| This self-study focuses on critical incidences (CIs) that occurred during three personal and professional periods of one teacher's life: a semester abroad as an undergraduate; an independent fellowship year abroad as a post-graduate; and, as a volunteer serving abroad. Using constant comparison methods to analyze archival documents generated in intercultural educational settings and contemporary data drawn from interviews and surveys with fifty participants, the study concentrates on how CIs did or did not affect the teacher's intercultural competence and identity development. Methods of inquiry utilized include ghostwriting (Rhodes, 2000) and shadowwriting (Clerke, 2009), and introduce a technique called BENCHspeaking to activate co-participants' voices. Five contested identity metaphors that emerge to describe the researcher's personal and professional identity are exposed: homebody, social networker, boundary pusher, opportunist, and goal setter. Teacher educators' ability to cultivate intra-cultural competence, personally and professionally, conclude the research, and pedagogical suggestions and implications for contributing to pre-service and teacher educator identity development are outlined. |
