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Self-study in teacher education practices is rife with tensions revolving around self and its position in relation to teaching practice and research. In this chapter, I explore and demonstrate these tensions building on Schwab's practical orientation and following its developments in narrative research and self-study. In particular, I focus on the role of self-knowledge in my work as a teacher educator as it has featured in my own self-studies. To present this, I rely on relational teacher education, a framework that I have developed and has guided my living and teaching as a teacher educator. Overall, this progression will demonstrate my belief that self-study is a crucial vehicle for developing self-knowledge; however, it ought to be seen as a means for relational teaching practice and not merely as an end.

Purpose – The purpose of this chapter is to examine how the exploration of metaphors of learning and teaching can contribute to the professional development of teacher candidates and teacher educators.

Approach – The chapter draws on the author's experiences as a teacher and teacher educator to illustrate ways in which metaphors of teaching offer deeper understandings of the personal and social dimensions of teaching and teacher education practices.

Findings – Metaphors and other artifacts by the author and teacher candidates are examined to illustrate how metaphors have been be used to story experience in teacher education.

Research implications – Imagining and re-imagining metaphors provide a solid foundation for the preparation and development of teachers. Engaging teacher candidates in the identification and development of their metaphors of learning and teaching contributes to their development into teachers able to understand the experiences of their students and adapt their teaching to enhance student learning. The exploration of metaphor can also help teacher educators to better understand their professional identities and practices.

Value – Teacher educators are uniquely positioned to help teachers explore how their teacher images inform practice and to analyze these images to enhance personal professional knowledge and teaching practices.

Purpose – The purpose of this chapter is to demonstrate “walking alongside” in the three-dimensional space of narrative inquiry, as explored through the field texts of two teacher educators, one mentoring the other through layered stories of “place.”

Approach – The authors use several interpretive tools to explore the question, “What sustains us as teacher educators?” The dialogue deepens as the authors make their professional knowledge landscapes more visible, bringing sacred stories, stories of gender, stories of hierarchy, stories of power, and stories of race forward, exploring how these stories are held in tension with one another. The authors ponder the questions: what happens when the small stories’ educators living in “place” become so far removed from authorized meta-narratives also underway in “place”? And, how can we remain wakeful to the numerous story constellations of others that revolve around us?

Findings – The analytical spaces described by the researchers helped them to realize and share with others that researchers may more fully respect the vulnerability our research participants feel that comes along with their own restorying. Vulnerability brought forward a common bond found in the experiences of “place” in the field texts. Narrative inquirers who write field texts, then restory their own narratives of place, add to the empirical dimensions of narrative inquiry and its attentiveness to lived experience.

Research implications – This demonstration, through its examples of the three-dimensional space of narrative inquiry, shows how interpretation emanates from the various cracks, corners, and even the air within this important analytical space. Narrative researchers may continue to unpack this space in their work. Narrative inquirers are also reminded that place is storied and that human beings are narratively anchored in place, an important consideration for relational research ethics.

Value – Readers can interact with the tools used by narrative inquirers, in this case, “tracing” and “burrowing and broadening.” Narrative inquirers may also recognize vulnerability as an effect of interpreting within the three-dimensional inquiry space, and understand the necessity of vulnerability as a part of thinking narratively.

The educational self is a construct derived from cultural psychology that attempts to account for the role of educational experiences in the construction and elaboration of the self. It conceptualizes of self as a semiotic process that is both dialogical and polyphonic from its origin, yet grounded in some historically and culturally derived shared meanings and practices. The purpose of this chapter is to situate discussion of the educational self in the context of the United States and to explore its implications for teaching, teacher education, and self-study of practice via an examination of the life trajectory of the author that is both retrospective and introspective. An argument is put forward that examining the educational self represents a promising starting point for understanding and studying one's own teaching or teacher education practices.

The question of teacher motivation is of paramount concern for educational leaders and managers. Both the commonly observed deficiency in teacher motivation and the abundance of teacher stress are serious problems that can be mitigated through teacher education. This study describes a relational‐training stress‐management course that was prepared and implemented in an attempt to reduce teacher stress. The 30‐hour programme was divided into ten sessions that included thematic exercises on a variety of topics: sharing professional experiences with colleagues, identifying specific stress factors and possible coping strategies, replacing irrational beliefs with more appropriate beliefs, analysing strategies for dealing with student discipline and motivation problems in the classroom, and practising assertiveness and relaxation. Following the course, participating teachers showed a significant decrease in their irrational beliefs and professional distress, as well as an increase in professional motivation and the perception of wellbeing.

In this chapter, we examine conundrums of self-study of practice (S-SP) research that emerge from positioning this work in a space that calls for a critical rethinking of ontology and takes seriously the work of postmodernist philosophy. We explore aspects of self in relationship to the other – concerns, transformations, representations positioning, and growth – when ideas emerge in the midst of practice. We begin with an investigation of conundrums of Self in relationship to Other where both exist in continual process of BECOMING based in the work of Deleuze. We then consider the self within the research framework of S-SP methodology. As part of this examination, we consider key characteristics of this methodology in relationship to the self in practice that is the orientation to ontology and dialogue as the process of coming-to-know in this space. Next, we consider the conundrum of particularity and wholeness in the exploration of tacit and practical knowledge. We use works by Clandinin and others to probe the ways particularities and wholeness interact with tacit understandings that entangle and merge into embodied knowing. We also articulate the conundrum of the ethical for the Self and Other in S-SP Research and other forms of intimate scholarship.

Education in recent years has witnessed an increasing involvement in the conversations regarding anti-oppressive practice and contemplation, particularly as foundations for pedagogy and curricular design. Naturally, both discourses have intersected with each other through the attempts at their integration, potentially leading toward new practices of enhanced educational impact. This chapter serves as a deliberate reflection and elaboration upon the nature and potential implications of their integration. As both discourses reflect valuable approaches and ideas, it is important to carefully examine and approach their integration to ensure that the value of each perspective is preserved as well as enriched in its power to educatively stimulate meaningful learning in the classroom. In order for such an educative situation to emerge, I argue that the integration should be defined by a sustained friction and differentiation between each perspective. By sustaining the friction, each perspective preserves their power to illuminate alternative possibilities in understanding the self and the world for the other. The educative value of such friction rests within its power to carry students onto a journey of continuous learning without settling upon finalized answers. Ultimately, I conclude that this friction is made possible and sustained by being embodied as the very self of the teacher.

In this chapter, we flesh out a new ecological account of the self of the teacher. We contrast this view with more traditional approaches that either stress the subjectivity of the teacher at the expense of the world or emphasize the other more than the self and hence leave no room for subjectivity. On the contrary, to an ecological approach, the self of the teacher is constituted through relating to her own subject matter. This involves a thing-centered approach according to which the teacher is defined in terms of drawing attention to something in the world out of love for this world.