In current educational research, there is an ideological chasm between the practical and the theoretical (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009; Darling-Hammond, 2016). An invisible boundary has been drawn, placing teacher educators and educational researchers into distinct and opposing camps. As new faculty in a college of education, we grapple with bridging the divide, as neither of these narrowly defined identities accurately reflects our conceptions of self.

Working toward creating identities that align with our epistemological and ontological stances on teaching and scholarship, we posed the following questions to ourselves and each other: How do we, as first-year education professors, negotiate these tensions to reject this false dichotomy and locate ourselves beyond this schism? How do we critically engage these fictitious archetypes to develop a new sense of eudaimonic self which resonates with our professional well-being?

We engaged in conversations to help us articulate a new sense of self that positions our researcher and educator identities in eudaimonic harmony, rather than in conflict (Bauer, McAdams, & Pals, 2008). Here we story how this dialogic inquiry (Skidmore & Murakami, 2016) facilitated the identity reconstruction process as we transformed into practitioner researchers.