Forging Teacher Educator Identities: Embracing Friction through Critical Reflexivity

ABSTRACT

In this essay, we use vignettes to portray our journeys toward, affiliations to and contentions with the “teacher educator” identity. By drawing on critical self-reflection, radical vulnerability and our collaborative discussions and work, we suggest that the formation of a teacher educator identity is relational, tied to emotion and embodied experiences, and career-long. We close with a series of critical questions meant to model the work we believe future teachers and teacher educators can engage in as they negotiate self and sustain a commitment to racial and linguistic equity.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ In employing the concept of “justice” we acknowledge the ways in which this word invokes imaginaries and futures that are always out of reach and often “incommensurate” with each other. We seek to invoke the many “diverse dreams” of justice that we each bring and to acknowledge that even without “political unity” or uniformly “shared objectives” we can “collaborate for a time together…while anticipating that our pathways toward enacting liberation will diverge” (Tuck & Yang, 2018, pp. 1-2).

² We would like to acknowledge that this work has been also with the collaboration and support of the director of our program as well as with other faculty members in our program.

³ Racial caucusing is programmatic activity in which students join groups based on their racial identities in order to have targeted discussions regarding their racial socialization, experiences in school and emerging teacher identities. Caucusing has an explicit political purpose which centers around the development of anti-racist dispositions and commitments to anti-racist praxis.