Abstract

While teaching is increasingly being accepted as a discipline there is a growing emphasis on teacher educators researching their own practice to advance the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) (Loughran & Russell, 2007). This study sought to explore the extent to which self-study contributes to teacher educators’ understanding of the SoTL within the discipline of teaching. While self-study is generally accepted as a scholarly approach (Kitchen, 2015) the aim here is to address the call for selfstudy researchers to evince a commitment to a practice-based and theory-building research agenda by linking with public theories (Vanassche & Kelchtermans, 2015), in this case the SoTL (Kreber & Cranton, 2000). Additionally given that self-study is collaborative (Loughran, 2010) findings here may help to somewhat address the dearth of knowledge about teacher educator collaboration (Heldens, Bakx & den Brok, 2015). A self-study approach was adopted to explore a journey of two teacher educators as they designed, implemented and evaluated new modules in special and inclusive education withinaninitial teacher education programme in the Republic of Ireland. Analysis and synthesis of data from 24 student teachers and two teacher educators provide insights and understandings into the collaborative interactions and factors that enabled and hindered these interactions. This may support other teacher educators develop a collaborative pedagogical culture to enhance greater understanding of the SoTL We argue for adopting self-study as a scholarly approach to engage with other theories, such as SoTL, thus contributing to the broader field of teacher education research.