Pedagogical Challenges of Immigrant Minority Teacher Educators: A Collaborative Autoethnography Study

Abstract

AbstractOftentimes, novice teacher educators need to navigate social and institutional context when they transitioned from teachers to teacher educators. This is particularly true for minority teacher educators. To date, studies on pedagogical challenges that minority teacher educators encountered when teaching in a dominating foreign culture are understudied. This paper concerns pedagogical challenges of two novice teacher educators teaching in a transcultural context where their home languages and cultures are marginalized relative to the U.S. mainstream culture. Using collaborative autoethnography, we investigated our own pedagogical challenges related to language, culture, and power structure through the notion of third space. In a teacher preparation program at a mid-western university, we as doctoral students taught white teacher candidates in courses of world language and elementary mathematics methods, respectively. We position ourselves as immigrant MTEs from China and South Korea. The study focuses our reflection on teaching practices as novice teacher educators in the U.S. and the relationships of these practices to personal and professional life experiences in home countries. We collected the data by interviewing each other with topics, such as our teaching practices and pedagogical challenges. We analyzed the data by coding inductively and deductively. To increase the reliability and creditability of our analysis process, we did a cross check by examining each other’s selected interview excerpts and codes that we labeled. We presented three findings on pedagogical challenges pertaining to language, culture, and sociopolitical dimensions and how we negotiated our perspectives of teaching and learning. This study has implications on supporting minority teacher educators and the pedagogy of teacher education.