This article presents the nontraditional research of four teacher educators who used their own stories about teaching and their responses to those stories to problematize their work with preservice elementary education teachers. The data were analyzed using qualitative data methods of coding, categorizing, and interpreting. Among the themes that emerged from the analyses of their stories and responses to each other's stories were profound emotional dimensions of their college teaching experiences. The conflicts underlying these emotions include issues of creating constructivist classrooms, the perceived dichotomy between the university and the "real world," and educators' desires to be both nurturing and instructive. The piece concludes with implications for other teacher educators.As teacher educators, we frequently confront the conflicts between the beliefs and practices we desire in preservice teachers and those that preservice teachers develop during field placements. We often feel frustrated that students in our reading methods courses leave our classrooms with one set of ideas and then acquire completely different notions about literacy, learning, and teaching in their clinical experiences. When facing these students as they return from the field, we sometimes wish to "wash them clean" from the ideas they have learned. In other words, we have the urge to cleanse students of the beliefs and practices they bring back from the field, to figuratively wash them down as one would hose down one's car after driving down a muddy road. This desire troubles us, because it contradicts our constructivist philosophies and it implies a lack of respect for the cooperating teachers and schools where field placements take place.The purpose of this project, then, was to problematize our wish to wash the students clean. Our goal was to develop insights into our own desires for our students and our work. In this way, we wished to understand ways in which we actually do influence preservice teachers' beliefs and practices and to explore our responses to the limitations on our ability to exert such influence.
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