Being a Teacher Educator: Exploring Issues of Authenticity and Safety Through Self-Study

Abstract

Abstract: The catalyst for this self-study was implementing peer-teaching in our respective science education and physical education teacher education courses. Because our students taught one another it meant we redefined our roles as teacher educators as well as the roles that our students took in the teaching and learning community. We documented and explored our learning about teaching and teacher education through journaling, observations, discussions and interviews with students. Our students’ responses to peer- teaching provided a critical lens through which we considered our efficacy as teacher educators. Through this collaborative self-study, we have learnt to manage the issues of authenticity and safety for ourselves and our students. Introduction Self-study shifts the perspective of the researcher from being the ‘outsider’ looking in on practice to being the researcher analysing practice in the moment of its production from the perspective of the teacher. Such an insider’s perspective provides a means to consider the tacit and personal practical knowledge that is central to an individual’s knowledge and understanding of teaching (Hamilton & Pinnegar, 2009). As two experienced teacher educators, we were drawn to self-study as a means to examine our own teaching and submit it to a form of critical inquiry. What we needed was a catalyst to sharpen our focus and alter our perspective in order to deepen our understanding of teacher education. Peer-teaching was the catalyst for this self-study. When we introduced peer teaching we recognised that it could create a learning context embedded in the practice of teaching in which students could experience and reflect on the relational complexities and dilemmas of teaching, the situational nature of professional knowledge and the role of discernment and decision making in the act of teaching (Garbett & Ovens, 2010; Macintyre Latta & Field, 2005; Wilson & I'Anson, 2006). Peer-teaching changed how and what learning took place from the students’ perspective. Comparing how we used peer-teaching in different contexts created opportunities to deepen our understanding of teacher education as a process. Authenticity and safety initially emerged as two issues that were central to the successful implementation of peer teaching from our students’ perspective (Garbett & Ovens, 2010; Ovens & Garbett, 2008). In this paper, we document our learning about teacher education as we attended to our students’ concerns. Our self-study has challenged our assumptions about teaching and