Crossing the Threshold: Reciprocal Learning in Transdisciplinary Polyvocal Self-Study

• In Event: How Can We Extend Self-Study Scholarship (and Why Might We Want To)?

Abstract

Purpose
We are teacher educators who have been facilitating and participating in transdisciplinary self-study research communities since 2010. Over the last decade, our work has centered on the transdisciplinary extension and enactment of self-study methodology within our respective home countries, where we have taught and learned with faculty and students. We have worked with colleagues outside our disciplines and across continents to study the enactment of transdisciplinary self-study. In this study, we ask, “What have we as teacher educators gained through extending self-study scholarship in transdisciplinary communities?” and “What impact have we witnessed for others?”

Perspectives
Through our our transdisciplinary, transnational interaction and reciprocal learning, self-study has become more than a research methodology. For us, it is a continuing process of seeking out innovative and responsive ways of knowing and re-knowing, seeing and becoming, as facilitators and enactors of self-study research in transdisciplinary situations—what we have come to call polyvocal self-study (Authors, 2015, 2018, 2019). Our conceptualization of polyvocality has made visible how dialogic encounters with diverse ways of seeing, knowing, and doing can deepen and extend professional learning, knowing, and practice through self-study research.

Modes of inquiry and data sources
We have consistently used poetry and dialogue as literary arts-based modes for exploring and representing our self-study research and practice in inventive, co-creative (collaboratively creative), and polyvocal ways (Authors, 2015, 2017, 2019). Our use of a combination of poetry and dialogue as collaborative inquiry has developed into a poetic bricolage self-study method (Authors, 2019). In the arts, bricolage denotes “construction or creation from a diverse range of available things” (Bricolage, 2018). For this study, we generated a poetic bricolage by creating a cluster of poems (Butler-Kisber & Stewart, 2009) composed of words from three of our published dialogues. Thus, the dialogues were our data sources. We fashioned our research and meaning-making process in an extemporary way with an openness that positioned our work as inquiry-guided (Mishler, 1990).

Substantiated conclusions
The poetry cluster that emerged served as an organic abstract of the impact of transdisciplinary self-study on our teacher education practices and of the reciprocal impact for others. Here, we offer an example of a poem from the cluster, titled, “Crossing the Threshold ↔ Reciprocal Learning”. The poem is in the tanka form, which portrays an image in the first two lines and expresses a response to that image in the final two lines, with the third line marking the shift of perspective (Poets.org., 2004).

Crossing the Threshold ↔ Reciprocal Learning

Playing with ideas
Inventing and exploring
Wide-ranging learning
Moving out of my own lens
Enriched by new encounters


Scholarly significance
The groundwork established by the self-study of teacher education practices community serves as a touchstone and vital resource. Self-study research continues to evolve because of the ongoing developments envisioned and enacted by teacher educators. We have been opening a gate for our global self-study community to extend self-study research to other practitioners. Our poetic bricolage self-study highlights the reciprocal learning that we have experienced by crossing that threshold.

Authors

• Kathleen Pithouse-Morgan, University of KwaZulu-Natal

• Anastasia P. Samaras, George Mason University