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The work of teacher education during student teaching typically takes place in two distinct "spaces": placement sites and college/university settings. The program featured in this article is structured in ways that clearly mark out those two spaces. Yet this configuration led our university supervisors, whose work primarily took place in the field, to feel like "outsiders." To redress this concern, a third learning space was incorporated into our student teaching seminar. We suggest that "third spaces" in combination with return-to-campus courses not only mitigates the peripherality of university supervisors, but also amplifies the influence of a teacher preparation program.

Drawing on his own experience as an illustrative case, the author examines the interplay of external influences and internal sense-making to explore aspects of teacher educator identity. Framed by attention to institutional, discursive and affinity perspectives on identity development, he argues that research and practice contexts in research-intensive schools and colleges of education in the USA contribute to uncertain conditions for the development of professional identity in the field of teacher education. Given an environment that sends mixed messages about the standards that most matter to knowing and acting in teacher education, teacher educators are encouraged to recognise their agency in claiming a sense of professional self, work with colleagues and students to cultivate deliberative inquiry spaces to shed light on the mystery of university-based teacher education, and explore the relationships embedded in the practice of teacher education that prompt recognition of what it means to be a teacher educator.

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This article presents an argument for self-study of teacher education practices as a means and ends tool for promoting reflective teaching. The assertion is that self-study serves a dual purpose: as a means to promote reflective teaching and as a substantive end of teacher education. The argument consists of a five-part theoretical rationale for the use of self-study in reflection-oriented teacher education programs. Taken together, the various components of this rationale suggest that the promotion of reflective teaching will require something other than an additive approach to teacher education reform. Rather, self-study calls for a reconceptualization of the very process of teacher education itself. When teacher educators adopt self-study as an integral part of their own professional practice, the terrain of teacher preparation shifts. Self-study becomes more than just a means to the treasured aim of reflective teaching-self-study becomes an end of teacher education in its own right.