Choosing the Margins: Possibilities and Exclusions of the Practitioner/Scholar

• In Event: Navigating Tensions in Teacher Educator Practices

Abstract

How do the intersectional identities of practitioner and scholar impact contributions to educational scholarship? What do these identities make possible? What do they make impossible? This paper examines the identity of the practitioner/scholar and what this dual identity affords in terms of knowledges, understandings, and experiences represented in academia. Through narrative inquiry, two practitioner/scholars examine their experiences in these margins over ten years of collaboration. This presentation makes visible the shape of insights and “data” that emerge from positioning ourselves as neither/both, as academics and practitioners. Our narrative data illuminate the conversations that emerge through the intersections of scholarship and practice encompassed in our own identities.

Authors

• Dana Frantz Bentley, Buckingham Browne and Nichols School

• Heather J. Pinedo-Burns, Teachers College, Columbia University