Self-Study of Language and Literacy Teacher Education Practices: Volume 30

In this chapter, we introduce readers to the volume, a collection of 13 inquiries that employ the methodology of self-study in teacher education practices (S-STEP) in culturally and linguistically diverse settings across the globe. After sharing the purpose and origins of the project, we provide an overview of the volume’s organization and brief summaries for each study. As a whole, the collection addresses two pressing yet interrelated challenges in teacher education research: understanding teacher educator development over the career span and how these scholar-practitioners prepare teachers for an increasingly diverse, mobile, and plurilingual world.

After spending three years as a secondary science teacher in an affluent Toronto neighborhood, I was surprisingly hired as a Literacy Teacher in my old school district just north of the city. I did not have a regular classroom; instead I was expected to work with as many teachers as I could within a cluster of elementary and secondary schools to, broadly speaking, pay explicit attention to the role of language in learning within the content areas. The purpose of this chapter is to analyze and interpret this part of my educational career by engaging in self-study via personal history; a personal history refers to becoming an accidental teacher educator, by virtue of a unique role as an in-service teacher educator with a language and literacy portfolio. Journals kept over two years reveal that, in many ways, I was a teacher educator before I knew what the term meant and that developing a pedagogy of teacher education with a focus on literacy made me increasingly frustrated with the over-simplified ways in which my school district framed issues of diversity.

In this chapter, we use self-study to explain the ways we enact community pedagogy in socioeconomically and culturally diverse school contexts in Bogotá, Colombia. We use our personal and professional journeys as language teachers, teacher educators, and researchers to show key experiences in our life stories and teaching trajectories that have influenced our teaching and research praxis. Our main interest as researchers and practitioners was to connect school curricula to the life of children and teachers in schools. Self-study helped us identify and problematize our identities and positions as foreign language teachers who espouse valuing of local knowledge. Through reflection and implementing field experiences with practicing teachers in professional development sessions in schools, we felt that we achieved such connection to develop the mindset for critical pedagogy.

With the increasingly cultural and linguistic diversity in education, teaching multicultural education for pre-service teachers becomes an important part of teacher education. In this collaborative self-study study, we examine how we construct our identities and how social interactions of multicultural education classrooms shape our identities. Our study draws on Lave and Wenger’s (1991) “identity as learners” concept, Akkerman and Bakker’s (2011) “boundary crossing learning” theory, Harré & Lagenhove’s (1999) positioning theory, and positionality concept. We found three themes that describe our identities and they reflect our embodiment of our positionality, our positions, our challenge confrontation, and our teaching improvement. We argue for the need of tracing the professional trajectories of multicultural education novice teacher educators and the important roles that our positionality plays in our identity formation. Our study has implications for professional support for multicultural education novice teacher educators and offers suggestions for further self-study research about multicultural education novice teacher educator identity formation.

This chapter explores the impact of context on the teaching of a multicultural teacher education course and illustrates what can be learned through partnering self-study methodology with discourse analysis. The study described in this chapter draws on data collected at two teacher education institutions with different student demographics in two different states in the United States. By drawing on methods of discourse analysis, we explore how the differences between two classes manifested in response to a set of class readings on race and racial stereotyping in schools. Specifically, we look closely at the discursive resources available in each location to talk about issues of race and racism. Through partnering discourse analysis and self-study methodologies, we uncovered deep-seated assumptions held by each of us that resulted in a reification of issues of race and class in ways that surprised and troubled us.

This chapter explores how four culturally, ethnically, and linguistically diverse colleagues use self-study methodologies and online journaling to systematically examine inquiry-based teaching and learning in international contexts. Respectively from the USA, Canada, Taiwan, and China, the main research question is, “How can we develop an inquiry stance in our similarly diverse teacher candidates?” For five months, they explore the question with one another in an interactive online journal. The analysis of their written journal reflections result in four main themes: (1) naming and framing inquiry and context, (2) perspectives on translating theory to practice, (3) common practices for developing inquiry stance, and (4) policy work. The chapter concludes with a list of recommendations for fostering inquiry-based teaching and learning with culturally, ethnically, and linguistically diverse teacher candidates. Self-study research methodologies, Philosophy for Children, and online journaling are also suggested as professional development models for diverse globalized teacher educators.

We are three teacher educators – Christi, Bethney, and Abby – representing literacy, educational leadership, and special education, who have collaborated in self-studies of our teacher education practices (S-STEP) over a period of five academic years. Through this collaborative engagement, we came to recognize the similarities and differences in our language and values found within each of our individual disciplinary cultures. It was through the juxtaposition of studying ourselves alongside of that of our colleagues that we further generated a shared culture and common understandings. In our chapter, we explore the ways in which self-study enabled collaboration with teacher educators representing different disciplines. The research brought to light specific disciplinary values, assumptions, and terminology that, when articulated and examined among critical friends, facilitated our ability to both broaden and deepen our individual understandings of teacher education practices in light of each other’s diverse disciplinary perspectives.

Teacher educators in rural settings where few English learners (ELs) may be enrolled in PK-12 schools are responsible for creating learning experiences that support preservice teachers in building a foundation for teaching culturally and linguistically diverse learners. The goal of the self-study described in this chapter was to investigate a teacher educator’s practice in a largely White, English-speaking rural area in the northeastern US. Learning experiences embedded in the one required course for preparing to teach ELs were grounded in extant research. This chapter highlights one unique experience in which the preservice teachers interacted with international ESL peers on campus to negotiate meaning of a complex text. The preservice teachers reported that this interaction led to analogous understandings for planning and implementing literacy instruction with ELs. These results may be useful to other teacher educators in rural areas who seek principled ways to strengthen preservice teachers’ preparedness for teaching ELs.

While the need to improve teacher preparation in response to linguistic and cultural diversity has been widely acknowledged, the learning process of teacher educators has not been widely discussed. This chapter presents findings from a self-study that examined practices aimed at preparing preservice teachers for linguistically and culturally diverse contexts through transformative intercultural learning. It exemplifies how Mezirow’s transformative learning theory can be put into practice by helping teacher educators reflect on their belief systems and practices. The findings show that disorienting dilemmas might challenge the validity of assumptions and lead to perspective transformation. It is evident that both teacher education process and intercultural learning share common ground in transformative learning. As researchers and educators continue to explore this relationship, particularly though self-study, it will lead to many insights about educational practice that is critical in a time of increasing diversity locally and possibilities for teaching and learning globally.

We share developing understandings from a self-study in which two university-based teacher educators worked with Indigenous Pueblo community members, teachers, and educational assistants to integrate Indigenous culture, heritage, and language into PK-12 Pueblo classrooms. We found that our collaborative endeavors (between Pueblo educators and the two of us) are resulting in culturally relevant and culturally responsive curriculum being developed and implemented. By our stepping aside from our traditional and Western positions as teacher educators to positions of supporters, the cultural experts (the Pueblo language teachers) took the lead and grew in their capacities as educators. This work has had a transcendent impact on both of us. The significance of this self-study is framed within working with diverse educators who teach PK-12 Indigenous students and within our development as teacher educators working in an institution that places more value on Western knowledge and less value, in practice, on Indigenous knowledge.

This chapter examines how the author, a teacher educator, uses self-study to reframe and reconceptualize her teaching of Emirati preservice teachers. The author describes how conducting self-study helped her shift from using monolingual approaches to teaching Emirati preservice teachers and a focus on improving their English language proficiency, to affirming their bilingual identities, and becoming more culturally responsive. Initially, the researcher posed the question, “how do I frame and reframe my teaching to support the English language learning of my Emirati preservice teachers?” then progressed to asking and answering the question “how can I affirm the bilingual identities of my Emirati preservice teachers and support their English language proficiency?”

In the current political environment where nativist sentiments are driving policies that overtly discriminate against immigrants and refugees, most notably Muslims, it is crucial to prepare teachers who will value and serve all students regardless of their ethnicity, language, or race. It has never been more important than now to bring the stories, experiences, and languages of all the people who make up this country into our classrooms. This study employs self-study of teacher education practices to question how teacher educators might improve our practice to better meet the needs of the diverse students in our classrooms, most specifically English Language Learners (ELLs). Self-study allowed me to engage in cycles of design and analysis to examine how well I implemented critical research as praxis as a tool to prepare students in my Sheltered English Immersion class to critically engage in theories and practices of teaching ELLs.

This chapter explores how TESOL teacher educators used self-study to respond to educational policies for emergent bilingual learners (BLs) and their teachers. The purpose was to examine tensions, challenges, and opportunities in our efforts as teacher educators to prepare teachers to teach BLs in mainstream classes through a state-mandated sheltered English instruction (SEI) course. Data sources, including emails, course artifacts, meeting agendas, and journals, pre and post surveys and course assignments were analyzed using mixed methods. Practitioners and participants agreed one SEI course is insufficient. In a coherent approach to preparing mainstream teachers to teach language, learning would be reinforced from coursework to the classroom. Without self-studies that provide an informed response to external policies that shape teacher education, the danger is new policies result in no substantive change.

Situated within the recent scholarship on core practices in teacher education, this chapter presents a collaborative self-study that explored one aspect of our developing practice as teacher educators through examination of Francis’s use of mediation in lesson rehearsal. Using examples from his practice, we explore the following research question: How does a teacher educator learn to provide mediation to create a responsive zone of proximal development within lesson rehearsal?

Specifically, we use Vygotskian sociocultural theory to examine Francis’s use of mediation during the rehearsal of the core practice supporting interaction and target language comprehensibility (I-TLC), one of the core practices addressed in his world language teacher preparation program. This self-study of mediation in lesson rehearsal illuminated Francis’ evolving practice as a facilitator of lesson rehearsal of novice teachers who are culturally and linguistically diverse, and who are preparing to use practices that are responsive to culturally and linguistically diverse students.