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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 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.

Purpose – In this chapter, we examine the influence of the commonplace of sociality within narrative inquiry during the process of interpretation and meaning-making. Our project was multivisioned because we were interested in what we learned about the methodology of narrative inquiry within the context of a phenomenon for inquiry (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000), which for this study was our identity as teacher educators (Bullough, 2005).

Approach – Using narrative inquiry, we interrogate our interpretive processes privileging the commonplace of sociality in examining stories of our identity as teacher educators from our own experience as teacher educators.

Findings – In our inquiry into interpretation from the orientation of the narrative commonplace of the social, four points of understanding emerged: (1) interpretation within the methodology of narrative inquiry is living and interpretation exists in the midst; (2) all three dimensions of the narrative inquiry space are always part of the process regardless of the commonplace under consideration; (3) if we look inward/outward in the process of interpretation, it always leads us back to the relational; and (4) when we deepen the analytic process, ethical issues, and therefore renewed grappling with our identity, emerge.

Research implications – Narrative inquiry at every phase – design, data collection, analysis, and representation – is a form of living and analysis and interpretation. As well, representation must allow space for the holistic and organic quality that this form of inquiry demands in the development and communication of ideas.

Value – The study points to the ways in which research on humans’ action and interaction returns to the relational and ethical even when that is not the focus of the research. Further, our response to narrative inquiry is not always analysis but often turns to story instead.

This is the 11th volume in the Advances in Research on Teaching series, and the second to address teacher education and professional development. The previous volume (Brophy, 2004) focused specifically on the use of video in those contexts. This volume casts a much broader net, looking at studies of a variety of teacher education and professional development issues. The studies were selected to offer contrasts in the types of informants who provided the data, the methods used to collect the data, and the means chosen for representing and communicating what was found.

This book was organized to illustrate some of the affordances and constraints of contrasting methodological approaches to qualitative research on teaching (who provides the information, how the information is gathered, and how the findings are represented). The differing perspectives, methods, and forms of representation in the included studies complement one another to enrich our insights about teachers, as they progress from applying to teacher education programs through various stages of completion of these programs to continuing their development as professionals. In addition to these methodological insights, however, the chapters offer a variety of substantive findings that will inform the work of teacher educators, including many that reinforce or otherwise connect with one another.

As teacher educators, we know that preservice teachers come into teaching with idealistic visions of both teaching and their own identity as a teacher. Students’ sense that they are or could be teachers is an important aspect of their decision to become teachers. If who they become as teachers must emerge from who they are as people, teacher educators ought to be interested in how students position themselves in their role and identity as teachers when they enter teacher education programs. This paper explores what preservice teachers’ initial applications to teacher education programs reveal about how preservice teachers position themselves as teachers.