Our academic sandbox: Scholarly identities shaped through play, tantrums, building castles, and rebuffing backyard bullies

Abstract

This paper presents four teacher educators’ stories that explore their scholarly identity development through an Academic Sandbox metaphor where Play, Tantrums, Building Castles, and Rebuffing Backyard Bullies, serve as creative constructs for describing their experiences of triumphs and challenges in academia. The authors share how a professional learning community (Faculty Academy) functioned as the safe space for “participatory sense-making” (See De Jaegher & Di Paolo, 2007) where situated agency emerged and became strengthened through the telling of the teachers’ stories (Archer, 2003; Clandinin & Connelly, 2000; Kligyte, 2011; McGann, 2014; McLean, Pasupathi, & Pals, 2007). Stories representative of each metaphorical construct are presented and discussed. Narrative inquiry served as the methodological means in which the authors examined their stories as representative events in identity formation.