How Can Gendered Reflexivity Be Used to Deconstruct Teacher Educators’ Intellectual Configurations?

This research investigates how gendered reflexivity functions as a conceptual tool for teacher educators to deconstruct their intellectual configurations regarding gender. We draw on the phenomenological approach, and Bourdieu’s reflexive sociology, and field theory to analyse teacher educators’ gendered experiences in the field. To conduct this analysis, we had focus group discussions with teacher educators inviting them to engage in a self-reflexive process on their practices and experiences within the context of dominant gender relations in the field. Through focus group discussions, we tried to understand how teacher educators make sense of their experiences of gender issues and how the practices that constitute these experiences are sustained by the relations in the field. The moments when differentiated understandings of practices and experiences emerged in these discussions let us see a potential that could lead the agents to rethink their practices. Gendered reflexivity, which can be regarded as agents’ awareness of their practices and discourses concerning gender and as a continuous and conscious questioning of what mediates these practices and discourses, can serve as a conceptual tool to deconstruct and transform teacher educators’ existing gendered intellectual configurations.