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.

This narrative inquiry explores how three mothers who are also educators can preserve and pass on their values and commitments developed from poverty and working class negotiate their cross class identities while living a curriculum of moral education with backgrounds to their children who are growing up upper upper middle class. Their narrative explores the concepts qualities of intimacy empathy and altruism intimacy emerge from their stories as as means of learning from and about others who have differences. Examining the ecology of mothers from poverty/working class backgrounds who are now academics raising their own children in upper middle class homes can explicate how ways to foster cross -class identities can be fostered in the home setting to that encourage awareness of inequities and promote learning oriented toward social justice needed in home and school settings. The narratives highlight opportunities for researchers and educators to move across cultures and illustrate how tensions between cultures can be held open for meaning making rather than assuming that people only have one class identity. The approaches and strategies of living a moral education curriculum chronicled in their stories offer a developmentally sensitive model of moral education that could, with modification, inform approaches to educating critical class-conscious educators. Future research is called for to further explore the impact of race on practices of moral education and how the types of relationships necessary for moral authority can be fostered within the confines of academia. Implications for morally educating predominately white, middle class educators are outlined.

The urgent need to prepare more mainstream classroom teachers to work with English language learners (ELLs) prompts innovative approaches to teacher preparation. One such innovation, use of technology, can prepare a large number of teachers efficiently. Yet quantity does not ensure quality. Focusing only on teaching strategies may diminish attention to developing positive dispositions toward ELLs. Field participation has been shown to be prospective teachers? most influential experience in developing attitudes toward ELLs, but neither early classroom experiences nor home visits with ELLs are always logistically possible. This article explores possibilities for pre-service teachers coming to know and developing positive dispositions toward an ELL and her family through a multimedia technological intervention. Using design based research (DBR) methodology and narrative inquiry, this article reports qualitative findings that suggest the positive influence of using digital stories in teacher education programs.