This year-long qualitative study follows a new teacher, who had
self-identified as a ‘positive person’, through her first year in the
classroom to explore the ways in which she maintained that disposition in the face of the difficulties that the work of teaching
entails. Using a lens of emotion states and traits, we catalogued
several different strategies this teacher used to return to her ‘positive’ emotion trait. A close examination of the data through I-Poems revealed that the very strategies she used were a type of avoidance from situations that produced uncomfortable emotion states. This avoidance contributed to a false sense of positivity, a dissonant between the teacher’s reported experiences and her perceived sense of self, gradually leading to burnout. The focus on maintaining her desired emotion trait distracted from the need to process her emotional experiences to improve her practice. Implications for teaching and teacher education are discussed.

In this systematic review, we explore the contribution of S-STEP research to the larger conversations in teacher education research. We seek to synthesize the assertions for action and understanding that have emerged in response to the Zeichner paradox (Berry & Loughran, 2004), identifying how S-STEP methodology integrates with other research on teacher education, and the unique contributions it is poised to make. This project reviews and synthesizes evidence that S-STEP research can and does contribute to the empirically-based knowledge of teacher education. In this review of studies reported in Studying Teacher Education, we explore the knowledge contributions of S-STEP to the field of teacher education and integrate the results of S-STEP studies with other research on teacher education.

In this self-study, a teacher’s in the moment recordings of emotional episodes were analyzed with the help of a critical friend, leading to the discovery of patterns of emotional responses. Initial emotional responses often covered up deeper emotional issues that implicated the teaching self. After dialog with a critical friend, those issues were recognized and contextualized, resulting in greater understanding of self that led to change in approach to future emotional episodes, leading to better classroom environments. Acknowledging deeper emotional issues empowered the teacher to manage herself and students with more emotionally healthy methods.

This study examined how our non-personhood experiences (NPHEs) contributed to our teacher educator identity process. We took up exploration of these experiences, which were very painful for us, not as entrée into victimhood, but because we wanted to learn something about how, in the face of such experiences, we could engage with these troubling interactions in order to renew our commitment to our work as teacher educators in the academe. During the analysis process, we considered our stories along four overlapping dimensions (1) our Selves in our own story, 2) others in the story, 3) colleagues not in the story, and 4) non-colleagues and others not in the story. A framework for looking at our NPHEs resulted that allows teacher educators to attend to students’ needs while simultaneously reasserting their own teacher educator identities in more honest and vulnerable ways. Analyzing NPHEs has the potential to help teacher educators engage and invite students to recognize teacher educators’ personhood and therefore better position them to recognize the personhood of their future students.

While many studies have documented the importance of supportive student?teacher relationships, particularly during students? formative education experiences, few studies have systematically examined teachers? conceptions of their relationships. The purpose of this project was to examine elementary school teachers? conceptions of closeness using a structured interview protocol. Participants included three Caucasian teachers from the United States. Specifically, as part of the protocol, teachers were asked to (1) rate their feelings of closeness for each of the students in their class, (2) describe each relationship, (3) identify patterns of interpersonal closeness and distance across their class, and (4) talk about their understanding of what it means to be close to students. Findings were organised into a grounded model of teacher closeness in which teachers described how their feelings of closeness to students were related to five different teacher?s approach orientations. Teachers? approach orientations may have important implications for the way in which children in the class are privileged or marginalised by their teacher relationship.