Challenges, Dilemmas, and Future Directions in Teaching about Teaching

This section of the book introduces a number of interesting issues that emerge in different ways through the different chapters but combine to form an agenda most appropriate to the work of teaching and learning about teaching. Throughout these chapters issues about the nature of self and the manner in which an exploration of self impacts understandings of practice are clear. Similarly, the content of each study also demonstrates a diversity of individual understandings of, and approaches to, that which comprises the work of teacher education. In addition to this are the challenges and dilemmas inherent in teaching which, in themselves, generate an invitation for ongoing examination and are indicative of different beginning points pertinent to a consideration of the nature of self-study.

This review chapter is designed to bring out the issues inherent in the preceding chapters so that they might be considered in ways that build on the diversity of understandings and experiences offered by the authors. Thus, this chapter begins by considering how self-study might be conceptualized in relation to these authors’ work. This will set the scene for a discussion of the manner in which their studies might be interrogated, questioned, and understood in light of understandings of self-study and its impact on teaching and learning about teaching. In so doing, this chapter demonstrates the value of adopting a big picture perspective on the work of teacher education so that the bringing together of the various accounts (under the themes that have been distilled from the chapters) creates a coherent and meaningful whole for those wishing to better understand the possibilities for self-study of teaching and teacher education practices.