Fiction, the Fictional, and Critical Conversations in the Landscape of Teacher Educator Identity

This collaborative self-study involves two teacher educators in different faculty streams, a Professor of Teaching and a Teacher/Scholar, studying the formation and interpretation of identity within a shared landscape of teacher education. Using narrative inquiry and qualitative self-study methods, including journals, teaching artifacts, and feedback from a critical friend, we explored how identity develops through experiences of place, time, and imaginative writing. Fiction played a central methodological role, enabling us to unsettle normalized identity categories as we experienced how context and critical interpretation shape our teaching selves. Four threads emerged: identity as continually evolving; movement across teaching places and relationships; the influence of research on practice; and the self as open to ongoing reinterpretation. Despite differing institutional expectations, our practices converged around creating learning environments that support teacher candidates’ identity-making in this shared and shifting landscape of teaching. We conclude that reflection, dialogue, and the fictive offer teacher educators a generative approach to understanding and reimagining their work amid the shifting terrain of teacher education and the institutional distinctions of faculty streams. The involvement of fiction in our work opens new possibilities in such self-study and in the teaching of teachers.