Teaching Diversity: A Reflexive Learning Opportunity for a Teacher Educator

Source: Teaching Education, Volume 27, Issue 4, 2016, Pages 410-426

This paper reports on a two-year self-study exploring the author's roles and evolving philosophy as an early childhood teacher educator teaching diversity in the US.
The author was interested in better understanding how and what she can learn from the complexity of her teaching experiences.

Data included her professional journals, students’ reflection journals, and communication with a critical friend.
She examined, when teaching diversity, how she constructed and navigated her roles, how the students constructed and perceived her roles, and how they have transformed her instructional philosophy and practices.

The findings illustrated a dynamic and tension-filled experience of a teacher educator teaching diversity in the US as a perceived outsider, suggesting that it was a reflexive learning opportunity.
The findings are aligned with a growing recognition that appropriate time and space is necessary for teacher educators to share and exchange their experiences and to gain support for their professional development when teaching diversity. Further, the findings are supportive of the contribution of self-study research in advancing the broader field of teacher education research.