Cultivating preservice teachers' "shutaisei" has been the focus of Japanese university-based teacher education since the late 1990s. This article contains the self-study of three teacher educators at different Japanese universities. All three of us believe that helping students cultivate their "shutaisei" should be an important…

This self-study of teacher education practices (S-STEP) is a collaborative analytical autoethnography (CAAE) of four colleagues, represented in the text as the Poet and alter ego 'Other', alongside three critical friends. We drew on an arts-based approach, merging three genres: poetry, theatre, and narrative (story-telling). With this teacher…