Chapter 11: Achieving Teacher Education Praxis Through a Multi-Faceted Internship Experience: Embedding Learning in Action

The transition from teacher to teacher-educator is often considered a private struggle (Berry & Loughran, 2005). Traditionally, emerging teacher educators’ learning experiences are individualized as they transition from a personal understanding of practice to a more theoretical, universal, and scholarly understanding of practice (Labaree, 2004). The personal nature of this development is because teacher education is commonly understood as a self-evident practice (Zeichner, 2005). However, teacher education researchers have argued that learning to be a teacher educator is a complex process. Emerging teacher educators enter doctoral programs with experience and practical knowledge in the field, and therefore are different from other traditional graduate students. As they transition from experts in a classroom of children, to learners with responsibilities for other adult learners, they encounter negative feelings of isolation and discomfort (Labaree, 2004; Murray & Male, 2005). Moreover, emerging teacher educators struggle to reconcile their pedagogical practices and identities of their new learning environments with their existing personal identities as educators (Butler & Diacopoulos, 2016).