Self Study

I’ve just read the first two chapters of a book on self study (Berry, A. (2007). Tensions in Teaching About Teaching. Understanding Practice as a Teacher Educator. Springer) and find myself wanting to comment. First on my understanding of how self study is different from reflection. Self study is seen as a more public or group event, the idea being that reflection is very solitary and done to think things through on one’s own. We use and encourage reflection in practice, but in accepting this difference, it really is self study that we ought to be encouraging in our graduate diploma programs as it is the sharing and the growth that comes from that sharing that we are looking for. Up until this point, or at least until coming to SFU, it really was reflection that I was engaging in. I’ve tended to be solitary in my pursuit of studying, analyzing and dissecting my practice. Working now within a “critical friends group” or perhaps more aptly a “critical colleagues group” I am only recently in a place where I have a group of colleagues willing to engage in this way with me. Previously working in a district teaching program I did  have a critical colleague group but didn’t really know enough to take full advantage of it. I’m excited about this venture into a more open sharing.

In chapter two the author looks at why teacher educators study their work: to develop their knowledge of teaching teachers, to understand what informs the approaches they take and then how those affect new teachers learning about teaching, and also to consider what happens when these same teacher educators research their own practice through self study. Teacher educators come to the field of teacher education either via research or from teaching, neither route one that adequately prepares them for the role. Using either their research based background or drawing on their own experiences as a teacher most go through a private struggle (reflection) to understand the role, a trial-and-error approach of development through practice, that is largely individual. Through self-study, that individual development of knowledge through practice can be shared, documented and legitimized for others to draw on, thus creating a growing public domain of knowledge about practice.

Previously theory about teacher education has been developed largely through a “science-oriented research approach” and thus has been “privileged within academia”. In this sense it has not always been relevant or practical in terms of what teachers needed to know. “Practical knowledge is personal, context bound and gained through experience” (page 12). Because it does not conform to the “established paradigms” of scientific research it is generally not regarded with the same status as theory knowledge. Self-study offers the notion of “authority of position” as coined by Munby and Russell (1994). Self-study offers “self-knowledge”. Brooksfield (1995) notes that it is crucial in allowing for development of one’s understanding of the foundations from which one develops his/her own philosophy of teaching, the underlying assumptions and understandings from one’s own experiences as a learner. A distinction is drawn between “embodied personal practical knowledge and practical knowledge drawn from reflection on practice, or the difference between knowledge and knowing, epsiteme and phronesis (perceptual knowledge). Phronesis “involves becoming aware of the salient features of one’s experiences, trying to see and refine perceptions, making one’s own tacit knowledge explicit, and helping to capture the particularities of experience through the development of perceptual knowledge.” (p 13) (see Korthangen, 2001) Phronesis though is more than just perceptions, it is also understanding the generalities that come out of the experiences one has, so making the connections to patterns, theories and generalizations to provide that “authority of experience”. In this way traditional research knowledge is used, tested and internalized (or not), or “moderated” in the words of the author.

“Self study involves locating one’s assumptions about practice through the process of reflection, in order to facilitate the development of phronesis. Thus it appears that self-study involves developing knowledge as phronesis, understanding the conditions under which such knowledge develops, understanding the self, and working to improve the quality of the educational experience for those learning to teach…. Self study seeks to position teacher educators as knowledge producers, and therefore challenges traditional views of knowledge production as external, impersonal and empirically driven.” (pp 14-15)

Teacher educators engage in self-study for a number of reasons including learning to articulate their own philosophy of practice, to understand a particular question or concern in their practice, to model and learn to work within critical reflection and to understand what it is that we really do separately from what universities are telling us we do.

Reading this article has informed and insprired me. I like the idea of investigating beyond my own reflection, of sharing that in a group, of being more precise, organized, and structured in my own investigation of what I am about, and of coming to understand my own teaching more thoroughly. I look forward to this opportunity to engage in a self study process with my colleagues.