Reality Check: A teacher educator returns home

Abstract

This collaborative self-study, told through email excerpts and reflections, explores a teacher educator's return to high school teaching. In this study, we juxtapose our voices and alternate between past and present to develop insights that reveal how going back can lead to moving forward with respect to educating prospective teachers. While the story is Lisa's, we work together to use self-study as a research approach methodologically aimed at improving practice. As a teacher educator, Lisa's experience of being a first-year teacher with her former students was one of the most powerful experiences of her professional life. Being a new teacher for a second time forced her to face novice-teacher issues as a participant rather than as an observer or researcher. At times Lisa had no choice but to put aside her doctoral training. When she subsequently returned to teacher education, she did so with renewed passion and enriched understanding of the challenges facing new teachers.