Studying Teacher Education

A journal of self-study of teacher education practices

ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cste20

The Role of Self-study in Times of Radical Change

Amanda Berry & Julian Kitchen

To cite this article: Amanda Berry & Julian Kitchen (2020) The Role of Self-study
in Times of Radical Change, Studying Teacher Education, 16:2, 123-126, DOI:
10.1080/17425964.2020.1777763

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/17425964.2020.1777763

Published online: 04 Jun 2020.

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STUDYING TEACHER EDUCATION
2020, VOL. 16, NO. 2, 123–126
https://doi.org/10.1080/17425964.2020.1777763

EDITORIAL

The Role of Self-study in Times of Radical Change

This editorial is written in the midst of the covid-19 pandemic. Educators across the globe
and at all levels of schooling have been forced to quickly adjust to this strange, uncertain
and challenging situation. Members of our education community are grappling with new
and different ways to engage learners from a distance and to connect with, and create,
community. There is no one-size-fits all approach as contexts, learners and opportunities
differ within and across classrooms, schools, regions and countries. Much public discus­
sion is focused on this moment as an opportunity for educational transformation, to re-
think long held assumptions about teaching, learning and schooling and to create new
transformative possibilities.
Self-study has important contributions to make in these times for documenting the
experiences and insights that come from radical educational change. As a methodology,
self-study of teacher education practices aims to understand situated human activity from
the perspectives of those engaged in it. In the current covid-19 environment questions of
relevance for self-study could include: What are the lived experiences of teacher educa­
tors as they undergo these changes with their learners? What is gained? What is lost?
What taken-for-granted assumptions about teaching and learning are raised and chal­
lenged? How do our learners’ responses to this situation help us see our own pedagogical
practices differently? And, how might we develop insights that contribute to richer
understandings of teaching and learning and to the public scholarship of teacher educa­
tion practices? Through self-study, we can examine our teacher education practices and
contexts with a view to transforming our practice and redefining education.
While the articles in this issue were not written during the pandemic, their common
theme of examining the alignment between pedagogical intentions and actions is very
recognizable and applicable to the current covid-situation. In each article, the authors
seek to better understand how they can ‘walk their talk’ in more genuine, deliberate and
generative ways as they engage individually and collaboratively in this process.
The opening article, ‘An Indigenous Approach to Self-Study of Teacher Education
Practices in Aotearoa New Zealand,’ by Rachel Martin from the University of Otago, New
Zealand, and Chris Astall, Kay-Lee Jones and Des Breeze from the University of Canterbury,
New Zealand, brings together a Māori (indigenous) centered framework with self-study
principles to inquire into the authors’ identities as teachers and learners. As a group of
indigenous and non-indigenous teacher educators, Martin and her colleagues collectively
explored their different worldviews and knowledges, leading them to more nuanced
understandings of their different landscapes of practice. Together they developed narra­
tive dialogues based on Māori principles and values that enabled them to challenge their
conceptions about culturally responsive practices and opened up new ways of thinking
and working together. As a consequence of their self-study, Martin and her colleagues
made an important shift in their approach to teaching and learning, from providing pre-

© 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group

124 EDITORIAL

service teachers with culturally responsive teaching strategies to purposefully embedding

these practices in the development and teaching of their teacher education programme.
Their study offers a ‘he wero’ (challenge) to all teacher educators, particularly non-Māori
educators, to critically reflect on their own knowledge perspectives and norms of practice
in order to improve their understanding of, and approach to, culturally inclusive practices.
‘Cultivating a Self-Study Community of Practice: Reflections of Faculty on Issues of
Evolution and Functioning’ also focuses on teacher educator development through
collaborative self-study. Karen Goodnough, Christine Arnold, Saiqa Azam, Kimberly
Maich, Alireza Moghaddam, Sharon Penney and Gabrielle Young, from the Memorial
University of Newfoundland in Canada, document the evolution of their self-study
group over 18 months as they conceptualized and implemented a shared self-study
inquiry. Drawing on the self-study research of others, including Kitchen et al. (2008) and
Patton and Parker (2017), Goodnough and her colleagues present their emerging under­
standing of the meaning of collaborative self-study as one of the mechanisms that
facilitates effective, productive collaboration for supporting teacher educator learning.
In the next article, ‘A Collaborative Self-Study of Critical Digital Pedagogies in Teacher
Education’ Jamilee Baroud from the University of Ottawa, Canada and Pooja Dharamshi
from Simon Fraser University, Canada, examine their learning about teaching critical
perspectives with technology. Concerned to go beyond simply building technical profi­
ciencies, they sought to better understand how they might embed teaching and learning
about the cultural and social contexts of technology use and integration into their literacy
methods courses. Drawing on data sources in the form of memos and shared on-line
reflections, they combined a critical stance perspective with self-study methodology to
enhance their focus on the relationship between action and reflection. Analysis of their
data revealed four main themes of: teacher educator uncertainty; teacher candidate
resistance; flawed engagement; and connecting students lived experiences to the curri­
culum. Based on these themes, they re-designed their pedagogical approach to more
purposefully cultivate a critical perspective in their teaching and their students’ learning.
‘Tensions and Possibilities in Fostering Critical Language Ideologies in Elementary
Teacher Education,’ by Rebecca Woodard and Arthi Rao from the University of Illinois in
Chicago, USA, continues the theme of teacher educators seeking to go beyond content
and skills, to cultivate a particular stance in their pre-service teachers. Woodard and Rao
investigated the developing critical language ideologies of their elementary pre-service
teachers through a series of semi-structured interviews over two years. From the analysis
of their interview data, they identified three main tensions experienced by the pre-service
teachers of navigating the push-pull of standard language ideologies; consistently recog­
nizing language as resource; and expanding positioning of multilingual students’ abilities.
Woodard and Rao then turned the themes towards themselves, examining their own
practices, identities, and curriculum. Through their study, they identified possible ways in
which their courses might contribute to these tensions and critically reflected on how
they could adapt their teaching to help pre-service teachers navigate these tensions.
Amanda Gebhard’s self-study, ‘Power Relations, Knowledge Productions, and Teaching
against Oppression in an Elementary Classroom on the Canadian Prairies’, takes us into
her experiences of returning to teach in a Canadian elementary school. Inspired by her
recently completed doctoral studies, Gebhard sought to enact the anti-oppressive
approaches she advocated through her dissertation and in her pre-service teacher
 STUDYING TEACHER EDUCATION 125

education university courses. Her self-study was initiated as a consequence of the ten­
sions that quickly emerged as she attempted to put her beliefs into practice. Using
a critical incident approach and with the support of a trusted critical friend who encour­
aged and challenged her thinking and provided alternative theoretical lenses, Gebhard
examined the ways in which power relations manifested through everyday life at school.
From her study, she came to recognize the important potential within everyday moments
at school for disrupting oppressive discourses and the value of self-study as a tool for
learning to teach against oppression. Her findings contribute new insights into what
makes anti-oppressive education both difficult and possible.
A similar theme, being confronted with discrepancies between beliefs and practices, is the
focus of the next article, ‘Disrupting My Teaching Practices: A Teacher Educator Living as
A Contradiction’ by Tim Buttler from Burman University, Canada. Buttler’s study emerged from
a critical incident in which he recognized that his science teacher education practices did not
reflect the constructivist perspective he espoused. His self-study focused on an examination of
his practice in order to identify how he might better understand and align his beliefs and
practices. Drawing on a range of lenses, including an autobiographical account of significant
education-related life experiences, video recordings of his teaching, a reflective journal, course
documents and the perspectives of several critical friends, Buttler sought to unpack his
perspectives and pedagogy. An interesting component of the study is his decision to include
three different critical friends: a high school principal and two university professors from
different universities, to challenge his thinking and support his search for alternative perspec­
tives. Although he acknowledged that data analysis did not reveal any particular surprises, the
value of his self-study emerged through the identification of three themes to guide future
efforts to align his beliefs and practices: changing the questions he asks, changing the role of
students in the learning process, and changing how he accounts for the context of teaching.
The final article in this issue, ‘Managing the Critical Friendship: Using Self-Study in the
Doctoral Supervision Process’ by Andrew Richards University of Illinois at Urbana-
Champaign, USA, and Victoria Nicole Shiver from Northern Illinois University, USA, focuses
on the process of building a critical friendship between doctoral student and advisor.
Their article builds on a small yet growing area of self-study research investigating the
doctoral process as an educative relationship. Data were collected via individual reflective
journals as well as formal and informal critical friend discussions. Data analysis embraced
Bullock and Ritter's (2011) notion of turning points and via this process the authors
identified three ‘turning points’ related to the development of their mentoring relation­
ship: initial apprehensions and shared frustrations, learning about and coming to trust
one another through critical friendship, and creating a more enjoyable and effective
supervisory relationship. Ultimately their study led to their reframing of power so that
instead of creating division and disrupting their ability to be honest, power became
something that they recognized, appreciated, and addressed as a necessary component
that ultimately enabled the emergence of a true critical friendship.
The covid-19 situation will potentially last for some time and its impact on education
will be felt in a variety of ways. We encourage readers to engage in self-studies of their
practices during these times of radical disruption. We welcome contributions to Studying
Teacher Education that consider the varying effects of change on education and how we
as teacher educators can contribute to the transformation of education.
126 EDITORIAL

References
Bullock, S. M., & Ritter, J. K. (2011). Exploring the transition into academia through collaborative
self-study. Studying Teacher Education, 7(2), 171–181. https://doi.org/10.1080/17425964.2011.
591173
Kitchen, J., Ciuffetelli Parker, D., & Gallagher, T. (2008). Authentic conversation as faculty develop­
ment: Establishing a self-study group in a faculty of education. Studying Teacher Education, 4(2),
157–171. https://doi.org/10.1080/17425960802433637
Patton, K., & Parker, M. (2017). Teacher education communities of practice: More than a culture of
collaboration. Teaching & Teacher Education, 67, 351–360. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tate.2017.06.
013

Amanda Berry
Faculty of Education, Monash University, Clayton, Australia
amanda.berry@monash.edu http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9902-7582
Julian Kitchen
Faculty of Education, Brock University, Canada