In Canada, most universities and their classrooms are often constructed as rational and neutral spaces where interaction between professors and students is free of the influences of race, class, and gender. Implicit in such a construction is the assumption that the university is a purely White space where students from the dominant racial group…

Research exploring the process of becoming a teacher educator always reveals the difficult balancing act that developing an identity as a teacher educator involves and the articles in this issue do just that. The Rice and McNeil studies of teacher educator identity in this issue are very revealing; they were conducted from the perspective of…

When the authors consider the articles by Bullock and Ritter, and Clift through the lens of role theory, both show how identity is, in part, constrained by the definitions of the roles individuals are assigned or take up and is developed from a response to the perception of individuals by themselves as well as by others as they act within these…

Role theory is based in a conception of a social world wherein various roles are either available or made available and those participating in such worlds shape their identity according to the roles that are made available to them. In positioning theory, Haare and van Langenhove (1998) suggest that teachers are always in the process of…

This article describes the use of self-study as a frame for professional learning that grew out of a professional development program for teachers examining their practice in a dual-language K-4 school. Located in the center of the rural state of Iowa, the school's development of a bilingual program for native speakers of both English and Spanish…

Drawing on 14 years of collaborative self-study group work at their university, East and Fitzgerald reviewed the data, stories and findings from that collaborative work, seeking to go beyond those original stories to identify practical implications of the tensions that emerged and played out within the various groups. Findings were shared and…

This article considers my mentoring of graduate Teaching Assistants (TAs) as they worked with me to teach a graduate seminar. I sought their input to improve instruction in a course students consistently described as highly rigorous. To understand how I provided mentorship, I look at the work we did together to plan and teach the course and at the…

This article is a re-analysis of three self-studies conducted by three sub-groups of the Active Collaborative Education (ACE) team and originally presented at a conference in 2008. Revisiting and retelling these stories for the purpose of this article highlighted some of the concepts that form the warp and the woof of our interwoven collaborative…

This two-year self-study explores my experiences as a new teacher educator learning to teach in an introductory foundations course. I was interested in better understanding how and what I can learn from the complexity of my early teaching. As my Freirian orientation to transformational learning was challenged, two key themes emerged: developing…

The integration of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) into subject teaching adds an extra layer of complexity for teacher educators. There are technical ICT skills to be taught and there are also many questions about how these skills relate to the development of subject knowledge and pedagogy. This article analyses the impact of the…

This is a self-study of my professional and cultural biography and identity, a history which directed me first toward the work of urban teaching and then into teacher education and research into comparative educational issues of racial and national identity. I use this inquiry to demonstrate how biography and identity influences the lived…

While supervising a student teacher in school, an incident occurred that highlighted a contradiction between my practice and my beliefs and prompted me to question why I do not always live the values I profess. The aim of this article is to investigate how self-study can help me to understand the complex and context-based situations of my…

This article, inspired in part by the Levine report that criticizes teacher education programs in the United States for being out of touch with practices that work in real classrooms, is a self-study that explores the rift between educational theory, particularly theory that pushes for social constructionist, child-centered approaches to teaching,…

In this self-study, a teacher educator and an experienced teacher analyze an unexpected shared opportunity to mentor pre-service elementary educators. Our partnership arose during a graduate course on literacy development for elementary students, serendipitously captured during an extended electronic conversation with the pre-service candidates.…

Sharpening our approaches to methodology in self-study research can strengthen our work and clarify questions that arise for readers unfamiliar with this research genre. Our article considers three methodologies--narrative, auto-ethnography and self-study--that privilege self in the research design, believing that addressing self can contribute to…