Exhibiting Care While Re/Constructing Teacher Education: A Self-Study of Teacher Education Leadership

Leadership development in higher education remains lacking, with most leadership development the result of learning on-the-job. Understanding and navigating the leadership challenges of increasingly complex higher education environments is even more demanding in colleges of education facing unprecedented pressures from outside and inside the institution. Given that little training exists for teacher education leaders, they often find themselves experiencing tensions related to how to facilitate teacher education reform as they learn on-the-job. In this self-study, we developed a reciprocal mentoring relationship that helped us unpack tensions related to our experiences as teacher education leaders. Two tensions were explored in this study, the tensions of action and intent and valuing and reconstructing experience. Investigating these two tensions resulted in two findings related to our transition into leadership. First, we found that leadership required exhibiting care and an ability to navigate the divides and challenges that can inhibit teacher education reform. Second, leaders learn and develop leadership practices over time, such as providing clear communication and understanding faculty roles in change and transformation. Learning to embrace successes while learning from challenges affords teacher education leaders opportunities to re/construct pictures of the self as leader through shifting interpretations of leadership, experiencing challenges in promoting change, and building new/existing programs to improve teacher education. These findings hold implications for teacher education leadership as they help make visible the challenges of teacher education leadership roles and the importance of faculty-leadership collaboration in teacher education program reform.