Becoming Ourselves as Teacher Educators: Trespassing, Transgression and Transformation

Abstract

This chapter documents the ‘processes of becoming’ of two teacher educators, Rachel and Mandi, by exploring our personal-professional learning from our ongoing experiences in the role. We come from different disciplinary backgrounds, entered teacher education at different times and through different pathways, yet despite our differences, we come together as researchers and teacher educators with shared common concerns to investigate and better understand what it means to teach teachers, (both personally, and collectively, as a profession), to examine our own roles in the learning-to-teach process and to develop our pedagogy of teacher education. Inspired by the work of Connelly and Clandinin (Teachers’ professional knowledge landscapes: Secret, sacred, and cover stories. In D. J. Clandinin & F. M. Connelly (Eds.), Teachers’ professional knowledge landscapes (pp. 3–15). New York: Teachers College Press, 1995) about teachers’ “Secret” and “sacred” stories of their professional knowledge and becoming, we interpret our experiences through three main themes of trespassing, transgression and transformation. We begin our exploration of each theme with an illustrative vignette from each of our personal-professional histories. We then go on to consider our vignettes, elaborating these shared themes and our responses to them by engaging in a dialogic process with each other. At the same time, while we have identified shared themes, we also recognise particular individual themes that have emerged from, and guided, our becoming as teacher educators.