The Accidental Teacher Educator: Learning to be a Language Teacher Educator within Diverse Populations

Abstract

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

Citation

Bullock, S.M. (2018), "The Accidental Teacher Educator: Learning to be a Language Teacher Educator within Diverse Populations", Self-Study of Language and Literacy Teacher Education Practices (Advances in Research on Teaching, Vol. 30), Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 17-36. https://doi.org/10.1108/S1479-368720180000030001