What Drives a Teacher Educator to Self-Study? An Exploration of Personal, Professional and Programmatic Influences

What drives a teacher educator to self-study? This is a question with what might be perceived as an easy answer. Perhaps there was an influential professor or colleague who conducted self-study. Or, an ingrained desire to engage in critical reflection. Maybe there was an experience that needed exploration. These are all valid reasons for why someone might choose to engage in self-study. In this work, our purpose was to look strictly to the past and investigate the experiences that we felt led a teacher educator to engage in self-study. Melva is a woman of color and recently tenured faculty member, who was made to feel uncertainty and inadequacy related to her teaching due primarily to perceptions held by others. There were several critical incidents that pushed Melva toward self-study, most salient were incidents that compromised her professional identity. Melva, new to the department, was aware of Brandon’s self-study scholarship and sought collaborative engagement for learning self-study research. Brandon, also newly tenured, has extensive selfstudy experience, including self-study presentations (AERA, Castle), publications in Studying Teacher Education, and service to the S-STEP SIG. This collaborative learning opportunity led us to examine how teacher educators come to self-study through the lens of novice and experienced self-study researchers. Our examination in this study encompasses professional, programmatic, and personal influences to answer the question of, “What personal, professional and programmatic influences draw a teacher educator to self-study?