much of the work that I do with pre-service teachers. I use the term ‘formative assessment’ here in reference to not a particular, exact protocol or system but to a range of principles, approaches and activities that build upon assessment that is about teachers getting to know the people they work with and those people getting to know themselves. Central to these approaches is the active involvement of students in their own learning and the recognition of the effect that this has upon motivation and critical engagement. Learning, in adults or in children, is always an active process, and it needs to build upon the skills, knowledge, values and attitudes that the learner already possesses and brings to any given situation. I have increasingly adopted and encouraged the problem-based approach in my teacher education work as this personalises learning by asking students to generate a range of ‘How can I…?’ or ‘How can we…?’ questions from where a course of action can be planned and a range of ‘trial’ solutions tested and examined. Development of knowledge and understanding can then be assessed by both student and teacher through asking ‘What happened?’ or ‘What is happening?’ This has not always made me popular, especially early in a course when students sometimes want me to provide answers and solutions, but the central feature of the model is the empowerment of the learner and the teacher within the process of teaching and learning that runs counter to the dominance of the top-down approach. I argue that such an approach, adopted as part of formative assessment, can empower teachers’ creative agency and therefore offers one site of resistance to the culture of accountability discussed in Chap. 5. It is a means of encouraging professional teachers to formulate their own meaningful problems and questions and then to encourage the learners they work with to do the same. This does not make teachers ‘unaccountable’ for the teaching and learning within their classrooms, but it does mean taking teachers seriously in recognising their abilities to act independently and responsibly. By encouraging students to focus on their own learning trajectory rather than continually comparing themselves with others, formative assessment encourages a learning-orientated rather than performance-orientated sensibility (Correia and Harrison 2019; Dweck 2007).

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So, things have changed. The students bring news from schools today, and I still tell some tales of how things were when I was ‘out there’, but I gave up telling them how to teach a while ago now. My experience can be useful, and I can tell them about policy and the law. We can draw upon philosophies and the seminal theories of learning and development, but they are the ones who will work out what to do and learn from the moments that are both light and dark. My aim is to generate a dialogic approach that promotes critical reflection within an environment that encourages students of teaching to examine their own contexts and to make progress in developing their own critical pedagogy. We need to promote assessment as learning that is consistent with democracy in fostering a more integrated approach to theory and practice, or what Freire (1995) termed as praxis: theory in action.

8.5  T  he Influence of Life Experiences on Pedagogy as Teacher Educators The premise of this book is that who teacher educators are matters because it impacts on their work and pedagogy as teacher educators. Others have written about their formative life experiences and how these have impacted on their work as teachers (e.g. Allison-Roan and Hayes 2012; McClellan and Sader 2012; Rice 2011) and teacher educators (Ramirez and Allison 2018; Skerrett 2006, 2008), but to what extent do our own early experiences (as outlined in Chap. 3) impact on our pedagogy? While other researchers have made explicit use of their stories in their teaching, we are forced to consider just how much we use our stories in our teaching. We discuss this further in Chap. 9. Judy:  I am usually reluctant to refer too much to my own experiences as a child or student in my teaching, although I am happy to give examples of general experiences that I have had as a teacher. However, these are usually events that are not particularly confronting or personal; just some anecdotes that help students make links to the topic under discussion. I can recall, however, some recent forays into the use of personal narratives to explore an aspect of teaching that I wanted my students to consider. On each occasion, I used a personal anecdote to highlight an important principle of teaching and learning, hoping that the personal nature of the story might make an impact on students’ understanding and, perhaps more importantly, develop their empathy. I believe that teachers need to be empathetic to the situation of all their students, not just the lower achievers, the academically able or the loudest. This, no doubt, springs from my own unhappy experiences, particularly at primary school, where to my knowledge, not one teacher ever stood up for me. I wonder whether or not those teachers really understood the very real impact of bullying and poverty on a young child. I mentioned in Chap. 3 that I use my Russian dolls to illustrate to pre-service teachers that it is essential for teachers to get to know and understand their students.

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This always appears to have an impact on my students, but my comment that ‘there is always more to someone than meets the eye’ is left at that. I usually don’t share the details about my own school experiences – I just let the idea hang there, hoping that the students will make good sense of it themselves. However, I recently shared my experience of my first (and only) day at kindergarten, in a written narrative, the contents of which were also captured in Chap. 3. When I presented this narrative to the class – about being put in a corner with my nose against the wall – some of the students were horrified that a 5-year-old child could be treated this way. However, the conversation soon moved to ‘of course, something like that wouldn’t happen today!’ I wonder how much the students really understood the trauma that this day created for me and that this was the main reason I never went back to kindergarten. I was reluctant to take the conversation any further, perhaps reflecting the concerns of Valerie Allison-Roan, that ‘Obstacles [to sharing] for me included fear of rejection, fear of being perceived as other or alien and, worst of all, fear that telling my story would be read as an attempt to elicit pity or praise’ (Allison-Roan and Hayes 2012, 130). Does it really make any difference to pre-service teachers if the story is that of their lecturer or if it comes from another source? The one time I did share a personal experience actually had me in tears and has left me reluctant to share such a story again, fearful of how I would handle the disclosure. In this particular graduate class, we were discussing the importance of teachers understanding students’ lives, families and communities, and how all students were deserving of respect and support no matter what their situation. I shared a story about an experience I had as a final year high school student. I was studying politics and was usually top of the class in tests and assignments. It was my favourite subject, and I did well, although I rarely, if ever, contributed to class discussions or asked questions. I dared not speak aloud. Our teacher was the daughter of a well-­ known foreign correspondent for one of Melbourne’s daily newspapers, so she had connections to journalists and to some politicians. One day, she invited a colleague of her father to talk to us about his life in journalism, reporting on local and foreign politics. I was enthralled. Soon after, this teacher announced that she had arranged a 1-day excursion to the national capital, Canberra, which included a brief meeting with our local member at Parliament House. Because of the distance, we would have to fly up in a day, so this made the excursion both unusual and relatively expensive. I had never been denied access to any school programmes or activities before (mum always managed to find the money to pay for local excursions, fundraisers, swimming lessons and so on), but a flight to Canberra was just out of the question. I had to tell my teacher that I couldn’t go. I don’t remember being particularly upset; disappointed yes, but it was just one of those many things that I didn’t do. We couldn’t afford it so that was that. My teacher was also disappointed, as she knew how much I loved the subject of politics, but she seemed to accept that I wouldn’t be going. A few days later, however, she called me aside and told me that she believed I really should go to Canberra and that the school had offered to cover the expense. It was the first time that I had ever felt actively supported by a teacher and had been given a hand up by the school (apart from the external scholarships and

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awards that I had earned through my academic results). As I shared this story with my students, and I told them that this was an example of a teacher believing in her student (me) and that all students (I) mattered, I could feel the tears well up. It brought back to me how rarely I felt valued at school, and, even now, many years later, the impact of this realisation was deep. I think my mini-meltdown had an effect on the students too, with one of them coming up to me, putting her arm around my shoulder and offering me a tissue. The importance of empathy and care in teaching? Here was a powerful example.

∗∗∗

One might assume that the development of pedagogy in teacher education is a steady continuum, as we journey down the ‘river’ of our careers to our inevitable destination. It might start out shaky and uncertain in the upper reaches, but with experience and the support of our guides and mentors, and after a few years of traversing this moving landscape, we will finally get there. However, just as we round a bend, or navigate a particularly rough set of rapids, giving a sigh of relief, we are challenged yet again to look at what we are doing, how and where we are doing it and why. Where we are situated in our journey (the context) matters, so we have to reflect and realign our practices but always keep an eye on our final destination – the teacher educators we aspire to be.

∗∗∗ Mike:  ‘All real change involves passing through the zones of uncertainty – the situation of being at sea, of being lost, of confronting more information than you can handle’. (Schon 1971, 12) It was February 2011, and I was leading a lecture about reflection and reflectivity in developing pedagogy, so I reflected – perhaps more openly and publicly than I had intended to – but it was certainly one way of making the tacit more explicit in teacher education. There were around 300 students and a team of my colleagues present for the lecture, which was part of the final year Leading Future Learning undergraduate module for students about to become primary or secondary school teachers. I had started with the quote from Alexander about pedagogy being: [T]he act of teaching together with its attendant discourse. What one needs to know, and the skills one needs to command, in order to make and justify the many decisions of which teaching is constituted. (Alexander 2004, 11) I had come to agree that being a teacher was a series of decisions in response to the many dilemmas of the day, informed by planning, evaluation and reflection. So if the leading of learning, or what we call teaching, is informed by pedagogy, I argued early on in the lecture, reflection is surely one of the key elements because it extracts meaning from experience by providing the tools that one needs to find out about self and the context in order to negotiate the way into teaching. ‘How will you engage with the structures of the educational settings you find yourselves in and still be yourself?’ I asked the students, using myself as an example. I reminded them that I had spent nearly 4 years trying to convince them of the case for interactive teaching and learning based on a commitment to social constructivism, and, yet, here I was giving a

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lecture to 300 people. ‘So, my dilemma is how do I make a lecture interactive and reflective? And this is what I came up with’. It was a risky strategy in many ways, inviting and, no doubt, quietly receiving ridicule – to a certain extent at least – as I asked the students to consider what they might do in a comparable situation and talk to each other about it. The feedback was useful with some good ideas about whole class teaching and the need to involve thinking and talking tasks. I reminded them of the reflective teaching (Pollard 2008) pattern of pedagogy with the ‘problem’-‘issue’-‘dilemma’ leading to ‘judgement’ informed by the classic cycle of planning, provision, collection of evidence, analysis of evidence, evaluation of evidence, reflection, then planning again. We returned to the concept of pedagogy as being made up of what we know, what we believe and feel and what we do as teachers, and I talked at length about the importance of reflection before asking them all to draw a timeline from birth to now and begin to identify some key moments that they saw as turning points, critical incidents or epiphanies. It seemed only right to follow the task myself by way of example, so I marked a few dates on the slide showing on the big screens. It was February, so I spoke about February 1975 when I was permanently expelled from school aged 15. Following a noisy part of the lecture, it was suddenly very quiet. As a colleague put it later, ‘you could hear a pin drop at that moment’. Although I had never advertised it too widely, I hadn’t been aware of keeping my permanent exclusion from school a secret. I had mentioned it before to individual students and colleagues in passing, but I realised that the colleagues in the lecture and most of these students were hearing it for the first time: a teacher educator, who had been a teacher for 12 years, and a behaviour support specialist teacher and adviser for 5 years had, in fact, been expelled from school 36 years ago this month. The point I wanted to make was about the feelings of rejection and loneliness and loss that I had at the time and that it was the teacher who became my friend, Len Goldman, who had kept in touch and gave me encouragement. He had never written me off when everyone else had, and he gave me a chance when I needed it most and deserved it least. ‘Never write anyone off’, I tried to say but my voice cracked, and I felt tears come to my eyes. It was very, very quiet. I knew that if I tried to say anything, I would break down, so I looked away to the side of the lecture theatre and concentrated on the exit sign. I didn’t say anything for what seemed like a long time. There was a long silence before someone started clapping, and then it seemed as though everyone did for quite a while. It was a strange moment: very powerful, and strange. Regaining composure and my voice, I explained that I felt partly embarrassed but also interested in the effect that articulating the memory had on me, and how sharing that memory and those feelings made me understand them in a new way. It was a good example of how the analytic and the evocative contribute to learning and a reminder that they are never really separated however much we think they may be. Several students and staff came to speak with me or sent me messages to say how much they got from the lecture. It was some of the best feedback that I’ve ever had. Speaking with a colleague, I asked about the distraction of the ‘emotional moment’, and she said that while she had heard me speak about reflection and self-study narrative previously, she realised now that she had never really understood it until she saw it in action during the lecture: ‘that’s when I got it’ she said, ‘that’s when the penny dropped’. While I do not make a habit of talking about personally painful experiences and I do not want to lose, or come so close to losing, my composure while teaching, I realise now that a penny also dropped into the box of my pedagogy that day in understanding how the composing and the sharing of narratives of experience can help us recognise and better understand ourselves and the context that we find ourselves in.

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References Allen, J., Rogers, M. P., & Borowski, R. (2016). ‘I am out of my comfort zone’: Self-study of the struggle of adapting to the professional identity of a teacher educator. Studying Teacher Education, 12(3), 320–332. Alexander, R. (2004). Still no pedagogy? Principle, pragmatism and compliance in primary education. Cambridge Journal of Education, 34(1), 9–33. Allison-Roan, V., & Hayes, M. P. (2012). Studying Teacher Education, 8(2), 127–141. Black, P., Harrison, C., Lee, C., Marshall, B., & Wiliam, D. (2002). Working inside the black box: Assessment for learning in the classroom. London: School of Education, King’s College. Black, P., & Wiliam, D. (1998). Assessment and classroom learning. Assessment in Education, 5(1), 7–71. Black, P., & Wiliam, D. (1999). Inside the black box: Raising standards through assessment. London: School of Education, King’s College. Brubaker, N.  D. (2012). Multiple layers of self in an evolving pedagogy of teacher education: Conflict and compromise in a quest for classroom democracy. Studying Teacher Education, 8(1), 3–18. Bullock, S. M. (2007). Finding my way from teacher to teacher educator: Valuing innovative pedagogy and inquiry into practice. In T. Russell & J. Loughran (Eds.), Enacting a pedagogy of teacher education: Values, relationships and practices (pp. 77–94). London: Routledge. Bullock, S., & Ritter, J. (2011). Exploring the transition into academia through collaborative self-­ study. Studying Teacher Education, 7(2), 171–182. Butler, B.  M., Burns, E., Frierman, C., Hawthorne, K., Innes, A., & Parrott, J.  A. (2014). The impact of a pedagogy of teacher education seminar on educator and future teacher educator identities. Studying Teacher Education, 10(3), 255–274. Correia, C. F., & Harrison, C. (2019). Teachers’ beliefs about inquiry-based learning and its impact on formative assessment practice. Research in Science and Technological Education., 1. https:// doi.org/10.1080/02635143.2019.1634040. Crowe, A., & Berry, A. (2007). Teaching prospective teachers about learning to ‘Think like a teacher’. In T.  Russell & J.  Loughran (Eds.), Enacting a pedagogy of teacher education: Values, relationships and practices (pp. 31–44). London: Routledge. Dewey, J. (1916). Democracy and education. New York: Macmillan. Dewey, J. (1933). How we think: A restatement of reflective thinking to the educative process. Boston: D.C. Heath. (Original work published in 1910). Dweck, C. (2007). Mindset: Changing the way you think to fulfil your potential. New  York: Ballantine. Fitzgerald, A., Williams, J., & Parr, G. (Eds.). (2017). Narratives of learning through international professional experience. Singapore: Springer. Forgasz, R., & McDonough, S. (2017). ‘Struck by the way our bodies conveyed so much’: A collaborative self-study of our developing understanding of embodied pedagogies. Studying Teacher Education, 13(1), 52–67. Freire, P. (1995). Pedagogy of hope. Reliving pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: Continuum. Hayler, M. (2011). Autoethnography, self-narrative and teacher education. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers. Kane, R. (2007). From naïve practitioner to teacher educator and researcher: Constructing a personal pedagogy of teacher education. In T. Russell & J. Loughran (Eds.), Enacting a pedagogy of teacher education: Values, relationships and practices (pp. 60–76). London: Routledge. Kosnik, C. (2007). Still the same yet different. In T.  Russell & J.  Loughran (Eds.), Enacting a pedagogy of teacher education (pp. 16–30). London: Routledge. Labaree, D. F. (2004). The trouble with Ed schools. New Haven: Yale University Press. Loughran, J. J. (2006). Developing a pedagogy of teacher education: Understanding teaching and learning about teaching. In London. New York: Routledge.

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Loughran, J. J. (2007). Enacting a pedagogy of teacher education. In T. Russell & J. Loughran (Eds.), Enacting a pedagogy of teacher education: Values, relationships and practices (pp. 1–15). London: Routledge. McClelland, P., & Sader, J. (2012). Power and privilege. In J. Norris, R. D. Sawyer, & D. Lund (Eds.), Duoethnography: Dialogic methods for social, health and educational research (pp. 137–156). London: Routledge. McGlynn-Stewart, M. (2010). Listening to students, listening to myself: Addressing pre-service teachers’ fears of mathematics and teaching mathematics. Studying Teacher Education, 6(2), 175–186. Perrow, M. (2013). ‘Welcome to the real world’: Navigating the gap between best teaching practices and current reality. Studying Teacher Education, 9(3), 284–298. Pollard, A. (2008). Reflective teaching: Evidence informed professional practice. London: Continuum. Ramirez, L., & Allison, V. (2018, July 15–19). Examining attitudes and beliefs about public education through co-autobiographical self-study. In D. Garbett & A. Ovens (Eds.), Pushing boundaries and crossing borders: Self-study as a means for researching pedagogy (pp. 351–357). Proceedings of the 12th international conference of self study of teacher education practices, Herstmonceaux. Rice, M. (2011). Competing and conflicting identity plotlines: Navigating personal narratives of entering teaching. Studying Teacher Education, 7(2), 145–154. Ritter, J.  K. (2007). Forging a pedagogy of teacher education: The challenges of moving from classroom teacher to teacher educator. Studying Teacher Education, 3(1), 5–22. Ritter, J. K., & Hayler, M. (2019). Challenges in engaging in self-study within teacher education contexts. In The second international handbook of self-study of teaching and teacher education. Dordrecht: Springer. (forthcoming). Russell, T. (2016). Narratives of the power of experience in a teacher educator’s development. In J.  Williams & M.  Hayler (Eds.), Professional learning through transitions and transformations: Teacher educators’ journeys of becoming (pp. 13–28). Dordrecht: Springer. Russell, T., & Loughran, J. (Eds.). (2007). Enacting a pedagogy of teacher education. London: Routledge. Schön, D. (1971). Beyond the stable state. New York: Random House. Skerrett, A. (2006). Looking inward: The impact of race, ethnicity, gender, and social class background on teaching sociocultural theory in education. Studying Teacher Education, 2(2), 183–200. Skerrett, A. (2008). Biography, identity, and inquiry: The making of teacher, teacher educator, and researcher. Studying Teacher Education, 4(2), 143–156. Solle, E. P., Frambaugh-Kritzer, C., Freese, A., & Persson, A. (2019). Investigating critical friendship: Peeling back the layers. Studying Teacher Education, 15(1), 19–30. Stenhouse, L. (1975). An introduction to curriculum research and development. London: Heinemann. Williams, J. (2013). Constructing new professional identities: Career changers in teacher education. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers. Williams, J. (2017). Learning from leading: A teacher educator’s perspective of learning through leading an international professional experience. In A.  Fitzgerald, G.  Parr, & J.  Williams (Eds.), Narratives of learning through international professional experience (pp.  169–184). Singapore: Springer. Williams, J., & Grierson, A. (2016). Facilitating professional development during international practicum: Understanding our work as teacher educators through critical incidents. Studying Teacher Education, 12(1), 55–69. Williams, J., MaRhea, Z., & Barrie, F. (2018). Co-teaching as pedagogy: Negotiating pedagogical spaces in university classrooms. In D.  Garbett & A.  Ovens (Eds.), Pushing boundaries and

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crossing borders: Self-study as a means for researching pedagogy. Proceedings of the 12th international conference of self study of teacher education practices, Herstmonceaux, UK. July 15–19, pp. 425–432. Williams, J., Ritter, J., & Bullock, S. M. (2012). Understanding the complexities of becoming a teacher educator: Experience, belonging and practice within a professional learning community. Studying Teacher Education, 8(3), 245–260. Zembylas, M. (2015). ‘Pedagogy of discomfort’ and its ethical implications: The tensions of ethical violence in social justice education. Ethics and Education, 10(2), 163–174.

Chapter 9

Constructing an Identity as a Teacher Educator

Abstract  All of the issues, contexts and questions discussed in the preceding chapters contribute to the ongoing construction of a teacher educator’s professional identity. In this chapter, the authors explore the notion of professional identity in shared text and in dialogue with each other. They draw upon the literature and their own personal narratives to develop and research their work, to examine their ongoing attempts to shape and frame their understanding of teacher educator identity. Keywords  Teacher educator professional identity · Becoming · Agency



∗∗∗ Judy: I have checked in my bags and am making my way to customs and immigration at Melbourne Airport. I am nearly ready to board a plane that will take me to the annual meeting of the AERA, my fifth of these conferences. There, I will present and attend sessions and meet with other academics, including teacher educators. I have one more piece of paper to fill in before I go through the barriers that separate ‘official’ Australian soil from the ‘unofficial’ no man’s land of the international departure lounge: the green and white departure card – Name, Passport number, Destination, Reason for travel – simple and straightforward. Occupation? Not so simple or straightforward. I always hesitate when it comes to filling in this part. What do I write that captures what I do, that other people would understand? Teacher? Lecturer? Academic? Teacher educator? Researcher? All of the above, really. I usually decide on the word ‘academic’ because it probably comes closest to a general description or understanding of my role. However, this process makes me start to think about who I am in a professional sense. I get the sense of having a fractured professional identity, with ‘teacher’ at the heart of it but many other versions of myself revolving and evolving around it: teacher educator, administrator, course leader, mentor, counsellor, researcher, writer, reviewer, examiner, collaborator…But my identity as a teacher educator isn’t just about what I do (my roles) but why I do it, how I feel about what I do and how I see myself in relation to my work and the others with whom I work (my professional identity). Although I use the term ‘academic’, I always feel a little uneasy describing myself this way. I almost feel like looking over my shoulder and saying: ‘Who? Me?’ I feel much more comfortable with the term ‘teacher’, which I have been (officially) since I was 21 years old and, in a personal sense, for much longer. As I wrote in Chap. 3, my early family and school experiences encouraged my determination to be a teacher, even though my school experiences as a student were mixed. I had a love/hate relationship with school, but I never

© The Author(s) 2020 M. Hayler, J. Williams, Being a Teacher Educator in Challenging Times, Self-Study of Teaching and Teacher Education Practices 22, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-3848-3_9

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wavered in my desire to be a teacher. I am still a teacher – but so much more now – one word or phrase really can’t convey what I do, my role, and how I feel about what I do, my identity. Perhaps I find it hard to fill in the box asking for my ‘occupation’ because being a teacher educator is more than merely an occupation. It is a way of being in the world – part of my personal as well as professional identity.



∗∗∗

9.1  Introduction In this chapter, we explore the notion of professional identity in shared text and in dialogue with each other. We draw upon the literature and our own personal narratives to develop and research our work, to examine our ongoing attempts to shape and frame our understanding of teacher educator identity.

9.2  Voice, Self and Identity For us, the act of narration reveals the way that narrative can locate critical engagement in autobiographical reflection and lead to, what Goodson and Gill (2014, 2) term, ‘transformation and reconciliation’. In other words, it is in the act of narration that we make meaning and develop a situated identity from what we understand to be a core or essentialised self. Having begun to find a way forward in the maze of identity construction that takes us towards an understanding of professional identity, we should pause for a moment to question the implicit assumption that sits at the centre of conventional narrative research: that the articulation of identity corresponds authentically and fairly directly to an actual identity. We can see and may agree with this, but we should also note that the assumption carries the tacit acceptance of a self-knowing subject who can speak for her- or himself (Denzin 1989; Grant 2013; Lather 2009). The post-structuralist objection to the notion of voice entwined with identity, professional or otherwise, is that both the idea of self and voice being the same and the concept of voice as a clear window to the inner self are untenable. Bakhtin’s (1981) argument that voice is inevitably dialogic informs the postmodern understanding of multiple voices and the fragmented self. From this perspective, the act of narration constitutes a range of provisional ‘truths’. The post-structuralist voice is said to be in a ‘constant performance’ of shifting, plural and often discordant combinations of discourse, power and positioning (Jackson 2009). In this context, voice is always understood as provisional and contingent; always becoming. The aim of self-narrative research, such as autoethnography and duoethnography, is to show how subjectivity is produced. Grant (2013, 8) posits that this might be described as ‘the post-structuralist narrating voice of the emerging I’ compared

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to ‘the narrating voice of the predetermined I’. Our duoethnographic writing recognises elements of a ‘predetermined I’ while narratively constructing and reconstructing an emerging, contingent ‘I’ in dialogue with each other, enacted through the roles we live and work through. This makes sense to us because we both need a story or stories of ourselves to live by, including stories of ourselves as students, teachers, teacher educators and, as we have come to see from writing this book, as ‘educators’ to work by. We have come to realise that none of these are fixed or certain, but they have elements of contextual consistency in how we see ourselves and how we attempt to enact our roles in teacher education. An element in our narratives, which we have come to see more clearly in the process of duoethnography is the influence of ‘ancestral voices’ as an important part of our stories of identity. While acknowledging the importance and generative energy of postmodern perspectives, Goodson and Gill (2014) regret that the emphasis on multiplicity and hybridity that sits at the heart of postmodern approaches has been at the expense of understanding the continuity and coherence people seek in coming to know themselves. They argue that to ignore these important social continuities is to ‘forego vital elements in the social patterning of experiences’ (Goodson and Gill 2014, 103) and that the development of a critical pattern of learning and pedagogy requires ‘reconnection and reappraisal of ancestral voices’ (105). The ancestral voices come from our childhood and sound from a time before our birth. O’Brien (quoted by Toibin 2012, 2–3) describes this as: [A] twilight zone of time stretching back for a generation or two before we were born, which never quite belongs to the rest of history. Our elders have talked their memories into our memories until we come to possess some sense of continuity.

Goodson (2013) argues that people have a narrative character that can be understood as a sort of DNA of personal response. We work on our life narrative, but we also inherit narratives from our parents and from their parents before them, as shown most clearly in Chap. 3 and discussed further in Chap. 10.

9.3  T  he Meaning of Identity and Constructing a Professional Identity as a Teacher Educator As we discovered in our previous work together (Hayler and Williams 2018; Williams and Hayler 2016), and as shown in our narratives in Chaps. 3 and 4, constructing and reconstructing any sort of professional identity of teacher education is often, if not always, a response to personal and professional experiences of transition. These changes evoke the inner discomfort that leads to reflection within the social, cultural and institutional context in which teacher educators find themselves. The process of identity construction itself is now widely, but by no means universally, understood as something that draws upon the confluence of individual and contextual factors that promote, as De Weerdt et al. (2006, 317) put it, ‘the change in concepts and images that relate to who we consider ourselves to be’.

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While the lack of consensus on the definitions of identity itself and the variety of theoretical frameworks that inform the research in identity development complicate investigations, Erickson et al. (2011) argue that considering teacher educator identity in terms of being and doing can overcome some of those complications. Within this framework professional identity as a teacher educator emerges from our personal characteristics, through our positioning of the self and others, through the enactment of our roles and through our collective teacher educator interactive discourse. Kim and Greene’s (2011) self-study of regular practice with core reflection developed their ability to understand their work as teacher educators in a way that unified, rather than separated, self as teacher educator and self as person. Following retrospective narratives of their own teaching histories, Young and Erickson (2011) were able to clearly identify themselves first and foremost as ‘teachers’, regardless of setting, the age of their students or the institutional expectations of them to engage in research. Our own identification of ourselves as ‘educators’ emerging from our duoethnographic process, as we discuss later, sits well with this because we see the term as incorporating our earlier roles and identities as teachers and teacher educators as well as our aspirations and sensibilities as people beyond our work. We can relate closely to Young and Erickson’s (2011, 127) own process of narrative inquiry and the ways in which it informs their understanding of themselves and the notion of identity itself: While neither of us claims to be the same individual we have always been, our narratives reflect a constancy of our sense of self-as-teacher. Our self-study reaffirms that our current role as teacher educators does not place us in a strange new category of educator – one separate and apart from teachers and teaching. While we may teach in a different context, a different population, and perhaps to a slightly different end than we did at other times in our professional lives, at each turn of the road, our evolving identity as a teacher remained with us.

Pinnegar (2005) also argued that the notion of a professional identity is not fixed but is evolving as we assume different roles and responsibilities in our work. As we take on various roles that become open to us, ‘we respond to the space available by accepting, rejecting, or negotiating that role through the way we position ourselves in the space, or shape the space to reflect our identity’ (Pinnegar 2005, 260). Our dialogue of narrative extends the identity of ‘educator’ beyond professional role as we consider the sensibilities and values that we take with us to all life roles, including the role of learner, and, in the not too distant future, to retirement from paid work.

9.4  T  he Role of Early Life Experiences in Identity Construction While there is extensive literature on the construction of teacher educators’ professional identities (Bullough Jr. 2005; Erickson et al. 2011; McNeil 2011), the connections between early life experiences and the work of teacher educators, as we have attempted to illuminate in this book, have not been as extensively explored in

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the research literature. School teaching experience has been analysed in relation to teacher educators’ practice in university settings (Bullock and Ritter 2011; Murray et al. 2019), but few researchers reach further back into their past to make sense of the present and to help shape the future. Mike (Hayler 2009, 2011) included memories from his own childhood alongside those of other teacher educators to illuminate the ways in which memory of experience influences how teacher educators work with students who are preparing to become teachers. In developing an understanding of how the professional identity of teacher educators is both formed and represented by narratives of experience, he concluded that while, ultimately, only the author of the stories can authentically recognise, choose or create the links between their own experience and their own pedagogy for themselves, the sharing of stories brings us to understand them in significantly new ways. One of the central aims of this book is to attempt to make connections between our past, present and future lives as individuals and as teacher educators, and to suggest that while we might not know the stories of other teacher educators, these stories are certainly there, and they have an impact on who teacher educators are and how they practice. We believe that our storylines and the power of our ancestral voices contribute to the teacher educators we are today, and who we are still becoming. In our discussion of developing pedagogies of teacher education in Chap. 8, we illustrated how powerful and, at times, confronting it is to reveal personal stories of experience to our pre-service teachers to show them the impact that they, as teachers, can have on the lives of their students. Other researchers have also identified how their early life experiences have explicitly (and perhaps implicitly) impacted on their work as teacher educators. For example, Valerie Allison shared and explored her childhood experiences and claimed: [L]ike others, my teacher educator identity and philosophy are built on my personal history and educational experiences. However, I do not represent what is typically believed to be true of those who pursue academic careers. At the best of times, my home was working class. At the worst, I would have been classified as living below the poverty level and homeless. Looking at my elementary educational record, it would have been reasonable to assert I would be unlikely to finish high school. (Allison-Roan and Hayes 2012, 128)

Valerie does not shy away from the difficulties that she experienced in childhood, and she makes explicit connections between these experiences and how her practice and identity as a teacher educator has been shaped. Use of her own, often confronting, childhood experiences in her teaching has enabled Valerie to explore her professional identity through this powerful lens (Ramirez and Allison 2018). Likewise, Allison Skerrett (2008) provides an insightful account of how her biography as a West Indian immigrant woman in the United States shaped her identity as a teacher, teacher educator and researcher. Allison wrote: My story is about people’s identities and their lived experiences. It is an immigration story in which people become strangers within their cultures and where they wrestle with contrasting, different, and contiguous cultures that are still significantly alike. My biography is one that bears the themes of race and education. It is about a teacher/researcher who has

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insider/outsider status, and who, as an urban teacher, was both close to, and distant from, like and unlike, the students she served and the colleagues with whom she taught. (Skerrett 2008, 144)

How Allison works as a teacher, teacher educator and researcher cannot be separated from her experiences as a child, adolescent and graduate student. Who the teacher educator is informs what they do. Bullough Jr. (2008) showed through his exploration of Counternarratives that, whatever ‘evidence-based’, ‘top-down’, ‘what-works’ forms of instrumental standardisation are delivered or imposed upon them, each teacher educator and pre-service teacher makes ‘teacher education meaningful in his or her own way’ (Bullough Jr. 2008, 229), a point illuminated, illustrated and emphasised through the narratives and vignettes that we have presented in this book. We argue that the principles and values at the foundation of these professional identities represent much of the answer to why we do what we do in the way that we do it through our lives and in our work. Teacher educators’ professional identity is seen to be inextricably part of identity itself, formed and reformed over the course of a career, mediated and shaped by the interplay of the personal, professional, institutional and political dimensions of life and work. In her study of primary school teachers, Nias (1989, 305) reveals the importance of emotional commitment and the central aspect of emotional feelings in professional identity: This is not an indulgence; it is a professional necessity. Without feeling, without the freedom to ‘face themselves’ to be ‘whole persons’ in the classroom [teachers] implode – or walk away.

It is clear to us that teacher educators’ professional identity can equally be understood to be ‘formed within, but also out of, narratives and stories’ (Mockler 2011, 519) that arise from the fabric and the history of our lives. Because identities are formed in context, the development of a teacher educator identity necessitates reflection on one’s own experience alongside the ongoing critical study of education and schooling. This narrative data provides the ‘stories to live by’ (Connelly and Clandinin 1999, 93) which enrich and are enriched by consideration of empirical research and historical studies that enable ‘productive beholding and thoughtful action’ (Bullough Jr. 2008, 229) of teacher education practice. The stories to live by provide the narrative threads or plot lines that teacher educators draw on to make sense of themselves and their practice. Mike:  It occurs to me that our perspectives and beliefs about identity are part and parcel of our identity and that we need to discuss where we stand on this before we write more specifically about the identity of, and our identity as, teacher educators. We have the phrase in the title of this chapter ‘constructing an identity as a teacher educator’ and, on a number of levels, ‘constructing’ works for me because I have come to understand identity, or certainly my own identity, as (re)constructive in nature via narrative, life story and various forms of auto-/duoethnography. For me, the idea of writing as a method of inquiry (Richardson 2000) has led to an academic

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understanding of composing, rather than discovering the self through stories of experience. McAdams (2001, 101) argues that ‘stories matter because identity itself takes the form of a story, complete with setting, scenes, character, plot, and theme’. I can see things that way, but only to a point because I also wonder about the ‘self’ that begins such a script: the ‘identity’ that comes before (re)construction. If my identity develops through writing and sharing narrative, what does it develop from? Who is the author at the beginning of the story, the ‘person’ who is changed and shaped by experience, and the ‘telling’ of the tale? Like the Russian dolls that Judy uses in teaching about teaching, is there a ‘me’ in the middle somewhere? Throughout this book, we have explored the potential of using dialogical narrative to both investigate and share our experiences and our understandings of becoming teacher educators. In creating the narratives that both (re)form and (re)present our identities of becoming teacher educators, I do not think we are expecting to arrive neatly at firm conclusions. In fact, writing this book has shown us how our thinking and understanding about issues actually changes as we write and engage through dialogue about them. Our perspectives become clearer yet always contingent and in formation. We are always, as Polkinghorne (1988, 150) puts it, ‘in the middle of our stories and cannot know where they will end’. When I came to respond to Judy’s narrative of professional identity in the draft of this book, and her note in the margin, ‘perhaps include a personal account of a critical moment in our becoming – something not already covered in previous chapters, something on our development’, I started looking to the past for just such a moment. I went back to the earlier draft chapters and I looked in my diaries and my journal. They are there, of course, those moments, eras, incidents and exchanges that I can and do cite as critical incidents (Webster and Mertova 2007), turning-­ point moments (Drake 2006) and epiphanies (Cole 2011). Experiences in my life and work that I can argue have shaped who I am and how I work in teacher education. Our stories in the chapters throughout this book attempt to reconstruct the personal and professional past, perceive the present and anticipate the future through the theme of ‘education’ as we script ourselves as characters in the central roles as children, as teachers and as teacher educators. As McAdams (2001, 101) puts it: Life stories are psychosocial constructions co-authored by the person himself or herself and by the cultural context within which that person’s life is embedded and given meaning.

After reviewing our previous writing, one of the key critical moments that I found in my own becoming as a teacher educator was the process of writing a collaborative self-study with Judy (Hayler and Williams 2018), about our learning in working together editing the book of teacher education narratives (Williams and Hayler 2016). While we were most interested in the contribution that the process of co-­ editing the book had made towards our professional learning, we also explored and articulated the development of our identities as teacher educators. Looking back, I think the articulation of those narratives of learning was a move forward for me in recognising how my substantive or ‘first-order’ self was now

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reaching a new form of congruence with my ‘second-order’ situational self as a teacher educator (Murray and Male 2005). In describing the process of working together, we both reflected on the exchanges we had by email that involved articulation of incidents and moments where we recognised ourselves in a new way. Early in the study, I had written of seeing myself differently while reflecting upon my responses and reactions to a series of events that seemed to signify my journey towards a more established ‘insider’ position within my profession as part of the self-study teacher education community of practice: being the lead external examiner for a PhD viva, presenting at meetings of the AERA and completing the process of editing the book with Judy. These were all turning-point moments (Bullock and Ritter 2011), new events for me that occurred in the first half of that year. While my narrative indicated some surprise that I should find myself at the centre of these events, it also signalled that I realised, again with some surprise, ‘that I was indeed the right person for the job’. While I knew this in a practical kind of way, writing of walking in London after the viva and remembering visits to the city throughout my life led me to be ‘struck by the feeling as much as the thought that I had become a person who takes a leading role in the awarding of a doctorate’ (Hayler and Williams 2018, 110). We both recognised uncertainty, as we do in this book, as a familiar feature throughout our time as teacher educators, but it was clear that we were learning, like Jason Ritter (Chap. 8) and Jennifer Mansfield (Chap. 4) to live with uncertainty, and that the process of editing the book and the self-study that followed were instrumental in expanding our views on what it means to be a teacher educator and ways in which our own substantive identities were connecting with our situational identities as teacher educators (Southworth 1995). I also wrote (Hayler and Williams 2018) about how an interview for a job at another university had made me see myself within my current teacher education role in a new way, but it was the articulation of the experience and my reflection upon it that made me see this clearly; so the critical moment in my becoming, the work on identity, was the moment(s) of articulation through writing as a method of inquiry (Richardson 2000). We recognised that new-­ found confidence can be fragile, but we concluded that we had ‘found that identity includes our core sense of self and personal agency’ and that ‘it is through and from experience that we learn. To be transformative, the experience must be examined and analysed closely, with uncertainties and dispositions laid bare’ (Hayler and Williams 2018, 115). Judy:  It’s interesting how a shared experience can be a critical moment for both participants, but in different ways. Just as Mike found our co-editing and the self-­ study based on that co-editing experience was a critical moment in his evolution as a teacher educator, I too found it to be significant in my understanding of myself as a teacher educator. I shared Mike’s growing sense of being an ‘insider’, but for me, the most important aspect was that the process of writing, collaborating, questioning and articulating was the first time I had actually looked at my work in the longer term and from the perspective of it being a ‘career’.

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Previous self-studies had been based on particular moments, experiences and incidents, but this paper helped me to see myself in a new perspective in the midst of a journey. It helped me to contextualise the editing process in relation to my decade-long career as a teacher educator and to examine more closely what I do and why I do it. I was able to uncover (and make public) anxieties and uncertainties as well as my growing sense of confidence in my work. I was beginning to realise that it is actually OK to be me. In the self-study article, we used Wenger’s (1998) notion of learning trajectories and how identities are formed over time and place. Our paper enabled us to look at our changing circumstances and knowledge over time and to acknowledge our ‘constant becoming’ (Wenger 1998). We hadn’t (and didn’t have to) reach an end point, but we realised that every experience, especially those reflected on and written about, contributes to that process of constant becoming. So, in terms of my evolving professional identity as a teacher educator now, more than ever, I see it as a continuum and a ‘place’ at which I will never actually, finally, arrive. After exploring so many aspects of who I am personally and professionally in writing this book and in dialogue with Mike, I can see some dimensions of my professional identity more clearly. Of course, I was aware of my life experiences before writing this book, but the process of writing and dialogue have helped me to shine a light on some of the less than happy experiences and to join the dots – to see how past experiences impact on my current work. I believe even more strongly now than when I began this project that to really understand pedagogy or professional identity or approaches to working with colleagues and students, we need to understand ourselves and acknowledge how we became who we are and why we have come to be who we are. This is not an excuse to say, ‘this is just who I am therefore there is no need to learn and grow’, but acknowledgement of where we are is the first step in the next stage of the journey of becoming. Mike:  We have both connected or tried to connect with our different cultural contexts through the children that we were in Melbourne and in Brighton, the teachers we became, the novice and then experienced teacher educators we continue to become; seeking evidence of the people we are now in the people we were then: our substantial selves through our situational selves (Murray and Male 2005; Southworth 1995). We explore and seek meaning at the intersections between autobiographical memory and the cultural settings of teacher education, but we cannot separate who we are as teacher educators so neatly from who we are as people. Professional identity cannot be easily uncoupled from identity itself. Part of me feels that we are looking for a consistent person in the narratives; seeking an essential self, shaped by experience but the same ‘self’ with the same ‘core’, authentic identity. Charles Bukowski (2002, 7) said of the writer John Fante: ‘let me say that the way of his words and the way of his way are the same: strong and good and warm’. That has the feeling of authenticity that we both aspire to and mention more than once in this book. I recognise those qualities in Judy’s writing and in Judy as a person: the way of her words and the way of her way are the same, and it occurs to me, finally, that

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this is one of the reasons that we are writing together. Baggini (2011) uses the ­metaphor of a pearl to examine the notion of an essentialised self. What do you think, Judy? Is there such a thing as a core self that persists through time? Judy:  Yes, I think there is. Coincidently, but I have just finished watching the latest episode in the 7 Up series, produced by Michael Apted. I first saw this series when I was at teachers’ college (we saw 7 Up and 14 Up; 21 Up was released soon after I graduated). I am one year younger than the participants in the series, so viewing 63 Up was an unsettling experience. (Do I look as old as some of them do?). As each of the remaining children-now-adults was interviewed, Apted asked them what they thought of the original premise of the documentaries – give me a child at 7 and I will show you the man (woman). Most of the participants agreed that, essentially, they were still that little boy or girl, although life’s challenges had shaped them along the way. When I look back to my seven-year-old self (the year my father died), I can still see the introverted, uncertain child with a thirst for knowledge and learning that has never left. As I wrote in Chap. 3, I didn’t enjoy many of my experiences at school, but I loved the learning that took place. Over the years, many of my family members have chided me about always having my head in a book (just as my mother did); I always watch, listen to and read the daily news (just as my mother did); I love to travel and explore new places (my free reading time at school was usually spent pouring over an atlas). When I look back on so many aspects of my life, what I have enjoyed the most is learning and sharing this knowledge with others. I have always enjoyed helping others to learn things or to solve problems or to explore new places. I have tutored struggling students and adults after school and work; I’ve been a ‘governess’ on an outback cattle station helping the children with their School of the Air studies; I have undertaken an Arts degree in History and Politics while teaching full-time. My life and work have always revolved around learning and teaching – perhaps the core of me, the essentialised self, as you put it, Mike, is as an educator. Not a teacher, not a teacher educator, but an educator – of myself and others. Learning about the world, and making a contribution to it, and helping others to do the same, is really who I am. I do this in different ways, in different places and with different people, but the essential motivation is learning and improving (myself and others). I look back on my opening narrative of this chapter, which was written some time ago now, and I can already see that the process of writing, in dialogue with you, Mike, has sharpened my understanding of my professional identity. In that narrative, I referred to my current role (or occupation) as a teacher educator or academic and grappled with the notion of role versus identity, but I didn’t mention the word educator in the list of possibilities to write on my departure card. However, as we write this chapter, it is becoming clearer to me that my identity, as opposed to my various roles, is, in essence, as an educator – something I always have been and, I expect, always will be in some shape or form. Mike:  That all makes sense to me, Judy. Your writing helps me to see the issue more clearly. You distinguish between the identity of ‘educator’ and the roles or

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sites of the enactment of that identity: learner, facilitator, school teacher, teacher educator. They are not easily divided, and they clearly inform each other, but, as I now understand it, the identity of educator is what you have brought, what you now bring and what you will bring to each of your life roles. That identity itself develops and shifts and changes. So, the ‘pearl’ that grew and grows from your essential grain of sand is the identity of educator. You take that with you when you go, and it becomes part of the new role when you arrive in that role. The essential self meets the situated self in a journey of becoming. Like the way that we can see the characteristics of the children within the adults in the 63 Up TV programmes as they take on new roles in life, work and retirement across the years. Different lives but, somehow, essentially, the same people. The postmodern critique of the essentialised self is that there is no essential sand or pearl of identity as such and that we are all a shifting collection of multiple selves that we represent differently to different audiences. There is something both inspiring and disconcerting about this for me. I like the idea that we are not fixed or set in deterministic ways. I am inspired by the possibilities of transformation as people reinvent themselves and remake their lives. We’ve done that ourselves to some extent, and we have both helped children and adults to do the same through education in different ways. I think teachers see this as ‘bringing out the best’ in people or helping them to ‘reach their full potential’ rather than a remaking of the self. At the same time, I am wary of the darker shifts in identity that make people seem so very different from how they were. It could be that circumstances reveal our ‘true’ selves in these situations and/or that we are shaped by circumstances that are often not of our own choosing; but the bottom line, if we follow this track, is that we can never really know or trust anyone or, indeed, ourselves. We all know the stories of people who turn on their neighbours when circumstances change; those who become racist seemingly overnight; colleagues who appear to abandon their humanistic and collegiate principles as they take on new management or leadership roles. So, I think I want to have a continuing sense of who I am and what I am about that I can set alongside my discontinuities and inconsistencies. The continuity element is what I recognise as myself in terms of continuing preoccupations and personality characteristics, including strengths and defects. I am also happy to see my professional identity as educator. Perhaps that is like the canoe bag of characteristics, sensibilities and principles that we have taken with us and developed through the rapids of change in different locations and roles. Maybe we are now trying to unpack the contents of that bag and find meaning in the various forms of data and discussion that we have presented throughout the various chapters in this book, most closely in the next and final chapter. I think one of our aims in making this book was to continue the process that we began in the self-study (Hayler and Williams 2018) exploring and grounding our understanding of our identities as teacher educators. But far from embedding our identity as teacher educators, our writing together seems to have moved us towards the broader understanding of ourselves as educators. Do you think we are writing ourselves out of the professional

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identities that we’ve been wearing for a while as part of the outward trajectories that we discussed in that last self-study paper? Judy:  Yes, I can certainly see a progression in understandings as this book has developed, but I’m not sure that we are writing ourselves out of our teacher educator identities but, rather, we are expanding our understanding of that concept and continuing along the trajectory of change and growth. Our teacher educator identities, however we have constructed them up to now, are part of who we are, but they are not the finished product. Also, writing this chapter has made me consider the concept of professional identity in a new way. My main research focus over the past decade or so has been on how to be(come) a teacher educator. While I have used the term ‘identity’ in many publications, I am now starting to wonder what this term actually means. It is very easy to conflate ‘identity’ and ‘role’, as we discussed earlier. I think I have been conscious of the need to do teacher education the ‘right’ way and to learn from others and from my own self-studies, exactly what the ‘right’ way is. I have also stressed that being a teacher educator is more than doing teacher education. But perhaps the real issue is that being a teacher educator is just being yourself in the context of teacher education. As I wrote above, for me, the overarching identity is that of educator. One of the most important revelations for me in writing this book has been the importance of life stories in understanding who we are as teacher educators. Rather than exploring who I am as a teacher educator, maybe the real search is how I can be me as a teacher/educator, drawing on and shaped by my continuing personal story. As you say, Mike, ‘the essential self meets the situated self in a journey of becoming’. I do believe there is an essential ‘pearl’ within us – we can see that from the stories that we have told in this book and how we have responded to particular situations or critical moments based on our prior experiences and, as we’ve suggested, our ancestral voices. For me, that essential self is being a ‘facilitator of learning, an educator’ – whether in a classroom or elsewhere. I think we actually recognised this ‘core’ identity in our previous publication about editing the book (Hayler and Williams 2018, 116) when we wrote: ‘In collaboration, we have found that identity includes our core sense of self and personal agency, as we identify and accept that, while we might be limited by our hesitations, we also have personal agency in understanding, accepting or rejecting career opportunities as they arise, in relation to our interests, beliefs and values’. We acknowledged that there was an ‘essential self’ but that we have agency to change, evolve, develop and be, according to the circumstances. An interesting interaction happened with a student recently, which made me think about all the issues that we have been grappling with over the course of writing this book. I have reflected in previous chapters and elsewhere on where my career might take me (Hayler and Williams 2018) in terms of my teaching, and on my gradual shift from teaching undergraduate pre-service teachers about teaching to working with graduate students in their quest to undertake research about teaching and education. This shift has become clearer this year when, for the first time, my teaching commitments are solely with graduate students in research units.

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At the beginning of the current semester, we had the first full-day workshop for the new group of students, and, for some reason, I didn’t feel at all nervous or worried about it. I have taught this unit once before, so I am familiar with the content, but, strangely for me, I didn’t experience the usual first day nerves. I really believe that this was partly due to my feeling increasingly confident about what I have to offer these students and that (after all we have considered during the writing of this book) I just needed to be me rather than trying to be someone I think I should be. One of the other lecturers began the session, and, about two hours into the workshop, I took over for my part. We did a few activities, and, as the students were working, I wandered around to their table groups to engage in conversations about their conversations. One of the students said to me, ‘I really like the way you teach, Judy. Very calm’. I was slightly taken aback but very satisfied that perhaps this student had picked up that I was feeling calmer than usual, especially on the first day of teaching. I remember thinking before this workshop that I should approach it as naturally as I could rather than trying to teach the way others might. Perhaps I am getting to the point where I am tired of trying to be who I think I should be, and becoming more accepting of who I am. I like to think that in this workshop, I had actually embodied who I am – a relatively experienced researcher, who is, nonetheless, still learning about research but keen to support this new batch of students on their journey as beginning researchers. Perhaps this fundamentally different teaching context (i.e. teaching research rather than teaching teaching) is an example of my expanding the concept of teacher education and ‘continuing along the trajectory of change and growth’ that I mentioned above. Having a greater awareness of this ‘river’ journey of professional growth, and what is in my canoe bag, particularly as a result of writing this book, seems to be giving me more confidence to just be me and to do the best I can in the circumstances in which I find myself. I like to think that if or when I go back to teaching pre-service teachers about teaching, I will maintain the identity of educator, although this will again require reflection again on what that means for me in the context of undergraduate teaching. Those ‘characteristics, sensibilities and principles’ that you refer to, Mike, certainly do need to be unpacked by us because they constitute our identities as teacher/ educators but also as people. Perhaps the journey to becoming a teacher educator is really the continuation of the journey to becoming ourselves.

∗∗∗

The notion of ‘identity’ is complex, and as we have discussed in this chapter, the concept is contested in the research literature. We have not come to a definitive definition or explanation; that is not the purpose of this book. However, we have illustrated how the ‘river journey’ of our professional becoming provides opportunities for quite reflection, conversations with colleagues and interrogating who we believe ourselves to be. Sometimes we have the luxury of time to consider these ideas (e.g. writing this book); other times we are paddling hard just to keep up with all the

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demands and challenges. Our canoe bags gradually fill with ideas and experiences, which we can unpack when we need some inspiration or motivation to go on. We are not the only ones on the river, but sometimes it can be a solitary journey of discovery, one that we need to take in order to become the people, and the teacher educators, we are destined to be.

∗∗∗ Mike: I seem to have started thinking about the past from an early age, but lately I keep getting drawn towards thinking about the future. I was 60 last month and I am wondering what to do next. I seem to be in good health, and things are sort of fine at work, but every now and then, I am reminded that the end is a lot nearer than the beginning. It always seems ironic to me that the school of architecture is in such an unattractive building. It was an engineering factory when I was a boy; then, somehow, when the company moved on, it became part of the polytechnic which became a university in 1992. Situated on the busy road at the edge of town, it is certainly a well-built and solid structure. At one end of one of the long windowless corridors, I find Human Resources and the Pensions department. I’m there to meet Graham with whom I have an appointment today. He oversees the arrangements for pensions, and we sit down to talk about my options. ‘Ok, so teacher training, that’s what you do now in the school of education, right?’ he asks as he sets up the form on his laptop. I want to go into the detail a bit more and explain the differences between the training and the education of teachers, the particular pedagogies and research informed, reflective practice that we develop with our students. But now is not really the time. I just say that we prefer to call it teacher education, and it is largely helping students to prepare to be teachers in school. ‘So, what subject do you actually teach?’ He says with a smile. This is a very familiar question that my barbers often ask me and seeks a reasonable answer such as ‘Maths’, ‘History’, ‘PE’ or ‘Geography’. I explain that I’m a primary specialist and my area is really pedagogy: teaching and learning, relationships, classroom organisation, planning and assessment, behaviour management, inclusion, ‘that sort of thing’. Graham looks up from his laptop: ‘So generic teaching skills?’ Don’t get me wrong, he is a nice guy and he is trying to help me and he needs to put something down in the box, but I’m finding it hard to get the complexity and importance of my work through to him. The word ‘generic’ sounds a bit thin. Like anyone could do it really; not much depth, but it is fairly accurate. ‘I guess so’ I say, and we move on. For some reason, Graham wants to know the details of the modules I teach, and, after around half an hour of me briefly describing them, we have established that the PGCE ‘education studies’ module that I teach and lead in semester 1 is now the only thing that I do that is part of a course that leads immediately to Qualified Teacher Status (QTS). All the others are part of BA, MA or doctoral routes that are once removed from QTS in one way or another. Two lectures and four seminars that are strictly teacher education with pre-­ service teachers. Lots of the students from the BA in education (non-QTS) go on to do the PGCE, and experienced teachers often do the MA or the EdD/PhD, but, even though I knew all this was the case, I am still briefly surprised to reflect on this. Next year, the course is changing, and the module, which I will not be leading, will be smaller with less teaching for me to do. It makes me wonder, again briefly, if I am still substantially a teacher educator or if I am more of an ‘educationalist’, or an ‘education academic’ these days. I don’t like the sound of either of those very much, and I decide, as I’m leaving Human Resources (but not my job as I need more pension yet), that whoever I

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am teaching, supervising or writing with, whatever the purpose of the task, I always bring my identity as a teacher educator to the work that I do, because that’s who I am – and I will be for a while yet.

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McAdams, D. (2001). The psychology of life stories. Review of General Psychology, 5(2), 100–122. McNeil, B. (2011). Charting a way forward: Intersections of race and space in establishing identity as an African-Canadian teacher educator. Studying Teacher Education, 7(2), 133–144. Mockler, N. (2011). Beyond ‘what works’: Understanding teacher identity as a practical and political tool. Teachers and Teaching: Theory and Practice, 17(5), 517–528. Murray, J., & Male, T. (2005). Becoming a teacher educator: Evidence from the field. Teaching and Teacher Education: An International Journal of Research and Studies, 21, 125–142. Murray, J., Swennen, A., & Kosnik, C. (2019). International research, policy and practice in teacher education: Insider perspectives. London: Springer. Nias, J. (1989). Primary teachers talking: A study of teaching as work. London: Routledge. Pinnegar, S. (2005). Identity development, moral authority, and the teacher educator. In G. Hoban (Ed.), The missing links in teacher education design (pp. 257–279). Dordrecht: Springer. Polkinghorne, D. (1988). Narrative knowing and human science. New York: State University of New York Press. Ramirez, L., & Allison, V. (2018, July 15–19). Examining attitudes and beliefs about public education through co-autobiographical self-study. In D. Garbett & A. Ovens (Eds.), Pushing boundaries and crossing borders: Self-study as a means for researching pedagogy (pp. 351–357). Proceedings of the 12th international conference of self study of teacher education practices, Herstmonceaux. Richardson, L. (2000). Writing: A method of inquiry. In N.  K. Denzin & Y.  S. Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook of qualitative research (pp. 923–948). London: Sage. Skerrett, A. (2008). Biography, identity, and inquiry: The making of teacher, teacher educator, and researcher. Studying Teacher Education, 4(2), 143–156. Southworth, G. (1995). Looking into primary headship: A research based interpretation. London: Falmer Press. Toibin, C. (2012). New ways to kill your mother: Writers and their families. London: Penguin. Webster, L., & Mertova, P. (2007). Using narrative inquiry as a research method: An introduction to using critical event narrative analysis in research on learning and teaching. London: Routledge. Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of practice: Learning, meaning and identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Williams, J., & Hayler, M. (Eds.). (2016). Professional learning through transitions and transformations: Teacher educators’ journeys of becoming. Dordrecht: Springer. Young, J., & Erickson, L. (2011). Imagining, becoming and being a teacher: How professional history mediates teacher education identity. Studying Teacher Education, 7, 121–129.

Chapter 10

What Does ‘Becoming a Teacher Educator’ Mean?

Abstract  In this final chapter of the book, the authors draw the threads together in an attempt to answer their research question: ‘How have our personal and professional life experiences shaped who we are as teacher educators?’ Through dialogue and shared text, the authors consider what it means to have a career as a teacher educator through the lens of reflection on critical moments that encouraged them to think more deeply about their work in this context. They discuss what they have learnt from the process of duoethnography and consider the strengths and limitations of the method. Keywords  Critical moments · Place and space · Temporality · Career · Duoethnography



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10.1  Introduction As the writing of this book draws closer to completion, we have taken the opportunity to reflect on ‘critical moments’ we encountered as we were working on the book, which have given us pause to further reflect on our careers as teacher educators. Kelchtermans (2017) argues that articulation and examination of critical incidents allows us to reconsider deeply held beliefs that are triggered by recall of these events. We share a sense of what has passed, what is now and what might lie ahead for the next phase of our professional journeys. Interestingly, our critical moments appear to be closely tied to the notion of ‘time and place’ – seeing ourselves in the past and the present, with implications for our (as yet unknown) futures, as our journeys down the metaphorical river progress. Our places of work also figure strongly in our critical moments, because changes in these places embody, to a degree, changes in ourselves. Judy’s critical moments were documented by her relatively early in the writing process because she wanted to capture moments which she believed to be significant in her professional journey © The Author(s) 2020 M. Hayler, J. Williams, Being a Teacher Educator in Challenging Times, Self-Study of Teaching and Teacher Education Practices 22, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-3848-3_10

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so they could be included in the book as it progressed. Prompted by moving office and Judy’s critical moment #1, Mike chose to reflect back on past locations and eras that, in hindsight, were important ‘markers’ in his career journey and illustrated well the process of constant becoming to which we have referred throughout the book.

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Judy: Critical Moment #1 (October 2017) As I am waiting in my office to return assignments to students after working off campus for a couple of weeks, I take the opportunity to undertake a clean-out of two filing cabinets and some bookshelves behind my office door. These have been repositories for papers and files over the last ten years, since I gained a full-time tenured position at the university. Because I have written extensively about my own and others’ career transitions as teacher educators, the process of cleaning out this accumulation of professional work gives me pause to think about where I have come from over the past decade or so and to wonder about where I might be going in the future. I recall my first tentative steps as a full-time academic, when I was given a converted storeroom as an office – it had no window but was made as comfortable as possible by the campus receptionist. I also remember when, after about one year ‘in the cupboard’, I made the move to my current office and the feelings of pride I experienced: my name and title on the door, my doctorate framed and hanged on the wall and a window overlooking a beautiful native garden, green lawns and the campus library. In between students dropping by to collect their work, I search through dozens of files, some dating back to 2007: research projects and reports, student files, research articles, conference papers, flight bookings and receipts and even readings and interview notes and recordings from my PhD – all collected in the days before most documents were digital. As I feed most of them into the shredder, I experience a mix of emotions: sadness, nostalgia and even grief and loss. Why? It feels like I am also shredding part of myself – the teacher educator I used to be, especially in the earlier years of my career. Most of the student files relate to teaching and supervising professional experience, something I did in the earlier years of my work as a teacher educator and that I don’t do much of anymore. I remember particular students, the struggles and successes they experienced and the time and emotional energy that I put into supporting their learning as pre-service teachers – often in this very office. I wonder where they are now and whether they are still teaching. Are they supervising pre-service teachers in their own classrooms? Did I have any real impact on their learning as teachers, or were they the teachers they were always going to become anyway? As my role is beginning to move away from working directly with professional experience, I feel a keen sense of loss. At the same time, though, I remember that I have been granted sabbatical for the next year and that I will be continuing a new direction in my work – writing the book with Mike. A new venture, a new direction

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of research, a different mode of writing and a freedom to draw on my experience to make a new contribution to the field. Mike: (July 2019) Life Cycle of a Teacher Educator Through Locations over 15 Years We are moving offices (again) this week, and so, like Judy in October 2017, I am shedding and shredding the physical evidence of my pedagogic planning and practice in teacher education. This time, unlike Judy, I seem to let things go easily, looking only briefly at the paperwork and keeping very little of it. Some of us seem to move offices fairly regularly at our campus, and, this time, the three of us who share the room are moving back to the office that we were in four years ago. Shifts in staffing and management strategy mean that the deputy heads of school now need the larger office, and the three of us have been told that we are moving back next door. We have decided to ignore the symbolic violence of being ordered out of our room and not resist. The new office is fine, and it is a good chance for a clear out. The important thing for the three of us (I think) is that we will continue to be sharing with each other. School of Education staff all gave up single occupancy offices when the school of education moved into a new building in 2010 – although I had never had my own office. Moving today makes me reflect on the importance of place and the relationships that I associate with locations in my life and work. Office 1, September 2004–August 2007 Sharing with Nadia. It was a big bright office in the old Bevendean building that got knocked down to make way for the soccer stadium (it’s a long story). I try to envision the room and remember my first exhilarating feelings of arriving at the university and then the growing anxiety and feelings of panic, sometimes hope, sometimes despair and, finally (but not finally as it turned out), escape (see Chaps. 3 and 4). I can see that I learnt a lot when I was based in that room as I tried to get to grips with being a teacher educator, but I needed the time to reflect upon and analyse things before I could consciously make any of the experience a tool of use in my work. I think of the room and remember everything happening at increasing speed as though I never had time to think about it and felt as though I was doing everything badly. Nadia became a great friend and colleague and we now work together on the EdD and in the trade union. Office 2, September 2008–October 2010 Same building, different floor, where I shared with Tim and Peps when I came back to the university. We were all ‘new’ and they have since both left to do other things in education. Their focus was secondary science and maths, respectively, so we got to see and talk about different aspects of teacher education to some extent, as well as our own phases and curriculum subject specialisms. I associate this room with completing my doctorate, the viva in a room just down the corridor in 2009, slowing things down in some respects, beginning to see the bigger picture in the education of teachers and feeling better about my place and the contribution I could make in teacher education and the academy; like I really had something to say that

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was not only about my time as a school teacher. I know from my diaries that the story was much more mixed, but, in my memory, I seem quite different from how I had been before. Judy: Critical Moment #2 (November 2017) Our university is undergoing a rapid building redevelopment and the Faculty of Education is moving into a new state-of-the-art teaching and learning building next month to replace the old 1960s structure that is well past its use-by date. I have two meetings in this old building today, both about the supervision of PhD students. As I walk up the stairs to the fourth floor, it occurs to me that today will be my last day in this building. I studied here for my Masters of Education in the 1990s and then my PhD in the early to mid-2000s, and I undertook my first casual academic teaching job in these classrooms. This place represents the beginning of my journey to becoming a teacher educator. On this particular day, incredibly, I encounter two people who I usually don’t see on my visits to this campus. They aren’t just anyone but are two people who played a significant part in my transition into academia: Helen is in her office sorting out things for the imminent move to the new building and her soon-to-be-announced retirement; Ian is back to work on some research that he is still involved in even though he formally retired a couple of years ago. Helen was my main PhD supervisor and the steady hand who guided me through the terrifying journey of completing my doctorate. I remember climbing the stairs from my office to hers, feeling like I was going to the gallows – not because of anything Helen said or did but from my feelings of inadequacy and fear. Why had I ever taken on this project? Now, today, after ten years, I am meeting with my own PhD student hoping that I give her the same support and encouragement that Helen gave me all those years ago. I have a brief chat with Helen before going across the hallway to meet with my student – and the intervening years seemed to melt away. Helen looks and sounds much the same as she did back then. It is sometimes hard to realise that I am now a supervisor of my own students’ PhDs. Later that day, I pass Ian on the stairs as I leave. I last saw him a couple of years ago; what were the chances of bumping into him today? Perhaps the universe is sending me a message. I say to him that this is my last time in this building, and I remind him that my first time in this building was working with him as a teaching associate. He had offered me the job and had nurtured me as I taught pre-service teachers (and adults) for the very first time. I tell him that it is fitting that he ‘bookended’ my time in this building – there on my first day and here on my last. As I exit the building, I experience similar feelings to those that I had when I was cleaning out my office: sadness, nostalgia, a sense of loss, but also pride in what I have achieved. I look back on my achievements and recall things that, when I first came to work with Ian and Helen, I could never have imagined doing. Challenges and disappointments, too, no doubt, but that is part and parcel of any career, I suppose. Next year is going to be a new chapter, with one whole semester of sabbatical devoted to reading and writing  – a luxury I haven’t had since studying for my

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doctorate. As I walk away from the old building for the last time, I wonder what the future will hold. Mike: More Moves Office 3, October 2010–August 2013 Brand new building, bottom floor of A block, sharing with Richard and Jackie. I associate this room with lots of laughter, but it was a turbulent time in universities and teacher education (see Chap. 5). I think we (mainly) had a good time when we got together in that office. Jackie became the course leader; Richard is a deputy head in the school of education (who is moving into my office as I write), and I got something published for the first time. In spite of (or perhaps partly because of) the policy upheaval, this was the beginning of the best and busiest time for me as a teacher educator when I wrote and taught new modules across a range of courses and began researching and writing on teacher education as part of my work, individually and with colleagues such as Judy. At my university, we had to respond to the national and institutional changes and somehow defend and strengthen the things that we believed were important, which made us examine and clarify the things that mattered most in our work (see Chaps. 6 and 8). There were lots of pressure. I seemed to be able to handle it well, although I was also diagnosed with persistent atrial fibrillation that needed two medical procedures to sort out. Office 4, August 2013–July 2015 Third floor of A block and part of the Educational Research Centre (ERC), sharing with Tim (different Tim) and Keith. There was a definite perceived ‘shift’ in moving up two floors and being located within the ERC (defunct since 2016), but, while the requirement for me to research and publish increased, the teaching workload did not immediately reduce. This was the first and only, of the office moves that I had chosen to make. It allowed me to work more closely with other researchers and writers, including Ivor Goodson and Avril Loveless. Avril had been my doctoral supervisor and previously (in 1990/91) my tutor on the PGCE (in the buildings where the soccer stadium now stands). Ivor and Avril remain wonderful mentors and true friends, as mentioned in Chap. 6. They have both inspired and encouraged me through their scholarship and critical friendship. To have earned the respect of those you most respect is one of the true rewards of life, and I see earning the respect of Avril and Ivor as a colleague, researcher and writer as one of the true achievements of my career. Office 5, July 2015–July 2019 The three of us moved next door to the big office where we shared with PhD students and full-time researchers. Like Judy, my work has changed significantly during this period, with less and less emphasis on undergraduate teacher education and more post-graduate work (see Chaps. 7, 8 and 9). A new vice-chancellor with a new university management regime during this period has led to changes and

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expansion of management within the school of education, with a new head of school and six new posts of deputy head of school. Much of the discourse has been about the financial difficulties of universities in general and our institution in particular. While, in many ways, I have more freedom and independence as an academic than I have ever had in my working life, there, conversely, appears to be an increasing atmosphere of accountability, top-down micromanagement and surveillance that reflects the picture in education at all stages, nationally and internationally (see Chap. 5). Judy: Critical Moment #3 (April 2018) I am attending AERA 2018, my fifth such conference, and realise that I have come a long way since New Orleans, 2012 (see opening narrative in Chap. 5). I see, in the programme, that one of the academics I most admire is presenting in an afternoon session. I hurry from the conference hotel to the afternoon venue to make sure I secure a seat to hear him speak. I am not alone, as it is quickly becoming standing room only. The other presenters are gathering and preparing for their presentations, but just before it’s time to begin the session, the chair informs us that the much-­ anticipated speaker is unable to attend. In his place is one of his colleagues, who does a great job, considering the pressure to fill such big shoes. It is interesting how some names become drawcards to these sessions almost regardless of the topic under discussion. I am attending this session not only to hear this author speak but also because the theme of the papers aligns with some of my own work. I am interested to see if there are some new avenues of research out there that I could follow up. As I watch and listen to one of the papers, the presenters are pushed for time so they quickly flick through a couple of the final PowerPoint slides. I think I see my name flash up on one of the slides, but I’m not sure. I am interested to know how the researchers have referred to my work (if indeed they have). At the end of the session, I approach the two presenters, waiting in line as others congratulate them on their presentation. When it is my turn, I tell one of them that I thought I saw my name on one of their slides and ask if they found my work useful. When I show the presenter my name badge, she immediately turns to her colleague and says, with a look of excitement on her face, ‘This is Judy Williams! She wrote this paper!’ (They have a copy of one of my articles in their folder.) Both these women engage in a lively, although short, discussion about my work and the aspects of it that they found especially interesting. As they mention a particular quote in the paper from one of my interviewees, I can visualise the scene in that person’s office when I conducted the interview. I can see her face, hear her voice and recall our conversation. Little did I think at that time, which was about six years ago, that this research would lead to a publication, cited at an international conference, and that I would be welcomed with such genuine interest and enthusiasm by the presenters. I am certainly not a ‘name’ like our missing presenter, but I am a ‘name’ to these women as they draw on my research to build their own. I leave the session with a sense of pride and place within the profession and within the field of teacher education, which I don’t think I have experienced before.

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Mike: Moving on Office 6, July 2019 (Back to Office 4) I think this will be my last office at the university. From the window, between the wall of the adjacent building and the hills in the near distance, I can just about see the primary school where I first worked as a newly qualified teacher following my PGCE. Our current PGCE students completed their course last week as I did here in 1991. I taught them on one module earlier in this academic year, but I haven’t seen them much since February. The course is changing next year, and I am scheduled for just one lecture in November. That feels somehow appropriate to me. I have got lots to do: a book to complete with Judy, a sabbatical in Melbourne, a research funding bid to organise, doctoral- and M-level supervision, and teaching on the BA and MA Education courses (see Chap. 9). I have made my contribution and it seems like it’s time to move on and make a different sort of contribution. This room feels like the right location for my final roles as a professional educator at the university. I am fascinated by the similarities between Judy’s story and my own in certain details: the actual buildings where we learnt to be school teachers and then later teacher educators are gone and going, though the institutions and the enterprise of teacher education continue in those same locations as they are reformed, rebuilt and reshaped. Our actual roles as school teachers and teacher educators are also undergoing change as we reform, rebuild and reshape an understanding of ourselves as educators in those same locations that somehow incorporates our identities as teachers and teacher educators.

10.2  W  hat Does It Mean to Have a Career as a Teacher Educator? When we first conceived this chapter, it was in terms of having a ‘career’ as a teacher educator. In the early stages of writing the book – indeed in the proposal to the publisher – we anticipated that the concluding chapter would be about drawing all the threads together to help us understand what being a teacher educator is in relation to our professional careers. However, as we have progressed through the writing of the book, we have come to see that the word ‘career’ is more than what we do but is about who and how we are becoming. Clare Kosnik (2007, 16–17) describes her career as a teacher educator as: [A] continuous looping back as I reconsider avenues taken and not taken, overlapping interests, a recanting of some sacred beliefs, and development of new values, at times being clear-sighted while at other times being confused about the next steps.

Like Clare’s, our careers continue to involve ongoing readjusting and reframing of beliefs and practices. It isn’t just about what we do but about the beliefs and values that underpin what we do and that guide us on our journey. Clare suggests that being a teacher educator involves tentative and at times uncertain pathways or

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‘avenues’ that lead to changes in thinking, unexpected outcomes and a still incomplete but ongoing journey. Sikes et al. (1985) maintain that a career is not defined merely by the roles that we adopt but provides a perspective in which we see our lives as a whole. These ideas were very strong themes that emerged from the book that we edited together (Williams and Hayler 2016) and that we identified in the journal article that we wrote about that editing experience (Hayler and Williams 2018). As we look back now, we can see that these themes have also characterised our continuing career journeys as teacher educators and that this book is a continuation of that journey. While we are bound to have our own individual ideas about what having a career as a teacher educator means, we have both come to think of it as more than the work we do. To us, it involves a sense of longer-term commitment to the profession and the ongoing learning that we derive from our experiences. Importantly, we also see it as a moral and ethical commitment to the people with whom we work. For us, working as teacher educators does not only involve roles and responsibilities but also growth in knowledge, self-awareness and the care for and mentoring of others. Looking back on our journeys of becoming, we have both, in different ways, made links between our early, often difficult, educational experiences and school teaching days (as outlined in Chap. 3) and the foundational values and principles that inform our most recent professional journeys. Judy can see that her career as a teacher educator really began when she took those first tentative steps into the kindergarten and then into the school classroom. Although Mike could only really see himself as a teacher when he began to actually be one, our ideas about what a teacher does and what children do and how they learn in the classroom were consciously and subconsciously being shaped by the forces and the people we encountered. How we responded to the various situations in which we have found ourselves laid the groundwork for who we would become as teacher educators: we both identify a love of learning; a thirst for knowledge, absorbing (in very different ways and at a different pace) what others had to teach us; a desire to belong but a constant feeling of being outsiders; and an increasingly critical framing of what we saw and learned about and what we believed should change (and stay the same) in the process of education. We took different routes to becoming teachers, but we both came, at different points in our lives, to ask ourselves how we could contribute to this world of knowledge and learning and to consider how we could help others to be part of and benefit from that world. These have really been, and remain, the key drivers of our work as educators today. We have both been pleased with sessions that we have presented at various conferences –sometimes together, sometimes separately – but also, often, felt that we were no more than very small cogs in a very large wheel. However, as our careers progress and unfold, we are beginning to acknowledge that being seen by others, on the international stage, and not just in our own immediate professional environment  – as described in Judy’s critical moment #3 above and in Chap. 5 by Mike – is a marker that our careers and the contributions that we have made within them really do have an impact on others. We are indeed making a contribution to the field of teacher education beyond our own institutions and localities and beyond our own shores.

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Like all educators, perhaps we can never really know the impact we have on people – those whom we encounter personally and those we never see face to face but who are, nevertheless, touched by us via the dissemination of our work through publications or presentations. Being a teacher educator means contributing to and influencing a wide and diverse audience: from the students in front of us in our classes and, in turn, their students; our colleagues down the corridor; students and teachers in our local school communities and overseas contexts in which we work; and fellow researchers in the international arena. We believe that it means contributing to the wider good through our daily work and, importantly, that we are always learning. Teaching is the ‘learning profession’, and, we believe, now more than ever, that teacher education is also fundamentally a learning profession. As we both recalled in Chap. 4, when we first started as teacher educators in our respective universities, neither of us really knew what we were going to experience and where this journey would take us. Although we knew the institutions well as students, we both assumed that our experience and expertise as classroom teachers were all that we needed. It is really only in hindsight and through reflection that what teacher education means and what being a teacher educator involves have become clearer to us. Perhaps that is why, as we discussed in Chap. 6, serendipity and working with and learning from others is so important, because a clear vision is not always there and there is often no road map (or river guide) to assist on the journey. It is also why the idea of critical reflection plays such an important part in learning to become a teacher educator (and a teacher of any sort, we would argue), because while we might not have much control over what happens, we do have control over how we respond to incidents in our professional lives. It is hard to respond appropriately if you do not have the intention and capacity to reflect deeply on those experiences. It is easy to assume that those who have achieved great success as teacher educator practitioners and researchers have always known ‘what to do and how to do it’, but this is not so. Tom Russell (2016) wrote about the importance of learning from experience and how he has ‘learned that teacher educators need to make deliberate efforts to understand how they learn from experience and to work consistently to support and encourage teacher candidates’ learning from experience’ (Russell 2016, 25). John Loughran has also written extensively about teacher education and the principles that underlie effective teaching about teaching and learning (Loughran 2002, 2013). So, we might have thought that someone as well-recognised and esteemed in the self-study of teacher education practices (S-STEP) community as John would have always known how teacher education ‘works’, but, like us, he has had to learn from experience and from critical reflection to help him to see more clearly where he was headed as a teacher educator. Vignette: Professor John Loughran Coming to understand what matters in being a teacher educator Episodes of teaching and learning quickly come to mind when I think about why teacher education matters to me. I vividly remember trying to plan my first class as a teacher educator. I had very little to offer when it came to ideas about what might be helpful, meaningful or useful for beginning teachers, despite believing that teacher preparation needed a good dose of teaching reality. I had a simple view:

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‘Real experiences from real classrooms. Maybe I’ll just show them what it’s really like and how to cope’. I thought to myself, ‘At least I still do real teaching – not like those down the corridor who haven’t seen the inside of a school for years’. That worked for a while. Student teachers loved the stories I could bring back from yesterday’s Year 10 Science class. Working half-time as a teacher and half-time as a teacher educator seemed like a really good life – for a while. However, it didn’t take long before the limitation of ‘stories from the classroom’ began to bite. I was stopped in my tracks one day when I was explaining role plays (something I rarely if ever did as a teacher in an all boys’ school). One of my student teachers asked, ‘Why don’t we do a role play instead of listening to you tell us about them?’ ‘Oooh, got me there. Good point. Why hadn’t I thought of that?’ I asked myself while trying to look cool under pressure. Thankfully, I’d been working with some expert teachers on documenting good teaching. I had finished proofing what seemed like a fun role play one of them had described for me. In that strange world of teaching when things just happen without planning, I jumped into doing the role play as if I had done it many times before! To my surprise, suddenly I understood something very different through doing a role play that I’d never considered before. The abstract became concrete. The experience was powerful, and the learning was strong. I wasn’t in control of the class in the normal way. It was more like we were all exploring something new together. Questions that wouldn’t normally come up bubbled to the surface. We pushed ideas around, admitted uncertainty, confusion and frustration without embarrassment. Together we were finding answers, creating explanations and enjoying learning together. That role play experience sensitised me to learning in new ways. It drew me into why some teaching procedures worked in a particular way for particular content. Concepts like pedagogical reasoning, teacher thinking and pedagogical content knowledge suddenly grabbed my attention. They became important despite me previously dismissing such things as academic jargon. It dawned on me that if teacher education was to really be valuable, then student teachers needed to see beyond the sharing of ‘tips and tricks’. They needed to experience and question the nature of quality learning in ways that their ‘apprenticeship of observation’ so effectively masked. Through that experience, I came to understand that finding the balance between meeting student teachers’ needs and expectations and pushing them to be challenged in their learning was the real point in teaching about teaching. It also meant that a pedagogy of teacher education became important to me as I questioned how, as a teacher educator, I could teach about teaching if I didn’t know more about why different teaching procedures worked. I quickly came to see that there was a need for me to develop knowledge of teaching that went beyond just being able to ‘do teaching’. My teacher education experiences showed me the importance of learning how to uncover, document and portray the knowledge underpinning expert practice. Those insights came to shape not only what I did and how I did it but also what it meant to be a teacher educator – to develop as a scholar in teaching and learning about teaching.

10.3  W  hat Have We Learned from Undertaking This Duoethnography? We now return to our research question to examine what we have learned about ourselves and teacher education: How have our personal and professional life experiences shaped who we are as teacher educators?

The details of the answer are, of course, in the narratives and discussions that we have constructed together and in tandem throughout the chapters in this book. Our

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choice of particular eras, events, incidents and relationships in making reflective narratives indicates in itself the ways in which we see those experiences as shaping and reshaping our stories as teacher educators. We can, as we have throughout this book, identify particular moments in our early lives that have shaped our beliefs and values about education and how this has informed our becoming teachers and then teacher educators. One of the key findings for us through the writing of this book is the confirmation that it is the process of reflective examination upon one’s own experience that makes it a truly valuable resource for understanding the present, taking decisions and making plans for the future. Writing the book has changed the way we understand ourselves and our work and to some extent the context of that work. In these uncertain and challenging times, the case persists that students of teaching, teachers and teacher educators grow and develop only when they look to themselves and consider their own experience and practice and themselves closely in connection to the wider contexts (Russell and Loughran 2007). We know the risk of not reflecting on and theorising about professional practice: without these important dispositions, teachers and teacher educators can become, as Eraut (1994, 71) puts it, ‘prisoners of their early school experience’. For experience to have educational value, we need, as Dewey explained in 1916 (323), to ‘extract its net meaning’ through reflection. The ‘net meanings’ that we have extracted through our examination of experience through duoethnographic narrative inquiry might best be framed as a number of working assumptions or ‘principles’ about teacher education that have emerged and/or have been reframed and clarified for us through writing together the chapters in this book. Here, we follow Bullough’s (2008, 228) lead in believing that the sharing of principles born of inquiry is useful personally and may also ‘prove provocative professionally, offering an occasion for others to compare, criticise, and perhaps reconsider their own theories and practices in relation to my [our] own’. Similarly, Hullfish and Smith (1961, 95) remind us that ‘a principle never tells one what to do; it merely helps one find out what to do’. We also offer the principles cautiously as a tentative conclusion to the duoethnographic research that we have followed in making this book. Notwithstanding some notable differences, we have discovered that the pattern of our careers and our experiences as teacher educators have often been remarkably similar to each other. As we have continued to confirm through each of the chapters in this book, we are always in the middle of the story. Our shared principles arising from our work on this book include the following. Because, in one way or another, identity is the basis of how we all make meaning. We cannot truly understand who a teacher educator is without recognising the complex life and professional experiences that have shaped them. This was particularly evident as explored through the narrative analyses of our own educational journeys in Chap. 3. While the life narrative of the author(s) cannot be shared explicitly in every research project or publication, as teacher/educators and researchers, we need to attempt and aspire to be aware of ourselves through personal and collaborative dialogue, reflection and reflexivity, on the bigger picture of who we are, beyond the immediate more traditional focus of our teaching, research or writing.

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This process of reflection and reflexivity on our life histories in context plays a central part in how we become, and continue to become, teacher educators, as shown in Chap. 4. We can draw upon valuable general principles in the literature, and engagement with theoretical frameworks will certainly enrich and help us to reframe personal experience, but becoming a teacher educator remains at the core a personal journey that only the individual can truly understand and represent and where our own private values and theories of education are tacitly formed. The essential work of making those tacit, implicit theories that are formed within our experience explicit, so that they can be examined, adapted where needed and consciously connected to our work, necessitates the joining of ‘public theory’ with our own private theories and beliefs about becoming teacher educators. The process of researching and re-searching our own experiences of being learners, teachers and teacher educators in England and in Australia, through the composition of narratives in dialogue with each other, has helped us to understand more clearly the ways in which dominant global ideologies influence the national and institutional structures and practices which can shape meaning and influence action in the process of education. We do not live or work in a vacuum: policy is all and ever around us and consciously or subconsciously impacts upon our experience and practice, as shown particularly in Chaps. 5 and 8. We need to be aware of when and how this happens and how it is happening, because understanding the process allows us to resist and push back when appropriate, to accept and adapt what we can live and work with and, where necessary, to make decisions that allow us to be authentic and ethical in our work. Clarity about our own central beliefs of the aims of education and teacher education in an ever-evolving society, and knowing why we do the things we do, is central to this process of examination and response to policy in order to avoid diversion from one’s principles and convictions and a separation between pedagogical belief and practice that leads to the fearful lack of creative engagement, as exemplified in Chap. 5. While the details of our roles and the ways in which we see ourselves have developed and altered over the years, our core aims have remained the same in wanting to make our contribution to the education of teachers who are able to create and maintain positive and tolerant learning environments, designed to include all the children and young people with whom they work. This informs much of our discussion of pedagogy in Chap. 8. Context matters in teacher education because professional selves are formed and reformed in context. Collaboration and mentoring are essential for transition into the profession and in the ongoing process of becoming a teacher educator, as demonstrated in Chap. 6. Developing pedagogies and skills in teacher education requires opportunities to share, test and explore curriculum, approaches and techniques with knowledgeable colleagues. Even though we do not know everybody’s personal story, when working with others, we need to be mindful that there is one and that each of us is different despite sharing many similar experiences. Teacher educators need to support each other in studying their own stories of education and educational practice as they learn in, as well as from, experience, within local, national and international communities of practice, and to guide their pre-service teachers in doing the same.

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Schools and the teaching profession have had a profound influence on our sense of self, personally and professionally. Whether or not we work directly with schools, teachers and children, as we recognise in Chap. 7, they are a central part of our stories, and the story of teacher education, and always will be. In Chap. 3, we shared that while we have mixed memories of our own school experiences, they have provided the foundational experiences for us both as children. They are a constant ‘place’ throughout our life histories, and they have prompted significant changes of direction and purpose in our lives and work. Schools also provided times of fear and loathing, which were nevertheless important lessons in life, and they housed significant mentors and enablers who facilitated our own growth and learning when we needed it most. Importantly, schools also provided the basis of our continuing careers as teacher educators and gave purpose and focus to our work in teacher education, especially in the early phase of our careers. Despite the fact that their place in our lives and work has shifted, they are central to our sense of self and our contribution to teacher education practice and research. Because quality teacher education involves the exploration of the teaching self, and the values and beliefs that characterise the self, a comprehensive definition of a single or general pedagogy of teacher education would be hard to pin down, as we acknowledged in Chap. 8. Perhaps developing pedagogies of teacher education is the process of us being who we are (with a deep understanding of who that person is), revealing what we bring to the education of beginning teachers and researchers in our particular contexts and making a contribution that will be individual, unique, sometimes imperfect, but nonetheless complementary to the contributions of others. Teacher educators can create only some of the conditions needed for learning to become a teacher in partnership with colleagues in schools, but, as with all learners, the learning itself is always and inevitably the responsibility of the pre-service teachers themselves. This cannot be forced or imposed, but it can be encouraged and facilitated through positive and supportive learning environments where dialogue and reflection take place. As each person makes teacher education meaningful in their own way, we believe that open articulation of the reasons behind the strategies and pedagogies employed should be a central strategy of teacher education in itself. The concept of a professional identity is equally complex and elusive. As discussed in Chap. 9, we have come to believe that there is a form of ‘essential self’ that lies at the heart of our identities as teacher educators, and this means that we are each to some extent unlike, as well as like any other teacher educator. We can change and improve our practice through self-study and research and learn with and from others, but, as we have noted more than once, we can never become someone else and wear their pedagogy or persona like an overcoat. We may inevitably become the teacher educator that we were destined to become in response to the context that we find ourselves in; we just could not see it at the beginning of our journey. In hindsight, particularly after completing this duoethnography, where we have come from, where we are and where we might now be going is clearer to us both. An important theme that has emerged for us is that of ‘time and place’. Our stories of experience illustrate how viewing our evolving professional identities through

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the lens of time and place provides perspectives that cannot always be clearly seen when we focus on particular issues, events and practices. It is only by viewing ourselves in relation to becoming over time, in many different places (or contexts), that we begin to see who we are – a complex interplay of events past and present, with an eye to the future and what that may hold. We are aware of a range of dualities that characterise our experiences of becoming, each one illuminated in the narratives and discussions in the chapters in this book. These dualities include familiar/ old and strange/new; stability and change; history and the present; continuity and transformation; self and others; fear and strength; and despair and hope. The presence of such dualities illustrates the complex nature of learning about self, others and context and reinforces the importance of storying experience so that these complexities can be uncovered, examined and, in some cases, reconstructed.

10.4  Looking Back on the Writing Process as Research As discussed in Chap. 2, a central aspect of duoethnography is that it draws upon dialogic reflective narrative in order to use the past to reconceptualise the present, the present to bring new understanding of the past and both past and present to imagine, envision and plan for future action (Norris and Sawyer 2013). We have found this temporal and ‘live’ aspect of duoethnography especially engaging, and we have come to know ourselves, each other, our profession and the contexts and cultures within which we live and work in new ways through using this method of inquiry in the way that we have. Through the dialogue of responding to each other’s writing with writing, we both came to wider connected meanings and new understandings of stories that we thought we knew well. The method allowed us to bring the analytic and the evocative together in a way that is not possible in most research by juxtaposing our narratives of experience with each other’s and making connections with other voices and literature in the field. We may recognise the inner reconciliation that we have both found through the process as temporal in itself, but it also informs our outward plans of action. The purpose of the method is not to confirm or to disprove subjective thinking as ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ but to show how subjectivity is produced. Working on this duoethnography also presented some unique challenges. Modern-day information and communication technologies provide many options for sharing data and for talking face to face. We utilised email extensively, as well as Google Docs, Dropbox and Skype. These media allowed us to collaborate on sharing ideas, writing text and discussing (synchronously and asynchronously) the book project in general terms and were invaluable to our work. However, the very nature of duoethnography, especially the dialogic and discursive elements, really necessitated us to work together, at the same time, in the same place. We were both fortunate to gain funding from our respective universities which enabled us to travel to each other’s institutions and hometowns to work together on the book. While electronic and Internet-based communication was vital and effective, it was when

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we were able to meet together, sit and talk over a meal, walk in our local areas and challenge each other’s thinking in real time and place that much of the deep understanding of our experiences emerged. There was something about this face-to-face interaction that enabled us to ask more probing questions and to take the time to ponder ideas, which the time spent talking on Skype could not provide. In addition to the occasional technical hiccup, we found that the slight time-delays and ‘freezing’ of the video hindered the flow of our ideas and conversation. These online interactions were useful for regular catch-ups and decisions about the way forward, but the intense scrutiny of ideas was more difficult. There is something about having the time and place to talk, explore, wander and wonder that, for us, cannot be replicated online. Opportunities to interrogate and respond to each other’s ideas remain a challenge for international duoethnographic collaborations such as this one but are essential as we explore our journeys of becoming. ∗∗∗

Concluding the Conversation…

Mike: It is now September 2019 and I am in Melbourne, your hometown, Judy, and we are writing the last part of the book. It is good to be here. We really got started in earnest on the book when you came to Brighton in England in July last year, and, today, we walked and talked about these last parts of the book in Brighton, Victoria, here in Australia. It would be easy to begin another narrative about the unexpected places that the work of teacher education can take you to, but we have agreed that this will be a dialogue about what we have learnt from writing this book using duoethnography. This morning, I ran past the high school that you went to as a teenager and wrote about in Chap. 3. I know something of your experience there – a place of some sadness and also much success. In Chap. 2 we wrote about the ways in which the reader constructs meaning in the text by connecting stories to their own context and understanding of the world, so let me write as a reader about what I have learnt from your narrative and why that matters in understanding teacher education. Of course, I could be ‘wrong’ about what you mean, but that is not the point. My intention is to show what I have learnt as part of making this book with you. So, I think of your story of being at school, the school I ran past today and the primary school you went to before that, which we drove past last week, and it seems to me that it was the education – the study, the books, the curriculum and the being taught by good teachers, the ‘work’, that allowed you to find success and have some ‘control’ in your life. You couldn’t control the actions of others which were sometimes unkind or indifferent towards you, but, when it came to your work, you stepped up and found your way. So, the work really mattered, and it paid off. The good teachers who taught, helped and supported you really mattered, and that has driven you as an educator, whatever the context of your role has been: teacher, teacher educator, researcher and writer. The story moves me, and I learn. As readers of and listeners to stories do, I bring my own story into the reading of your story and learn from the differences and similarities, and, through that narrative analysis, I understand my story in a new way because I am persuaded to think about the elements from that period of my own life that might continue to drive my thinking and my pedagogy. That is narrative learning. The stories show, as we say above, ‘how subjectivity is produced’, and that allows the reader to consider how their own ­subjectivity is constructed, making personal theories and beliefs explicit and open to change when change is needed. Judy: It is interesting that you have chosen to stay in a location in Melbourne that enables you to run past my old high school and consider what my experiences in that place

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triggered for you personally. I drive past both my primary and secondary schools almost every day on the way to work or to the gym and also past the cemetery where both my parents are laid to rest, just down the road from my old primary school. The past is never far away from my present. I think you are right that my experiences at those schools, which represent such personal highs and lows, and my ‘ancestral voices’, particularly on my mother’s side, really do underpin my ‘self’ as a teacher/educator. The same is really the case for you too, far away in the UK (my ancestral home). I suppose these experiences are the basis of what is in our respective ‘canoe bag[s] of characteristics, sensibilities and principles’, which we referred to in Chap. 9. For me, the contents of my canoe bag include a love of learning (and the work involves, as you refer to in your narrative above): a desire to seek out new ideas and a belief that teachers need to be creative, humane and encouraging of each individual student’s learning and growth as a person. There also lurks a deep sensitivity to bullying and cruel behaviours and a fear of criticism or contempt on the part of other people. Fortunately, this is countered by a ‘learned helpfulness’ (as opposed to learned helplessness) that I can take from my bag and which enables me to overcome, over time, difficult situations with a new-found strength and sense of purpose. I’ve had to develop this response in the past in order to survive and, no doubt, will need to again in the future. Perhaps, Mike, as you have said during our discussions for this book, the points of pain can become points of strength. I really like that idea, which I think resonates with us both. I can see this more clearly as I have taken the opportunity, during the writing of this book, to see myself and my work in new ways, with a new perspective and understanding, and increased confidence. Of course, we were both aware of our own stories before writing the book, but I have come to see much more clearly that teacher education really is made up of stories – something that we referred to in Chap. 1 but has become even more clear to me now. Everyone has a story: our colleagues, our students, their students – even policies and institutions have a story. Just like us, they came from somewhere and will, in turn, go in a different direction, at some time in the future. If, through this book, we can illuminate the importance of telling, listening to and reflecting on storied experiences, then I think we have made a valuable contribution to knowledge about teacher education and teacher educators. I am looking forward to the next chapter in the story….

References Bullough, V., Jr. (2008). Counternarratives: Studies of teacher education and becoming and being a teacher. Albany: State University of New York Press. Dewey, J. (1916). Democracy and education. New York: Macmillan. Eraut, M. (1994). Developing professional knowledge and competence. London: Falmer. Hayler, M., & Williams, J. (2018). Narratives of learning from co-editing, writing and presenting stories of experience in self-study. Studying Teacher Education, 14(1), 103–119. Hullfish, H. G., & Smith, P. G. (1961). Reflective thinking: The method of education. New York: Dood, Mead and Company. Kelchtermans, G. (2017). Studying teachers lives as an educational issue: Autobiographical reflections from a scholarly journey. Teacher Education Quarterly, Fall, 7–26. Kosnik, C. (2007). Still the same yet different. In T.  Russell & J.  Loughran (Eds.), Enacting a pedagogy of teacher education (pp. 16–30). London: Routledge. Loughran, J. (2002). Effective reflective practice: In search of meaning in learning about teaching. Journal of Teacher Education, 1(53), 33–43.

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Loughran, J. (2013). Developing a pedagogy of teacher education: Understanding teaching and learning about teaching. London: Routledge. Norris, J., & Sawyer, R.  D. (2013). Duoethnography (Understanding qualitative research). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Russell, T. (2016). Narratives of the power of experiences in a teacher educator’s development. In J. Williams & M. Hayler (Eds.), Professional learning through transitions and transformations: Teacher Educators’ journeys of becoming (pp. 13–28). Dordrecht: Springer. Russell, T., & Loughran, J. (Eds.). (2007). Enacting a pedagogy of teacher education: Values, relationships and practices (pp. 16–30). London: Routledge. Sikes, P., Measor, L., & Woods, P. (1985). Teacher careers: Crises and continuities. London: Falmer. Williams, J., & Hayler, M. (Eds.). (2016). Professional learning through transitions and transformations: Teacher educators’ journeys of becoming. Dordrecht: Springer.