Resumen de Becoming and Being a TESOL Teacher Educator: Research and Practice
When I first heard about this book, the title immediately drew me in: it resonated with my career path, hinting at the process, growth, and identity involved in being and becoming a TESOL teacher educator. As with some contributors and participants in this research volume, my first experience with training teachers occurred somewhat by accident: I was asked to teach a course on ELT methods to Korean public school teachers because I had a master’s degree in applied linguistics and there was no one else to do it. Although I felt underprepared and underqualified, it was a good learning experience, even though I doubted my efficacy at the time. Now, as a professor of English education, training future English teachers is a core aspect of my teaching duties, but I am still learning new things and wondering what I can do better every year despite starting over fifteen years ago. What I found out early on is that unlike for preparing to become an English language teacher, there were no textbooks and very little scholarship geared toward becoming a teacher educator. As the editors state in their introduction, ‘university-based TESOL teacher educators are often self-made through their own experimentation and practice with limited contextual support in the higher education sector’ (p. 3), which was definitely the case in my own experience, and is also the case with many participants in the book. As the editors note, ‘the inception of this book thus derives from our shared concerns about the various challenges faced by TESOL teacher educators’ (p. 3) such as myself.
