How Is the Process of Self-Study Transforming Me as a Doctoral Researcher and as an Academic at a University of Technology in South Africa?

• In Event: “Starting With Ourselves”: Perspectives From the Transformative Education/al Studies Project

Abstract

Higher Education in South Africa has, amongst its many challenges to deal with, the issue of poor undergraduate success and throughput among students from the previously disadvantaged communities as well as the subminimum academic staff qualifications (ASSAf, 2010; Scott, Yeld & Hendry, 2007). I identify with these issues both as a doctoral student from a previously disadvantaged community and as an academic staff member teaching at a University of Technology in South Africa. I have found that the self-study approach to education/al research is appropriate in my Higher Education context since "knowing more about ourselves as teachers and teacher educators changes us, provokes growth, jolts us out of complacency – sometimes radically, in ways that can seem transformative…The very process of self-study itself changes its practitioners and their situations. Seeing things differently, self-study can prod us to take action" (Pithouse, Mitchell & Weber, 2009, p. 48). It is in changing myself and my situation during both my practice and my research that I believe I am contributing to the American Educational Research Association’s mission to “promote the use of research to improve education and serve the public good” (Ball & Tyson, 2011, p. 198), particularly in South Africa.

In this presentation, I will explore my lived experience as a Higher Education practitioner and part-time doctoral student, showing how my research as well as my practice have been transformed during my self-study research process. Whilst doing a self-study, I have examined my own values, beliefs, knowledges and hence ways of knowing, being and becoming as a practitioner-researcher in Higher Education to provide an account for my understanding of learning as a biochemical process. It is in systematically examining my practice through telling my own stories, the stories of those that I interact with as a professional academic developer and the use of multimedia that I have become more aware of the various educational influences on my practice. Through the application of Marcel Jousse’s “Laws of the Anthropology of Geste and Rhythm” (Jousse, 2000), I discover how changes in my values and my beliefs are associated with biochemical changes occurring in my whole being as a result of intussusception. My new knowledge of myself, my educational influences as well as the educational influences of those I interact with during my doctoral study have transformed my practice both as a doctoral researcher and as a practitioner. This transformation has resulted in the generation of a living theory (Whitehead, 2008) that offers spiritual resilience gained through a connection with a loving dynamic energy as a standard of judgement.

Author

• Delysia Timm, Durban University of Technology