Yet, the last few years have seen major changes in the ways that teachers and students interact. The advent of the COVID-19 pandemic ushered in a near total reliance on digital technology for teachers and students to do what previously would have been completed in an in-person, classroom setting. For myself, this was a dramatic shift. I began to reflect upon and rethink my understanding of being a teacher educator, how I was enacting this role, and the implications of relying on technology and objects to do my work. I had placed my students at the heart of my professional identity as a teacher educator, and I began to wonder how digital tools such as my laptop, smartphone, and other apparatuses were shaping my role and my work. I wondered how the use of resources such as Zoom, email, the internet, and others contributed to my teacher educator identity. Given that technology is assuming an even more central space in the field of education (most recently with the proliferation of artificial intelligence), it is vital to understand how the use of these tools, their affordances and limitations, and the opportunities these present in shaping our work.
In Teacher Educator Identity as a Relational Ontology: An Inquiry of the Entangled Self, I report on my experiences investigating these questions and themes. Over the course of one semester, I employed self-study inquiry methods to document, analyze, and assess my teaching practices (both in-person and online). Self-study enabled me to investigate how I supported my students’ learning and development; rather than focus on the teacher-student relationship, I turned my attention to the multiple technologies, resources, and material goods I employed to conduct my tasks and duties. In this way, I was able to gain greater insight into the role of “things” as constitutive elements in what it means to be a teacher educator and how these affected the direction of my work. I learned that a wide variety of objects, resources, and material artifacts had a shaping influence on me as a teacher educator and how this informed my teaching. This lens on my professional identity was not limited to the dynamics of a teacher-student relationship. Rather, it was expansive and I began to understand myself as entangled with the material and digital world. The reported study provides a way of thinking about identity that may be new to many teacher educators, teachers, and education researchers. The article is a thought-provoking work for those eager to learn more about the dynamic nature of being a teacher educator, self-study methods, and how material resources have a shaping effect on our professional practice.