Exploring the Transition into Academia through Collaborative Self-Study

An emerging body of self-study of teacher education practices research considers whether classroom teaching experience and doctoral study constitute sufficient preparation for engaging in the work of teacher education. As new academics who explored this issue as graduate students, we turned to one another in this collaborative self-study to examine our transition from doctoral students to assistant professors. Although we set out to explore our pedagogies for teacher education, we found our posted messages quickly became a way for us to query issues about how our identities were emerging as we enacted our new roles as academics. Data revealed three major turning points and indicated that a focus on pedagogy can be pushed aside by the pressures of initial socialization. We conclude that self-study methodology helped us to understand this tension and also provided support for professional development for new academics.