Intimate Scholarship: An Examination of Identity and Inquiry in the Work of Teacher Educators

Abstract

In this chapter we look across the literatures of identity, inquiry, and pedagogy to explore the place of teacher educators in their institutions and the methodologies for inquiry they use to sustain themselves as instructors and scholars. Through examination of practice that represents a fundamental quality of teacher education and guided by felt obligations to students, teachers and teacher education, the evolution of identity formation as a site for the growth of professional knowledge occurs through experience. This chapter articulates the need for and potential contribution of intimate scholarship to the conversation concerning research on teacher education. We assert that intimate scholarship includes various methodologies but we privilege this label when the researcher is one of the researched. In addition, relational ontology grounds researchers with a focus on the particular rather than the universal, a coming-to-know process through dialogue and a context that includes a space of vulnerability and openness.

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Introduction

In this chapter we look across the literatures of identity, inquiry, and pedagogy to explore the place of teacher educators in their institutions and the methodologies for inquiry they use to sustain themselves as instructors and scholars. Through examination of practice that represents a fundamental quality of teacher education and guided by felt obligations to students , teachers and teacher education, the evolution of identity formation as a site for the growth of professional knowledge occurs through experience . This chapter articulates the need for and potential contribution of intimate scholarship to the conversation concerning research on teacher education. We assert that intimate scholarship includes various methodologies but we privilege this label when the researcher is one of the researched. In addition, relational ontology grounds researchers with a focus on the particular rather than the universal, a coming-to-know process through dialogue and a context that includes a space of vulnerability and openness. Such work utilizes numerous research methodologies, including forms of action research , autobiography , autoethnography , reflective inquiry , scholarship of teaching and self-study of teaching and teacher education practices (S-STEP ).

This chapter explores various tensions, puzzles of practice and conundrums addressed in the literature and gives attention to the notion of intersecting identities. For example: teacher educator identities shaped by and viewed through the lens of culture, sexual orientation , race and class. We explore how becoming a teacher educator – experiencing living contradictions, wondering about experiences, investigating practices, or exploring professional curiosities (Pinnegar & Hamilton , 2009) – offers focus, context , and opportunity to use inquiry, particularly forms of intimate scholarship to contribute new knowledge to the research conversation on teacher education . Ultimately, we turn to a consideration of how what we learn leads us to form and shape pedagogical responses .

Theoretically, we take as starting points the notions of identity – as socially constructed, subjective, plural, and subject to constant personal negotiations as people position and re-position themselves within social and institutional contexts (Murphy & Pinnegar , 2011; Pinnegar & Murphy, 2011) – and professional identity as the ‘valued professional self’ (Davey , 2013, p. 6). Teacher educators ’ identity negotiations and constructions of professionalism are indeed complex (Murray , 2014). This chapter draws on key theories of identity as a backdrop against which we place a survey of literature on teacher education regarding teacher educator professional identity, their lived experience s, their identified roles and positioning in the institutional structures within which they work. The problematics of self-identification are also addressed.

As we examined teacher educators along with their roles and ways of being in their institutions, we looked at how identity, inquiry and pedagogy represent and shape that place, recognizing that wherever they are in the world pressures, questions and critiques exist about what ‘ought to be done’ and what teacher educators should do. We also remembered that teacher educators, across institutions, national boundaries, and cultures, might well have other and potentially differing roles in their institutions beyond their classrooms. Importantly, we cannot understand teacher educators, their identities, their views of inquiry and approaches to pedagogy without turning first toward teacher education . In many ways we could say that teacher educators educate themselves for their profession (Arizona Group, 1995; Martinez, 2008) so that their preparation as teachers (or lack thereof) and their teaching experience become critical to understanding how they perceive their identity, inquiry and pedagogy.

With its professional focus, teacher education has a different place in the university than most disciplines. Whereas an academic in a discipline must know the work and thinking within a discipline, a teacher educator must know the discipline along with having the pedagogical skills to prepare others to teach the concepts and principles a typical university person teaches. When we consider what it takes to be a teacher educator, we also explore the institutional grip upon the minds of teacher educators (Arizona Group, 2007; Ball, 2003; Davey , 2013) and the ways that training models may bound, decontextualize, and hold static students and teachers. Every review of research on teacher education published in the last decade has argued for the need for stronger research to guide teacher education and teacher educators. However, such reviews usually promote research models that focus on experimentation and the use of large data sets as the research that needs to be done (e.g., Borko, 2004; Cochran-Smith , 2005; Cochran-Smith & Zeichner, 2005; Darling-Hammond & Bransford, 2005).

In contrast, some researchers like Putnam (2005) assert that a thorough study of the particular offers insight that can guide us in responding to recurring difficulties in education and beyond. Similarly, other researchers who focus on teacher education and teaching argue that research on teaching and teacher education that will be most helpful for preparing new teachers will emerge from careful studies of the particular and the local (see Bullough, 2008; Darling-Hammond & Lieberman, 2012). Looking at the particularities of identity, inquiry and pedagogy can be a fruitful place for intimate scholarship (see Hamilton & Pinnegar , 2016), the kind of scholarship that provides insight into the personal practical knowledge teacher educators hold or are developing about preparing teachers, since without this scholarship such knowing is absent from the academic discourse. Indeed, through intimate scholarship such knowledge can be strengthened and presented in ways that can be viewed as influential enough to move teacher education forward. We define intimate scholarship (Hamilton, 1995) as work conducted from an ontological orientation developed in a coming-to-know process that emerges in and is authorized through dialogue (Hamilton & Pinnegar, 2014).

For teacher educators deeply engaged in designing and enacting practices that support the development of new teachers and simultaneously studying teaching and teacher education , subjective research methodologies allow the development of understandings and make needed contributions to the research conversation. Indeed, utilizing more intimate methodologies allow such researchers to uncover and excavate their tacit (Polanyi , 1967) and practical knowledge (Clandinin , 1985; Clandinin & Connelly , 1996) developed in the present moments (Stern, 2004) of their practice that may remain hidden from those using other forms of research. Such research is intimate because it always involves our own understandings of ourselves and our experiences in relation to those we educate and our imaginings about those they will educate.

Identity, Inquiry, and Pedagogy Influence and Inform Teacher Educators in the University

There has been dramatic movement socially and politically around the world in the past ten years and as a result of this movement countries increasingly turn to the education of youth as problem or resource. When this occurs the conversations often turn to a focus on the terrain of teaching and teacher education (for example, UNESCO , 2004, 2005, 2006, 2008, 2010). These discussions, though loud and insistent, seem to remain static and the map of concerns shows little differentiation or extension. In other words, there seems to be a continual rehashing of concerns with teacher education without concomitant attention to the actual landscape of teacher education in individual countries. Moreover, this litany of recommendations fails to consider the kinds of progress that understanding the development of teachers and teaching have been made. Orland-Barak and Craig (2014, 2015a, 2015b) have developed such a response exploring the pedagogies of teacher educators across the world. While teacher education and related research are in fact global concerns, researchers in this field sometimes ignore the international nature of the enterprise and fail to take into account the nuances of meanings from results provided by the context of the country where researchers conduct their research (see Hamilton & Pinnegar , 2013). As intimate scholars oriented to the ontological , we recognize that when teacher educators fail to notice the particularity of the work or to examine research findings as local knowledge , they then fail to realize the richness and variability that context imbues in such studies.

When researchers recognize the influence and contribution of context to findings, alternative explanations for results and understandings emerge from international inquiries. When we question results not in terms of validity but in terms of context, we wonder about teacher education practices in a particular setting. Addressing this wonder brings teacher educators to new and different questions. Looking globally in this way as intimate scholars we wonder what we can learn about the terrain of teaching and teacher education and its related research. To consider the implications of these wonderings requires an exploration of texts focused on comparative studies of teaching and teacher educators—texts that focus both more generally on teachers and teacher education, as well as studies that focus more specifically on methodologies.

Weaving the literatures of Shulman and colleagues (Shulman, 1987 & see https://www.//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LeeShulman), Ball and colleagues (e.g., Ball & Forzani, 2007, 2009), Korthagen and colleagues (Korthagen, 2004; Korthagen & Vasalos , 2005), along with the works that take a transmission model toward teaching and teacher preparation, while considering the contexts from which such work emerges, teacher educators come to new understandings of teacher education and scholarship in this field. Additionally, we juxtapose the works of Fenstermacher (1986, 1987, 1994), Dewey (1933/1993, 1938/1997) and other teacher educators engaged in intimate scholarship : a scholarship of enactment .

When we examined issues of identity in the earlier handbooks of research on teacher education (Houston, 1990; Sikula, 1996), such studies labeled these investigations as explorations of beginning teacher development or the learning-to-teach process. Such work tended to focus on teacher thinking , beliefs of new teachers, processes of becoming teachers, and challenges routinely faced exploring metaphors that guide development. In the Cochran-Smith , Feiman-Nemser, McIntyre, and Demers (2008) handbook, teacher identity as a theme in research on teacher education emerged. In that text, Rodgers and Scott (2008) argued that the earlier research had subsumed these categories and moved forward as theorists took a greater interest in who teachers were as people. However, this research still focused on teacher identity with little attention to the role or place of teacher educator identity development. In the International handbook of self-study of teaching and teacher education practices with its focus on the S-STEP research and with the aim of making tacit ideas explicit, recognizing teacher educators as critical participants, and seeking an orientation toward improvement marks the emergence of research that explores identity formation among teacher educators (see Loughran , Hamilton , LaBoskey , & Russell , 2004). Although initial research focused mostly on static notions of teacher identity formation attending to role enactment or Erikson’s (1980) conceptions of identity, such work has since moved forward with more complexity .

In this chapter, a twenty-first century examination of these issues, we push these concepts further. Specifically we look across the literatures of identity and inquiry to explore the places where, as teacher educators , we argue that experience in identity formation is a rich source and site for intimate scholarship with potential to contribute to research on teacher education and teaching (see Hamilton & Pinnegar , 2016). As we examine the research on teacher educators, we look at how identity and inquiry represent and shape that place with the recognition that wherever they are in the world, there are pressures and questions and critiques about what ought to be done and what they should do.

We also remember that they often have roles in their institutions beyond their classrooms. Importantly, we cannot understand teacher educators , their identity and their views of inquiry without turning first toward teacher education . In many ways we could say that teacher educators prepare themselves for their profession so that their preparation for teaching becomes critical to understanding how we perceive their identity and inquiry (see Arizona Group, 1995). Such research is intimate because it always involves our own understandings of ourselves and our experience in relation to those we educate and our imaginings about those they will educate.

Practice as a Purpose of Teacher Education

Teaching and teacher education is anchored in and by practice. As teacher educators , hopefully our own practice develops and strengthens as we engage in our work and model for preservice teachers ways to take up practice (for a discussion of the importance of developing better rather than best practice, see Bullough, 2012). A fundamental responsibility and commitment of teacher education and teacher educators is the preparation and education of new teachers. Obligations toward the students of our students (Arizona Group, 1997) represent an overarching component of this responsibility and commitment to the preparation of teachers that teacher educators feel. Whether that moral purpose is about making a difference or having an obligation, it weighs on most teacher educators and serves as the ethical basis from which we/they construct our identity as teacher educators and from which we act.

As we engage in teacher education , inwardly we imagine the children our students will teach and consider the educational experience s we want these soon-to-be teachers to enact. This perspective toward unseen children influences us – seemingly present in our peripheral vision and as background in deliberations about programme development for and in interaction with our students. Indeed, as we and other teacher educators prepare new generations of teachers, we feel the ethical press and the moral and ethical claims of these future students. Constructing strong practices with our students and educating them to build strong educational experiences and develop educative environments for their students becomes our purpose as teacher educators.

Exploring the purpose of teacher education , the obligations and commitments of teacher educators , and the fluidity of teacher educator identity formation , fundamentally anchors teacher education and related research in practice. As teacher educators we orchestrate programmes, design activities, and construct courses that enable future teachers to develop their own practice as well as teach themselves to be teachers. We also engage in our research conducted from our position of knowing and doing teacher education within the framework of intimate scholarship . This frame informs our work as we excavate understandings of experience and practice using a variety of strategies and/or methodologies. In one example of intimate scholarship, LaBoskey (2012) provides insight into this layering as she examines the practice of her former students to better understand her own teaching practice with current students. In another, Feldman (2006) uses existential argumentation to examine how his experience as a teacher educator led him to resist attempts at his institution to dismiss the rigor and value of teacher education. In moving this knowing into doing, he found new courage to advocate for himself and for the preservice teachers he taught. His arguments provide impetus for action and insights into being a teacher educator that can enable others of us to shift the discourse about teacher education.

Lovin et al. (2012) engaged in a study grounded in intimate scholarship to explore their beliefs as teachers of mathematics becoming teacher educators . In their examination, they realized that while they knew a lot about teaching mathematics from a reform paradigm, the field as a whole lacked similar understandings about how to prepare teachers to take up reform practices in ways that best support preservice teachers. Living alongside teachers, students , and community members, Huber and Clandinin (2005) demonstrated the intersecting trajectories of experience and meaning-making as captured through their exploration of a school field trip during a narrative inquiry. Engaging in narrative research , Murphy , Pinnegar , and Pinnegar (2011) explored the ethical tensions that past narratives introduce into current understandings of selves as teacher educators. Using the tools of narrative inquiry and the perspective of Schwab ’s practical, Craig (2013) traced the concept of the teacher’s best-loved self. She explored those practices that teacher educators might engage in support teachers in fostering their best-loved teacher selves. In their autoethnography , Coia and Taylor (2013) demonstrated how early theoretical understandings about feminism shaped their practice as teacher educators and how their practice as teacher educators shaped their understanding of feminism.

This series of research examples demonstrates the promise of unique understandings in the examination of ideas when we utilize intimate scholarship through research methodologies such as S-STEP , narrative, narrative inquiry, autoethnography , action research , reflective inquiry , or memory work. Examinations of knowing , doing and becoming teacher educators conducted within such methodologies bring new knowledge to teacher education .

Knowing Practice as Contribution to Teacher Education Scholarship

The recognition of knowing as a teacher educator in the doing of teacher education shifts what kinds of knowing are of most value to teacher education and teacher educators . In developing understandings of practice that inform research on teaching and teacher education, inquiries into experience , practice and knowing and doing as teachers and teacher educators require methodologies of research oriented toward intimate scholarship (and the knowing, doing, and becoming of the teacher educator (Hamilton & Pinnegar, 2016) acting within teacher education practice). More recently, some researchers (see for example, Ball & Forzani, 2009) in the United States have suggested that a narrower view of teacher education would be a more productive approach to preparing teachers and argue that practice should be the purview and focus of teacher education. In contrast with our view, this alternative approach looks narrowly at practice as a way to generate selected teaching techniques where teacher educators train preservice teachers to enact practices in a reprise of Kagan’s (1992) call to train teacher candidates rather than educate them. Presented as straightforward practices, the claim seems to be that if we identify universally useful practices and train future teachers to enact them, adjustments from student-to-student, context -to-context, are easily accomplished.

From this vantage point, if prepared well in these techniques and practices, these beginning teachers will enter the classroom unprepared to deliberate or navigate the complexities of knowledge and learning or the variations of context but to precisely enact the practices taught. This orientation to practice ignores the nuances of Schwab ’s (1970) description of the holistic nature of practices and the kinds of deliberation teachers need for successful teaching . It asserts teachers/teacher educators ’ supremacy of position.

We juxtapose an opposing view, where teacher educators ’ support teachers in teaching themselves to teach, responding to nuances, and integrating children, context , and content . The contrasting view described above where teacher educators train preservice teachers in specific practices and evaluate the precision with which they enact the practice regardless of context, child, and/or content produces (we use this word strategically) teachers who can enact practices without developing understandings of the experience of teaching, the elements to which they might attend, how to adjust and learn from experience or how they might consider their own personal practical knowledge . Even if they do reflect upon their practice, attending to its fidelity to training, we suggest that such reflection serves to instantiate the institutional grip and narrowness of the prescribed view of teaching as a set of practices to be generally deployed. Stephen Ball (2003) argues that teachers currently often regulate themselves in enacting prescriptive practices because being inculcated in such practices leads them to judge themselves as incompetent as teachers when they veer from the practices they learned.

Bullough (2012, 2014) in a series of articles argues for the need to consider what kind of teacher education (preservice and professional development ) sustains rather than limits the life experience of being a teacher. This recent orientation to teacher education that trains preservice teachers to enact best practice reverts to an orientation of research on teaching and teacher education grounded in an abstractionist ontology and epistemology and reifies a positivistic orientation to research. In other words, it is an ironic movement backward away from what we have come to know and understand about the teaching that sustains students and their teachers.

We argue here that teacher education , anchored in practical knowing and practice, is better served by an orientation to research that embraces intimate scholarship and simultaneously contributes to the practices of teachers, teacher educators and teacher education programmes as well as contributes to research on teacher education. We argue here that fundamental to research on/in teacher education is an understanding of practical knowing . There are three ideas about practical knowledge that inform those engaged in scholarship for educating teachers. Noel (1993) argues that extant ideas about practical knowing in educational research that seeks to understand teacher (or teacher educator) knowledge share commonalities but different orientations. She highlights certain similarities: “… content of the practical as the interaction between situational and personal aspects of the teacher and the teaching situation ; methods as concepts of deliberation for specific decision making ; and various approaches to guiding principles of the practical” (p. 1). Each conception enables us to consider the ways in which practice and the practical anchor teacher education and how exploration of this knowing and doing contributes to research in teacher education.

The first notion we explore is personal practical knowledge as defined and proposed by Clandinin and Connelly (see Clandinin, 1985; Connelly & Clandinin, 1984, 1985). Their work identifies the kinds of knowledge that inform teachers and teacher educators in their practice and that reveal its holistic quality . Second, we consider the works of Merleau-Ponty (2013), Polanyi (1967), and Stern (2004) as these researchers offer another look at embodied knowing . Finally, we fit the assertions of Fenstermacher (1986, 1987) and Noel (1993) about practical arguments into this discussion as they articulate the coherence of teachers’ practical knowledge uncovered through an examination of such arguments.

Personal Practical Knowledge

Personal practical knowledge emerged as a concept as Clandinin (1985) sought to understand teachers’ language in accounting for their knowing of and accounting for their practice as teachers. Connelly and Clandinin (1984, 1985) argued that knowing and acting united within a person and becomes evident in the teacher ’s account of teaching because personal practical knowledge comprises all that goes into, “the make up of a person” (Clandinin, 1985, p. 361). This knowledge develops in the circumstances of teaching from the actions as well as the emotional and relational significance of these actions. Using the word personal in the name signifies that the person and context involved in this knowledge includes all that a person brings into teaching – the character, the past, the present and the future. (See Ross & Chan , Chap. 1, this volume for an elaboration on these ideas.)

What people say and how they act – in the stories they tell and the comments they make about their teaching practice – reveals this knowing . The ‘knowledge ’ in personal practical knowledge refers to the convictions that a teacher holds in teaching and in interaction with others involved in the practice. This knowledge grows with experience , including intimate and social interaction as well as the traditions and background of the person. Teachers’ actions and their accounts of their experience, actions as a teacher, and stories told about their teaching all express the knowing. Specifically, they argued that all the experiences that are part of a person’s being compose personal practical knowledge. Rather than conceiving of the elements of knowing that a teacher brings to teaching as being made up of separable constituent parts (Shulman , 1987), personal practical knowledge encapsulates the holistic quality of such knowing to inform the doing and becoming in teaching.

This conception of knowing recognizes that experience , past knowledge , ethical commitments, and emotional understanding synergize to guide teachers in their teaching . The organic quality of this knowledge allows teacher educators to recognize that preservice teachers bring personal practical knowing into their preparation as teachers since it includes their beliefs about students and learning, their understanding of content , and their desires and commitments to teaching. Personal practical knowledge is shaped by experience, and captured in storied accounts of decisions to be teachers and actions in teacher like roles. This personal practical knowledge continues to emerge and develop throughout their teaching lives, as teachers make meaning from experiences and seek information to enhance content they teach, and the relations they have with their students, their community, and their families.

This conception of personal practical knowledge presents a complex and nuanced view of how, and from what perspective, such knowledge might be shaped. Though complex, its very complexity provides entry points for understanding the actions of teachers as teachers and makes clear that density, complexity, and potentiality for influencing the knowing and ultimately the doing of teachers. Moreover, this conception enables teacher educators in their considerations of how they might transform the practice of future teachers and explore their own knowing and doing within their own practice as teacher educators.

Embodied Knowing

The personal practical knowledge that informs teaching is embodied knowing , much of which is tacit . Clandinin (1985) has argued that personal practical knowledge becomes visible in the way we enact our teaching practice. Routines we use, assignments we construct, responses and interactions we have from/with colleagues and students , and lessons and experiences we have all reveal our knowing . Accounts of the what, how, and why, as well as our feelings about and in our teaching—our stories -become ways to reveal our tacit knowing.

Polanyi (1967) and Stern (2004) both provide insight into how such knowing emerges or develops. Such knowing emerges in experience , with emotion , commitment , desire, belief and enactment all contributing to this knowing. Our interpretation of action, our response and the response of others to it also shape and inform this knowing. Still, this knowledge can remain hidden if not brought to consciousness. The telling of stories can surface that knowledge in ways that other activities cannot.

Merleau-Ponty (2013) argued that our bodies and actions can reveal our knowing . In teaching we enact our practices in a busy and interactive, public space. Things happen in classrooms that require immediate response. In fact, many things happen simultaneously, requiring a short response. Teachers rely on their personal practical knowledge , the content knowledge and their embodied knowledge – developed through experience – how, where, why and what we respond builds the knowledge that supports teachers and teacher education in the desire to be present to our students (Rodgers & Raider-Roth, 2006). This presence requires that our attention focus intently on students and the circumstances, and guides us in taking the required action. Being able to act in such settings on routines and practices frees up space, which allows us to be present to students in our moment of interaction with them. Thus uncovering what knowing, commitment , desire, and emotion embodied in our action promises development of deepened understanding for teaching.

Stern (2004) argues that such knowing develops in present moments as we move into consciousness. We live our lives not in great gulps but in moments. As we act in these moments we build up this store of embodied knowing . He argues that our lived experience s are made up of small momentary events, present moments, or ‘nows’. In these moments change occurs and our lives unfold. Furthermore, he asserts that change occurs because in the present moment we participate in events that can either positively or negatively impact the rest of our lives. In a present moment, as we bring a past experience forward and reconsider it in this moment, we may reinterpret, relive, and retell , coming to new understandings that have the power to both reinterpret the past and propel us forward into the future. As we act we move from consciousness to non-consciousness, attending to both—what and when we come into consciousness and what and when we act in non-consciousness within our teaching practice are both sources for our knowing as teacher educators and fruitful venues for exploring and learning what we know and might contribute to research in teacher education .

Practical Knowing

Fenstermacher (1986) proposed that teachers could better understand their practice if they use a formalized exploration process of practical argument. The practical argument allows teachers to present their understandings of their practice that could expose conflict between their word and their action. In a way this could be considered the relation of one’s living contradiction – those tensions between what you say you do and what you actually do. A practical argument allows a way to understand how knowledge base d in an oppositional epistemology can end up in action—thus how empirical findings can effect practical action . When, “findings generated in one epistemic and value context [can be] applied to a quite different epistemic and value context” (p. 357). Through explorations of practical arguments , teachers can reveal the contradictions in their thinking and explore how and why they act as they do. Tracing practical arguments found in their thinking about their teaching provides a strategy that teacher educators and teachers can use to both reveal and refine their practical knowing .

As we have argued, teacher education is anchored in practical knowing . From this perspective, the kind of scholarship that would hold the most promise in informing research in teacher education, would not be research conducted from an orientation toward generalizability and warrants for knowing . Instead, scholarship that takes up the perspective of the person in action and privileges learning from experience by exploring and interrogating it, opens possibilities for exploration into what might be known about educating teachers and the knowing and doing of teacher educators . Taking up scholarship from this perspective, exploring and excavating practice and the space between the practitioner and Others engaged in the practice, making the private public by exploring and uncovering the meaning in doing, from the perspective of the actor , could be useful. It also represents a space of great vulnerability. This kind of scholarship carefully examines the particular with an orientation toward ontology rather than epistemology with dialogue as a coming-to-know process. Scholarship like this we label intimate scholarship because of the nature of the particular, where work centers on the particular – person, context , experience – and requires a willingness to be vulnerable in a public setting.

Practical Knowing and Professional Identity

Drawing on psychological understandings, professional agency can be described as internalised mental models, located within individuals who have particular professional roles and identifications. Over time, these internalisations may shift in response to external events, or may be constructed through personal reflections. Individuals may have multiple possible selves with some preferred over others. In contrast, socio-cultural perspectives on professional identity suggests that it develops in response to social and cultural values, norms, discourses and practices of the context in which individuals work. These professional contexts can be understood as normative, with those in authority having an interest in the professional community upholding the norms, which may present pressure to conform and deny occupational groups agency and voice (Rodgers & Scott, 2008). Common to socio-cultural understandings of professional identity are the ideas that it involves ongoing interactions among biography (personal and professional), views of self, agency and social structures, and that it is a site for constant renegotiation over time (Feiman-Nemser, 2001; Flores & Day, 2006; Gee, 2000). While some may disagree as to the relative importance of individual agency and cultural/social interactions as the prime determinants of identity, most share Taylor’s (1989) view that, “self can never be described without reference to those who surround it” (p. 35).

From a post-structural perspective , professional identity , which can be thought of as a form of social identity, is not a single entity. It may consist of ‘multiple selves’ or subjectivities, all of which are contestable and subject to change over time in response to historical, social, cultural and psychological circumstances. In particular, professional identity must be seen in terms of the group politics that give form to it, as well as the emotional, value-laden discourses of belonging that help construct it.

Position of Teacher Education

Although the historical structures of teacher education programmes worldwide have been challenged and subject to change over recent years, the settings in which these discourses are played out have varied. In many contexts, the neo-liberal reformist agendas that have dominated the politics of higher education in most western countries over the last two decades has sought to transform education into a commodity market. This has taken different forms: in some locales attempts to reprofessionalise teacher education have relocated into the academy with the ostensible intent to increase academic rigour. In other locales, teacher education has been relocated to public schools.

In the wake of fiscal constraint and institutionalised austerity , moves to drive structural reform include institutional amalgamations, cultures of compliance, staff cutbacks and redundancies, changes in pedagogies and modes of teaching delivery and shifting priorities. Inevitably many teacher educators have reexamined who they are, what they stand for and value in their roles, and whence they derive their feelings of professional agency. Within a British context , a study by Brown, Rowley, and Smith (2014) highlights some of the challenges to professional identity for teacher educators working between institutions.

Positioning as a Teacher Educator

While mindful of those national differences in political and policy agendas, we argue that teacher education and the study of it is not just about practice but the practical (Orland-Barak & Craig , 2014; Schwab , 1970, 1978) where we reveal our doing (our action, our practice) our talk and our story of our experiences (Clandinin , 1985; Clandinin & Connelly , 1996). What we examine more carefully here is how our positioning within teacher education as teacher educators opens particular vistas and venues for productive intimate scholarship that is obscured, blurred or irrelevant to explorations of teacher education conducted from a modernist perspective.

Cochran-Smith (2005) argued that in the new teacher education we need to conduct studies that look across institutional contexts so that what researchers uncover is generalizable . She argued that only when we have in hand knowledge base d in positivistic criteria for knowledge including randomized sampling, statistical analysis with large data sets, sampling multiple institutions and consider teacher education in general as the context will the knowledge of teacher education and teacher educators be taken seriously. Further, it is only this kind of validated generalizable knowledge that will allow us to build the needed new teacher education. From her perspective and that of others, teacher education is under mandate to meet this challenge . As teacher educators, we need to develop and apply generalizable knowledge developed from a modernist epistemological and abstractionist ontological perspective to reform our teacher education programmes.

When we consider this notion of re-form, we consider it against Greene’s (1999) notion of releasing the imagination. Reform as a term suggests not ‘new’ but a re-formation or re-arrangement of what is already present. In contrast, Greene’s idea that what we can know from a modernist perspective provides only a horizon against which we can consider the deeper knowing that emerges from intimate scholarship . It is in this space between seeing large and seeing small that imagination is released. In their final chapters, Clandinin et al. (2006) demonstrated how looking across the far horizon (seeing small) of research on dropouts is imbued with radical new insights and generates unusual provocative new questions only when juxtaposed against their inquiry (seeing large) into the lives of diverse children in elementary school. From their work, we see how similar work within teacher education brings large-scale work argued for by Cochran-Smith against work that sees teacher education and teacher educators large, such as the work by Lovin et al. (2012). This work raises new questions about differences between understanding learning from mathematics by children and teachers and the understandings of teaching teachers held by teacher educators. Or, examining work about teacher learning against Brubaker ’s (2011, 2012, 2015) study of negotiating assignments with preservice teachers opens our imagination concerning how experiences like those of Brubaker’s students shifts the terrain of the learning to teach process anchored in shifts in the pedagogical experiences of teacher educators and preservice teachers.

We assert that to reimagine and develop contexts, programmes, and practices in teacher education in the preparation of strong teachers, the greatest hope comes in understanding the particular. In developing trustworthy accounts of inquiries conducted from the perspective of the person deliberating on the competing demands of practice and orchestrating their work (practice, programmes, assignments, assessments ) in particular ways, teacher educators can provide the kind of knowing most helpful for doing teacher education and becoming teacher educators. Studies grounded in intimate scholarship are necessary (Hamilton & Pinnegar , 2016). Through intimate scholarship, teacher educators can provide examinations and inquiries into their practice (doing) and uncover their knowledge and evolution in teacher education and as teacher educators.

In intimate scholarship , as the aforementioned studies along with Clandinin , Davies, Hogan, and Kennard (1993) reveal, teacher educators can examine the ways that the mega-studies proposed by Cochran-Smith (2005) apply or not. Similar work where teacher educators explore their knowing in educating preservice teachers that emerge from large scale studies of the results of training teachers open new questions for teacher education . They provide a relational ontological basis that can guide judgment concerning teacher education, teacher educators and the ethics that ought to underlie teacher education. Such intimate scholarship explores which particular studies in developing educative experience might enable intimate scholars to uncover perspectives about knowing and doing teacher education (for example, Bullock , 2009; Mansur & Friling, 2013). This scholarship links the research conversation in teacher education to personal experience concerning shifts in becoming teacher educators within the contexts of their own practice. What we argue is that well-orchestrated, designed, conducted and reported intimate scholarship potentially provides more profoundly helpful knowing for doing teacher education and becoming teacher educators. Such studies allow teacher educators to deliberate about the dynamics of their own contexts, students , obligations and commitments in relationship to the understandings provided by such studies. As Greene (1999) noted, through such deliberations the imagination (of both the intimate scholar conducting the study and the teacher educator examining the study) is released. Shifts in current programmes produce radical transformations in practices and new avenues for inquiry are opened for consideration.

Moreover, we argue that not only is intimate scholarship a useful orientation to inquiry to transform teacher education , but also that the shifting ground of practice emerging from the uneasy positioning of teacher education in the academy provides fertile grounding (see Davey , 2013). Examining carefully our knowing and doing as teacher educators within particular programmes, in particular places, with particular students engaged in particular experiences can better inform teacher education than studies that come divorced from contexts with findings presented as generalizable .

Positioning Teacher Education and Educator Scholarship Internationally

Research in teacher education spans the world (see Zhu & Zeichner, 2014 or Orland-Barak & Craig , 2014, 2015a, b). Yet, a question that should plague the work is whether researchers attend carefully enough to the variation that context produces in the application of research in one country to research in another. In a series of short pieces, Hamilton and Clandinin (2010, 2011) critiqued this phenomenon and explored the implications for research in teacher education. Too often in this current climate, researchers across the world draw on research across international boundaries (often relying heavily on work from the United States) and apply it to reasoning in their own cultural context as if we now work in a global culture. They ignore the notion that while issues of concern may be shared across national boundaries, there is local variation (Anderson-Levitt, 2003) addressing the dynamics of the situation within particular cultures or countries. While researchers have always argued context matters, they routinely apply findings from one context and situation to another that is quite different.

It seems that if the underlying issues are shared there is an assumption that studies on that issue can be applied anywhere. Reports from UNESCO (see, for example, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2008, 2010) provide clear evidence that there are shared issues, one example of which is the quality of teacher education (see Russell & Martin, this volume.) Using intimate scholarship , Berry (2007) demonstrated that there are indeed similar quandaries that entangle intimate scholars yet the breadth and depth of understanding of teacher education can be limited when scholars fail to recognize that local variation and context matter. They matter for the study being conducted and for other scholars who resonate with the findings of a particular study and want to use the ideas to respond to particular situations within their own setting.

Hamilton and Pinnegar (2013) explored the phenomenon of the dominance of the American research voice in the world conversation and the lack of practical action that attends to shifts in context and culture across international and institutional boundaries . They explored ideas that hold currency in research on globalization. Specifically, in this work, they assert that while issues transcend national boundaries and the problems of one country may share themes and concepts with another, generalizing findings from one country or culture to another must attend to local variation around issues related to the research and to the cultural context where they hope to apply the findings. Those who hold notions of a global culture argue that either through evolution or economic dominance, all countries of the world share that culture. In contrast, another more tenable position is that as a result of globalization and the fact we are all human, where issues in one culture or country can crop up in another, findings from research can help us reason about these issues. Unless we attend to the context of findings and the context where new research may be initiated, researchers can do damage to the ideas and limit what might be learned (Hamilton & Pinnegar, 2016).

Some would argue that, in many ways, conducting large scale studies across multiple institutional boundaries erase context as a factor. However, Putnam (2005) asserts that such findings from the social sciences have been of little use in solving or even responding well to the intractable problems of the world. Polak’s (2009) work on helpful responses to poverty demonstrates this phenomenon. He argues that when social scientists enter a setting and desire to alter it, the usual first step includes an extensive exploration of context whereby they draw understanding of the situation from those most deeply and closely involved. The next step involves a broad sweep of ideas from research. In turn, they attempt to integrate specific local knowledge with more generalized knowing in pursuit of potential ways to respond to particular situations (Polak, 2009).

In making a similar point, Putnam (2005) explained that careful attention to the particular, wherein a scholar in one setting can contemplate application of results within another context and vice versa, can contribute to the experience under consideration. Milan Kundera (1980) argued that repetition is the second infinity. Using the example of a pianist, he points out that each time a piece is played results in a unique rendition of the artistic work. With each iteration the pianist highlights different features, uses different phrasing and communicates different affect and emotions resulting in a different resolution to the piece.

Grounded in ontology intimate scholarship insists that context as well as understandings that emerge be made explicit and positioned to contribute not just to scholarship but to practitioners grappling with problems across international and cultural settings. Teacher education and teaching occur repeatedly within a particular setting and across institutional and international boundaries. Thus work that explores a particular experience in a particular place at a particular time provides opportunity to excavate this second infinity. In the process, researchers enrich the research conversation on teaching. Examining variations in practice and the knowing /understanding from the perspective of the particular has the potential for transformation of our practice, who we are as teacher educators and our collective understandings of research on teacher education and teaching.

We argue that exploring particular local variation gives us understanding of how things might be different or how our own context could be shaped or shifted slightly to accommodate practices from elsewhere. Importantly intimate scholarship can reveal disasters, disappointment and/or success, all of which can inform us. (For other examples, see Placier’s (1995) self-perceived fiascos in her classroom ; Brubaker ’s (2010, 2011, 2015) negotiations with students ’ work and Lovin et al.’s (2012) exploration of tensions regarding beliefs in a mathematics education classroom.) Inadequacies as well as failures as well as triumphs inform our knowing , especially when we clearly articulate deliberations, responses , shifts, and understandings within our inquiries. We learn from the disasters as well as the successes of others, since such reports allow more complex and nuanced positioning from which our work as scholars and educators can proceed.

Identifying as Teacher Educator: A Not-So-Simple Question of Definition

Here we turn to a few thorny issues of definition regarding the terms we have used in this chapter: ‘teacher educator’, ‘identity’, and ‘professional identity ’. Who are the group we call teacher educators ? What do we know about the nature and factors affecting the development of their professional identity? Previous discussion in this chapter has highlighted the ways in which intimate scholarship offers a powerful way of understanding the work teacher educators do and requires brief consideration to fully understand the potential contribution of explorations by teacher educators.

That teachers matter, and have a profound influence on student learning (Darling-Hammond , 1997, 2006; Hattie, 2009) is an axiom in the research literature on schools, teacher education , and schooling. This robust literature highlights the importance within schooling of teacher thinking , knowledge and decision-making (Elbaz , 1983, 1991; Schön , 1983; Shulman , 1987), teacher identity (Connelly & Clandinin , 1999; Day, 2004; Day, Kington, Stobart, & Sammons, 2006; Korthagen , 2004), the professional/personal nexus in teaching (Hargreaves, 2001; MacLure, 1993; Palmer, 1998), and the sociocultural aspects of classroom culture (Bishop & Glynn, 2003; Darling-Hammond, 1997; Ladson-Billings , 1995).

In other words, what teachers think, value, believe, who they are, and how they relate to learners and others as a professional community matters (see Fenstermacher , 2001; Fenstermacher, Osguthorpe , & Sanger , 2009; Osguthorpe, 2009; Sanger & Osguthorpe, 2011). By extension, we assume that the same aspects matter in relation to teacher education and teacher educators . If the quality of teaching in schools is determined in large part by who teachers are and how/what they teach, then the quality of teacher education is equally determined by who teacher educators are, what they believe, value and by what they know and teach. And given claims that who teaches teachers influences teacher learning as much as actual curriculum content , teacher educators are increasingly being recognized as crucial to the preparation of future teachers educating students for the demands of the twenty-first century (see Darling-Hammond , 2006). Yet despite a burgeoning of teacher education research and literature over recent decades, gaps remain when it comes to the study of teacher educators themselves.

Context, Responsibility, Vagueness and Definition

As Loughran (2011) and others have stated, one problem in writing about the work and professional lives of teacher educators comes in defining of the term itself – what it implies, who it labels, and who lays claim to the title. Historically, the term teacher educator has been problematic , ambiguous and differently defined over time and place. While there has been a rich literature about teachers, there has been little to match this literature on the subject of teacher educators until more recently. In what early literature exists, a common theme emerges around vagueness of definition, compounded by persistently pejorative discourses around their status within the academy , highlighting a lack of desirability of self-identification (Ducharme, 1993; Tischer & Wideen, 1990; Zeichner, 1999). Several decades on, recent shifts in the location, provision and nature of teacher education , has only served to reinforce an ongoing vagueness about the term. The problems of identification and delimitation with respect to who is, and is not, a teacher educator have persisted to the present (Davey & Ham, 2010, 2012; Murray , 2014). The label of ‘teacher educator’ as a role, job designation or title is still clearly problematic internationally, not least because of institutional and international variation in the nature of teacher educators’ work, their responsibilities and their varying degrees of involvement with student teachers and the contexts within which they work with them (Davey, 2013).

Clearly, acknowledging teacher educators as under-researched (Harrison & McKeon, 2008; Murray , 2014), and poorly-defined, and poorly understood group (Ducharme, 1993; Martinez, 2008; Mayer, Mitchell, Santoro, & White 2011; Zeichner, 2007) is not a new insight, despite the fact that teacher education itself has become increasingly positioned in the twenty-first century as a ‘policy problem’. Seen as a lever for educational change in schooling internationally, teacher educators have both come increasingly under scrutiny (e.g., Murray, 2014) as well as being recognized as important catalysts and change agents. While much work on teacher educator identities has focused on those who worked in preservice education, more recent definitions have broadened to include studies of those involved in professional development of teachers beyond the induction stage, through to those working in partnership in schools with in school mentors. Those who do the work of teacher education in schools are also being redefined or redefining themselves as teacher educators, a group Livingston (2014) suggests “may be ‘unrecognised’ or ‘hidden professionals ’” (p. 226).

A decade ago, Zeichner (2005) and Loughran (2006), among others, highlighted the need to prepare teacher educators who not only consume but also generate knowledge through research on practice that adds to the scholarship of teaching and teacher education . Dinkelman , Margolis, and Sikkenga (2006a) argued these ideas as teacher educators involved in S-STEP work and suggested that these ideas had been instrumental in providing, “a powerful impetus for the growing body of research into teacher educator identity, competence and practice” (p. 7). We take this idea further to assert that engaging in intimate scholarship and privileging the particular supports a deeper examination of practice and the worlds of teachers and teacher educators and therefore offers the greatest promise for knowing and doing in such worlds.

This chapter attempts to address the gap in the literature of teaching and teacher education concerning teacher education and teacher educators knowing and doing by drawing together what we do know in order to add to our “rich mosaic of knowledge ” (Martinez, 2008, p. 36) about the complex professional lives, practices and identities of that group we call teacher educators and the inquiry in which we engage to develop knowledge of teacher education practice that has the greatest potential to inform research in this area. We constitute and continually reconstruct multiple and ever-changing identities or subjectivities through the semiotic processes of language and within language. Seeing identity as a, “discursive activity” and a “communicational practice” (Sfard & Prusak, 2005, p. 16) we agree that identities form, “… in this shifting space where narratives of subjectivity meet the narratives of culture” (Zembylas, 2003, p. 221), where identity theory including post-structural identity theory emphasizes the flexible, discursive, shifting and ongoing nature of identity negotiations.

Context Matters

How one becomes a teacher educator varies across and within continents. In Australia, New Zealand , South Africa , and parts of Europe teacher educators enter the field through practitioner pathways and academic pathways. Elsewhere, such as in the United States and Israel , they follow an academic pathway into teacher education through higher degrees (Lunenberg & Hamilton , 2008; Murray , Swennen, & Shagrir, 2008), whereas teacher educators with a focus on secondary education in the Netherlands are teachers with a master’s degree in a specific subject. In general, there is no formal professional path to become a teacher educator (Bates, Swennen, & Jones, 2014). The fact that “the profession of teacher educators is neither well-defined nor recognised as being an important profession with its own merits. This appears to influence the identity of teacher educators” (Lunenberg & Hamilton, 2008, p. 186).

Responsibility

To add to this complexity , the past decade or more has seen a burgeoning development of different routes into teacher education in many countries. The growth of professional development schools and partnership schools in the US and elsewhere has spawned the growth of ‘hybrid educators ’ (Zeichner, 2006), teacher education has been opened up to privatization in many international contexts and economic imperatives have led to a casualization of the workforce. As early as 2002, Ling, for example, found that the sessional staff employed to teach in Australian teacher education courses were generally classroom teacher s, either currently practicing, recently retired or enrolled as post-graduate research students ; nearly all were part-time. Cochran-Smith (2003) notes many teacher educators are “part-time, adjunct, temporary, and/or clinical faculty and fieldwork supervisors ; graduate students who supervise as part of financial assistantships or part-time jobs; and school-based personnel who work as site-based supervisors” (p. 22). As Cochran-Smith and others (see Lunenberg & Hamilton , 2008; White, 2012) note the growth of in-school teacher educators who work alongside preservice students in classrooms as mentors. Cooperating or associate teachers or teachers involved in the professional learning and/or development of colleagues along with a number of other school-located roles are also among the group who now may claim the title of teacher educators.

Writing from a UK perspective, Murray , Czerniawski, and Barber (2011) reinforce Ducharme’s (1993) early comments about the broad and heterogeneous nature of teacher educators as an occupational group. The result of the range and nature of the different institutions offering teacher education programmes, a government mandated requirement to work in partnership with schools, ongoing institutional imperatives faced by teacher educators around the teaching, research and administration triad, the ongoing challenges of constant audit, performativity, accountability at policy levels that all academics, including teacher educators face, multiple pathways into teaching and teacher education. In other words, as responsibility and the location for preparing teachers continue to shift in response to government policies and reform agendas, so do the people taking up this work and claiming the title. The heterogeneity of the term has led to attempts to more finely differentiate among those doing the work.

Vagueness

In the Scottish university context and elsewhere (for example, Australia, Israel , New Zealand , South Africa ) mergers between the old colleges of education and local universities have been identified as a ‘universalization process ’ (Menter, Brisard, & Smith, 2006), what Menter (2011) denotes as teacher education ‘tribes’. In seven Scottish universities with teacher education programmes, he identified four ‘academic sub-tribes ” consisting of former college staff (FCS); longstanding university staff (LUS); newly appointed university staff (NUS) and temporary university staff (TUS). And if anything, the title of teacher educator has expanded beyond a traditional university context to include anyone working in a school, which has responsibility for the professional learning of ITE students and/or colleagues. This further problematizes identification, since the term itself can both be ascribed by others, via their institutional roles, and claimed by teacher educators themselves as part of their own self-identification and categorization.

More recently, teacher educators can be described as those who educate teachers Loughran (2014), but understanding the variability behind the title, the positioning and the power that comes with these identities are important to recognize. The increasing move to locate more teacher preparation work out in schools, particularly in the UK, means that it is important to distinguish among studies of in-school teacher educators and mentors and the development of professional identity within the schooling context .

Identity and Definition

In light of such complexities and variations around definition and self-identification , it can be argued that the professional identity of teacher educators will derive from and be dependent not only upon their biographies, values and beliefs , the nature and value of their different roles and professional work, and their affinities, communities and institutional positioning, but their national contexts and locales as well. As Hamilton and Clandinin (2011) contend:

While we recognize that notions of teaching and teacher education may be universal, how one teaches or becomes a teacher or teacher educator is not … The preparation of teachers and teacher educators varies from country to country and in many instances, the preparation varies within countries, given the differences apparent in alternative certification programs. For example, who becomes, and how one becomes, a teacher educator is not universally defined across countries. (p. 244)

In other words, where teacher educators are recruited from and the conditions for access to the role varies from country to country (Lopes, Boyd, Andrew, & Pereira, 2014) and even within countries from institution to institution. Most importantly, these contexts impact the professional identities formed and the ways teacher educators approach their practice. Ironically, beginning teacher educators who come to that position without having taught are themselves first year beginning teachers and they bring to their practice of teaching teachers the same hesitancies, misunderstandings, and difficulties with management, curriculum design, planning , and teaching that the teachers they are teaching will bring to their practice.

For the most part, however, those who identify as teacher educators came to teacher education to do teacher education and they are committed to that. Indeed, they stand in the space of practice and they look forward to the kinds of practice preservice students will develop. Schwab (1970) argued that knowing in teacher education centers on knowing of the practical, particular, situated, and local. He sees teachers and teacher educators as oriented toward resolving student dilemmas within their particular context while seeing ways to orchestrate and design experiences so that learning occurs. In his explanation of the particular, Schwab reminded us that unlike theoretical knowing that guides the social sciences, practical knowing involves a holistic sense that encourages teachers to attend to the whole child (or preservice teacher in this case) – including development, social background, current intellectual development, along with intentions and desires – as well as the content or understandings to be taught and the context in which the learning will occur.

Pathways in Becoming

In an early exploration of the pathway toward becoming teacher educators , the Arizona Group (1995) asserted that they taught themselves in their becoming teacher educators. They drew forward and integrated their personal practical knowledge as teachers and of teaching and the content and experiences of graduate school and their first forays into the practices of teacher education as teacher educators as graduate students . From this initial basis of knowing as teacher educators, they began doing teacher education and acting as teacher educators in roles as faculty members within the academy . In this process, they continued becoming teachers of teachers. Through this exploration, they came to three deeper understandings that have informed their identity-formation as teacher educators.

First, we never arrive, always becoming , with no point at which a teacher educator identity solidifies. Identity is always forming, never formed. Identity emerges from knowing and doing and developing; a becoming process that deepens and expands our sense of the world and our places in it. In knowing as a teacher educator and doing the practice of teacher educator (in practicing teacher education as a teacher educator), the landscape shifts and seems uncertain. Our knowing forms a basis for acting as a teacher educator – surfacing our understandings, commitments, and obligations that inform our practice and guide our action in the space of teacher education. Furthermore, in doing teacher education – taking up and enacting our practice as teacher educators we confront what we know and believe through our actions and interactions. Knowing and doing form a basis from which to act; however in the knowing and doing who we are as teacher educators is ever subject to disruption, transformation , and emergence.

Second, looking backward and following our own development as teachers, we began to look at our students and ourselves, “with more loving eyes” (Arizona Group, 1995, p. 50). We remembered our own foibles, failures, and vulnerabilities . We recalled our successes, our sacrifices and our striving for perfection as teachers. We then saw the resistance, engagement, and development of this new generation of teachers from a deeper understanding of our own becoming . Seeing their resistance not as rejection or disengagement but as part of their pathway toward becoming teachers and shifting beliefs and ultimately action, allowed us to better respond and be more welcoming of their initial ideas.

Third, rather than resisting our student claims that they taught themselves to teach, we embraced and celebrated their right to own their claims. These three understandings positioned us differently in our identity as teacher educators , in our responsibilities in educating a new generation of teachers (in our practice as teacher educators) and in our inquiries into teacher education . We recognized that teaching is constantly an act of deliberation and judgment . We saw that there was much that could be contributed to research in teacher education through explorations into the ideas that intrigued us, the contradictions we experienced in our own practice, and the resolution of individual and institutional conflicts (Arizona Group, 2007). We recognize that we cast our role as teacher educators as one in which we teach teachers to teach themselves to teach and that what we bring to this task is knowledge that can educate the judgment of these teachers and position them to learn from their experience –as students and scholars, as citizens and as teachers.

Obligation as Teacher Educators

We have asserted thus far that teacher educators should recognize that teachers through experience (highlighted naturally by Dewey’s (1938/1997) characteristics of continuity and interaction) teach themselves to teach. In teacher education our role is to educate teachers’ judgment – about students , curriculum , the political and how and where they should change practice. Underlying this assertion is our belief shared by most teacher educators that they have a deep obligation not just to the education and experience of the pre-service teacher they face but also to their students. In relationship to this consider Appiah (2006) who reminds us that as human beings we have, “obligations to others, obligations that stretch beyond those to whom we are related by the ties of kith and kind, or even the more formal ties of a shared citizenship” (p. xvi). In addition he also argues for another commitment : our need to take seriously the value not so much of human life in general but in the particular human lives—in our case the lives of those we teach. This means exploring deeply our own beliefs and those of our students. We are open to and welcoming of divergence in the beliefs of our students and seek to understand both their beliefs and their practices as a person. We have an expectation that as we teach teachers and as those teachers then teach their students universal concern for the well-being and development of our students, as preservice teachers, and our respect held for individual difference can clash with each other. This is a fundamental challenge within our obligation to educate teachers in ways that lead to their continued growth their personal willingness (and ours) to grow, change and continually strengthen and develop.

As teacher educators regardless of how we come to the role, if we seek to support our students in teaching themselves to be teachers, we must do as Schwab (1970) argued, and support them in learning the elements of the whole that they can enlist for student learning. Simultaneously, teacher educators must enable their ability to both attend to the whole and capitalize on and integrate strategies and techniques that will move this child’s learning or life forward in the ways the teacher desires. In a similar way, as we design learning experiences that support future teachers in learning how to develop their practice, teacher educators must also be aware of the whole, the parts within the whole, and the points of productive action. While we do this, we consider what experiences, lessons, readings, and assignments, might we engage in with our students in order for them to construct strong practices themselves.

Teacher educators and teacher education is clearly anchored in practice. It is also grounded in a relational ontology rather than an abstractionist one. The space in which teacher education practice is constructed is fluid and uncertain. In our practice we respond to the particulars of the dilemma. Thus, while there may be preferred ways of proceeding or preferred strategies, what teacher educators choose to do emerges through an evolving understanding of the particular students , content , experience , and context before them. Studies of this evolving practice not only build our identity as teacher educators and inform our own practice, but as we systematically examine our experience we contribute new understanding to the research conversation. Additionally, response in our practice attends to the emotional (Zembylas, 2003, 2005), the ethical (Kelchtermans & Hamilton , 2004), the intellectual, the relational and the contextual. What we do one time will form part of our deliberation but never determines fully what we, in our role as teacher and teacher educator, choose to do next or next time. Both the uncertain terrain of our practice and our decision to study it and make our knowing public leaves teacher educators vulnerable. Teacher education and our knowing of it as intimate scholars of teacher education and the contribution we might make to the research conversation must be based in and emerges from our practical knowing rather than positivistic research on practice.

Purpose/Position/Obligation

People differ from each other and there are many possibilities of how people become teacher educators and in what ways their construction of what that means differ. There is much to learn from our differences. Indeed, there are many possibilities worth exploring and we neither expect nor desire that every teacher educator or even every teacher education programme should converge on a single mode. In terms of scholarship focused on teacher education, such differences mean that there is much to inquire into and that the meaning, purpose , practice of individual teacher educators who have committed to teaching teachers suggests an endless array of studies.

The heart of our lives as teacher educators involves relationships. These relationships are often tenuous and always emerging. They are tenuous because of the myriad institutional boundaries we negotiate in our practice and in knowing and doing teacher education (see Hoban, 2005 for an examination of the systems that must be negotiated in preparing teachers). We work with teachers, usually not at one school but many, our programmes require support from other departments and we often are required to provide support for them. We work with State Offices and Ministries of Education and accrediting agencies to gain permissions and credibility for credentialing teachers. We work with multiple school districts . Within a college of education, teacher education may be orchestrated across department boundaries: elementary (or primary) or secondary education, curriculum and instruction, technology, special education. The names will vary depending on national contexts. In addition, in our colleges we work with a multitude of offices and personnel, all of whom often have veto power concerning the practices, programmes, and structures we believe are optimum. Even within teacher education departments we often encounter institutional boundaries when elementary education, early childhood, and secondary programmes for example might all be housed in one department. Actually as we ‘do’ teacher education, relationships with the parties involved and our engagement in and with them link the practices and programmes together. Relationships either grease the wheels or provide the deterrents to successful teacher education. Exploration of practice and programmes always involves others and the development of understandings concerning such relationships.

Teacher education is anchored, as we have asserted and demonstrated, securely in practice. But this practice is not abstract; it is concrete and it is human. Our commitment and obligations involve supporting teacher candidates in teaching themselves to teach. We seek to engage with them in the kinds of interactions that lead not just to their certification but also to their flourishing and ongoing growth as teachers. A tension always with our understanding of the challenges and difficulties faced by the student (future teacher) in front of us is the image we carry of the students this teacher will teach. Thus, as teacher educators , our concerns move beyond the efficacy and rigor of our own teaching practice and whether our students learn what we teach, to the whole of who students are and the relationships they need with others involved in their education and with us.

We recognize that preparing a teacher is not the task of us as an individual and we must care about the quality of those relationships. An examination of those relationships is part of what intimate scholarship can contribute. As important as teachers’ knowledge of content for teaching is their manner as teachers—their own moral development and the way they communicate it to students (see, Fenstermacher et al., 2009). As teacher educators , we must be concerned with our manner and how we engage in practices that communicate our manner and support preservice teachers in their development. We care about teachers’ emotional regulation and their ability and willingness to care for and about those they will teach (see Zembylas, 2005). Again, as teacher educators we must develop emotional regulation and care for our own students. We need more research on exactly how a teacher educator might do that in authentic ways to sustain teachers and teacher educators. We are concerned that we and they are able to communicate clearly and well–not just in terms of course content but also with other humans. We want them to feel grateful for the privileges they have experienced and be willing and capable of enabling opportunity and accruing privileges and fairness for their own students. Just as teaching is fundamentally relational; so, too, is teacher education . Intimate scholarship allows teacher educators to develop understandings in these areas that enable them to meet their obligations to their students (preservice and inservice teachers) and the obligations they hold for the students of their students.

Appiah (2006) has argued that through relationships we are able to negotiate the human and institutional boundaries that threaten to divide us in the cosmopolitan world we live in. We know that not all the teachers we prepare, and indeed almost all of them, will not be teaching in schools like those that educated them. They will not necessarily work with those they feel culturally most comfortable with, or those with whom they already share deep familial relationships. Just like us, the teachers we prepare will need to reach across difference for the development of relationship. We argue with him that teachers and teacher educators have obligations that, “stretch beyond those to whom we are related by the ties of kith and kind or even the formal ties of a shared citizenship” (p. xiv). It is the teacher’s obligation to have the skills and understanding to stretch beyond these boundaries. As teacher educators, we need to both develop knowledge about doing this and exhibit that knowledge in our actions.

Further, Appiah (2006) argues that being able to embrace these obligations is not all that we must do. With him, we argue for our need and for the teachers we educate to, “take seriously the value not just of human life but of particular human lives, which means taking an interest in the practices and beliefs that lend them significance” (p. xiv). The teacher educator who embraces methodologies of intimate scholarship is positioned to enact and scrutinize such practices. The inquiries of teacher educators guided by intimate scholarship methodologies can take up these questions as they enact practices and explore the curriculum and pedagogies (Pinnegar & Hamilton , 2014). Through examinations of relationships and obligations across institutional boundaries with other faculty, teachers, administrators and most imperatively future teachers we educate contributions to research conversations on teaching open to us. Oriented toward a relational ontology , focused on the particular, developed through dialogue and emerging from a space of vulnerability, intimate scholarship provides a unique position to develop deep and vital knowing to guide doing as teacher educators.

Engaging in intimate scholarship , focused on teacher education practice and formation as a teacher educator, the teacher educator seeks to develop knowing that can guide and improve her practice and inform the practice of others. Inquiries that developed from the orientation of intimate scholarship enable teacher educators to study what they begin to understand about how their practice can meet their purpose as teacher educators. Such scholarship carefully embraces and examines the uneven and shifting terrain of teacher educators’ position in the education of teachers (both future and practicing). More than any other scholarship, intimate scholarship allows teacher educators to deepen understandings about our obligations to our students and their students. Moreover, intimate scholarship ponders the knowing and doing that informs us as we engage in continually becoming stronger teacher educators.

Given these perspectives on identity and obligation, what then is professional identity ? With recourse to the work of Rodgers and Scott (2008) – who draw on three perspectives to argue for common conceptual elements of professional identity, Gee (2000), Davey (2013) and others who have theorized notions of identity and professional identity – a working definition of professional identity emerges. Professional identity can be thought of as both personal and social in origin and expression: On the one hand, one’s personal ‘self’, or one’s ‘identity’, consists of a self-assigned mix of beliefs , values, perceptions , experiences and emotions that constitute the way one sees one’s own place in the world. On the other hand, identity or self is intensely socially and relationally situated, and is influenced by the political, historical, social and cultural conditions and discourses that operate among and around us. Professional identity is thus personally and individually perceived, but socially and culturally negotiated.

We suggest that identity formation is an ongoing process that continues beyond the initial years as a teacher educator, though the initial transition into teacher education is the site for most studies reviewed by those currently doing work seeking to understand teacher educator identity formation . While we will begin by examining work (particularly overarching reviews of this work), we also recognize that it is intimate scholarship since the researcher is often the researched. The focus of such work can often be prompted as a result of disruption to a sense of self or concerns about the relationship between who one is as a teacher educator and a commitment to preparing teachers. Wonderings about the interrelationship between the development of the teachers they teach and their own understanding of their knowing and doing as a teacher educator can be the impetus for intimate scholarship that reveals this ongoing development (see Craig , 2013; Feldman , 2006, 2009; Hamilton & Pinnegar , 2014). Our point is that ongoing identity formation experience of teacher educators continues to fuel their inquiries into teacher education, even once they can appear comfortable and even settled in their profession.

As we have noted, professional identity can be fragmented, as well as evolving and shifting in nature. It is not a singularity, but is composed of many elements and expressions that may vary from circumstance to circumstance. Some ‘core’ aspects of it may be thought of as relatively stable and coherent compared to others, but all are ultimately subject to renegotiation and re-storying over one’s occupational life. By its very nature, one’s professional identity is always in a process of becoming .

Professional identity also involves emotional states and value commitments. Because of its socialized nature, powerful contextual forces operate to shape and constrain it, and this constant shaping necessarily involves levels of emotional commitment and resistance–to belief systems, to professional concepts or discourses, and to cultural norms. Professional identities are emotional geographies (Hargreaves, 2001) as well as personal histories . Professional identity comprises both how one sees oneself and what one values in oneself as a professional (Davey , 2013).

A further facet of professional identity is that it necessarily involves some sense of group membership, or non-membership, and identification with a collective. It involves not just how one sees oneself ‘doing my job’ as an individual, but also the commitments and affinities – or otherwise – that one feels towards others doing similar or different jobs. Thus the elements of individuals’ identities and identifications that are common across those individuals may constitute something we could call a group or collective identity. One’s sense of self as a member of a purposeful occupational community is a significant and necessary component of one’s professional identity (Wenger , 1998; Gee, 2000).

Extrapolating then from Coldron and Smith’s (1999) and Beijaard, Meijer, and Verloop’s (2004) ideas relating to teacher identity , what teacher educators understand as the ‘valued professional self’ (Davey , 2013) can be understood as partly achieved by their active location in social space, which is defined as an array of possible relations to others, “some of which are conferred by inherited social structures and some chosen or created by the individual” (Coldron & Smith, 1999, p. 711).

In light of complexities and variations around definition and self-identification of teacher educators , it seems reasonable to argue that the professional identity of teacher educators will derive from and be dependent not only on studies of their biographies, values and beliefs , the nature and value of their different roles and professional work, their affinities, communities and institutional positioning, but also on their national contexts and locales. While there are studies and reviews which explicitly address teacher educator identity (Davey , 2013; Erickson & Young, 2011; Erickson, Young & Pinnegar , 2011; Loughran , 2011) the not-so-simple matters of definition relating to ‘teacher educator’ ‘identity’ and ‘professional identity’ and complexity of the phenomena present challenges in deciding what studies and literature to focus on. Internationally, empirical studies that focus either specifically or, more often, contingently on the identity of teacher educators, fall broadly into four categories :

• Studies in higher education of the demographics of teacher educators as a particular disciplinary community or occupational sub-group, for example: (see for example: RATE studies, 1987–1994; Turney & Wright, 1990).

• Studies (mainly from Western jurisdictions) of the impact of managerialist reformism in tertiary education policy on the work and lives of academics generally, or, occasionally, of teacher educators in particular, for example: (For example: Archer, 2008; Clarke, Hyde, & Drennan, 2013; Whitchurch, 2010).

• Small-scale (longitudinal ) research on groups of teacher educators within and/or across some national/international contexts, including (Chan & Clarke, 2014; Davey , 2013).

• Case studies, self-studies, intimate scholarship of individual and small groups of teacher educators , relating their own experience of the (or some aspect of) practice of teacher education . These comprise accounts of teacher educators’ biographies and stories, their own pedagogical beliefs and practices, the professional significance of their race, gender or sexual or subject orientation , the impact of their teaching on student teachers, their roles as research supervisors , and other concerns for teacher educators.

• In addition to these categories are some recent literature reviews which take a particular focus, including a few on novice ex-practitioner teacher educators and their transition and induction into higher education and a small number which specifically address concepts of professional identity (for example: Dinkelman , Margolis, & Sikkenga, 2006b; Izadinia , 2014; Saito, 2012; Williams, Ritter, & Bullock , 2012). We have focused here for the most part on more recent literature that contributes to the growing understanding of teacher educator identity formation . Given current research imperatives in universities, it is perhaps unsurprising that the majority of studies of teacher educator identity are written by and focused on university-based teacher educators or the transition to becoming a university-based teacher educator (e.g., Bullock & Ritter, 2011; Erickson et al., 2011; Smith, 2011).

As we note, while literature relating to tertiary teacher educators working in pre-service teacher preparation programmes is foregrounded, the international trend to locate more teacher preparation work out in schools means that it is also important that we recognize studies of in-school teacher educators and mentors and the development of professional identity within schooling contexts (Boyd & Tibke, 2012; White, 2012). Much of the work that is focused here is retrospective, conducted by those who have made the move to the position of teacher educator reflecting back to their experience as teachers (see Senese, 2002).

In making sense of the literature and presenting the field of teacher identity research, we sought to represent the research literature in a way that both recognized the complexity of the field, yet synthesized it in a way that made this complexity understandable. In our efforts, we have attempted to draw threads together across research and, through the particular framework adopted, to offer a way of theorizing and understanding teacher educator identity. The focus in examining teacher educator identity formation has been on the use of inquiries that are explicitly concerned with teacher educator identity per se.

Much of the literature around teacher educator identity formation suggests that for them the development of a teacher educator identity is a central process. Shifts and points of transition in role inevitably present as powerful catalysts for change, growth, renewal, and cognitive dissonance and offer both opportunities and challenge . Intimate scholarship has explored the impact on practice and identity as teacher educators move from one cultural context to another. Studies that explore the initial shift from teacher to teacher educator reveal that while the transition initially appears to be a simple one, it is not and those making the shift experience it as challenging and stressful (Boyd & Harris, 2010; Boyd, Harris, & Murray , 2007; Boyd & Tibke, 2012).

Hamilton ’s (1995) work compared the transition to the disruptive experience of Dorothy as she traveled to and through Oz (including the tornado) and Placier (1995) used the headings Fiasco 1 and Fiasco 2 to indicate the difficulty of the move. Indeed the notion that many, if not all, teacher educators have difficulties in adjusting to the academic, pedagogical, and social expectations of higher education -based teacher education work, is now almost a truism in the literature. This includes uncertainty about the exact nature of new professional roles, difficulty adjusting to the pedagogical skills and, within the US context at least, an overwhelming concern with achieving tenure. Even more recently, many of the same preoccupations persist. Mayer et al. (2011) study about the accidental pathways into teacher education and the career trajectories of a small group of teacher educators working in a range of university sites in three states in Australia highlights the unsustainable limitations of such haphazard entry and induction and the need for more deliberate induction, mentoring and career planning .

While many studies focusing on the transition from teacher to teacher educator do not have a specific empirical focus on professional identity or identity per se, several studies do address the matter of identity development directly. Murray (2002) and Murray and Male’s (2005) studies of teacher educators working in ITE in England, has shaped thinking about initial identity development for teacher educators. Murray describes the move from being ‘first order’ practitioners – that is school teachers – to being ‘second order’ practitioners as a slow and stressful process, a crucial period for establishing new professional identities and takes about 3 years. This process involves making adjustments to the expectations of working in teaching , with its different roles and sets of demands, including research, learning new pedagogies of teacher education , extending knowledge base s, ways of working and so forth. Drawing on data from their 28 participants, individuals felt that being a teacher educator had become part of their identity once their prior feelings of “professional unease and discomfort” (p. 139) and over-reliance on their credibility as first-order teachers subsided to be replaced by greater self-confidence and professional socialization into their new institutions. The authors argued the need for induction programmes that recognize the unique needs of teacher educators and are better tailored to individual needs, while also recognizing that other professional groups will share some aspects.

Smith (2011) in a Norwegian context highlights similar challenges in her description of the induction of two new teacher educator colleagues during a turbulent political and institutional environment as they juggled multiple roles. As part of their discussions about shifting role identifications, Dinkelman , Margolis and Sikkenga’s (2006a) S-STEP highlighted not only the importance of early experiences as teacher educators but also argued they did not give up their teacher identities to take on new ones as teacher educators. These novice teacher educators in fact claimed their ‘dual citizenship’ in terms of negotiating conflicting roles within their new contexts. Davey ’s (2010, 2013) phenomenological longitudinal study of the professional identity of eight teacher educators teaching in a range of institutions over a 5 year period of institutional and political change both affirms and extends this idea, arguing that teacher educators in New Zealand in fact were subject to ‘multiple mandates’ because of old affiliations and responsibilities beyond the classroom in terms of national professional roles and that their taking on of new identities (both I-identities and D-identities in Gee’s terms) was additive. They accrued new roles rather than shed older valued ones. Aiming to get beyond individual stories, Davey’s moved toward theorising what a teacher educator professional identity might involve: an organic comprehensiveness of scope; embodied pedagogies and expertise ; an ethicality of purpose and practice and ambivalence; and, professional unease – each of which is unpacked in detail within the study.

Similarly, Berry ’s (2007) study of tensions offers an in-depth exploration of a teacher educator’s pedagogical knowing that move us beyond the rich particular to a more conceptual level. Berry’s study highlights the pedagogical complexities and conundrums that face teacher educators in their work with preservice teachers. While juggling competing agendas she uncovers the tensions around balance within her practice, including: developing confidence vs encouraging uncertainty; between telling vs allowing for independent growth; between action and intent; between safety and challenge . Such tensions offer a rich and intimate insight into and understanding of the intricate and multifaceted nature of the pedagogical practice and decision-making of teacher educators.

Barriers and Challenges to New Teacher Educators

Barriers and enablers for new teacher educators are recurrent themes in the literature. Harrison and McKeon’s (2008) longitudinal empirical study of the emerging professional and academic identities of five beginning UK teacher educators foreground the barriers many teacher educators face in the early stages of their professional learning . Challenges faced include: poor mentoring and support; inappropriate induction courses and relatively few opportunities for collaborative work in planning ; and, teaching writing which resulted in a reliance on reliance on trial and error . However, Harrison and McKeon (2008) also argued that the individual’s experiences varied. While for some these challenges served to slow or even stall the transition process, for others it was accelerated. Further to this, they found assumptions about Lave and Wenger ’s (1991) socio-cultural concept of communities of practice to be problematic and, “limited in illuminating the nature and processes of learning at work” (p. 166).

The assumption that developing identity by way of scaffolding moving from peripheral legitimate participation towards full engagement in a community with the help and support of others is premised on an assumption that there will be helpful colleagues who offer opportunities for mutual and initially low risk collaboration. Instead the beginning teacher educators involved in Harrison and McKeon’s study struggled with others’ expectations that they operate as autonomous experts in their new workplace , and found difficulty juggling the demands of working across multiple communities. On the other hand, several common factors facilitated the group’s learning, including: flexible, institutional wide induction , formal and informal ongoing in-depth professional conversations with a designated mentor or colleague(s) and academic study, in this case at Masters’ level (Harrison & McKeon, 2008).

With the intention of providing beginning teacher educators with a reference point for understanding the complex challenges of becoming , Williams, Ritter and Bullock ’s (2012) literature review of 60 (mainly) self-studies by beginning teacher educators in university contexts also use Wenger ’s (1998) work on learning and identity within communities of practice to structure their discussion and conclusions about learning as experience , as belonging, as practice to highlight the multifaceted complexities of becoming. They argue that professional identity and developing as a teacher educator is shaped by three key factors: their biographies; their institutional contexts and the nature of the overlapping community/ies within which they belong and across which nexus they broker memberships; and, the on-going development of a personal pedagogy of teacher education .

The authors identified differences in teacher educator identity formation between more and less experienced classroom teacher s. Those who were experienced tended to have strong identities. Their synthesis also highlighted the many tensions in the literature for beginning teacher educators : around ‘letting go’ of prior teacher identities, seen as sources of authority and professional credibility, around challenges to their self-efficacy; around deficit discourses, blurred boundaries around changing roles; and around deciding where they fit (White, Roberts, Rees, & Read, 2013) and what Dinkelman et al., (2006b), from the perspective of intimate scholarship , called, “deciding which leg to stand on” (p. 19).

While also focused on their transition from teacher to teacher educator, Trent’s (2013) study of seven language teacher educators in two Higher Education institutions in Hong Kong examined the impact of boundary crossing as a powerful context for identity construction. Trent employed Varghese, Morgan, Johnston and Johnson’s (2005) framework of identity-in-practice and identity-in-discourse to argue that while crossing boundaries offers opportunities for learning as forces for change and development, such experiences may also result in ‘conflictual, marginalizing experiences’.

Trent’s (2013) study reinforces the need to take into account the institutional situatedness of settings, along with “broader societal discourses of teaching and learning that differ across educational jurisdictions” (p. 274). In other words, while there are similarities in trajectories into teacher education , cultural, contextual and temporal differences are significant shapers of identity. As we have argued earlier, context matters and studies of the particular allow for researchers and practitioners to make more informed judgment concerning when findings from one study might apply to another.

Izadinia ’s (2014) review of 52 research papers on the professional identity of teacher educators , most of who were again university teacher educators, confirmed a number of issues raised and problematized elsewhere in the literature on teacher educator professional identity, including the ongoing paucity of studies on the subject and issues around definition and the impact of inadequate academic induction . Indeed, such focus on limited, insufficient or non-existent induction and how such gaps might be rectified has been a constant in the literature on transitions into teacher education . Over the last two decades, a number of studies from several Western jurisdictions have advocated for more and better formalised induction processes to support new teacher educators in their new identity development (Buchberger, Campos, Kallos, & Stephenson, 2000; Murray , 2002, 2005a, 2005b, 2008, 2012; Murray & Male, 2005; Sinkinson, 1997; Wilson, 1990).

Induction into teacher education is often experienced as functional and compliance oriented rather than ‘professional development ’ oriented (Murray , 2005a). It is presented as haphazard in form (Murray, 2005a), as well as narrow or limited in scope (Sinkinson, 1997). In some situations, the processes are too generic to support the specialised needs of teacher educators (Martinez, 2008). Few teacher educators, it seems, receive any formal preparation for teaching in their new context . Rather they are, as Martinez (2008) put it, “self-basting turkeys [left to] do it themselves” (p. 41); an image that finds resonance across the Tasman Sea (Davey , 2013). Citing a collaborative , exploratory study of novice teacher educators across six countries, van Velzen, van der Klink, Swennen and Yaffe (2010) found that none of the participants experienced a satisfying induction into both their institution and the profession as well and that a lack of shared language in communicating professional issues highlighted a need for further development this within international communities.

Taking a position that there has not been a thorough analysis of available literature, Izadinia (2014) attempts in her review to highlight those processes involved in identity formation in order to point a way forward. The author identifies a number of both external and internal tensions faced by teacher educators across studies. As others have found, these centralised around: new/changes, role expectations, the building of new pedagogical, organizational and institutional understandings of the new teaching and research roles and context , and challenges in creating new networks and relationships.

Teacher educators in these studies faced a range of inner conflicts , negative emotional tensions and self-views: senses of vulnerability, issues of credibility, marginalization, feelings of uncertainty, and, self-doubt. While shifting roles and developing new ones such as researcher identities were often impeded by teacher educators’ prior experiences , beliefs and values, knowledge base s and attitudes, the review also highlighted affordances. Key activities influencing positive identity development came from both self and community support, ranging from daily experiences of working as a teacher educator, supervising student teachers, trial and error , professional reading, reflection, and systematic and careful inquiry into one’s own practice. Participation in supportive learning communities was emphasised as invaluable and, as is increasingly highlighted elsewhere in the literature, suggestions for developing high quality induction included: the crucial nature of developing and belonging to formal and informal learning communities where novices listen to and learn with and alongside more experienced peers; developing trusting, supportive and collegial relationships ; purposeful reflection. Well-framed S-STEP and practitioner research (intimate scholarship ) were seen as, “building blocks of academic induction programmes as a learning community” (Izadinia , 2014, p. 436).

Based on different groups of studies (only six studies in common with Izadinia ) and taking a different orientation , Saito’s 2013 review on the challenges faced by novice ex-practitioner teacher educators as they moved into university faculties highlights similar difficulties in identity switching or adjusting to new work environments. This review foregrounds ‘fear of research’ and the development of a researcher identity – as arguably one of most problematic adjustments for many novice teacher educators, in contrast with other academics. Effective support programmes are once more seen as a key to overcoming some of the challenges faced by novices . Reiterated themes include: the importance of participation in communities of practice (Swennen, Jones, & Volman, 2010); the power of reflection, of both informal and formal learning opportunities; of mentoring, including peer mentoring, including on the job collaboration, all as means of dissipating isolation and loneliness. Engagement in S-STEP or other forms of intimate scholarship wherein one explores ones’ own experience serves to uncover not only processes of identity development but potentially contributes to understandings in the literature of what it means to know and do teacher education . Thus, such methods are yet again promoted as offering powerful opportunities to integrate teaching and research in ways that enable new teacher educators to reflect on the “tensions, surprises, confusion, challenges and dilemmas faced in their teaching contexts” and that focus on teaching specific research skills as well (Saito, 2012, p.196). Saito argues the importance of teacher educator agency, suggesting that novices may need to reframe their struggles to see them as opportunities for professional growth, not deficits, or to use a computing metaphor, as ‘features rather than bugs’. It is recognizing and articulating these difficulties that makes change possible.

Such studies can also enable beginning teacher educators to more clearly chart the shift in knowing that occurs, and to highlight not just the challenges of becoming a teacher educator, but to illuminate what they know as teachers. The differences in knowledge between doing teachers and doing teacher educators provide a rich resource for developing knowledge that can inform practices and pedagogy in teacher education . Saito also argues for the taking of institutional responsibility . Supportive academic colleagues are necessary to support novice teacher educators’ enquiries.

Context and Identity Formation

While it should be noted that both these literature reviews are selective, excluding for the most part publications in non-English and non-peer-reviewed journals, book chapters, books, conference proceedings and reports, a number of clear themes emerged which are found in other studies of transition , such as from graduate student to teacher educator. Published studies in this area tend towards self-studies focused on the impact of collaborative professional learning on identity development. For example, Butler et al. (2014) discussed the value of a doctoral seminar on teacher education pedagogy and S-STEP methodology in shaping their identities as educators and future teacher educators. Through these themes, the development of a collaborative mindset, a teacher educator-researcher perspective, and a critical self-awareness emerged. As Williams et al., (2012) also affirmed, an examination of the shaping influences of doctoral student s’ professional and personal histories was crucial, as was having guided support from more experienced teacher educators. Kosnik et al. (2011) described a 3 year Becoming Teacher Educators (BTE) initiative for 12 doctoral students who were prospective teacher educators, working alongside two professors. Strengths as a community, shared leadership, opportunities to develop teacher education knowledge and improve research skills , were seen to be positive influences on both identity and practice. Collaborative professional learning, too, is the focus of a Canadian S-STEP of doctoral students. Murphy , McGlynn-Stewart and Ghafouri (2014) emphasized the importance of a critical friendship within a supportive writing group in preparing them for future teacher educator identities.

Most studies then debunk the myth that that the move between teacher and teacher educator roles and that the consequent development of new identities is easy or unproblematic. Indeed insights into the process suggest the opposite: that the initial transition into teacher education with its new demands and cultures is most often complex , stressful and challenging with ramifications for both personal and professional lives. Such transitions may be hindered or facilitated through personal beliefs and biographies, existing levels of self-confidence and self-efficacy and they are inevitably impacted on by external socio-cultural factors which include the type and quality or its absence of induction processes, and both interpersonal and communal support for new teacher educators .

Ironically, some of these same tensions and challenges as well as factors that support and scaffold initial identity development emerge in relation to a teacher educator’s ongoing professional learning , their puzzles of practice, development of knowledge , expertise and self-efficacy across all roles and affinities identified as part of the work and developing identities of teacher educators ; including teaching and pedagogical practices, the place and role of research, induction into and brokering membership of multiple communities of practice (See Clandinin , Downey, & Huber, 2009).

The next section of the chapter looks beyond the initial transitions into teacher education towards the ongoing processes of becoming , in relation to changes in roles and in the development of different kinds of expertise needed in new institutional contexts, within shifting political landscapes.

On-Going Processes of Becoming: Professional Identity Development

As already articulated, teacher educator professional identity negotiations can be understood as an ongoing process of becoming . In this section, the stories of becoming draw from literature that focuses on teacher educators who are post-induction and initiation into the roles and identities of teacher educator. Themes in literature about established teacher educators echo those pertaining to new teacher educators transitioning into the role, highlighting the complexity of teacher educator identity negotiations even for those past the novice stage (Berry , 2007; Davey , 2013) and how ongoing developments and (shifts in) roles act to illuminate or intensify issues around identity negotiation (McDonough & Brandenburg, 2012); and tensions for teacher educators in negotiating expectations and multi-memberships of communities of practice (Davey, 2013; Davey et al., 2011; Kosnik & Beck, 2008; Kosnik, Menna, Dharamshi, Miyata & Beck, 2013; McKeon & Harrison, 2010; Sindelar & Rosenberg, 2000; Williams et al., 2012).

The literature also highlights elements of identity development that relate to changing policy and institutional contexts and the challenges for teacher educators confronted with the changing nature of their work. In several international contexts, this concerns the development or promotion of a researcher identity or of ‘working the dialectic’ between educational practice and research (Cochran-Smith & Lytle , 1993, 2009). Also strongly evident is the role of ongoing professional learning and S-STEP or intimate scholarship as an aid to ongoing identity development. It is these latter factors that are the focus of this section on teacher educator ‘ongoing becoming ’.

Other studies of experienced teacher educators examine the ongoing process of their formation of identity as a teacher educator (see: Arizona Group, 2007; Bullough, 2005; Coia & Taylor, 2013; Craig , 2013; Feldman , 2006, 2009; Hamilton & Pinnegar , 2014). Studies done by teacher educators later in their career indicate that while experience might somewhat ‘smooth the way’; the context of teacher education remains challenging. Finding ways to be sustained as a teacher educator is not a simple process. In their return to a re-examination of their 1995 study, the Arizona Group (2007) indicated the ways in which the difficult questions of their initial experiences continued to plague them. Further, some work done from those later in their career, examine how their identity as a teacher constantly emerges and energizes their identity as a teacher educator, particularly when they have opportunities to return to the classroom as part of their professional responsibilities (see for example, the work of Russell , 1995; Snow & Martin, 2014).

Schlein and Chan (2012), as experienced teacher educators , used forms of intimate scholarship to explore the impact that taking up teacher education in landscapes culturally different from where they engaged in their doctoral work had on their knowing and doing teacher education. The construction of new identities as a result of wearing new hats in different contexts is evident in other studies. For example, as part of a school-based action research project in the context of reform in language assessment in Hong Kong , Chan and Clarke (2014) problematized the ways in which the university teacher educators acting as facilitators and the teachers with whom they worked negotiated and managed identities whilst being engaged in a collaborative project. Identities were found to be neither fixed nor finite in the context of collaboration, and were negotiated and constructed in an ongoing manner against a backdrop of contextually salient discourses. Similarly, Pinnegar (1995), who took up a position at a different university, examined what impact beginning again at a new institution had on her identity as a teacher educator. Using role theory and Bourdieu ’s (1983) concepts of habitus and field as conceptual lenses, a more recent S-STEP by Clift (2011) also highlighted the impact of an institutional shift. In her case, this also involved a move in state and roles, at a point late in her career . Her study analyzed the impact such a move had on her sense of self and identity as she negotiated both different roles and contexts.

Shifting Roles, Shifting Contexts, Maintaining Identity Formation

Coia and Taylor (2013) examined how their understandings of theories that animated their work as teacher educators had both remained constant and shifted across their years as teacher educators and the impact that shift had on their doing teacher education . LaBoskey (2012) engaged in a study exploring her influence (concerning a commitment to social justice) in the teaching of her former students , particularly their own enactment of such practices. What such work shows is that identify formation is ongoing, can constantly fuel curiosity and research about teacher education and that attention to shifts in identity lead researchers to make provocative contributions to research on teacher education.

Teacher Education Reform and Ongoing Identity Negotiations

One of the themes across international boundaries within teacher education research has been the subject of reform, as part of policy agendas to bring about change in education and school systems (Cochran-Smith & Zeichner, 2005; Murray & Kosnik, 2011). Sugrue (2013), writing in the Irish teacher education context , highlighted the “competing and contradictory logics of accountability and professional responsibility and how these tensions are navigated and constantly re-negotiated by teacher educators ” (NP). The policy imperatives and accountability pressures of which he writes represent global forces clearly recognizable in and beyond the borders of Ireland and Europe . These forces cannot help but impact teacher educator work and identity.

One form of accountability that has gained policy prominence in recent decades in a number of countries is research audits, often linked to university funding mechanisms. Middleton (2008) argued that, in the New Zealand context , the implementation of an audit culture acts to reproduce and reinforce theory /practice binaries. The pressure and tensions experienced by teacher educators who are required to negotiate research and teaching accountabilities is clearly documented in research literature (see, for example, Dinkelman , 2011; Gemmell, Griffiths, & Kibble, 2010; Houston, Ross , Robinson, & Malcolm, 2010; Lunenberg & Hamilton , 2008; Murray et al., 2011). Swennen et al. (2010) contended that, “there seems to be broad understanding that teacher educators have to transform their identity as teachers to become ‘teachers of teachers in Higher Education’ and (increasingly) to become researchers of teaching and teacher education ” (p. 131). For established teacher educators whose roles have focused particularly on teaching and mentoring, the increased pressure to research and generate research outputs presents particular identity challenges as they negotiate changing accountabilities and expectations of their roles.

Policy shifts that have led to the expansion of school-based training and enactment of school-university partnerships for teacher education have also effected changes in the nature of teacher educator work. Emerging research suggests that university teacher educators and teachers in schools working in partnership for teacher preparation present an uneasy alliance between universities and schools and that work in this space affects teacher educators’ sense of professional purpose and identity (Brown et al., 2014; White, 2014). The as yet small amount of research relating to the ‘hidden’ professionals – teacher educators in schools – means it is difficult to identify where and how they are deepening their knowledge and understanding of roles, possible selves and professional identities as teacher educators. There is, though, a growing body of research that sheds some light on their identity negotiations. For example, early work in this area is exemplified by Clandinin et al. (1993), an edited volume that emerged from a school-based teacher education programme in Canada, that included the voices of all participants (university teacher educators, school-based teacher educators, classroom teacher s and teacher candidates ).

Bullough (2005) examined his own history as a teacher educator beginning with his school-based experience . More recent work includes a review of the work of Livingston and Shiach (2010). Livingston (2014) notes that school-based mentor identities seem to relate predominantly to their roles as teachers of children and to reflect the, “implicit and explicit norms, beliefs and expectations of their fellow teachers and the school” (p. n226). Smith and Ulvik (2014) found that taking on teacher education roles as professional development leaders in schools had an impact on those teachers’ professional identity . This literature, though, tends to relate to initial becoming rather than to ongoing identity negotiations in more established or long-standing teacher education positions.

Contribution of Intimate Scholarship

Across this chapter we have argued that teacher education is solidly grounded in practice and that our knowing of it is based in practical knowledge . It is fundamentally relational, and focused on the particular, and our knowing of it emerges, is clarified and is strengthened through dialogue . When we inquire into our knowing, doing, and becoming as teacher educators (our identity formation), we are most interested in constructing accurate, rigorous, and trustworthy accounts of what is based in ontology , specifically a relational ontology (Slife, 2004). Currently, many engaged in research on teacher education argue for large scale, multi-site, multi-institutional studies that provide generalizable findings that could be applied to any programme in teacher education across multiple-sites and national and international boundaries (see Cochran-Smith , 2005). Such an orientation devalues, and perhaps presents as irrelevant, studies that uncover the practical knowledge that resides behind the practices of teacher educators and is part of their ongoing negotiation of their identity. Such studies reveal the embodied, tacit and personal practical knowledge teacher educators draw on as they support both preservice and inservice teachers in beginning and continuing their quest to become teachers.

In more recent work, Cochran-Smith (Cochran-Smith & Villegas, 2015; Cochran-Smith et al., 2015) provides a two-part analysis of research on teacher education . The work focuses on an analysis of extant research. The group articulates three trends (accountability and effectiveness of teacher preparation, teacher preparation for a knowledge society mostly focused on new conceptions of learning and oriented toward student rather than teacher learning, and teacher preparation for diversity). They then identify these as three programmes of research on teacher education and assert clusters of research programmes within each of these subcategories. The findings reported are based on a review of the literature that included empirical studies of teacher education predominately within the United States. They did not limit by methodological , epistemological or theoretical orientations and included international studies that were relevant and that impacted research in the United States. They searched widely including hand searches as well as targeted computer searches. They did not include articles that reported on teacher education that supported teachers beyond initial preparation. However, even though such teachers might actually be considered no preparation and first year teachers, they did include studies on Teach for America and other alternative route programmes.

The first category presented in the overview is policy and assessment oriented aligned with the neoliberal politics and modernist epistemology . The third category is focused on the volume of work conducted around issues of diversity, specifically how to disrupt through coursework and field experience pre-service teachers’ beliefs about diversity and their responses to it. The second category includes everything else in teacher education —methods courses, pedagogy, literacy instruction, content knowledge , etc. This category focuses on teaching future teachers to take up new theories of learning to engage their students in ways that are based on new theories of learning.

The last two categories they identified do include at least a section that might include intimate scholarship . However, these clusters are subsets of two major categories, with one focused on diversity and one focused on student and teacher learning. In unpacking their overview, they privilege the clusters that focus on teacher learning rather than teacher educator learning. In part II, they argue as the first point, the need for research to inform policy makers and in that light push toward improvement in teacher education . They argue that there is a deep and on-going need for multi-site longitudinal studies oriented so that they adhere to and align with modernist notions of research. They end by asserting that to truly develop deep understandings of teaching teachers, research needs to be conducted from a multiplicity of epistemological and methodological orientations, a point that lies in direct contrast to their first assertion. However, while their story of research on teacher education is more traditionally presented and their categorization of the aspects of teacher education to be studied resonates with more modernist conceptions of teacher education and research on it, their article provides quite a strong evidentiary basis for our claim that research on teacher education is anchored in practice—the practice of teaching and the practice of preparing future teachers .

As we review the overview (part I & II), we are struck by the fact that while the group sought research from a multiplicity of paradigms, methodologies, and orientations, the overall conception of teacher education research presented articulates a narrative and categorization of teacher education that continues to resonate with the ‘sacred story’ of teacher education identified by Clandinin (1995)—one where teacher educator is expert and distributes knowledge of teaching to students who will be teachers.

In Cochran-Smith and Villegas’ (2015) and Cochran-Smith et al.’s (2015) reporting of their analysis and their categorization and clusters, they present a story of teacher education research rather than teacher educators ’ story of research. In other words, theirs is a story told by researchers about teacher education and research on it, rather than the story teacher educators would tell of research on teacher education (see Clandinin , 1995). While they argue that studies from a variety of perspectives can be helpful in order to improve the potential for teacher education research and the improvement of teacher education, they give the most weight to studies aligned with modernist ways of knowing , arguing such studies have the most value and impact in informing teacher educators and policy makers.

In contrast, we argue that the surest way to strengthen teacher education programmes is to conduct research from the basis of intimate scholarship . The characteristics of this orientation to research best match the kind of knowing that fuels, energizes, informs and ultimately improves practice. Intimate scholarship can be conducted through a variety of methodologies such as narrative inquiry, narrative research , life history, action research , autobiography , memory work, autoethnography , phenomenology, and S-STEP . However, regardless of methodology, intimate scholarship is conducted and presented from the perspective of the person acting in practice or in understanding experience . The intimate scholar expects to act on what is uncovered in the inquiry in order to develop as a teacher educator and improve their practice. Rather than attempting to make knowledge claims such scholarship is instead oriented to ontology and careful, thoughtful uncovering of what is in practice, memory, or experience. Like practice and experience, the inquiry space is dynamic and evolving, enabling studies that attend to surprise, growth, and transformation . Intimate scholarship recognizes that such work is always relational and that integrity and ethics are hence of vital concern. The researcher is open, willing to be disrupted in life and practice, and therefore always stands in a space of vulnerability. This means that the emotional, intuitive, and tacit are always part of the inquiry.

One of the exciting and challenging aspects of intimate scholarship is dialogue as a process of knowing . This basis pushes inquirers to seek other interpretations, alternative perspectives and multiple ways of understanding what we explore. This multiplicity of knowing engenders uncertainty but also promotes growth both in our own knowing and doing of teacher education and in the research reports we share of our inquiries.

Researchers who conduct intimate scholarship recognize that the reader of the research is a partner in knowing and doing teacher education research. The reports of their research must make visible the relevant aspects of their own personal practical knowing , their becoming as a teacher educator, the contexts of their setting, the theoretical basis and conceptual orientations of the assignments, programmes and practices being explored. Intimate scholars recognize that such reporting needs to be vital and vibrant. Researchers reading such reports will be engaged in both conceptualizing the inquiry conducted and simultaneously imagining and reimagining both how things might be otherwise and how what is being said relates to their own knowing and doing. From inception, through design, implementation, analysis, and reporting, the intimate scholar feels the presence of this other scholar. In intimate scholarship there is therefore a consistent and constant attention to meet the demands of the scholar’s own integrity and to meet the requirements of this other scholar to judge the scholarship as trustworthy, insightful, and relevant. The intimate scholar is always aware of the other in the scholarship indeed of the multiplicity of others. The others embodied in our own multiplicity of understanding and insight, the others who will read our studies, the others we seek out to dialogue with to uncover what we learn within our studies, and finally the others with whom we are in relationship in the studies we are conducting. Intimate scholarship is different from more traditional scholarship , is always wakeful and draws on the knowing and doing of these others within the inquiry being conducted.

The questions, puzzles , and topics of studies conducted from a space of intimate scholarship are personal. As teacher educators know and do teacher education they are constantly in a process of becoming . This is important to the promise that intimate scholarship holds in informing teacher education research and teacher educators’ practice.

As we are doing teacher education , the disruptions in our experience , the focus of our contemplation, the tensions we feel in our practice, all lead us to explore these things more deeply. In these explorations, we observe more carefully and thoughtfully both ourselves and others in interaction and relationship to us. We develop an evidentiary trail that allows us to return again and again to what we did and how we understand it. We engage in dialogue about what we are seeing with ourselves, with others, and with the research texts that inform the field. Thus, the reports we produce are entangled in the practical basis of our knowing and integrated in subtle and nuanced ways with potential research.

The basis of these studies is personal and continual. We teach the same content over and over again and yet, as teacher educators , we recognize differences in our students ’ engagement and learning. We observe student teachers or mini-lessons and we recognize variability in performance and understanding. We notice how changes in the structure or even language of assignments shift the learning of these future teachers . We can explore how those we educate instantiate practice, how they develop as teachers, and what they valued in their experiences with us—both immediately as they enter teaching and across time in teacher education . Uncovering our actions, our thinking about what we are doing, and the interactions we have with students, we are oriented to developing more robust practice and more nuanced and subtle as well as more strategic responses in guiding the learning of future students. If we are intimate scholars, we provide an empirical exploration of these puzzles , our doing of teacher education and the knowing that emerges from the studies. Publishing our developing understandings and anchoring them in evidence from our practice and our reflection can then inform the larger research community.

As we inquire into who, what, and how we are as teacher educators , what and how we know and understand teacher education , preservice teachers, and the institutional interactions we engage in; and what and how we are in relationship to others in our practice, we explore hidden corners of teacher education. We shine a light in those corners and enable others to take up practices, adjust and shift their own knowing and doing, or sometimes even move in completely different directions.

Since teacher education research is fundamentally oriented to practice, engaging in it using intimate scholarship allows the inquiries themselves to be enacted in a space that is uncertain and evolving. As teacher education programmes and practices play out in particular contexts, cultures, schools, students , content , assignments, evaluations, and programmes, examination and exploration require inquiries that are grounded in the particular and that value this kind of particularity. Such work that reveals the practical knowing and tacit embodied knowledge that is embedded in context and both develops and is revealed in experience —both in doing and knowing that emerges in this kind of experience. Inquiries into teacher education as an enterprise conducted through intimate scholarship are able to uncover, explore and examine the nuances of understanding that can be best extracted from particular experiences. Such work is energized by the characteristics of continuity and interaction that Dewey (1938/1997) argues leads to deeply educative experiences. Excavating these experiences and developing accounts of them provides information that can invigorate the scholarship of individual teacher educators as well as teacher education as an enterprise.

As teacher educators , we are always in a process of becoming . As we learn new things, as we try out new practices, as mandates change, as institutions enact reforms, we are becoming different. The sites of this becoming are all worthy topics for research in teacher education from the perspective of the teacher educator. Further, we become interested in what we are doing and what the action reveals about what we know and who we are. Through inquiring into that space, new understandings that can inform teacher education emerge. Sometimes as we act as teacher educators, people label us or name us differently from how we might name or describe ourselves; such denials of who we think we are again are fruitful sites for inquiries that will inform teacher educators and teacher education. Exploring the trail of how we came to know or do through exploration of past experience , or memories of events, can provide important understandings that can help us think in new ways about our own learning and growth and how we might better support and sustain the teachers we are educating.

Putnam (2005) suggested that we are confronted with intractable problems (like poverty, language diversity, mayhem, politics) issues that continue to emerge, where the solutions suggested fail and where difficulty returns. Modernist research attempted to find generalizable solutions that would resolve such problems once and for all. However, as Putnam reported, such efforts failed since the problems taken up remain. He suggests that Dewey opened a new enlightenment by indicating that we should embrace and explore our experience . We should document and examine the resolutions to these intractable problems we attempt to solve. By providing careful, coherent, vivid and detailed accounts of the contexts of the problem and our knowing and doing in response, we have the best hope of informing and shaping our own world in ways that sustain and support human flourishing. Intimate scholarship with its characteristics of vulnerability, particularity, openness, dialogue , ontology hold the strongest potential for the development of understandings that will strengthen the practice of individual teacher educators as well as the field as a whole.

Conclusion

We have argued throughout this chapter that teaching teachers is teaching practice within the space of practice. As a result, we have argued that knowing , doing and becoming in teacher education is practical and practice based. Intimate scholarship takes up the study of experience , our practical knowing within it, and our action as practice in response. The study is undertaken from the perspective of the person experiencing teacher education, practicing and acting as teacher educators . It values and explores the particular of practice, experience and memory of particular events, situations and actions. It attends to the tenets of rigorous scholarship in order to make public the private action of teaching in teaching teachers. Findings emerge through dialogue with others, with self, with the research literature and with the data that documents the practice and experience. Since the orientation is toward developing clear pictures of what is (ontology ) rather than making claims based in modernist epistemology and abstractionist ontology , then engaging in dialogue supports the intimate scholar in uncovering and making explicit that which is implicit in their knowing and doing of teacher education.

Such dialogue in the inquiry process of intimate scholarship supports the researcher in uncovering the knowing in the doing and the doing in the knowing—all in a process of becoming . Dialogue uncovers the knowing, strengthening assertions through moving insights into more explicit evidence from practice, memory, and experience and instills confidence in this explicit knowing.

The Contributions of Practical Knowing

Polanyi (1967) argued that our knowing in our doing is tacit and embodied. As Schwab (1970) argued for that practical knowing in teaching is holistic and is shaped, informed, and formed by our experience and action as teachers. As we attend to particular aspects of our action or our knowing, in some ways we pull it away (though never completely sever it) from that whole. In inquiry we continually attempt to explore how it might be different, how we might find alternative explanations, and how we might introduce differing interpretations and take other perspectives . In this way what was singular in an action blossoms as multiplicity in our knowing of it.

Intimate scholarship is capable then of producing research accounts that alter and inform the terrain of research on teacher education and teaching , but just as importantly, it informs, reforms, clarifies and transforms the practice and experience of the teacher educator. What is learned is reconnected to the holistic network of action, knowing , thinking, and becoming that is our experience, practice, and memory. Thus, studying and restudying similar issues and experience has the potential to continually inform teacher education research and practice. An example of this is the work of Brubaker (2010, 2011, 2015), who in a series of studies explores negotiation around assignments and grades within his ongoing enactment of democratic practices in his pedagogy as a teacher educator. Studies of this kind result in overarching concepts. In a similar manner, the work of Berry (2007) uncovered a set of tensions always present in teacher education.

In knowing Berry ’s tensions we can hold them in our thinking in relationship to the dilemmas that emerge in our own practice, serving as guides and critics in terms of our thinking, knowing, doing and becoming as teacher educators . Practice and our experience of it and our knowing and doing within it become a never-ending source for inquiry from the basis of intimate scholarship .

Intimate Scholarship and Identity Formation

Intimate scholarship as a way of exploring knowing , doing and becoming in teacher education as scholars we argue is the strongest conceptual tool for uncovering, querying, and unpacking such knowing and what we can know from our doing. This is so because the person who is the knower is also the actor , the planner and the implementer of practice or the person having the experience being studied. While more distanced perspectives characteristic of non-intimate scholarship whether quantitative or qualitative methodologically can be utilized in studying teacher education, such methodologies have difficulty capturing the emotion , the intuitive, and the relational that are simply part of inquiry oriented through intimate scholarship.

Teaching is a very public, private act. It feels that way in the knowing and doing of it. Intimate scholarship has a similar duality—it explores our private thinking and knowing in terms of our always-public enactment of it and it takes what we know privately and tacitly through our inquiries and offers that knowing for public consideration. Our action in teaching may publicly appear confident but as teachers we are always aware that we are standing in a vulnerable place filled with potential disruption and uncertainty. Intimate scholarship allows us to stand in this fluid uncertain space and uncover, surface and examine knowing and doing that is potentially the kind of knowledge most likely to transform our own teacher education practice and, through contribution to research, transform research in teacher education and knowing for teacher education.

Teacher educators who conduct and engage in intimate scholarship always have a personal stake in their work. This personal stake is founded in their integrity and their commitment to acting ethically within their practice—to constructing experiences and engaging in practices that will support teachers in their becoming teachers (in teaching themselves to teach). As teacher educators inquire into their experience , memory, thinking, and practice as teacher educators, they gain clarity about the knowing (obligations , commitments, responsibilities and understandings) embedded in their doing. As they develop clarity, the latter positions them to refine and sharpen their practice and more fully meet the obligations of their practice. Their practice shifts, assembles and reassembles itself.

This new knowing and understanding of their practice through doing reconnects, reforms, reshapes their practice becoming tacit and embodied. Because teacher educators have uncovered this knowing, it is more consciously rather than non-consciously available to them as they deliberate, reflect on, and plan their teaching of teachers. It guides them as they act and as they plan for action. It is part of their intuitive consideration of practice and in-flight decision-making. The knowledge is practical and becomes part of their personal practical knowledge as teacher educators ; it becomes part of their ongoing identity formation.

Fenstermacher (1986) argued that the reasoning that captures and informs teaching practice is revealed in teachers’ practical arguments . He differentiates practical arguments from arguments made through formal reasoning as arguments that end not as syllogisms but in actions taken. He suggested that as teachers reasoned about their practices and attended to places where action and belief were in conflict then their practice would shift and reform itself. Morgan (1993) provides a piece of intimate scholarship that demonstrates this transformation as a public school teacher . She articulates what she learned from a careful examination of the reasoning behind her action in keeping a child in from recess to read an assignment not completed at home. She uncovered a collision between her belief and her action. In making this incoherence present in her knowing of teaching, she worked to address her competing need for students to do their work and her belief that reading should not be a punishment and devised more sophisticated practices for attending to this discrepancy . Her article made public personal practical knowledge that guided her teaching, the eclecticism based within it, her reasoning and response and her changes in her practice.

Unlike research conducted from a modernist epistemological orientation , intimate scholarship does not rely on generalizability as a mode through which knowledge claims can be imposed on teacher educators . Such research is often, because of the basis and claims of generalizability, embraced and imposed across international borders as if context and the particular do not matter. In contrast, intimate scholarship with its focus on the particular, its ability to make the public private, and its attention to trustworthiness is best positioned to inform and be informed by research conducted from this perspective. The reader is invited in as a co-interpreter. The researcher has an obligation, since the orientation is toward ontology , to make explicit the contextual, situational and relational features within which the inquiry was conducted. The readers are then able to imagine and reimagine the knowing uncovered in the publication, within the space of their own practice.

The reader of intimate scholarship is invited to make two kinds of judgments—one focuses judgment on the trustworthiness of the work itself and the other focuses on how applicable and viable the insights are in informing the practice of the reader/researcher. In an international context , which is more characterized as Local Variation than World Culture (Anderson-Levitt, 2003 ) , the researcher does not make a unilateral transfer of the knowledge claims to their own setting, but as Local Variation argues the understandings and insights are utilized in forming teacher education practice that is culturally sensitive and relevant. In intimate scholarship invites the reader (across institutional, personal, and international boundaries) to explore the context and practice of the inquiry and judge the understandings uncovered. The scholar teacher educator then determines not only the usefulness but also the space in which such insights are utilized. The findings from intimate scholarship are then embraced within the practice of this teacher educator scholar.

Practice and Pedagogy

Our argument in this chapter is that intimate scholarship is grounded in, and attuned to, studying the particulars of our experience and practice. This scholarship is capable of making the emotional, tacit , embodied knowing of our practice explicit. As empirical research founded in evidence and presented in publication, it is positioned to make a unique contribution to the research literature because it exists not on either end of the practice theory divide but in the midst of it. It is also then more universally available for other teacher educators to consider as they examine and excavate their own practice. It can be held in relationship as mirror of, contrast to, or insight for their own inquiries into and knowing of teacher education .

Finally, such insights both borrowed from reflection on the intimate scholarship of others and emerging from one’s own work as an intimate scholar can be taken up in the practice and inform the personal practical knowledge of the teacher educator. Orland-Barak and Craig (2014), in introducing the pedagogical practices of international teacher educator scholars, argued that pedagogy represents the same space between theory and practice. Thus, intimate scholarship findings potentially transform three sites of inquiry simultaneously: the conversation in research on teaching and teacher education ; the inquiries of teacher educator scholars into their own knowing and doing of teacher education; and, the pedagogical practice developed.

Value of the Particular

All of this becomes problematic when teachers across countries attempt to apply supposedly ‘generalizable ’ findings from one country to another where the context may make the results irrelevant or inappropriate. Fundamental to Intimate Scholarship is an orientation to making the particularities of the study as well as the findings clear and evident so that those reading the scholarship are able to determine the coherence and applicability of the understandings developed to the context of their own work. Mishler (1990) argued for exemplar validation, which refers to the ability of a study’s findings to be reimagined in ways that make it informative for those developing practices in a different setting. The study and how it is reported allows the researcher to determine how they might take up what is learned about one particular situation in the situation and context of the person reading the study. Putnam (2005) suggested that examining what is learned from a particular response (successful or not) could be used in deciding how one might respond to a similar issue in their own context or practice. Drawing the findings of research forward to consider how it applies in a different context is not straightforward and requires adjustment and repurposing of the understandings that emerged from the study. This, he asserts, is the promise of focusing on the particular, rather than generalizable in research. Nowhere is this more true than in research on teacher education .

Obligation as an Intimate Scholar

The major purpose of teacher education generally, and teacher educators specifically, is teaching teachers. Attached to this purpose is a felt obligation of teacher educators to the students that the teacher candidates they are educating will teach. Thus, in knowing , doing and becoming , teacher educators are focused on, oriented toward, and ethically bound to developing the kind of practice that will enable them to meet this obligation. Enacting this purpose requires that teacher educators envision, design, and implement programmes, courses, and practices—experiences that will enable these future teachers to engage in the knowing, doing, and becoming teachers. Intimate scholarship generates research that can inform this work.

Through their inquiries, teacher educators engaged in intimate scholarship , as we have emphasized, are able to develop insights that allow them to design and enact such experiences. Just as intimate scholarship provides a basis from which teacher educators can transform their own practices and develop personal understandings for this purpose , the work of other teacher educator/researchers can be embraced as practical knowledge that can also inform this process. Finally, making their intimate scholarship publicly available, teacher educators conducting inquiries from the base of intimate scholarship are able to inform the personal practical knowledge of other teacher educators and contribute to and potentially shape teacher education more practically.

Intimate scholarship can inform the pedagogy of teacher education across institutional, personal, and international boundaries not through generalizability but through entering the personal, practical knowledge of the teacher educator (doing the research and reading it) and thus be integrated simply into the practice and experience of the teacher educator. This knowledge then re-forms as a new whole, enabling new venues and nuances of experience and practice that can be taken up as an inquiry by the intimate scholar. Furthermore, as Mansur and Frilling’s (2013) inquiry into their development and design of an open learning space demonstrated, findings from more traditional research embodied and embraced in practice and then revealed in descriptions of context and the focus of further study are also made practical.

Engaging in intimate scholarship and reading and reflecting on it enables teacher educators to shape and design the kinds of experience identified by Dewey as educative . Attending to both continuity and interaction, the informed intimate scholar designs experiences that enable future teachers to begin to embody particular knowing to shaping their own doing and becoming as strong teachers. In such work, teacher educators position future teachers to be open, wholehearted and responsible as they engage in educative experiences where they teach themselves to become teachers.