Inquiring about Teaching to Inquire: Teacher Educators Explore the Knowledge Embodied in Teaching to Inquire

• In Event: Considering the Embodied Knowledge of Teacher Educators

Abstract

Purpose
Drawing on Polyani’s (1967) definition of tacit knowledge as “know(ing) more than we can tell” (p. 4) and research on embodied knowledge among teacher educators (Ord & Nuthall, 2016; Jimenez, et al, 2025), we explore three teacher educators’ design and use of an inquiry project with preservice teachers. By collaboratively focusing on the inquiry project as an artifact of our practice and as a through line of our teacher education program, our intent is to try to make visible to ourselves and other teacher educators those layers of understanding and knowing – what Jimenez et al (2025) describe as layers of embodiment (p. 6) – about learning to teach that are implicit as frame, scaffold, and substance in our work and that could be of use in developing a knowledge base to guide the work of teacher educators.
Grossman et al (2009) describe three phases of pedagogy for professional learning: representation (witnessing exemplars of practice), decomposition (analyzing the practice witnessed), and approximation (enacting practices witnessed and studied). However, as Lortie (1975) demonstrated, the apprenticeship of observation is the paramount learning mode in teaching. Hence, the importance of situating inquiry and reflection as core to learning to teach and to teaching itself. The inquiry stance that is implicit to such work makes possible what Cochran-Smith and Lytle (1999) describe as knowledge “in” “for” and “of” practice, and, when what is learned is shared, discussed, analyzed, and practiced in community with other professionals professionals have a means to engage in relational witnessing (Jimenez, et al, 2025) in ways that blur the lines between theory and practice.
Only recently, however, has this growing understanding of the value of inquiry in learning to teach been applied to the professional learning of teacher educators (see Vanderlinde, et al, 2021; Snow, et al, 2022). The learning curve of teacher educators is qualitatively different from that of new teachers: Few teacher educators have been prepared for this work; their identity “as a teacher educator is constructed over time” (Goodwin & Kosnik, 2013, p. 334). Most enter higher education “moving from being first-order practitioners—that is schoolteachers—to being second-order practitioners” (Murray & Male, 2002, p. 126). The complexity of this adaptation cannot be underestimated. It “demands extended pedagogical expertise, the capability to teach the subject of teaching in the higher education setting, and a specific understanding of oneself as a teacher of Teachers” (Vanassche et al., 2015, p. 345).
Methods and Data Sources
For close to 10 years, we have been teaching together. In that time, we have we have drawn up lesson plans, developed protocols to scaffold our work, noted progress and process, shared writing tasks, developed a research archive, and met regularly to shape and reshape the inquiry project. It is this body of work that we call on here as the data of a collaborative self-study (Petrarca & Bullock, 2014; Louie et al., 2003) designed to shed light on how our learning as teacher educators about teacher education is embodied in our practice.

Authors

• Frances OC Rust, University of Pennsylvania

• Sonia M. Rosen, University of Pennsylvania

• Jessica Whitelaw, University of Pennsylvania