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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.

The purpose of this paper is to document and analyse the author's first two years of developing a pedagogy that meaningfully incorporates the content creation and social collaboration functions of digital technologies.

This paper uses self‐study methodology to describe, interpret, and challenge excerpts from the author's teaching journal to develop warranted assertions for how and why digital technologies are used in particular ways during undergraduate and graduate level courses.

One finding of the paper is the relative ease with which the author slipped into a comfort zone of using digital technologies in rather superficial ways, since the major hurdle of ubiquitous access that he had previously encountered was removed due to the fact he was now teaching at a mobile‐enabled institution. The paper also reports on the relative success the author experienced using blogging tools to further develop relationships with undergraduate and graduate students and engage them in meaningful discussions outside of class time.

Although this study focuses on the author's experiences as a new academic in a mobile‐enabled institution, and thus might initially seem limited in applicability, the practical implications of this research are inherent in the methodology and methods used to critique is pedagogical approach and to challenge himself to find ways to integrate digital technologies into his teaching.

The paper will be of interest to anyone who has ever struggled with questions of relevancy in the use of digital technologies in both off‐ and online post‐secondary classroom environments.

The field experience placement is an integral part of teacher education programmes. It is ostensibly meant to provide a place for teacher candidates to enact pedagogical theory gained during coursework under the supervision of an experienced host teacher. In reality, the field placement is a source of considerable tension for teacher candidates, as they struggle to reconcile their prior assumptions about teaching and learning and their prior identities as students with the demands of school culture that requires teachers and students to act in particular ways. The field experience is emotional work that has a considerable impact on the development of new teachers’ identities. In this chapter I will focus on how two new teachers learn during the field experience placement, with a particular emphasis on the roles of emotion and the development of professional identity in learning to teach. Cultural–historical activity theory (CHAT) will provide a useful lens to interpret some of the challenges of learning to teach during the field placement.

This chapter is the result of an interest in the professional and research literature exploring the intersection between education and digital technology. Decades of research and press have largely focused on the ways in which particular devices might be productively used in the K-12 classroom. Educational radio, educational television, the computer, and more recently the tablet have all been framed as being valuable for supporting student learning. Critics such as Neil Selwyn have argued that research in educational technology needs to focus less on supporting particular devices and more on the nature of social interactions that are mediated, constrained, and enabled by various technological affordances.

This chapter reviews four theoretical frameworks in terms of their approach the social nature of the use of technology in education.

The chapter introduces a number of conceptual frameworks that are helpful for considering the social implications of using digital technologies to support the needs of diverse learners in a teacher education classroom.

Scholars, especially who are also teacher educators can consider using and developing frameworks that are more robust for thinking about digital learning in education.

The value in this chapter lies in the critical conceptions explored and interrogated. The author demonstrates the complexity of teacher knowledge overlaid with technology.

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.