Search results

This chapter analyzes our practice as researchers engaged in intimate scholarship using the Framework of Analysis (Pinnegar & Hamilton, 2009) as an analytic tool to scrutinize the trustworthiness of our research practice and to develop a deeper understanding of how S-STEP research establishes itself as trustworthy and rigorous scholarship. With the recognition of S-STEP research and other forms of intimate scholarship as genres of teacher education research (Borko, Liston, & Whitcomb, 2007), scholars engaged and other forms of intimate scholarship can turn to a more rigorous inquiry into and critique of our work in order to consider how we might improve our practice as researchers and support and strengthen the position and future of this research. For these reasons, we take up a critique of a particular S-STEP research study using the Framework for Analysis in order to explore both whether the work studied can be judged trustworthy and what such examination reveals about the process of establishing the trustworthiness of studies utilizing intimate scholarship methodologies.

Purpose – This chapter explores the complexity and tensions inherent in the question of how story becomes research with particular attention to the use of narrative research in studying teacher education.

Approach – To do this, we begin each section with a narrative fragment from earlier published research in which we collaborated (Hamilton, 1995). Then, we use narrative research analysis tools to explore the meaning of each fragment, lay that understanding alongside research accounts and wonderings about research in and by teacher educators, and consider the fragment in terms of specific understandings of narrative inquiry as research methodology for studying teacher education.

Findings – This chapter examines when story moves to research while probing the tensions between knowledge and living as teachers, teacher educators, and teacher educator researchers. Using the first fragment, we explore fulfilling roles as a teacher educator by using a narrative analysis tool that teases apart the author's role of narrator, actor, and character. In the second fragment, we consider the contexts that influence a teacher educator researcher by examining the fragment to determine the levels of narrative. In the third fragment, we utilize the tools of plotlines and tensions to unpack the competing plotlines of epistemology (modernist vs. narrative) ending with an examination of the importance of ontology in narrative work. In our fourth fragment, we unpack nine approaches to narrative by examining the essential role of story for each element of the research process.

Research implications – As teacher educator researchers, we always stand in the midst – in the midst of the story where we may be simultaneously narrator, character, and actor, in the midst of living the research we are most interested in studying. Within a single moment, we can act as teacher, teacher educator, and teacher educator researcher when our research focuses on our own practice. Our experience as we live it represents the tension between arrival and arriving.

Value – The value of this chapter is the way in which it demonstrates narrative analysis and distinguishes among various approaches to narrative research.

In this chapter, we inquire into our ever-unfolding experiences as teachers and with teacher research participants in order to explore the complexities of curriculum making in teacher education. In doing so, we lay the foundation for understanding narrative inquiry as both theory and method as such, frame our work in this volume. Curriculum making, a term introduced by Joseph Schwab, reflects the dynamic process of learning in which the teacher, learner, subject matter, and milieu interact. Moreover, we think about the ways people make sense of themselves, identity-making, in the process of curriculum making. Through Derek’s experiences with Lee, a previous Grade five student, and Cindy’s work with Jesse, a research participant, we inquire into their curriculum making and identity-making. We argue that in schools, there are multiple curricula in the making, going beyond the formal notions of curriculum as grade-level standards or classroom objectives. In our inquiry process, we consider experiences in schools through Aoki’s understanding of curriculum-as-plan and lived curriculum. In his writing, Aoki noted that the lived experience of curriculum in schools is much more complex and varied than the planned curriculum that is meant for a generalized audience; students and teachers bring their lives with them into particular contexts that indelibly shape the ways that curriculum is lived out. As well, we think about the ways experiences and places shape teachers and researchers and the ways we see the world.

This chapter explores the idea of paradigm shifts and the changes that have taken place in the field of teaching and teacher education over the past four decades. The work unpacks how teachers, their practices, their professional development, and their education are conceived in the positivist and interpretive paradigms. The study of teaching and teacher education is likewise shaped by the ontological and epistemological underpinnings associated with different research methods and the paradigms with which they are associated. To demonstrate the influence of paradigms, this chapter concludes with a rich example of how the interpretive tradition has shaped a teacher education program in northern Finland.

Teacher researcher pedagogy (TRP) is a national-based pedagogy in Iran. This pedagogy has been introduced and adopted to Iran’s teacher education system from 1996. In line with this pedagogy, we studied the narratives of the teachers who were already involved in TRP to understand how it helped them reconstruct their professional identity. We found this pedagogy helped teachers improve their professional consciousness. The teachers with good manners and methods could take obviously significant advantage of TRP and involve in reflective practical research. As a consequence, an epistemological shift happened in the professional life of such caring teachers where they no longer only use the knowledge of a third-party person. Such conditions recovered teachers’ professional identity and put them in power position.

The Zeichner Paradox presents the Self-Study of Teaching and Teacher Education Practices (S-STEP) research community and other researchers engaged in intimate scholarship with three challenges to the viability of our methodology: the development of questions significant to the larger research base of teaching and teacher education; the use of existing research to frame our questions; and the connection of our current research to the works of other researchers to inform our work. Based on identified exemplar studies, we demonstrate tools that might be used by researchers to strengthen the presentation of our work and explore the challenges to reveal links between and among them.

In this chapter, the author, drawing on his extensive career as a researcher and teacher educator, examines variations in the work and lives of teachers and the educational backdrops with which they interact – what Ivor Goodson called the ‘genealogies of context’. His work develops Michael Huberman’s seminal research on the lives of secondary teachers and, in doing so, provides empirical evidence which challenges linear views of the development of teacher expertise and highlights the key roles of professional identity, commitment and school culture in career long effective and successful teaching.

This chapter discusses the findings of a self-study of teacher education practices (S-STEP) conducted to investigate the ways the author supported teacher candidates, and first year teachers who were teaching emergent bilinguals in planning reading and writing activities around authentic texts. The purpose of the study was to determine in what ways the researcher supported the candidates’ planning, in what ways the teacher candidates implemented the activities, and how the self-study informed the researcher as a teacher educator. The study looked at how the teacher candidates and first year teachers implemented the activities with their own students. Teacher candidates were supported by the researcher through a methodology class, class observations, informal meetings, and emails and text messaging. The teacher candidates and first year teachers reported that all of the activities and strategies that they learned from the researcher and then implemented with their own students were effective. Both the teacher candidates and the first year teachers modified many of the strategies in order to meet the needs of their emergent bilingual students. Through this self-study investigation of how students used and modified the strategies and activities, the researcher gained valuable information that will inform work with future students. She will introduce fewer strategies and activities and explain how each one can be used to teach different content. In further study, the researcher will provide student teachers with a rubric to evaluate the effectiveness of each strategy or activity with different types of students.

In this chapter, we use self-study to explain the ways we enact community pedagogy in socioeconomically and culturally diverse school contexts in Bogotá, Colombia. We use our personal and professional journeys as language teachers, teacher educators, and researchers to show key experiences in our life stories and teaching trajectories that have influenced our teaching and research praxis. Our main interest as researchers and practitioners was to connect school curricula to the life of children and teachers in schools. Self-study helped us identify and problematize our identities and positions as foreign language teachers who espouse valuing of local knowledge. Through reflection and implementing field experiences with practicing teachers in professional development sessions in schools, we felt that we achieved such connection to develop the mindset for critical pedagogy.