Chapter 3 The Self-Study Learning Community When and How and Where and Who

Chapter 3

The Self-Study Learning CommunityWhen and How and Where and Who

Chapter 3: The Self-Study Learning CommunitySelf-Study Teacher Research: Improving Your Practice Through Collaborative Inquiry

Culture of The Self-Study Learning Community

The goals, tasks, and behavior of a group, on both an individual and a collective level, help describe the group’s culture, or the ways its members go about doing their work and how the things they value get embedded into that process.

Chapter 3: The Self-Study Learning CommunitySelf-Study Teacher Research: Improving Your Practice Through Collaborative Inquiry

Diverse and Unified

The culture of self-study research is diverse in multiple ways such as: Geographic location Years of teaching experience Theoretical orientation Discipline Topics studied

Self-study scholars are unified by their practice in using self-study rather than by a discipline, topic, or context.

Chapter 3: The Self-Study Learning Community

Self-Studyship

Self-study is not limited to teachers.

Although self-study research grew out of the work of teacher educators, it has expanded to include practitioners such as administrators, librarians, occupational therapists, psychotherapists, counselors, and community educators working for social justice and educational reform.

This extension of self-study of teachers to other practitioners is known as self-studyship (Samaras & Freese, 2006).

Self-Study Teacher Research: Improving Your Practice Through Collaborative Inquiry


Paradigm Shift

According to Kuhn (1996), paradigms emerge when:

Researchers are attracted away from competing paradigms due to their dissatisfaction with the current methods available.

The new method is open-ended enough to leave all sorts of problems for the redefined group of practitioners to resolve.



Practitioner Research

Practitioner research can be considered a conceptual umbrella to describe many forms of practitioner-based study of teaching and teacher education” (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2004, p. 602).

Forms of practitioner research vary in nature and the “types of outcomes they might choose to study” (Grossman, 2005, p. 445).



Influence, Confluence, and Divergence

The self-study movement was influenced by earlier paradigms such as: Teacher inquiry Reflective practice Action research

Self-Study is distinguished from the earlier

paradigms by its unique methodological

components.



Teacher Inquiry

“It was during the 1980s that teacher research gained new standing because of its potential to lessen the divide between theory and practice, on the one hand, and contribute needed insider perspectives to the knowledge base about teaching and learning” (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2004, p. 603).

“Most of our knowledge about developing as teachers has not been grounded in practice or personal experience. The emergence of self-study and teacher research has shifted this trend” (Hamilton & Pinnegar, 1998, p. 236).



Reflection and Self-Study

Self-study, in part, is an extension of the notion of reflection (Dewey, 1933; Schön, 1983, 1987).

But self-study “pushes the virtues of reflection further” (Loughran, 2004, p. 25) by requiring dialogue, public critique, and presentation from the researcher’s personal reflection.

Self-study employs a validation group to gain perspectives on the analysis and a forum to make the research public for review and critique.



Action Research and Self-Study

In action research, the goal of the “action” is for a change in the classroom.

In self-study research, the “self” is the focus of the study with the goal of leading to a reframed understanding of one’s role in order to impact students’ learning.

Self-study includes multiple methods to arrive at new understandings and with self-study scholars creating new methods.



Practicing Self-Study

Self-study scholars explain that they want to “walk the talk” and practice self-study as a habit of mind in their own work (Guilfoyle, Hamilton, Pinnegar, & Placier, 1998).

Although teacher educators had taught the use of reflection and action research in their education courses in the 1980s, it was not until the early 1990s that teacher educators began practicing what they were preaching—to reflect on, inquire into, and study their own practice (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 1993; Loughran, 2004).



The Self-Study School

The Self-Study School is “a popular research movement which began in the early 1990s by teacher educators studying their practice and through member research, presentation, and publication was formalized and came of age a decade later” (Samaras & Freese, 2006, p. 38).



Formalization of Self-Study

The Self-Study School was formalized through: Conferences: AERA and Castle The Self-Study of Teacher Education

Practices Special Interest Group [S-STEP] International handbook Studying Teaching Education: A journal

committed to self-study research Book and journal publications



Important Events in Outgrowth of The Self-Study School

The Self-Study of Teacher Education Practices Special Interest Group [S-STEP] began in 1993 and grew into a community of scholars committed to developing a new paradigm for teacher education research.



Critique and Sustainability

There has been critique of practitioner research and self-study research, and scholars have responded by offering clearer guidelines and suggested directions for its sustainability and future.



Class Activity

Share the teacher professional communities you belong to and the culture of those communities.

What role do you play in those teacher professional communities?

What do you see as the benefits and challenges of teacher professional communities?


Documents

Chapter 3 The Self-Study Learning Community When and How and Where and Who