Developing My Identity as a Research Educator: A Journey of Self-Reflexivity
Author: Mora, Raúl Alberto
Date: 2018-10-18
Type: Reports - Descriptive
Subjects: Professional Identity,Teacher Researchers,Reflective Teaching,Faculty Development,Teacher Education Programs,Graduate Students,Research Universities,Foreign Countries,Second Language Instruction

The notion that teachers should incorporate research into their own craft has gained traction over the past decade, becoming an increasing imperative. In the case of Colombia, for example, preservice education programs have incorporated research methods classes to their curricula along with the writing of a research paper for their senior thesis in addition to the traditional student teaching experience. Amid all this push to increase the research knowledge base of prospective teachers, an element of discussion remains amiss: what it means to prepare said teachers to become researchers. This issue is, for the most part, uncharted territory in the literature. Who gets to become a &quot;research educator,&quot; a term I have begun to use recently (Mora, 2014), still remains quite hazy. Should research educators be faculty members with PhDs? Should they be master researchers, according to national or international guidelines? What levels of professional development should we demand of these educators? Those are questions that are currently surrounding my own practice, shortly after finishing my doctorate at a &quot;Research I&quot; University in the United States in 2010. Specifically, this paper will zero in on my work as a research educator between 2011 and 2014, the time I was an Assistant Professor at my home university. I will share some of the issues I have encountered in the research education of three groups of students: (a) my students at the Student Research Group on Second Languages, where they are learning to do research within the field of second language literacies; (b) my graduate student at the Graduate Specialization in ELT and (c) my own master's advisees at the MA in Learning and Teaching Processes in Second Languages. This paper is grounded in three main ideas: (a) self-reflexivity, drawing from the initial understanding of reflexivity (Archer, 2007; Bourdieu &amp; Wacquant, 1992; Mora, 2011, 2012) as reflection with social and scientific foundations that leads to social change (Mora, 2014), but specifically framed in teacher education (Clift, 2009; Zeichner, 2006); (b) Self-Study of Teacher Education Practices (S-STEP, Bullough &amp; Pinnegar, 2001; Loughran, 2007; Pinnegar &amp; Hamilton, 2009), a research approach highly favored by teacher educators in the U.S. and Australia as a rigorous way to understand the evolution of personal practice over time; and (c) Auto-ethnography (Anderson, 2006; Ellis, Adams, &amp; Bochner, 2011; Muncey, 2005; Wall, 2006), as a methodology that values personal experience as build-up for larger research endeavors. This topic is increasingly relevant, in particular in Latin America, as I explore the different negotiations and transitions in which U.S.-trained doctoral graduates must engage to actively participate in the new teacher education realities of our home countries. This paper will also make recommendations for &quot;Research I&quot; institutions to help their international graduates in education and linguistics programs in the almost inevitable transition from their school classrooms to teacher education programs.