Nine teacher educators in their first three years as tenure-track professors in an education faculty established a self-study group in 2006-2007. These professors met once a month to link their teaching and service to scholarship through the self-study of teacher education practices. In addition, members met in pairs or small groups to develop…

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…

This article reports a self-study conducted during my four-year tenure as head of the elementary school department within a college of education. During that period, I explored my developing understanding of the role of relationships in the processes of my professional and personal growth. I describe the three cycles of action that comprise the…

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,…

The first term of any preservice teacher education program can be challenging for students in many ways, and learning to read and write in a scholarly way is one potential challenge. This article chronicles events in my secondary education literacy course when I asked students to write in a descriptive, analytical, and reflective way about the…

This article reports a study of literacy instruction in our own elementary preservice program. It examines the views and practices of both the preservice faculty who teach literacy and a sample of graduates of the program during their first three years of teaching. The new teachers reported learning many things from their preservice program,…

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…

Engaging in a self-study is a multi-faceted activity that involves not only autobiography and theory, but also students and colleagues. Learning from and with colleagues can take many forms. This article discusses the authors' experience with reciprocal classroom observation in a teacher education context. Peer observation supported our learning…

This article explores how supervisors of teachers preparing dissertations can create a space for the imagination in the tutorial setting. The imagination is seen as "opening up to possibility," where the student is taking a step into the unknown. The article discusses how the tutor can best support this, taking the theme of "holding the space for…

Within teacher education the position of educational foundations courses is increasingly precarious. Such courses are often declared irrelevant by students who embrace the aims of training and immediate practicality over education as the essence of learning to teach. Drawing on student and instructor diaries and diary summaries, the article…

This article reports the influence of school-integrated teacher education (SITE) courses on student teachers' initial experiences of learning how to teach. We analyse data from five student teachers who reflect back on their experiences of learning to teach through the integrated teaching and learning experiences of SITE courses. The article…

This paper reports a self-study of three faculty of colour engaged in teaching a special summer session geared to recruiting people of colour to teaching. Given our past experiences in institutions of higher education, we recognised the unique situation and potential of faculty of colour teaching a class made up almost exclusively of students of…

This paper reports a self-study of developing an integrated play-based pedagogy in a preservice early childhood teacher education subject about play. It is framed by understandings of play in children's lives and adult learning. The self-study was initially driven by a contradiction between teaching preservice teachers about play through didactic…