Ariela Gidron

‘Without stones there is no arch’: a study of professional development of teacher educators as a team

In this work we study the meaning of professional development as a participative process within a community of practice. In this collaborative narrative self‐study we look at the development of ourselves as a professional group working together in an intensive program. The study is based on personal career stories, each told by its author, but once told becoming a chapter in the group’s story, to be further analyzed and interpreted by its members. This process revealed four themes that contribute to professional learning experiences constructed within the context of being in the team: group diversity, interwoven work, the novice stance and collaborative research. In this paper we discuss our emerging understanding of the significance of the collaborative engagement of teacher educators for the generation of a theory of practice and suggest situating this understanding within a broader ecological perspective using the metaphor of the ‘edge’, a fertile ground for sustainable change and development.

Negotiating a Team Identity through Collaborative Self-Study.

This study presents our emerging understanding of the meaning of collaborative self-study as one of the mechanisms that facilitates effective, productive collaboration. Stemming from our experience of collaborative professional life over eight years, we explore the crisis we confronted as a professional learning community, the tensions underlying the crisis, paths to resolving our crisis, and our decision to look more closely at how collaborative communities of practice impact both group and individual identities. The study follows a change in our identity as a team from a culture of “doing” our practice into a culture of studying our practice – a culture of collaborative self-study.

Writing as a journey of professional development for teacher educators

The linkage between writing and professional development of teacher educators has hardly been investigated in the past. Our study aims to explore and describe how teacher educators, who wrote and published books in their knowledge domains, with budgetary, professional and institutional support, perceive the experience of writing, and to what extent they view it as contributing to their personal professional development. Eighteen experienced teacher educators, who completed their respective books, were interviewed individually or participated in a focus group discussion, in which they told their stories of writing their own books. The transcriptions of these narratives were analyzed, using both holistic and analytic methods. The findings reveal that although the teacher educators had different motivations for writing and took various paths in their writing, they all view this experience as contributing to them cognitively, emotionally and in practice; teaching nourished their writing but was also influenced by and improved as a result of the writing. We therefore suggest that the notion of writing and publishing books about theoretical knowledge and the practical wisdom of teacher educators become an established practice as a professional development convention for teacher educators. By providing editorial and budgetary support, we can offer the encouragement to teacher educators to make writing and publishing an integral part of their professional undertaking. In this way, we can elevate the academic status of teacher educators and broaden our knowledge on practical and theoretical aspects of teacher education.

Conversations in a Collaborative Space: From stories to concepts to dimensions

This article is a re-analysis of three self-studies conducted by three sub-groups of the Active Collaborative Education (ACE) team and originally presented at a conference in 2008. Revisiting and retelling these stories for the purpose of this article highlighted some of the concepts that form the warp and the woof of our interwoven collaborative way of professional life. The reanalysis identified three concepts: territory, the expert as novice, and de-idealization. These concepts then led us to identify the three dimensions of territory, knowledge, and values. We propose that, beyond the local context of our self-studies, these dimensions can help characterize collaborative space and serve as lenses to help understand its complexity. In this article we present these dimensions and outline some key questions regarding collaborative teams of teacher educators.

Storying curriculum making in a collaborative research and teaching landscape

Purpose – This chapter examines the complexity and contextuality of storying curriculum making in a collaborative landscape of teaching and research, as it moves from telling stories of collaborative curriculum making toward exploring curriculum within a collaborative landscape. This work is based on our lived experience of 9 years of collaborating as a team of teacher educators. Methodology and Findings – Three stories are at the focus of our study – the unfolding story of the collaborative writing of this chapter and two stories that relate to our curriculum planning in the more traditional sense, illustrating almost opposing sides of a collaboration continuum: A story of creating and preserving contrasted with a story of creating and changing. Together, these examples present a picture of the way we experience the making of curriculum in a collaborative landscape: building and teaching a program of learning for our students in tandem with team learning of our own. Value of paper – The collaborative landscape revealed in this chapter, with its tensions and opportunities, serves as basis for discussing the issue of territory as an overarching concept for the redefinition of questions regarding ownership, authorship and identities. These issues become crucial in a collaborative situation, in which one has to compromise on definition of clear cut working space.

Paving a Professional Road

While the first year in ACE focuses on helping our students tell and read narrative texts of their stories from the field (see Chapter 1), during the second year, the students engage in teaching and studying this experience through narrative selfstudy, thus, embarking on the road of professional development.

Studying our Practice

On one of my practicum days, I entered the classroom before the teacher, together with the children. In the midst of the commotion, I noticed a child with his shoe laces untied. I called him from nearby: “Noam!” He looked at me, and I said, “The shoe laces!” He kept running towards his chair. I called his name again, he turned and I repeated: “Your shoe laces!” this time pointing towards his feet.