Entangled Laborings in Online Teacher Education: Subaltern Negotiations

How were online university teachers’ identities affected during the Covid-19 pandemic? Inquiry into the entangled laborings experienced during the pandemic years expanded as we, a small community of online teacher educators in the U.S. Southwest, teased out our experiences between spring 2020 and fall 2022 semesters. This intergenerational self-study by five online university teacher educators during the [unsettling] period of the Covid-19 pandemic reflects our attempts to unravel the evolution and transformation of our teacher identities as we struggled to negotiate our subaltern status within the university, the challenges of equity and inclusion in our online classrooms, and the disruptive elements in our lives and the lives of our students. To conduct this study, we drew on Self-Study of Teacher Education Practices (S-STEP) research methodology which enabled us to deconstruct our experiences in a collaborative and place-centered manner. As a collective, we questioned the emotional, physical, and pedagogical, laborings which we encountered daily through the lens of plática, the practice of deliberate relational conversation that centers everyday experiences and emphasizes healing. This reflective self-study examined (1) the laborings that have been required of us as we have embraced becoming online teacher educators; (2) the experiences during the pandemic that informed our becomings and (3) our roles as female teachers in convoluted/turbulent times. Our findings reveal the dynamic and adaptive nature of the construction of teacher identity in terms of transformative praxis [and community] in the face of new challenges, new technologies, and new assemblages.