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In this chapter, we present Self-Study of Teaching and Teacher Education Practices (S-STEP) as a research methodology that can be used pedagogically to explore the practices of teacher educators for their professional development. It can be seen as a pedagogic practice that enlists reflection to enable teacher educators to explore and explicate practice and make explicit what they know about teaching and teacher education in order to improve practice and contribute to larger conversations in research on teaching and teacher education. After providing a succinct interpretation of the origins of S-STEP work, we suggest that historical context, along with the understanding of the theoretical underpinnings, makes it viable as a research methodology and a potentially valuable pedagogy for teacher education research. S-STEP is an intimate research methodology (Hamilton, 1995) in which the person conducting the research is both the focus and the author of the research and provides an insider’s perspective into practice and experience.

We provide examples to demonstrate how others and we take up S-STEP as pedagogy for teacher educator professional development that allows us to grapple with what we know either explicitly or tacitly from and about our practice. International S-STEP research has the power to inform the professional development of teacher educators across these boundaries, because it attends carefully to the particular of the practice and context from which it emerged.

In this chapter, we introduce readers to the volume, a collection of 13 inquiries that employ the methodology of self-study in teacher education practices (S-STEP) in culturally and linguistically diverse settings across the globe. After sharing the purpose and origins of the project, we provide an overview of the volume’s organization and brief summaries for each study. As a whole, the collection addresses two pressing yet interrelated challenges in teacher education research: understanding teacher educator development over the career span and how these scholar-practitioners prepare teachers for an increasingly diverse, mobile, and plurilingual world.

This chapter analyzes our practice as researchers engaged in intimate scholarship using the Framework of Analysis (Pinnegar & Hamilton, 2009) as an analytic tool to scrutinize the trustworthiness of our research practice and to develop a deeper understanding of how S-STEP research establishes itself as trustworthy and rigorous scholarship. With the recognition of S-STEP research and other forms of intimate scholarship as genres of teacher education research (Borko, Liston, & Whitcomb, 2007), scholars engaged and other forms of intimate scholarship can turn to a more rigorous inquiry into and critique of our work in order to consider how we might improve our practice as researchers and support and strengthen the position and future of this research. For these reasons, we take up a critique of a particular S-STEP research study using the Framework for Analysis in order to explore both whether the work studied can be judged trustworthy and what such examination reveals about the process of establishing the trustworthiness of studies utilizing intimate scholarship methodologies.

The purpose of this chapter is to make visible the similarities and differences among narrative, self-study of teacher education practices, and autoethnographic methodologies to generate clarity about when each methodology might be most appropriate. Using Margery Wolf’s (1992) A Thrice Told Tale as a heuristic to support our exploration, we look at a selected slice of data as if standing within each methodology. As we do that we consider ways that we might engage each methodology to push forward our thinking about powerful research. Our goal is to critically examine the processes that researchers use for the study and to explore the ways using particular methodologies in appropriate ways that can strengthen our thinking about professional knowledge.

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.

We are three teacher educators – Christi, Bethney, and Abby – representing literacy, educational leadership, and special education, who have collaborated in self-studies of our teacher education practices (S-STEP) over a period of five academic years. Through this collaborative engagement, we came to recognize the similarities and differences in our language and values found within each of our individual disciplinary cultures. It was through the juxtaposition of studying ourselves alongside of that of our colleagues that we further generated a shared culture and common understandings. In our chapter, we explore the ways in which self-study enabled collaboration with teacher educators representing different disciplines. The research brought to light specific disciplinary values, assumptions, and terminology that, when articulated and examined among critical friends, facilitated our ability to both broaden and deepen our individual understandings of teacher education practices in light of each other’s diverse disciplinary perspectives.

In this chapter, we use self-study to explain the ways we enact community pedagogy in socioeconomically and culturally diverse school contexts in Bogotá, Colombia. We use our personal and professional journeys as language teachers, teacher educators, and researchers to show key experiences in our life stories and teaching trajectories that have influenced our teaching and research praxis. Our main interest as researchers and practitioners was to connect school curricula to the life of children and teachers in schools. Self-study helped us identify and problematize our identities and positions as foreign language teachers who espouse valuing of local knowledge. Through reflection and implementing field experiences with practicing teachers in professional development sessions in schools, we felt that we achieved such connection to develop the mindset for critical pedagogy.

The Zeichner Paradox presents the Self-Study of Teaching and Teacher Education Practices (S-STEP) research community and other researchers engaged in intimate scholarship with three challenges to the viability of our methodology: the development of questions significant to the larger research base of teaching and teacher education; the use of existing research to frame our questions; and the connection of our current research to the works of other researchers to inform our work. Based on identified exemplar studies, we demonstrate tools that might be used by researchers to strengthen the presentation of our work and explore the challenges to reveal links between and among them.

This chapter is based on a self-study of teacher education practices (S-STEP) project that explored the pedagogical practices of a teacher educator and the impact of such practices on a teacher candidate engaged in the process of becoming a translingual teacher. This S-STEP study includes David, a professor in a teacher education program in the greater New York City metropolitan area, and Mary, a teacher candidate enrolled in the program. The purpose of the study was to discover how different class activities influenced the philosophical and pedagogical views of one teacher candidate in the program. The following are the two research questions of the study:

1. How did the class experiences that a teacher education professor, David, designed help teacher candidates conceptualize translingual approach to language and literacy development?

2. How did a monolingual teacher candidate, Mary, develop her role as a translingual English teacher through the completion of these experiences?

How did the class experiences that a teacher education professor, David, designed help teacher candidates conceptualize translingual approach to language and literacy development?

How did a monolingual teacher candidate, Mary, develop her role as a translingual English teacher through the completion of these experiences?

The findings of this S-STEP project demonstrate that the Sociocultural Reflection, the Community Study, and the Linguistic Landscape fostered a translingual approach to language and literacy in the classroom. Moreover, the findings suggest that upon the completion of the projects, one teacher education candidate was able to better define translingualism as a phenomenon of study, ideology, and pedagogy.

Since this investigation is based on a S-STEP project of a single teacher educator and a single teacher candidate, more research with larger populations is needed. Practical implications for teacher educators and teacher candidates in other settings are explored.

This chapter discusses the findings of a self-study of teacher education practices (S-STEP) conducted to investigate the ways the author supported teacher candidates, and first year teachers who were teaching emergent bilinguals in planning reading and writing activities around authentic texts. The purpose of the study was to determine in what ways the researcher supported the candidates’ planning, in what ways the teacher candidates implemented the activities, and how the self-study informed the researcher as a teacher educator. The study looked at how the teacher candidates and first year teachers implemented the activities with their own students. Teacher candidates were supported by the researcher through a methodology class, class observations, informal meetings, and emails and text messaging. The teacher candidates and first year teachers reported that all of the activities and strategies that they learned from the researcher and then implemented with their own students were effective. Both the teacher candidates and the first year teachers modified many of the strategies in order to meet the needs of their emergent bilingual students. Through this self-study investigation of how students used and modified the strategies and activities, the researcher gained valuable information that will inform work with future students. She will introduce fewer strategies and activities and explain how each one can be used to teach different content. In further study, the researcher will provide student teachers with a rubric to evaluate the effectiveness of each strategy or activity with different types of students.