Chapter 5: The Strategic Use of Questioning in Doctoral Seminars on Teacher Education

In this chapter, we (one faculty member and six graduate students) reflect on the design of a doctoral seminar designed to introduce scholarship in the field of teacher education. The seminar was strategically designed around questions intended to catalyze discussions about the enduring challenges, tensions, and debates related to teacher education. In this chapter, we reflect on how engagement with these issues informed—and continues to inform—our work as practicing teacher educators.

Becoming a teacher educator is a complex process that involves not only the acquisition of knowledge and skills but also a reflection upon one’s teacher educator identity (Allen et al., 2016; Dinkelman et al., 2006; Williams & Ritter, 2010). The profession of teacher education lacks a uniform definition across contexts, thereby placing early-career teacher educators in the position of having to define their own professional identity (Lunenberg & Hamilton, 2008). This process can be especially challenging, given that there are many tensions inherent in the work of teacher education that necessitate that these novice teacher educators balance the demands of their professional context with their own deeply held educational commitments (Beeman-Cadwallader et al., 2014; Berry, 2007; Donnell, 2010).