Chapter 6: The Pedagogy of Teacher Education Course: Learning and Living Teacher Education Practice and Self-Study Research Methods

When I was a doctoral student, I lacked what might be called a “formal education” in how to be a teacher educator (Butler, 2019). For most teacher educators, learning is centered around a disciplinary area rather than teacher education more broadly. Teacher education is seen as something learned by happenstance, with little thought given to the complexity inherent in being a teacher educator (Labaree, 2004; Loughran, 2006). Although my formal course of study focused on social studies education, I had the luxury of learning from faculty invested in preparing doctoral students to become effective teacher educators and I was surrounded by fellow doctoral students who were interested in applying that learning to their scholarship and practice. We may not have had specific courses dedicated to teacher education—we were studying to become social studies education professors after all—but the director of our doctoral program, Todd Dinkelman, provided opportunities outside the formal curriculum to investigate our identities and pedagogical practices as emerging teacher educators (Cuenca et al., 2011; Dinkelman et al., 2012).