Who Does Self-Study? Looking Beyond Teacher Education

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

Abstract

Purpose
Self-study scholars can struggle with scholarly acceptance of their work and the field often perceived as “emerging” after 25 years, even as other areas within qualitative research such as case study and ethnography have become readily accepted and used by researchers. Cole and Knowles (1998) argued that “unless self-study processes are applied more widely [beyond teacher education] … chances are that this progression of acceptance will not happen with the same potency nor at the same pace” (p. 229). This paper serves to frame the broader problems of acceptance facing self-study scholarship by reviewing the presence of self-study research in practice-oriented fields outside teacher education and making the case for its inclusion in said fields.

Perspectives
Education belongs to an area of human sciences that Polkinghorne (2004) terms the “practices of care.” He noted that within the varied areas of human sciences, narrative research provides certain benefits to developing an understanding of practice and personal growth. His concept of narrative knowing in the human sciences focuses on the meaning we make of practice and self (Polkinghorne, 1988, 2004). With the emergence of practitioner-oriented scholarship in these care professions, there exists an opportunity to consider how self-study might be applied more widely beyond education (Cole & Knowles, 1998).

Modes of Inquiry
This paper draws on one part of a chapter in the forthcoming second edition of the International Handbook of Self-Study of Teaching and Teacher Education Practices (Kitchen et al., in press). The chapter answered the question of, who does self-study and why? Pertinent to this paper and symposium is the final third of the chapter, in which the authors sought to determine to what extent self-study research was present in what Polkinghorne (1988, 2004) considers “practices of care” that fall outside education (e.g., nursing and medical education, physical and occupational therapy, social work, counseling). Beyond looking for the presence of self-study in these fields, which was generally absent aside from nursing education, we also searched for literature from a narrative “I” perspective (i.e., narrative inquiry, autoethnography) (Hamilton et al., 2008) to ascertain the possibility of self-study emerging as a viable research option in these fields.

Substantiated Conclusions
In our review, we found self-study research to be minimally used in the identified “practices of care.” Nursing education was the sole area in which self-study research existed, limited to transdisciplinary scholarship at the turn of the century and recent work by nursing doctoral student (Barbour, 2016; Drevdahl et al., 2002; Louie et al., 2003; Woods, 2017). Rather, the norm in these fields was a more extensive use of narrative inquiry, nominally focused on the researcher, and the growing use of autoethnography. In our review, we saw rich opportunities to extend self-study into these areas as there are many overlapping questions related to identity, preparation and teaching. The symposium is grounded in these opportunities, as we collectively highlight a number of attempts to introduce self-study into transdisciplinary settings and note other ways in which self-study might be extended into practices of care.

Author

• Brandon M. Butler, Old Dominion University