On the Tension-Fraught Enterprise of Teaching Self-Study to Colleagues

• In Event: On Facilitating Self-Study of Teacher Education Practices in Different National and Transnational Contexts

Abstract

Objective

This study describes the experiences and challenges encountered by the author, a self-study practitioner, as he attempted to facilitate a group of seven departmental colleagues from his school of education in the United States in learning about and engaging in self-study over a three year period.

Theoretical framework

This self-study invokes Berry’s work (2004, 2008) on tensions to shed light on my experiences teaching self-study. Berry (2004) argued how the development of knowledge and understanding of practice gleaned through self-study could be conceptualized as tensions, explaining how the construct is “intended to capture both the feelings of internal turmoil that many teacher educators experience” and “the difficulties that many teacher educators experience as they learn to recognize and manage these opposing forces” (p. 1313).

Methods

It was decided in year one to hold meetings once every three weeks for two hours each. Representative activities included: instructor-led presentations, resource sharing, coding activities, question and answer sessions, open-ended discussion, and planning self-study inquiries. We also created a blog that had individual spaces for us to reflect, and a space where we could collectively engage in discussion. I drew upon these data to engage in an analytical process of “self-critical reflexivity,” described by Ham and Kane (2004) as an “iterative and consciously self-analytical reflection on, repetition of, and gathering data about, the purposeful actions that are the center of the study” (p. 129).

Data sources

Data sources consist of my journal entries from our blog, made after each of our meetings, as well as the artifacts I created for use by the group during our meetings.

Results

The struggle for me instructionally revolved around the tensions of ‘telling and growth’ and ‘planning and being responsive.’ The desire to reach some destination with my colleagues pushed up against what I knew was the equally important need to simply encourage their journeys. I also felt relational tensions, primarily between ‘safety and challenge’ and ‘valuing and reconstructing,’ in terms of how I interacted with my colleagues in a new professional setting. I tried to honor the experiences brought to the group, but fear this sometimes prevented me from pushing the group in new directions. Another tension that surfaced included ‘confidence and uncertainty;’ that is, I wanted to enhance my colleagues’ confidence in doing self-study at the same time as I wanted to promote awareness of the messiness of the process. Lastly, my own feelings of efficacy seemed influenced by the tension between ‘action and intent’ in that I remained concerned with how my actions were being perceived.

Significance

This study adds another perspective to the growing literature on teacher educators’ professional knowledge and development. Specifically this study furthers previous work on tensions by considering them in a new context. This study is also important in that it gives those of us in the S-STEP community an opportunity to reflect on the challenges that surfaced and to consider how we ought to deal with them to best advance understanding and use of the methodology to others.

Author

• Jason K. Ritter, Duquesne University