The crucial tensions that emerge in a pedagogy of teacher education—the theory/practice gap, the struggles to represent the rich complexities of practice, the challenge to “teach” relational practice, and the preparation of a largely white, female teaching force for diverse communities and populations––often seem more elusive despite decades of research, and tinkering in innovation. The intractableness of these tensions is, in large part, emergent from the ways the pedagogy of teacher education is situated within the neoliberal agenda of the university, centered on patriarchal academic notions that favor individualistic, hierarchical, and logical ways of knowing with little, if any, attention to the limitations of such ways of being. As decades long doctoral faculty in teacher education, we take up and model a feminist teacher education pedagogy to prepare teacher educators to navigate these critical tensions in their work with the next generations of teachers.

Specifically, we describe our feminist embodied co/autoethnographic self-study where we examine the blurring principles of our feminist friendship epistemology as a model of teacher education pedagogy. We define this framework as a stance focused on building relationships with and mentoring our doctoral students through caring collaboration, co-construction of knowledge, and embodied self-reflection. We explore how our own learning to be teacher educators and scholars has shaped this work. We emphasize a blurring of boundaries between the individual and the collective, authority and dialogic negotiation, and the creative and the practical. We share some of the principles of our feminist friendship epistemology. Then we briefly describe our co/autoethnographic methodology to provide insight into our process of self-reflection and f analyze our narratives of becoming teacher educators and co-mentoring of doctoral students as teacher educators. We offer a vision for how feminist teacher education pedagogy invites a radical re-imagining for how we prepare and mentor teacher educators.

Research Aim

This S-STEP research engaged diffractive readings of Jane Eyre (Brönte, 1943), Black Skin, White Masks (Fanon, 1952), and The Racial Contract (Mills, 1997). Diffractive readings revealed insights about (white) women’s education, (white) women’s roles as teachers, and the way in which colonialism frames and shapes expectations for how (white) women can/should act as disruptive agents.

Theoretical Framework

Women teach and learn in Jane Eyre; they also mentor each other about working with children and responding to controlling men. Jane Eyre draws on and shapes colonizing discourse—yet interpretations often focus on white feminism (Hanley, 2009; Mohanty, 2003; Spivak, 1985, 1993). Since Jane Eyre contains plot elements from the Caribbean (Jamaica), Fanon’s (1952) and Mills’ (1952) work provides insights through observations as raced/gendered Afro-Caribbean people. Reading multiple texts through one another is a critical posthumanist strategy. For example, Jackson (2020) read philosophical works about Black(end) peoples through Toni Morrison’s work.

Methods

My diffractive reading responded relations of differences that mattered (Barad, 2007). Over a 4-month period, I read Jane Eyre, then Fanon, then Mills. Simultaneously, I was part of a reading group focused on decoloniality, which supported reflective practice (Berry, 2004). Using notetaking, I cross-read for consistent ideas and insights (Thomas, 2018). Reading group members provided opportunities for sharing emerging thinking. I solidified thoughts into findings through word art (Samaras, 2010).

Findings

First, Jane Eyre brought forward women’s solidarity in disrupting colonizing educational structures while Fanon (1952) and Mills (1997) argued that issues of race/gender separate women by worthiness, complicating noticing of shared problems. Second, lauded feminist strategies of demurring followed by defiance is more complex when applied cross-contextually.

Relevance

(White) women teacher educators may use diffractive activities with pre/in-service teachers to promote de/colonial noticing; it also enables a turn-to-self for difficult-to-recognize insights about applying feminisms for social justice.

As teachers and teacher educators committed to equity and inclusion in education, we [the authors] aim to consistently examine our teaching practices and act upon what we uncover through critical reflection. While we have engaged in this work individually, we have found that the dialogue and collaboration grounded in our feminist partnership is a powerful tool for teacher reflection and development (Authors, 2024; Klein & Taylor, 2023; Tillmann-Healy, 2003). Through partnership, we worked (and continue to work) to support one another as we move from reflection, to decision making, and ultimately, to action. We drew on our feminist friendship to engage in collaborative self-study via an ongoing dialogic journal through which we analyze critical incidents from our teaching—often moments of tension that challenged our commitment to social justice and equity. We turned to our queer feminist foundation (Kuzmic, 2014; Marinucci, 2010; Murray & Kalayji, 2018) as we examined the ways we disrupted our pedagogical choices and our evolving feelings about those actions. To spark our dialogic journaling, we used analytic questions including:

• How does our queer feminist stance inform our reflective practices?

• What barriers get in the way of fostering our commitments to equity and justice?

• How does collaboration support our practice?

Our data included iterations of individual journaling, written responses to each other’s reflections, and transcripts from our dialogues via Zoom. Each of these data points guided our analysis of the critical incidents we examined. Our collaborative self-study deepened our investigations as we questioned, challenged, and co-constructed meaning in partnership. Through it, we were able to make sense out of difficult moments, challenge ourselves to grow in our dedication to equitable teaching practices, take transformative action, and support one another as we navigated the barriers that we often face as we disrupt oppressive systems.

In our self-study analyses of our student evaluations of teaching, read through the lens of critical discourse analysis, we found a predominant theme: white students found discomfort in being challenged, particularly by professors of color. Despite the increasing diversity of our K-12 student population, the vast majority of the K-12 teaching force remains white; according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (2019), there are currently 9,313,000 teachers, 81.5% of whom are white. We must, as teacher educators, continue to critically reflect on our material conditions, and our own cultural contexts—and insist that our teacher education students do the same—engaging in a dialectic between theory and practice. Freire reminds us to challenge our students to read the world critically especially when it becomes uncomfortable to those who find power from the innocence of the exploited (Freire, 1998a).

Building a theoretical framework that incorporates culturally responsive pedagogy, anti-racist pedagogy, critical race theory, and self-study, can assist teacher educators in developing more critically conscious teachers. This framework aims to equip educators and teacher candidates with the tools and mindset necessary to engage in critical self-examination, develop a critical consciousness, and, ultimately, transform their praxis in a way that positively impacts not just themselves, but their students as well. Decades of research on teacher education illustrates the need for teachers to involve themselves in their students’ worlds (Delpit, 2009), reject deficit notions of their students (Emdin, 2016), build and sustain relationships with their students and communities (Milner, 2018), and develop a critical consciousness (Ladson-Billings, 2009).

Our self-study process relates to the anti-oppressive education approach (Kumashiro, 2004). The anti-oppressive education approach seeks to disrupt traditional paradigms in the field of education for social justice, encouraging us to discover what oppression is and what changes need to be made in our field.