Chapter 11: Co-Mentoring: Supporting One Another Into, Through and Beyond Administrative Assignments in Teacher Education

We are three mid-career teacher educators who, over time, have developed and maintained a collaborative partnership to support one another as teacher educators. In this chapter we detail our process of “co-mentoring” and analyze how our efforts to mentor one another in similar mid- and low-level administrative roles at divergent institutions provided us with the support necessary, first, to navigate new roles while maintaining our commitments to teaching and scholarship; second, to conceptualize and enact our roles in ways congruent with our ideals as teacher educators; and finally, to step away from administrative responsibilities and recommit ourselves to being full-time faculty members in our respective departments and institutions. We have included excerpts and summaries from our dialogical journals and transcripts from virtual meetings, along with other informal correspondences and exchanges spanning nearly a decade to illuminate our process.