Morbidity and Mortality

Within higher education, evaluation practices often operate as high-stakes mechanisms of accountability that can produce unintended professional harm. This narrative self-study examines how evaluative experiences shaped the identities and professional trajectories of two teacher educators who encountered significant wounding events within institutional evaluation systems. Grounded in Self-Study of Teacher Education Practice (S-STEP) and narrative inquiry, and informed by Dewey’s theory of experience, the study adopts the medical practice of Morbidity and Mortality (M& M) review as a conceptual and methodological orientation for examining professional harm. Data sources included recorded conversations, written reflections, annals, institutional artifacts, and memory work. Findings revealed three interwoven threads across both narratives: loss of educator identity, wounding events enacted through impersonal and opaque evaluative systems, and the sustained work of unpacking experience to move forward. Professional evaluations functioned not as sites of learning but as moments of amputation and death that disrupted identity and altered professional trajectories. By utilizing self-study and narrative inquiry while bringing the language and orientation of M& M into educational research, this study reframes evaluative wounds as events worthy of collective, analytic examination rather than private endurance. The findings invite reconsideration of how evaluation is enacted and experienced, highlighting the need for dialogic, transparent, and caring approaches that support meaning-making, ethical responsibility, and professional sustainability.