(Re)navigating the classroom as a teacher educator

Using identity as a frame, this chapter captures the realities of the author grappling with her own practices in becoming a teacher educator through a series of raw and genuine narratives that draw on professional experience as a context for learning and growth. In the context of this work, professional experience is imagined as school-based experiences, which provide pre-service teachers with the opportunity to engage with theoretical and conceptual ideas about learning and teaching in a supported classroom environment. From the perspective of pre-service teachers’ learning, these experiences are relatively well documented. Drawing on journal entries spanning several years, this chapter instead explores how a teacher educator negotiates a professional experience space to make the most of this opportunity in terms of how it informs her own thinking, practice and ultimately ways of being.