Case 2: Advancing Teacher Education Scholarship while Growing as a Teacher Educator: The Generative Potential of the Clinical Practice Fellows

Teacher education is facing turbulent times. Amid dual pandemics of COVID-19 and racism (Jones, 2021), teacher educators find themselves addressing a slate of contested social issues and competing reform agendas (e.g., Bullough, 2021; Cochran-Smith et al., 2018; Cochran-Smith & Stringer Keefe, 2022). The wide range of interconnected problems affecting clinically based teacher education in particular—difficulties sustaining boundary-spanning relationships during COVID-19, financial stressors from declining teacher candidate enrollments, and inequitable teacher licensure requirements, just to name a few—only compounds the pressures that teacher educators must address.

The challenge of continuing to advance teacher education scholarship while navigating such turbulent times can feel insurmountable. There is no panacea, but one promising way that teacher educators can sustain their scholarly activity is to form supportive communities in which they identify shared curiosities, dissect thorny problems, and collaborate with passionate colleagues. As a clinically oriented, university-based teacher educator, I, the author of this case, have found this kind of community in the Clinical Practice Fellows. The case illustrates how I have been working with the Clinical Practice Fellows, as a generative scholarly community, to advance my teacher education scholarship and grow my practice as a teacher educator.