Becoming Ourselves as Teacher Educators: Trespassing, Transgression and Transformation

This chapter documents the processes of becoming of two teacher educators, Rachel and Mandi, by exploring our personal-professional learning from our ongoing experiences in the role. We come from different disciplinary backgrounds (Rachel as a former drama teacher and Mandi as a former science teacher) and entered teacher education at different times (Rachel more recently than Mandi) and through different pathways (Mandi took a practitioner pathway from the high school classroom, while Rachel took a researcher pathway after completing her doctorate). Despite our differences, we come together as researchers and teacher educators with shared common concerns to investigate and better understand what it means to teach teachers, (both personally, and collectively, as a profession), to examine our own roles in the learning-to-teach process and to develop our pedagogy of teacher education, although we draw on different literatures and use different methods to address these concerns in our research and practice. Through this chapter, we explore our similarities and differences, struggles and insights, and seek to evolve our individual and collective thinking about becoming as teacher educators. We have organised this chapter in such a way as to invite readers into this process with us.