Judy Sharkey

Recent scholarship examining how teachers and teacher educators learn to teach has advocated for a more critically oriented and better developed pedagogy of teacher education, in which teacher educator as practitioner is both in evidence and examined. Yet we currently know little about teacher educators as learners and reflective scholars open to examining their practice and research, and such inquiry is particularly limited within the scholarship in English language teacher education. This article brings together the narratives of the five co‐authors, all TESOL teacher educators based in U.S. universities who examine questions about the intersections of their identities and pedagogies. They do so as a first step toward addressing the gap in the literature regarding the self‐reflexivity of teacher educators. Identifying themes related to the intertwining of their social and professional identities and their pedagogies, their perceived legitimacy as teacher educators, and the impact of multiple contexts on their identities and pedagogies, the five co‐authors consider how they are both domesticating and domesticated by teacher education (Morgan, 2016) and argue that when teacher educators engage in shared and transparent exploration of their identities and pedagogies they are better able to identify their pedagogical blind spots and opportunities to agentively leverage their identities to challenge dominant discourses.

Inspired by the recognition of teachers and teacher learning in the knowledge base and the calls for greater attention to the pedagogies and development of teacher educators, in this brief essay we posit that a deeper understanding of the teacher educator as scholar, as practitioner, as researcher, is critical to the LTE knowledge base.

Who’s educating the teacher educators? The role of self-study in teacher education practices (S-STEP) in advancing the research on the professional development of second language teacher educators and their pedagogies

The multilingual reality of migration in the 21st century has presented US schools and teacher education programs with pressing challenges: more and more P-12 educators have become de facto language teachers, asked to make their content and classrooms accessible and meaningful to newcomer students whose home language(s) and culture(s) differ from those in their new schools and communities. These challenges are exacerbated by climates of anti-immigrant rhetoric, xenophobia, and demographic shifts that impede or foreclose interaction between different racial, cultural and linguistic groups. This article addresses a number of questions arising from this situation: What is the role of second language teacher education in the preparation of mainstream teachers serving newcomer students and their families who never imagined themselves as language instructors? How might infusing the principles of intercultural citizenship and immigrant integration policy frameworks expand and enhance current linguistically and culturally focused teacher preparation approaches? This article presents a multi-year study with in-service teachers working in immigrant/refugee communities in a small state in the Northeastern US. Findings indicate some promising potential, yet a stronger, more explicit Intercultural Citizenship approach needs to be articulated and integrated much earlier in the program.

Here we share findings from a 9-month qualitative case study involving a school–university professional development inquiry into how teachers develop, implement, and interpret community-based pedagogies (CBPs), an asset-based approach to curriculum that acknowledges mandated standards but begins with recognizing and valuing local knowledge. After describing the structure and activities of the professional development project, we focus on the work and perspectives of four teachers at one public school in Bogotá. The challenges identified were outweighed by the benefits, including increased student engagement, motivation, family–school involvement, and an appreciation of local knowledge as curriculum resource. In addition to generating rich curriculum exemplars in chemistry, social studies, and language arts, the teachers’ interpretations and enactments of CBPs indicate that CBPs are flexible enough to allow multiple entry points, teacher autonomy, and ownership, and share enough commonalities with other pedagogical approaches to allow different learning trajectories for teachers and students.