Search results

In this chapter, we deliberately attempt to reframe the “self” in self-study of professional practices by focus on how “self” can be conceptualized in ways that do not equate “self” with “I.” Drawing insights from Deleuze and Guattarian’s (1987) rhizomatic philosophy, and particular the concept of assemblage, the objective was to engage with a research assemblage to investigate its function and production. We – i.e., a doctoral candidate, who was researching his practice of teaching pre-service teachers, his two supervisors, and his critical friend – engaged with audio data from our meetings conducted throughout a four-year period. Zooming in on the research assemblage at times when we were provoked to reorganize, adapt, and enhance our systems of thinking (Ovens, Garbett, & Hutchinson, 2016), we highlight the nonlinear and fundamentally relational process of constructing knowledge in self-study of professional practices. We argue that the researcher-self became only one of multiple human and non-human components in a joint construction of knowledge. We suggest that self-study researchers can decenter the researcher-self by embracing a research stance of “coming into composition” (Strom & Martin, 2017) where the researcher engages with a research assemblage to construct joint understanding of teaching and learning. This stance to self-study requires researchers to make themselves into a rhizome.

In this volume, we ask what happens when the researcher in forms of intimate scholarship is decentered – no longer the focus, but merely one part of an entangled material-discursive formation collectively producing the “results” of the inquiry. In the midst of the current ontological turn in qualitative research, we argue that this form of scholarship offers the opportunity to address directly the question of the post-human subject and generate thinking for the field of qualitative research more broadly. In particular, chapters in this volume highlight ways that researchers of teaching and teacher education practices can advance conversations and knowledge in education while exploring theories with an ontological view of the world as fundamentally multiple, dynamic, fluid, and co-constituted by entangled material and discursive forces. Authors “put to work” post-human, nonlinear, and multiplistic theories and concepts to disrupt and decenter the “I” or researcher-subject in self-focused methodologies, and/or to analyze knowledge and practice as co-produced by multiplicities of human/material and incorporeal elements in which the self is but one temporally “individuated” or “subjectivized” component. In the introduction, we provide brief discussions of intimate scholarship and post-human perspectives, followed by an orientation to the content of the this book.