Finding A Way Through The Swamp: A Case For Self-Study As Research*

Abstract

The point, or points, at which a ‘self-study' might become ‘research' is a matter of some discomfort and ‘dissensus' even among those who work and write in the self-study of teaching and teacher education areas. Those of us in the practitioner research, teacher researcher, action research and self-study in teacher education communities all forage somewhat nervously in the swamplands between the apparently infertile deserts of positivist detachment and the impenetrable jungles of postmodern de/con/structive self-inspection. In our interests we straddle precariously a perceived chasm between the high theory of academe and the rich chaos of situated practice, and in so doing, we often buy into, at the same time as resenting, an unhelpful binarism that opposes rather than reconciles the university to the school, theory to practice, the academic to the teacher and, the researcher to the practitioner. Taking a scenario of a rejected research proposal as its starting point, this chapter addresses these issues in relation to three core questions: by what criteria do teacher-researchers judge their studies to be research?; how might the epistemological issues of self involvement be resolved?; and, how is self-study in teaching and teacher education situated in the political discourse of the academy? We conclude that establishing an epistemological warrant for self-study as research is still largely an enterprise conceptualized within, and judged against, the contested but nevertheless conventional requirements of the academy. It also seems that the exercise is made particularly problematic because any such research discourse is embedded in the political context of an academy that continues to privilege ‘outsider' research approaches at the same time as it struggles to accommodate to the unique position of teaching and teacher education as simultaneously the thing we know about, the thing we do and the thing we research.