Chapter 17: “But you Taught Me to Stand Up for Myself, and Now I Need to Stand Up For My Country, For my People!”: Navigating Learning Spaces and Forging Critical Friendship as Teacher Educators

Oksana Moroz and Gloria Park (hereafter, Moroz and Park or we) begin with the Facebook Messenger exchange (Figure 17.1) to illustrate how we responded when the war on Ukraine broke out. Moroz identifies herself as an emerging teacher educator working on her dissertation, and Park has over two decades of experience as a language teacher and teacher educator. Building on the work of Canagarajah (2018), Weinstein and Park (2014), and Porter and Tanghe (2016), we define and employ learning space to complicate the physical, virtual, digital, and ideological spaces dictated to us in what and how we continuously learn as teacher educators. We also want to emphasize that our learning becomes a fluid process within this everchanging sociohistorical-political contexts that often dictate our multiple and contradicting roles as teacher educators. Moreover, our emphasis on learning that occurs in the learning space is part of the fabric of our journeys as teacher educators. Regardless of our years of experience, learning for teacher educators is constant, complex, fluid, and unpredictable in that every occurrence is an opportunity we need to embrace in this process of learning with and from one another. Hence, for this chapter, we describe various intertwined learning spaces that guided us in unfolding the learning events that transpired in the transdisciplinary doctoral teacher education program due to the war in Ukraine and how we chose to respond. By illustrating these learning spaces, Moroz and Park focus on the specific learning opportunities to demonstrate our teacher-educator identity negotiation and to showcase that learning is a natural fabric of our unpredictable lives in general and a response to the war in Ukraine, in particular. This aligns with the work of Rosenberg et al. (2018), who described students’ experiences during the war and how educators supported them. In addition, illustrating these allowed us to home in on the coexistence of learning place and space for (emerging) teacher educators to champion social justice (Behizadeh et al., 2019) and critical friendship as part of our ongoing transdisciplinary teacher education program.