הייחוד שבביחד: התבוננות אוטואתנוגרפית-שיתופית במקומן של קהילות עמיתים בחייהם של מכשירי מורים

Many lecturers in teacher education colleges choose to work and research in communities of practice. In this study the place of communities in the professional and personal lives of teacher educators is examined via a collaborative autoethnography of four lecturers (the authors of this manuscript). Autoethnography is a research method that allows researchers to express their personal voice in order to raise social and cultural insights. Each author wrote a narrative about his or her professional biography. These were analyzed holistically. Then, a grounded theory approach was used to find common themes in the narratives. The findings indicate that there are links between the history of the authors and their engagement in communities. Additionally, they all have a great deal in common. They all participated in communities to increase their sense of belonging, advance their research skills, improve their teaching practices, promote changes, and ascend in the organization's hierarchy. Engaging in communities of practice was also connected with the development of a professional identity of "a teacher educator within a higher education institution" – a role for which there is no formal training, and which includes contradictory characteristics of school and university cultures. Several challenges emerge from collaborative work, including a contradictory message from the college management: encouraging collaborative research, yet favoring publications written by a single author.