Learning from Experiences of Non-Personhood: A Self-Study of Teacher Educator Identities

This self-study examines how our non-personhood experiences (NPHEs) contributed to our teacher educator identity process. We took up exploration of these experiences, which were very painful for us, not as entree into victimhood but because we wanted to learn something about how, in the face of such experiences, we could engage with these troubling interactions in order to renew our commitment to our work as teacher educators in the university. During the analysis, we considered our stories on four overlapping dimensions: (1) our selves in our own story, (2) others in the story, (3) colleagues not in the story, and (4) non-colleagues and others not in the story. A framework for looking at our NPHEs allows teacher educators to attend to students' needs while simultaneously reasserting their own teacher educator identities in more honest and vulnerable ways. Analyzing NPHEs has the potential to help teacher educators engage and invite students to recognize teacher educators' personhood and thereby better position them to recognize the personhood of their future students.