Exploring Challenges to and from Self- Study Methodology · University of Cambridge. He has worked with self-study methodology since begin-ning doctoral studies with Tom Russell 15

Exploring Challenges to and from Self-Study Methodology

Novice and Expert Perspectives from a French Scholar

Cécile Bullock and Shawn Michael Bullock

ContentsIntroduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2Setting the Scene: A Newcomer to Self-Study Methodology (Cécile) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3Setting the Scene: A Newcomer to la didactique (Shawn) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5Distance, Professionalism, Vulnerability, and Self in Research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6

Distance: How Close Is the Researcher to Their Research? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8Questioning Conceptualizations of Professional Ethos . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9Vulnerability as Enaction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10

Self-Study Challenged: Une posture didactique, du dedans et impliquée . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12A Didactic Stance/Une posture didactique . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13A Stance from Within/Une posture du dedans . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15A Self-Conscious Stance/Une posture impliquée . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16

Power and Language in Self-Study . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17Power and Self-Study . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18Languages in Self-Study Research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18

Perplexing Politics: Framing Challenges to and from Self-Study . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21

AbstractIn this chapter, we will use our perspectives as insiders and outsiders to eachother’s research communities as a device for exploring challenges to self-studyfrom sociolinguistic French scholarship and challenges from self-study to thesame scholarship. Cécile is relatively new to self-study but an experiencedresearcher in sociolinguistics; Shawn is an experienced self-study researcher

C. Bullock (*)Faculty of Education, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, BC, Canadae-mail: [email protected]

S. M. BullockFaculty of Education, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UKe-mail: [email protected]

© Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020J. Kitchen (ed.), 2nd International Handbook of Self-Study of Teaching and TeacherEducation, Springer International Handbooks of Education,https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-1710-1_15-1

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mailto:[email protected]

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https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-1710-1_15-1

who is new to sociolinguistic framings originating in the Francophone academy.In this chapter, we consider our changing roles as novice and expert to analyzeand interpret the ways in which the two research traditions might learn from eachother and, in particular, the vulnerabilities and challenges Cécile faced engagingin collaborative self-study as an experienced researcher from other reflexiveresearch traditions. The chapter is thus an analysis of an ongoing collaborativeself-study and critical friendship that provides a critique of self-study methodol-ogy. We conclude by highlighting the role of language and power inherent in anyconsideration of self-study methodology and methods.

KeywordsSelf-study · la didactique · Plurilingualism · Critical friendship · Collaborativeself-study · Didactic stance · Vulnerability in self-study

Introduction

In this chapter, we will use our perspectives as insiders and outsiders to eachother’s research communities as a device for exploring challenges to self-studyfrom sociolinguistic French scholarship and challenges from self-study to the samescholarship. Cécile is an associate professor of French education at Simon FraserUniversity and was completely educated within a set of sociolinguistic frameworksin France before moving to Canada 15 years ago. Broadly speaking, her research hasexplored the teaching and learning of French as a second language (FSL) in minoritylanguage contexts in both France and Canada. Cécile has long used a reflexive stancein her work, but, more recently, she has turned to self-study methodology as a wayto understand further her identities as a researcher and teacher educator. Shawn isa reader in the history and philosophy of science, technology, and education at theUniversity of Cambridge. He has worked with self-study methodology since begin-ning doctoral studies with Tom Russell 15 years ago and has been particularlyinterested in the transition from teacher to teacher educator and the lenses that thehistory and philosophy of science and technology bring to understanding self-studymethodology. Prior to his current position, he was an associate professor of scienceeducation at Simon Fraser University.

We began a critical friendship (Schuck and Russell 2005) a number of years ago,and one recurring theme in our work together has been to realize that we move freelybetween the roles of novice and expert throughout our conversations. For example,Cécile is new to self-study methodology, but she has a robust understanding of howto situate herself within ethnographic and sociological research, particularly withinquestions pertaining to language acquisition. Shawn is well-published in self-studymethodology, but until conversations with Cécile, he has lacked a theoreticalframework with which to consider questions in language education, despite havingexplored language education in a number of ways earlier in his career. A fewpersonal details are relevant in the interest of being transparent to the reader: weare recently married, and thus we draw attention to the fact that references citing

2 C. Bullock and S. M. Bullock

Sabatier are referring to Cécile’s work before 2019. We have written academically inboth French and English, and we have both taught in both languages, althoughCécile has taught more in French and Shawn has taught more in English. Ourlanguage of personal communication is French.

Setting the Scene: A Newcomer to Self-Study Methodology(Cécile)

In June 2017, I began my journey into self-study methodology to understand myown practice as teacher of French as a second language (FSL) and teacher educator.I was educated and trained as a FSL teacher in France; my educational backgroundis in sociolinguistics and multilingual language acquisition. I use la didactique duplurilinguisme (e.g., Coste 2015), a sociological perspective on language teachingand learning to describe, interpret, and analyze all processes underlying languagelearning, teaching, and acquisition. I moved into the field of self-study through myinvolvement in Shawn’s research program, ostensibly designed under the broadumbrella of critical friendship method that help him to describe, interpret, andanalyze his pedagogy of teacher education using self-study methodology alongsidecolleagues in teacher education. Early on, I noted the following:

I understand self-study as a scholarship that helps teachers and teacher educators to makesense of their practice and their assumptions about teaching and learning and to allow themto build strong(er) professional identities. I also understand it as a reflective stance aboutteaching and learning, supported by theory and an analysis of professional practice. (Cécile’sResearch Journal, June 2017)

My journey to and through self-study has neither been straightforward nor easyto understand. As someone who was formed in the French Academy, the implicitassumptions created via the largely anglophone scholarship in self-study have beendifficult to navigate, although the results have been personally and professionallyrewarding. In a chapter explicitly devoted to the history of self-study in the firstedition of this handbook, Loughran (2004) was quick to situate the field along a longintellectual genealogy that, in part, reflected broader movements in the academy.Indeed, one might sum up the genesis of self-study methodology in the followingway: teacher educators became interested in making explicit the very reflectivepractices they expected teacher candidates to engage with.

Something that is understandably absent from Loughran’s (2004) history of self-study is a discussion of related, concurrent, interests in reflexive practices withinFrench academic circles and traditions of thought. Of course, this is unsurprisinggiven that the vast majority of published self-study work, particularly in the earlystages of the methodology in the 1990s, was constructed and enacted in Englishwithin scholarly traditions most familiar to the American, Australian, British, andCanadian academies. When approached to consider the broad theme of “challengesto and from self-study methodology,” my immediate reaction was, as a relative

Exploring Challenges to and from Self-Study Methodology 3

newcomer, hesitation. I soon realized, though, that not only were my feelings ofuncertainty around understanding self-study and its expectations documented bymembers of the community (notably by Mena and Russell 2017), but also I wasperhaps positioned to ask questions of the methodology that others are not. Althoughnew to this particular methodology, I am neither new to the academy nor to the ideasof reflexive practice, autoethnography, and practitioner-based forms of research.Additionally, as a plurilingual scholar, I recognize that how one approaches intel-lectual problems and discourses is, in part, a function of the languages one uses tocommunicate. Indeed, a key feature of my early work in this field has been therelevance of both language and initial academic formation in how one thinks aboutself-study methodology and practice (e.g., Sabatier and Bullock 2018).

The purpose of this chapter is to offer a provocation to the field of self-studygrounded in a continuing self-study of my own transition to the field. In so doing,I hope to add to work begun by Bullock and Madigan Peercy (2018) that exploredchallenges from inside the self-study literature and outside the self-study literature:

A review of literature from “inside” and “outside” the field is generative for thinking aboutthe affordances and critiques self-study would do well to address as it moves forward asa methodology, a set of communities, and a vital contributor to research in teacher education.At the outset of this project, we expected to read very different sets of critiques from insideand outside the methodology of study—not only were we incorrect in our hypothesis, but itseems that there was a remarkable coherence to the field regardless of literature. It is clearfrom the literature, for example, that self-study methodology offers a valuable way todevelop professional voice as a teacher educator in multiple contexts, within multiplekinds of pressures. The methodology provides a conduit for a variety of kinds of collabo-rative work and a way of engaging in the professional development of teacher educators.It is also clear from the literature that self-study is haunted by concerns of relevance withinthe broader discussion in teacher education; a claim that we find interesting given the numberof people writing about self-study outside of the “internal” academic work. (p. 24)

They further posited that part of the confusion around critiques of self-studyperhaps lay in nomenclature across traditions. It is this confusion, compounded byboth language and academic cultures, that is my jumping off point for this chapter.

Thus I take a slightly different frame to think about challenges to and from thefield. My provocation is grounded in my status as an insider-outsider to the field.I am an insider in the sense that I have attended a self-study (“Castle”) conferenceand American Educational Research Association (AERA) sessions, as well aspublished in Studying Teacher Education. I am an outsider in the sense that I havespent the bulk of a 20-year career in research working with ideas from the Frenchacademy and, mostly, writing in French. My challenges to self-study come froma consideration of theoretical frameworks with which I am most familiar. Thechallenges I receive from self-study refer to the ways I have been challenged, indeeddisrupted, as a result of engaging in this work. Throughout the chapter, I sometimeswrite in first person (a challenging task for any French scholar, I might add) whenreferring to my own experiences in both text and excerpts from the research journalI have kept for 3 years. The rest of the chapter, with the exception of the followingsection, is co-constructed by Shawn and me and is written in more of a traditional


style to analyze both excerpts of my self-study data and to introduce relevantliterature. We hope that moving between first person and third person accounts inthis way helps to highlight some of the boundary crossing that we both have had todo as we develop new understandings of self-study together.

Finally, I wish to highlight the role of language as a mediator in any academicwork. My thinking is mostly done in French through French primary sources, and soa significant challenge from self-study to me has been to understand ideas framed inEnglish, which are often both linguistically and conceptually unfamiliar. I am indeedgrateful to my coauthor and critical friend for talking through these concepts inFrench and in English to help me mediate these challenges. We have provided all ofthe English versions of citations from French sources. Given the questions aboutinclusion and equity that have been raised via self-study methodology (e.g., Kitchenand Bellini 2012; Kitchen et al. 2016; Smith et al. 2016; Skerrett 2008), I hope thatthis chapter about challenges can be useful for those considering issues aroundlinguistic inclusion, plurality, and self-study.

Setting the Scene: A Newcomer to la didactique (Shawn)

In Bullock (2018) I used the metaphor of an “accidental” language teacher educatorto highlight my longtime, if tacit, engagement in language education, teaching, andlearning. After a few years as a secondary school physics teacher, I took on a uniquerole in which I was a language and literacy teacher for a group of schools in a largeCanadian school board. Doing so afforded me the opportunity to work with elemen-tary and secondary colleagues across all subjects and provided 2 years of profes-sional engagement with educational research under the broad umbrella of literacyeducation. I retained many of these ideas when I transitioned into full-time doctoralstudies and an academic career, most clearly in a paper in which I explored what onemight do with ideas around science literacy in teacher education (Fletcher andBullock 2012).

With hindsight, I realize that I have never had a theoretical framework tointerrogate my understanding of language education and in particular to separatediscussions around “literacy” and discussions about language acquisition, teaching,and learning. Among other experiences, I took an extended amount of Frenchgrowing up in Ontario, was required to pass a translation exam as a part of myMA in history, and routinely code-switched between languages and terminologywhile teaching various martial arts (Bullock 2014). Despite these experiences, it wasnot until conversations with Cécile that I realized that I was a language educator,despite my unwillingness to identify as such.

As a result our collaborative self-study and critical friendship, I have spenta considerable amount of time learning about la didactique from conversationswith Cécile, from reading relevant literature, and from attending and presentingat conferences and academic events in France. Thus, our critical friendship, frommy perspective, offers opportunities for both of us to learn from and with eachother’s immersion in different academic worlds. My role in this chapter has been to


a different kind of critical perspective to Cécile. Although Cécile has used ladidactique as a starting off point from which to understand and interpret self-studyliterature, I have engaged in the opposite directions. These conversations, mediatedbetween scholarship in two languages, have been enormously useful for me as a self-study “insider” and as a novice “outsider” to la didactique.

Distance, Professionalism, Vulnerability, and Self in Research

In this section of the chapter, we explore the challenges and tensions associated withthe subjectivity of self-study research and, in particular, how these challenges andtensions manifest for someone who is both new to the methodology and familiarwith other conceptualizations of reflexive research. Specifically, we explore threechallenges from self-study methodology to those who engage in reflexively orientedresearch by using vignettes authored by Cécile, who is relatively new to self-studybut who is also an experienced qualitative researcher formed by experiences in theFrench academy.

To begin, we argue that our personal and professional stories are never far fromthe postures that we deploy when conducting our research. Our experiences asteachers and teacher educators, as well as our life stories, nourish our professionalidentities (Bullock 2014; Bullock and Sabatier Bullock 2019; Sabatier and Bullock2019). In self-study, researchers operate from and embrace the premise of their ownsubjectivity and “present evidence of meaning and relationships among pheno-menon from the authority of their own experience” (Pinnegar 1998, p. 32). Yet,assuming the implication of their subjectivity in their research, their posture, andtheir practice, sometimes, offers resistance and tensions. One early source of tensionfor me emerged during my participation at the Castle Conference of 2018:

I feel like a fish out of its aquarium. Shawn has been so reassuring and patient even whenI resisted his suggestions for how we might present in a manner appropriate to thisconference; yet, I’m so uncomfortable; I’m not sure I will be able to present our work theway he would like us to do. It’s too personal. This is not “how” I’m used to talk aboutresearch in a conference. I don’t want to expose my inner thoughts; I don’t want to appearunprofessional. . . It reminds me of this first day at Simon Fraser University, with all thefaculty associate teachers in our teacher education program. How uneasy I felt when I wasasked to introduce myself. I spoke about my qualifications, about my work with teachers andwhat I would like to do with student teachers. . . they all listened and then somebody askedme: “Yes, but who are you, Cécile?!” (Cécile’s Research Journal, August 2018)

The frustration I felt with both occasions at which I was asked to, in my view,be personally vulnerable highlights French scholars frequently discuss the differencebetween le soi (the self) and le récit de soi (the story of the self), often underlying thecomplexities of working with both simultaneously. For example, Altet, Desjardins,Etienne, Paquay, and Perrenoud (2013) draw attention to the fact that tensionstranspire when engaging in problematizing one’s self into one’s practice. Suchtensions have to be taken seriously as they may hinder the benefits of conducting


self-study in teacher education. To answer the question “Who am I?” is tantamountto being interested in the way we define ourselves and in the representations that weconstruct in our relationship with others. As Butler (2005) points out, it is in therelationship with others, in their injunction, that we are led to sketch the contours ofour identity. Butler argues, in part, that one accounts for oneself when one is askedand that constructing an “I” is, in part, a reconstruction of past actions. Yet, self-study does not solely depend on the ability to reconstruct an experience. It has muchin common with Schön’s (1983) concept of the action present that time period inwhich one is able to affect one’s actions. Put another way, self-study methodologyconstitutes the prerequisite condition as a means of assuming responsibility for one’sactions and making sense of one’s actions. LaBoskey (2004) framed this as themethodological requirement of being self-initiated and self-focused. Such a focusrequires le soi (the self) and le récit de soi (the story of the self) to interact in waysthat were initially uncomfortable for Cécile.

The tension Cécile experienced at the Castle Conference demonstrates that, eventhough she had embraced self-study methodology in theory – mediated via readingrelevant literature and writing her first self-study paper – she still had to enact it inher practice as scholar. As LaBoskey (2004) argued, she had to make the results ofher self-study public. What is often not clear from self-study literature, however,is that the ways in which one is expected to make the results of practice public gobeyond traditional mode of academic knowledge dissemination. A self-study pre-sentation at a self-study conference is a singular experience, particularly if one isused to claiming a degree of distance from one’s research, implicitly or explicitly.

Thus Cécile struggled with the idea of appearing inadequate and vulnerable asa researcher, publicly. The transition from the personal to the professional sphere wasexperienced with discomfort. Cécile was faced with a paradoxical situation: on theone hand, she adopted the multifaceted process of self-study in private; on the otherhand, she resisted enacting this “singular experience of the self” (Martucelli 2002,cited in Bertucci 2009, p. 45) in public. For Cécile, the challenge was to reflect on herepistemological postures and to reconsider her role, not only as a researcher but asa witness of her own experience. This reconfiguration leads to engaging with herexperience instead of thinking about it. In her exploration of the meaning thatsociolinguists (Cécile’s educational background) make of their relationship to theirfield of research and their research object, Bretegnier (2009) emphasizes that engag-ing with one’s field of research “should not be reduced to an artificial, casual exercisethat makes direct causal links between the thematic choices of research and socio-identities and experiential traits of researchers” (pp. 35–36). Put another way: Cécilefelt as though she was being put in a position to present her self-study work in a waythat precisely opposed the foundations of her academic training. She had tore-examine her ways of knowing by revisiting the epistemic, affective, and socialdimensions that were at stake in her identity as a scholar. Fundamental to this processwas the question of “distancing”; that is, the implication of researchers within theirinquiry.


Distance: How Close Is the Researcher to Their Research?

At the outset of my self-study work, I sought to give meaning to my practice byproblematizing my narrative of teacher educator and research. Doing so suggestedthat I articulate the tensions that arise in conducting self-study and that I use thesetensions as jumping off points for as a place of meaningful expressions of self. Bydoing so, however, I found that professional habitus as a scholar, and some of theirfoundations, were called into question. One of these foundations finds its source inmy scholarly background in sociolinguistics. The distancing or implication of theresearcher from their research field is a quarrel that is still discussed in socialsciences in general, in sociolinguistics in particular, and perhaps in Francophonesociolinguistics most particularly. It is not an exaggeration to suggest that questionsof distance are those most likely to provoke distrust and tension in my journey asa self-study scholar – a fact made all the more relevant by the intensity with whichself-study scholars examine the construction of self in relation to identity andpractice.

The basic questions of the objective/subjective distance of the researcher fromtheir research object and its subsequent question of the implication/neutrality for theresearch bear the mark of certain conceptualizations of positivism. For manydecades, a particular view of being objective was prevalent, and it claimed that wecan read reality from our observations in relatively unproblematic and disinterestedways. Labov (1972), considered one of the first sociolinguists, referred to the“observer’s paradox” (p. 209) when discussing the effects of the researcher’sinvolvement in his/her research design. As Bretegnier (2009) argued: “For thesake of asserting scientific rigor, the figure of the researcher still appeared as aneutral figure, which made it possible to conceal the question of their own repre-sentations on their so-called ‘object’ of research—at the time a delicate or even tabooquestion. It would have required researchers to think differently about the thenuntenable paradox of the articulations between ‘objectivity’ and ‘subjectivity’”(p. 29).

We are all likely familiar with the development of the qualitative paradigmdrawing from the phenomenological perspective. Researchers have reclaimedmore and more their social individuality; yet the fact remains, as Castellotti (2009)points out, that research (and a researcher) which would reflect on its action, itseffects, and the changes that it produces into practice is “sometimes still either littlerecognized, or even badly perceived or valued.”As a result, “there is the permanenceof an epistemology that considers researchers as being apart, free of psycho-socialand emotional enrolment” (Castellotti 2009, p. 138).

It is clear that the sociolinguistic frameworks in which Cécile has operated duringher career still carry a certain amount of baggage regarding the distance betweenthe researcher and the research. Her primary framework, la didactique duplurilinguisme, sets up French didactics (that are very different from English orGerman conceptualizations of didactics) as a relational way of understanding howto apply educational theories to problems of practice understood from plurilingualperspectives. Through our self-study work, we have realized that the operating


frameworks of la didactique still conceptualize the researcher as an actor on theresearch, reflexive though they may be, and thus someone with a certain amountof distance. It is small wonder, then, that Cécile encountered some questions whenshe came to self-study, which blurs lines and concepts of distance even further. Self-study, we have come to realize, is more than reflexive practice. As Loughran (2005)stated, a clear definition and set of methods for self-study methodology have notemerged. But it is clear to us that one of the methodology’s defining features is thechallenges it poses to distance – and perhaps this is part of the underpinnings of someof the critiques it has received from the research literature.

Questioning Conceptualizations of Professional Ethos

In Sabatier and Bullock (2018), we shared a vignette of Cécile’s early experiences asa teacher educator in Canada that has turned out to be a more significant challengethan originally anticipated:

Early in her career at the university, [Cécile] was asked to introduce herself to a group ofteacher candidates. She responded by introducing her professional qualifications and theframeworks in which she worked; as is customary in France. A seconded teacher workingwithin the teacher education programme, somewhat dismissively, stated in response: “Yes. . . but who are you?” Cécile was unused to being asked to define her identity to teachercandidates in this way . . . there was clearly an accepted way to talk about who one is asa teacher and it did not match her initial expectations. To be asked a question of “Who areyou?,” in that fashion, implied that her response was somehow lacking in substance and thatshe had thus failed to cross the border from education professor “from abroad” to teachereducator at Simon Fraser University (SFU). (Sabatier and Bullock 2018, p. 263)

It is clear that there is a cultural dimension to how the concept of a professionalis constructed; such dimensions are also at play in how we consider the concept ofa teacher and a teacher educator. The French term for teacher educator, formateur desenseignants, implies a particular engagement with, and responsibilities for, how newteachers come to be. The excerpt above reveals that the culture of teacher educationat Cécile’s workplace found her way of presenting herself lacking. Perhaps Cécilewas particularly attuned to the implications of these sorts of questions because, asa language educator, she recognizes that one of the first things one teaches studentsof a new language is how to present themselves: one’s name, where they come from,and some other basic personal details are the early features of almost any course ofinstruction. With some further distance from this original incident, Cécile is alsoprepared to hypothesize that part of the reason she was questioned in this particularway was a result of a difference in the professional ethos of local schoolteachers andthe French academy.

Guibert (2013) investigated the reasons for which secondary school Frenchteachers tend to resist engaging in reflexive practice. He argues that French school-teachers tend to develop social representations of the teaching profession that are notvery conducive to the construction of knowledge from situated and enacted practice.


Instead, they tend to develop representations that are closely adapted to the conceptof compétence, a term that might best translate as an action one is able to take basedon professional knowledge. Such representations result in the construction of pro-fessional identities, the relationship with oneself, and the way in which the relation-ship to knowledge develops over a career. For Guibert, these representations areculturally rooted in the professional ethos teachers (and researchers, we add) developabout their role as models for others. Such professional representations both drawupon and make a mark upon individual and collective dimensions of professionalidentity.

It is thus relatively clear both why Cécile had the reaction that she did and whyher colleagues likely thought very little about the potential effects of the exchange.Returning to a previous example of Cécile’s experiences of the Castle conference,which provoked a profound questioning of her research stance, we can see that self-study of teaching and teacher education practices offers methodological hope for thepower of question conceptions about what it means to be a teacher and a teachereducator, including but not limited to the questioning of different professional ethos.Although Cécile already claimed subjective approach in her previous body ofresearch, she would now argue that self-study methodology requires her to adoptan in situ professional stance of a researcher and a realization that she is in theresearch and not simply doing research on her practice (in French, we would say thisis a difference between être en recherche and faire de la recherche). Pinnegar andHamilton (2009) called attention to the ontological stance that self-study researchrequires, and we see the tension that Cécile articulated between differing conceptionsof a professional ethos as crucial to fulfilling said ontological commitment. We alsohighlight, however, that these two stances, are not incompatible – and it is not justself-study researchers who articulate the compatibility between these stances.Wentzel (2012) considers that being in research leads to another way of thinkingabout practice, of questioning it, and also of understanding and interpretingit. Adopting such a research stance is not easy or simple. It uncovers a final tensionthat we refer to as vulnerability as enaction.

Vulnerability as Enaction

It is one thing to feel vulnerable as a researcher; we expect that most researchers havethis feeling across disciplines. We naturally feel vulnerable when sharing new ideas,when arguing against established frameworks, or when venturing into a field for thefirst time. We would argue that this sense of vulnerability tends to be compoundedfor self-study researchers, as the object of our study is not particles, literature, orsocial systems: our research is on ourselves in relation to identity and to our practice.Self-study methodology requires and invites a public scrutiny on who we are in howwe teach future teachers. In so doing, self-study requires us to be vulnerable throughour own actions as researchers and as teacher educators.

Cécile struggled with accepting the required vulnerability as a researcher in self-study. In fact she resisted it in many ways, at times feeling she was in conflict with


herself, with her relation to scientific knowledge, with her practice as scholar, andwith her relation to others, researchers, and systems of thought. Cécile’s malaise andfeelings of resistance disappeared from the moment she situated herself in theprocess of “being in research.” This unique stance promotes meeting with oneselfin an availability of self which in turn allows a disposition of mind conducive tolistening, to dialogue, and to what Allender and Allender (2008, p. 145) call “findingpower in practice.”

When Cécile agreed to turn her vulnerability into enaction, she realized that thisvulnerability could be a rudder in the often-turbulent waters of navigating a newsystem of thinking and research. Schön (1983) spoke of the swampy lowlands ofpractice; and indeed, self-study owes a considerable intellectual debt to Schön’s wayof conceptualizing knowledge of practice. For example, he reconceptualized profes-sional knowledge as knowing-in-action, and it is here that we suggest that a partof self-study methodology is vulnerability-in-action. It is difficult for us to imaginea sense of self-study that does include vulnerability – LaBoskey (2004), for example,argues that we make the results of our self-studies open to public scrutiny. Thus thevulnerability required by self-study methodology is no longer an impediment, but amechanism for action. One can again find warrant for this approach in the extantliterature as well as within the self-study literature.

Roger, Ruelland, and Clot (2007) insist on the importance of professional con-troversies, loosely defined as an argumentative, structured, and continuous discus-sion on a given subject. Crucially, one is also required to engage in these experienceswith professionals, researchers, or teachers, as mechanisms for adapting and devel-oping practices. Taken in this way, vulnerability is no longer the result of aninadequate relationship with knowledge, but, on the contrary, it is an internalizationof an embodied research process which takes into account the fact that each scholarevolves in their own environment, with their own rules, in their own world. It isthe premise of the researcher’s “motivation to act” (i.e., enaction) in self-study. It isfrom the awareness of the problematic situation that a process of clarification ofconflicting values begins (including during the dialogue with critical friends). Sucha process allows a step back necessary to adopt a sufficient emotional distance tomobilize the theoretical and conceptual frameworks which will help us to understandour practice and to transform it. In other words, vulnerability as enaction paradox-ically allows Cécile to enter into a process of questioning her practice and herresearch stance. Embracing her vulnerable self in self-study amounts for Cécile tohaving a singular experience of her “self,” with her “self,” and by her “self” (Samarasand Freese 2009).

Through discomfort and in search for equilibrium, Cécile’s vulnerability neitherhalts nor restricts the meaning of her experience and the construction of knowledgethat flows from it. In this sense, Cécile’s vulnerability is an experience that is bothindividual and social. According to Molinié (2009), the self “never appears as a fixedpoint, eternally defined, but as the middle point of the never-ending gravitationalpull of individual experience” (p. 121). A reflexive approach such as self-studymethodology is also, in itself, a social experience because it calls for “an accounting


of all the suffering and the difficulties that accompany the current process ofde-composition and re-composition” of professional identities (Tardif 2012, p. 64).

Vulnerability as enaction, then, is a necessary part of self-study methodology thatrequires an understanding of the effects of individual experiences and collectiveexperiences as teachers, teacher educators, and researchers. Such understandingallows for a process of construction and reconstruction of these professional iden-tities through self-study methodology and a particular kind of openness that Cécileneeded to realize in her journey. It is a process full of challenges to and from self-study and to and from the researchers, and it is to these challenges that we now turn.

Self-Study Challenged: Une posture didactique, du dedans etimpliquée

So far, we have discussed challenges to and from self-study research by consideringmoments in Cécile’s journey as a newcomer to the field, having been formed asa researcher and teacher educator in a language and country without a tradition ofself-study as conceived within self-study of teaching and teacher education practicesmethodology. We labeled these challenges as the challenge of distance, professionalethos, and vulnerability as enaction and, in part, concluded that said challengesrequired a mindset of being in the research, a conclusion supported by Pinnegarand Hamilton’s (2009) concern about privileging ontology over epistemology inself-study.

In this section of the chapter, we examine the additional challenges that comefrom French didactics toward self-study. In many ways, said challenges come fromCécile’s initial mindset and the reflective turn required by self-study, even for anexperienced researcher familiar with subjective approaches to research in education.Thus while the previous section articulated challenges from self-study to Cécile’sframework as a researcher and teacher educator, this section explores the challengesto self-study that come from Cécile’s previous experiences as a researcher withinFrench didactics. Our key organizing framework comes from comments Cécilemade in her research journal after about a year of working with the methodology:

Isn’t self-study une didactique impliquée, a didactic stance, whose posture is anchored “fromwithin” (une posture du dedans) to access the significations of teaching and learning andexplicitly give meaning to professional knowledge and problematize teachers’ selves in theirpractice in order to reframe their beliefs in the act of teaching? (Cécile’s Research Journal,July 2019)

Motivated in part by work from Bullock and Madigan Peercy (2018), we wish toadd to conversations from within the self-study literature by using frameworks andliterature not typically employed by self-study researchers. Here again, we aim tonavigate challenges to .and from self-study by considering our roles as insiders andoutsiders to various literatures and modes of thought. We note that self-studyliterature tends to argue for a certain coherence about self-study approaches, if not


a “correct” way to do self-study. We also note that external critiques of self-studymay see this assertion as problematic. We aim to further complicate the discussionsby challenging what it means to “be” in self-study research by using ideas fromCécile formational scholarship, la didactique du plurilinguisme. The three chal-lenges to self-study that we explore here are une posture didactique, une posturedu dedans, and une posture impliquée – roughly translated as a didactic stance, fromwithin one’s self, that requires a self-conscious approach to reflexive research. Eachchallenge complicates further what we see as a fundamental challenge posed by self-study that of being in the research as a teacher educator and as a researcher.

A Didactic Stance/Une posture didactique

In a chapter discussing the ethical considerations of self-study (Bullock and Bullock2019), we already underlined the necessity of adopting a didactic stance, as under-stood by the Francophone conceptualization of la didactique, rather than a peda-gogic one, to engage in self-study methodology. By “didactic stance,” we mean thecreation of a meaningful learning space which takes interest in acquiring knowledge.In doing so, the didactic perspective cannot be reduced to a simple matter ofpedagogy. We also acknowledged the epistemological baggage around the word“didactic” in English, particularly given that the word looks quite similar to theFrench didactique and the German Didaktik, despite the fact that the three conceptsare conceptualized quite differently in each of the three languages and associatedscholarly traditions. Given that the vast majority of scholarship in self-study ofteaching and teaching practices methodology has been written in English, weacknowledge that the idea of a “didactic stance” might seem initially uncomfortablefor certain readers. We also direct readers to Loughran’s (2006) critique of the oftencasual use of the term pedagogy as a synonym for teaching strategy, withoutreference to the different philosophies and conceptual underpinnings of the term.

Vergnaud (1999) argues that la didactique is not to be set in oppositionto pedagogy. It tends to concern itself more with the challenges of analyzing thecontent of the activities involved in learning, particularly from a social and cognitiveperspectives. For Coste (2015, p. 18), “la didactique operates at a meta-level inrelation to pedagogy and what happens in class, or more generally, in activitiesaimed at learning.” It is thus a way of thinking about teaching and learning,grounded in reflexive approaches, situated in practice, and aimed at improvinglearning. We see immediate parallels with LaBoskey’s (2004) requirements thatself-study of teaching and teacher education methodology be self-initiated andfocused, improvement-aimed, and interactive while using multiple, primarily qual-itative methods and seeking exemplar-based validation (pp. 842–852).

The term “didactic” (la didactique) directly refers to the theoretical and concep-tual framework that is adopted by Cécile when she documents, questions, analyzes,and interprets her teaching and learning practice. La didactique du plurilinguisme(plurilingualism) is a conceptual offspring of la didactique des langues et de cultures(languages and cultures), itself an offspring of a larger discipline – la didactique


générale (general) – that aims to articulate theories of teaching and learning withinsituated professional practice and the social contexts they are embedded in. Forscholars in la didactique du plurilinguisme, teaching and learning are complexmatters that are situated in multiple social contexts. Like self-study methodology,la didactique makes explicit the knowledge inherent to teaching and what Munbyand Russell (1994) referred to as the authority of experience, which arose froma concern articulated in the following way:

If Schön is correct that there is a knowledge-in-action that cannot be fully expressed inpropositions and that learning from experience has its own epistemology, then our concern isthat learning from experience is never clearly contrasted with learning that can be expressedand conveyed in propositions. (p. 92)

Multiple self-study scholars have referred to the authority of experience asa foundational element of knowledge gained from the self-study of teaching andteacher education. Similarly, la didactique and its various conceptual progeniesarose from concerns about the nature of knowledge gained from the experiences oflanguage educators gained in the crucibles of changes to immigration patterns inFrance in the late 1960s. La didactique du plurilinguisme indeed arose from theinterrogations of researchers in la didactique des langues et des cultures in the 1990sabout the relationships between the teaching of mother tongue and foreign languagesand foreign languages between them. La didactique du plurilinguisme appears as anattempt which aims “to constitute a body of possible responses to the needs of aneducational actions and approaches to teaching aimed at a majority or partiallymultilingual public” (Dabène 1994, p. 166). Similarly, Coste (2014) argued thatresearchers and teacher educators need to risk asking themselves and others how ladidactique is meant to aid in the “development of capacities to act in and with severallanguages” (p. 455). Like self-study, la didactique requires a certain practicalorientation to improving practice.

The transition from French didactics focused on languages and cultures toCécile’s particular areas of expertise, those focused on plurilingualism (Dabène1994; Billiez 1998), or of linguistic plurality (Coste 2015) was characterized bya close and comprehensive examination of the role of the researcher in didactics.More specifically, researchers began to question how individual journeys, profes-sional progress, and the construction of scholarship as social action (in the sensegiven by Webber (1978) and Touraine (1992)) are intertwined. Moreover, Frenchdidacticians began considering how between reflections on and interrogations oftheir scholarship might be operationalized in order to attain educational changes inpluralistic societies. Thus, like self-study, French didactics are anchored in a socio-constructivist perspective, in which “research is always a work of interpretation andscholars are always in the thick of the research process rather than distanced from it”(Cousin 2013, p. 3).


A Stance from Within/Une posture du dedans

The second challenge we pose to self-study is what we refer to as “a stance fromwithin.” While the first challenge, a didactic stance, might be a relatively straight-forward transition to and from self-study, adopting a “stance within” has a certaindegree of unfamiliarity for newcomers to self-study methodology. The expressioncalls attention to the very notions at the core of self-study methodology: reflexivityand reflective practice. It is not difficult to find any number of references to eitherterm in English language scholarship; it is far more challenging to find coherentapproaches to either term. Like many popular ideas in educational research, one risksa shallow consensus in which it is far too easy to assume that we are using words inparticular ways. As Cousin (2013) notes, for example: “Sometimes reflexivity istreated as a synonym for ‘reflective practice’ with the result that its distinctiveattention to positionality and knowledge construction is neglected or simplified”(p. 4). Cousin’s affirmation immediately questions the language used to discuss howto qualify our inquiry stance: is it about reflective (reflect) practice or reflexive(analyze) inquiry? And how are those terms understood, particularly across theoret-ical frameworks, languages, and context? One person’s idea of reflexivity could beanother person’s concept of reflection, which in turn might be what yet anotherperson calls critical reflection. Such confusion, we argue, seems particularly likelywhen one conducts self-study across multiple languages.

This set of challenges helps to address explicitly the idea of positionality in self-study and how positionality (or “distance”) may generate understandings andinsights on our practice in contexts. Engaging in self-study should not be limitedto or reduced to a mere confessional account of the limitations of one’s perspectiveon teaching and learning in practice. If the first steps require stopping and thinkingabout one’s practice to problematize it, what Schön (1983) called problem framing,the second steps require researcher to adopt an analytical approach that considers“the genesis, the procedures and the consequences of our actions” (Bertucci 2009,p. 44). In so doing, the researcher operating from perspectives offered by Frenchdidactics and self-study takes on a stance from within, “demanding a reflexivity ofthe actor who analyses their actions from the inside” and thus problematizes thatassumptions that make their “professional knowledge possible” (Bertucci, p. 44).From this perspective, a “posture from within” allows a reflexive practice withexternal aim. But la didactique offers caution as well: Perrenoud (2013) arguedthat all forms of reflection are not reflexive. Furthermore, even if we are all capableof reflection, we are not always in a reflexive disposition. Such a disposition isa necessary condition for change; it is a form of lucidity whose componentsare intellectual, emotional, relational, institutional, and in relation with identities.As Perrenoud (2013) notes:

The reflexive posture is only relevant for those who live a certain tension between theirambitions and what they manage to do. It takes a certain amount of disappointment,frustration and therefore failure for thought to take hold of the problem. (p. 83)


Berry (2007) offered tensions as a framework for analyzing her practices asa science teacher educator. Although there is considerable merit in using her seventensions as tools for understanding one’s own practice, we would argue that theheuristic of tensions itself is of potentially far more value. The challenge of devel-oping a stance from within to self-study, offered by la didactique, offers another setof tensions in addition to those articulated within the self-study literature. Thischallenge reminds us that the turn-to-self advocated by self-study is not self-evident.

A Self-Conscious Stance/Une posture impliquée

The final challenge to self-study comes from the “meta” level that Coste (2014)argued was essential to adopting a framework of la didactique. Doing so implies thatone must adopt a “self-conscious stance,” which we define as an explicit acknowl-edgement and definition of just what it means to be in the research and to examineone’s own practice. Writing from outside of self-study methodology but withinbroader anglophone traditions of reflexive practice, Cousin (2013) provided ahelpful articulation:

The methodological debate in practitioner research has shifted from how to minimisesubjectivity to that of thinking more about how to bring oneself into the research processself-consciously. This involves an acknowledgement that the self is the research tool in theinquiry rather than a threat to its objectivity. (pp. 4–5)

Writing several decades before, Touraine (1992) warned that “it is difficult toseparate the individual from their social situation . . . the actor is a reflexive mode ofconstruction of social experience and a founding principle of the analysis of themanifestations of individual and collective life” (cited in Bertucci 2009, p. 47).Taking the implications of this claim seriously calls for what Francophone scholarTardif (2012) referred to as the return of the actor (p. 55) in his examination ofthe research paradigm that has emerged since Schön’s work. Within the setting ofself-study, meaning making is a social activity even when we are doing it on ourown. The scholarly communities associated with self-study call to mobilize thenotion of social actor “understood as a principle of intelligibility of the social”(Tardif 2012, p. 55).

The challenges faced by Cécile led her to assert and mobilize the dispositions,motivations, meanings, and ways of thinking that allow her to act in her givensituation. She was, in other words, forced to re-examine her role as a social actor.Cécile appears in her self-study researcher thus as a social actor who seeks tounderstand her social activity (teaching and learning for example). This socialactivity implies room for maneuver, choices, and decisions on the part of the actorinvolved in contingent social situations (Castellotti 2009; Tardif 2012). Cécile’schoices and positionings are co-constructed in an articulation between the differentfragments of her history and all that have contributed to it. They allow her to assert,drawing on her theoretical background (la didactique du plurilinguisme and


sociolinguistics), a dialectical link between pre-constructed material (her knowledgebase derived from her educational background) and elements under construction (herreflection on her action) which are subject to questioning when conducting self-study. Her self-conscious stance is characterized by an adaptation and a constantnegotiation of the forms of intervention of the researcher according to what is soughtto be understood.

Lastly, Cécile’s involved positionality results in a critique of established catego-ries and ideologies that imprisoned her ways of thinking and her social practice(Apple 1995; Tardif 2012; Zeichner 1996), as an individual, as a teacher, as a teachereducator, and as a self-study scholar. Her self-conscious turn requires her to considerthe ways in which research in self-study is a force of contestation in the face ofestablished power. For Touraine (1992), “the subject constitutes a social and politicalactor who moves in a social space to be understood as a field of conflicts, negoti-ations and mediation between rationalization and subjectivation, which constitutethe two aspects that are both opposite and complementary to modernity” (p. 457).Self-study scholars such as Berry and Forgaz (2018) call for a new relationship withknowledge, identities, and power. One way of responding to that call is to considerhow self-study methodology demands a self-conscious stance.

Power and Language in Self-Study

In this chapter, we have interrogated Cécile’s experiences as an experiencedFrancophone scholar who has recently begun engaging in self-study methodologies.We have also used Shawn’s experiences within self-study as a way to analyzeCécile’s transition into the field while simultaneously considering his relativenewcomer status to la didactique, Cécile’s field of expertise. In so doing, we havearticulated three challenges from self-study methodology to Cécile’s work as ascholar: the challenges of distance, professionalism, and vulnerability each causedmoments of tension and opportunities for reframing. We have also articulated threechallenges to self-study methodology offered by Cécile’s background in Frenchdidactics and sociolinguistics: a didactic stance, a stance from within, and a self-conscious research stance. In articulating the latter, we might reasonably ask self-study researchers for clarifications around what it means to adopt stances familiarto both self-study and French didactics, particularly when warrants come fromdifferent traditions.

We wish to conclude our chapter with an exploration of two perspectives thatarise from the six aforementioned challenges to and from self-study. The first newperspective explores what Cuenca and Park Rogers (2019, p. 45) name “the recog-nition of power” in self-study research. The second perspective explores the role oflanguage(s) in conducting self-study as Cousin (2013) declares that “we have to usethe social tool of language to make knowledge claims and this requires us to thinkabout the implications of this process” (p. 6).


Power and Self-Study

In Cécile’s research journal, we find some evidence of her early explorations ofpower within self-study, largely due to the choices she makes as a teacher educatorand as a researcher:

Self-study is in other words a political inquiry stance. As such, power is at stake betweenmyself, the students I’m interacting with in my classes, my colleagues, but also with anyinstitution that imposes on me what I need to teach and sometimes how I need to teach. Yet,as a self-study scholar, I have to be critical of the social ideologies that are circulating. Whichmeans I also need to be critical of how I represent reality. Which words? Which languages?Languages are far from being neutral. When I use French, it is generative of a way of seeingand talking about something that may be different from when I use my other language,English. Thinking about the words I use, about when I code-switch from one language to theother, is also part of being reflexive, isn’t it? (Cécile’s Research Journal, July 2019)

Language plays a significant role, here, because Cécile has had the experienceof being in the dominant majority culture in France doing research with minoritylanguage populations in French urban environments and also being in a minorityFrancophone context conducting research with minority language populationsin mostly English-speaking urban environments. Self-study is a useful way ofuncovering Cécile’s logics of actions and motivations while reflecting on herstruggles in teaching and learning contexts when doing self-study leads to “thepotential to critique the rather narrow and instrumentalist view of teacher educationpractice and scholarship furthered by policies in many countries” (Vanassche 2018,cited in White and Jarvis 2018). In doing so, this critical approach, as soon as itstarts, uncovers the inextricable relations that link Cécile’s own knowledge and waysof thinking and the social ideologies about learning and teaching, about identities,and about the social relations of domination. The need to better explore theseideologies and reflect on the connection between the reflective practitioner (be ita teacher, a teacher educator, and/or a scholar) and the sociopolitical issues related toeducation is conducive of power structures that crisscross self-study, whether we likeit or not. Cuenca and Park Rogers’ account to attending to the (in)visibility of powerin self-study resulted in the call for “more attention to be given to the ways in whichpower shades the ethics of engaging in collaborative self-study research” (p. 55).

Languages in Self-Study Research

As a “basis for knowing” (Bullock 2009) and a space for developing professionalknowledge about teaching teachers, self-study methodology uses language as aheuristics for meaning making and interpretation. When Cécile writes about herexperiences in one of the two languages that are part of her linguistic repertoire, orwhen she mixes the two idioms, she sets in motion a series of linguistic and culturalmediations that give meaning to her subjectivity and that deserve to be interpreted.In order to identify her logics of actions as teacher, teacher educator, and researcher,


and to highlight the identity foundations that underlie her activity, it is thus necessaryto align her subjective dimension with a methodological device (a sociolinguistic,cultural, and critical discourse analysis) that allows to study the words that givemeaning to her subjectivity, her history, and her experiences. Cousin (2013, p. 6)mentioned that “Once we name something, we have created a cultural layer to it; wehave assigned to it a signifier.”

The question of languages in research and scientific writing brings out a reso-lutely new sociolinguistic perspective in doing self-study. It focuses on the notionof mediation that Aden (2012) defines as being “at the foundation of our sharedunderstanding.”Mediation underlies all the situations and processes of linguistic andcultural contacts facilitating (or not) the circulation of information, interpersonalrelationships, and social integration (Huver and Lorilleux 2018). It refers to anyintervention that aims to reduce the distance between two (or even more than two)poles that are in tension with each other. When conducting self-study research in twolanguages, Cécile engages in a concatenation of linguistic, cultural, and cognitivemediations that make content and contexts intelligible.

Alternating between the use of French and English or otherwise interacting inmulti- or plurilingual mode within the same turn of phrase highlights that linguisticplurality needs to be more investigated in conducting self-study research. Thecirculation of ideas, concepts, and notions, from one framework to another, fromone language to others, lies in the ways in which these ideas, concepts, and notionsare transformed by the different linguistic and intellectual traditions (Zarate andLiddicoat 2009). Exploring the ways in which they shape our understandingsand insights of our practice will help us to gain a deeper understanding of changingresearch contexts and take into account other norms and modes of thinking.McDonough and Brandenburg (2019) address this issue by urging self-studyresearchers to “engaging with ethical issues in and across cultures” (p. 175).

Perplexing Politics: Framing Challenges to and from Self-Study

Self-study methodology is challenging as a research approach because it examinesthe extent to which one is living out one’s values. It requires one to discuss andre-examine them in a way that values can evolve in response to examined practice(Russell 2007). By nature, self-study calls for a variety of theories and multiplequalitative methods. As Samaras and Freese (2009, p. 9) note, “self-study scholarscome from various theoretical orientations and conceptually frame their studiesaccordingly.” By doing so, “there is no one way, or correct way, of doing self-study. Rather, how a self-study might be done depends on what is sought to be betterunderstood” (Loughran 2007, p. 15). Throughout both our work together and in thewriting of this chapter, in which we have deliberately crossed boarders of languageand academic cultures, we have explored perspectives offered by both power andlanguage in an effort to better understand the perplexing politics of self-studymethodology.


We recognize that there are any number of ways in which one might framechallenges to and from self-study. Bullock and Madigan Peercy (2018) examinedchallenges raised from within self-study literature and those raised in the extantliterature, concluding in part that there was perhaps not as great a difference inconcerns as one might originally think. In examining challenges to and from theself-study, we argue that one must always begin with an acknowledgment of whatSegall (2002) called the reading positions associated with the endeavor. For exam-ple, we might examine questions such as: What categories of research and associatedassumptions are we adopting and discussing in our work as self-study scholars?What frameworks, paradigms, and discourses shape our foundational ideas asteacher educators and as researchers? What are the intellectual and social historiesof these ideas? How do our assumptions frame our understanding and insight aboutteaching, learning, and our identities?

These questions bring to mind Bullough and Pinnegar (2004) discussion ofthe “four perplexing clusters of problems for self-study,” which are the problemsof definition, ontology, form, and scholarship (p. 340). We have touched on eachof these throughout this chapter via an examination of a research tradition, ladidactique, that has not been widely explored within most anglophone scholarshipalthough it shares many of the goals of self-study methodology.

In this chapter, we have taken the perspectives of a researcher at once new andexperienced to highlight the perplexing politics of challenging self-study. We, as aresearch community, naturally expect self-study of teaching and teacher education tochallenge newcomers, but to what extent do new ideas from other research traditionscontinue to permeate the corpus of self-study literature? In the years that come, wehope that both novice researchers and experienced researchers from other method-ological traditions continue to contribute to self-study methodology. In particular, wechallenge both newcomers and the existing community to explore, from first prin-ciples, the epistemological, ontological, and axiological assumptions they have bothabout self-study methodology and about other methods and methodologies they seekto combine within a self-study framework. If self-study methodology is a hybridmethodology, as Bullough and Pinnegar (2001) suggested, then how do researchersfrom other methodological traditions navigate this hybridity in their own work.Additionally, we strongly encourage researchers who conduct self-study researchin languages other than English to make explicit the particular challenges andopportunities that multiple languages offer to self-study. We hope to read morecross-cultural and crosslinguistic self-study research, written in multiple languagesand for multiple academies. For those familiar with existing traditions of self-studyin English, this will require a willingness to work through the history of thedevelopment of the field over the past 30 years with fresh pairs of eyes. For thosenew to self-study, this will require a willingness to help self-study researchersunderstand the ways in which other research traditions have grappled with similarideas, particularly in other languages. In both cases, it is important to resist thetemptation to automatically assume that we are either talking about the same issuesusing different words or approaching ideas in diametrically opposed ways. We hope


that this chapter has provided one illuminating possibility: a consideration of theways in which self-study both challenges and can be challenged.

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Documents

Exploring Challenges to and from Self- Study Methodology · University of Cambridge. He has worked with self-study methodology since begin-ning doctoral studies with Tom Russell 15