Todd Dinkelman

From Teacher to Teacher Educator: Experiences, expectations, and expatriation

This paper reports a study of two beginning teacher educators making the transition from classroom teacher to university-based teacher educator. A hybrid qualitative methodology, combining case study and self-study of teacher education practices, was used to investigate features of the institutional context they encountered, the knowledge bases they employed in their decision making, and the merging of their former identities as classroom teachers with their new identities as teacher educators. This paper reports on the questions that guided the study, its research frames and methodology, and the first two categories of results—institutional context and shifting role identification. These findings offer insights into the ways in which both beginning teacher educators managed to recast their teaching identities. A subsequent paper builds on these insights by addressing the frames of understanding and knowledge employed in this transition and by describing how these frames informed decisions made in the arena of teacher education practice.

From Teacher to Teacher Educator: Reframing Knowledge in Practice.

This paper concludes our report of an investigation of two beginning teacher educators making the transition from classroom teacher to university-based teacher educator. The authors combined case study and self-study of teacher education practices to investigate features of the institutional context they encountered, the knowledge they employed in their decision-making, and the merging of their former identities as classroom teachers with their new identities as teacher educators. Our initial paper described the theoretical framework, methodology, and two categories of findings—institutional context and shifting role identification. This paper builds on those insights by addressing the frames of understanding and knowledge employed in this transition, and how these frames informed the decisions made in the arena of teacher education practice. We also explore the implications of these findings by discussing the need for support as educators make the transition from teacher to teacher educator.

Forming a teacher educator identity: uncertain standards, practice and relationships

Drawing on his own experience as an illustrative case, the author examines the interplay of external influences and internal sense-making to explore aspects of teacher educator identity. Framed by attention to institutional, discursive and affinity perspectives on identity development, he argues that research and practice contexts in research-intensive schools and colleges of education in the USA contribute to uncertain conditions for the development of professional identity in the field of teacher education. Given an environment that sends mixed messages about the standards that most matter to knowing and acting in teacher education, teacher educators are encouraged to recognise their agency in claiming a sense of professional self, work with colleagues and students to cultivate deliberative inquiry spaces to shed light on the mystery of university-based teacher education, and explore the relationships embedded in the practice of teacher education that prompt recognition of what it means to be a teacher educator.

The Influence of a Collaborative Doctoral Seminar on Emerging Teacher Educator-Researchers.

Over a 7-year period, graduate teaching assistants participated in a teacher education doctoral seminar designed to develop emergent scholarship and practice in teacher education. Six former students in the seminar, all now assistant professors, joined Dinkelman in an open-ended, far-ranging, month-long conversation captured in a threaded, online discussion forum. The study unfolded as a collaborative self-study that made use of this forum and subsequent analyses to address two central research questions: (1) What influence might our seminar have had on your development as an emerging scholar? and (2) What influence might our seminar have had on your development as a teacher educator? In this article, we reflect on how participation in the seminar shaped the emergence of new scholars and teacher educators, as doctoral students and also as new faculty members. Findings suggested the seminar facilitated emergent scholarship by helping participants map the terrain of teacher education research, prompting actual research, and blurring the knower and known in studying teacher education. The seminar also helped develop emergent teacher educators practice through helping participants learn a language for teacher education, develop a sense of program, value collaboration, and define purpose and care for the practice of teacher education. The concluding discussion emphasizes the need for additional inquiry into the ways early-career teacher educators develop commitments to teacher education research and practice.

Self-Study and Social Studies: Framing the Conversation

Over the past two decades, self-study has secured its place on the map of approaches to better understanding teacher education. Self-study has attracted interest from researchers and teacher educators representing diverse content areas. Curiously, however, social studies has remained largely on the sidelines as an under-represented participant in the growth of this new genre of educational research. Self-study can be a valuable way for social studies educators—both teachers and teacher educators—to learn about teaching, learn from their practice, and become better at what they do. Uniquely grounded in practice and its surrounding contexts, self-study represents a means of investigation that provides insights into some of the more elusive, and persistent questions in our field.

Complicating Coherence: Self-Study Research and Social Studies Teacher Education Programs and Practices

The main argument of this chapter—that self-study offers great potential to promote more coherent social studies teacher education programs—is neither complex nor controversial. Indeed, there is so much “common sense” to the idea, I feel compelled to justify why such a straightforward proposition warrants an entire book chapter for its elaboration. Rather than provide that justification first, my hope is that an adequate justification emerges from my elaboration of the argument itself.

Observation Reports and the Mystery of Supervising Student Teachers

Over the past several years, I have read hundreds of “observation reports” authored by university supervisors in a secondary social studies teacher education program at my University. As a faculty member heavily involved in an initial certification teacher education program, I typically play no official role in the field instruction arrangement that brings together university supervisors, student teachers, and cooperating teacher.

Stand(ard) and Deliver: Yet Another Standards-Based Framework and the Ground-Level Work of Preservice Teacher Education

The C3 Framework for Social Studies Standards, InTASC, and edTPA represent recent, influential standards-based initiatives directed toward the reform of preservice teacher education programs. Carried by the same neoliberal reform currents propelling broader educational reform in the United States, all three initiatives share common intellectual underpinnings. What does this apparent uniformity of purpose mean for the ground-level work of teacher education? We employ a self-study conceptual analysis of how we interpret reform-based standards in the context of our work in a social studies teacher education program. Reforms are continuously interpreted and adopted in education programs. Yet little is written about how educators take up these reforms and implement them in their work. This analysis reveals the meanings brought to bear on the comparatively stable discourse evident in this most recent reform movement, and troubles the assumed relationship between reformed standards documents and reformed teacher education.