Kathleen Pithouse-Morgan

Towards academic generativity: working collaboratively with visual artefacts for self-study and social change

There appears to be a mounting consciousness in academia that knowledge production and the scholarly dissemination of knowledge do not necessarily lead to general well-being or improvement in society. In this article we start with ourselves by initiating an exploration into generative possibilities for becoming agents of social change through our own educational research. We take a collaborative self-study approach to our inquiry, using artefact retrieval as a visual method to re-examine our own research interests. Our individual reflections on our chosen artefacts are brought together into a reflexive dialogue. We follow this with a collaborative reflection, in which we explain how we have noticed similarities in both the connotative and denotative histories of our artefacts and gained an alternative perspective on our interests and practices as educational researchers. The article demonstrates how, by working with visual artefacts from our professional spaces, we were afforded the opportunity to collaboratively re-think our research endeavours. As ‘critical friends’ we were able to recognise the importance of moving beyond advocating change, and to explore how ‘starting with ourselves’ research approaches can facilitate social action for the benefit of others.

Polyvocal Professional Learning through Self-Study Research

Polyvocal Professional Learning through Self-Study Research illustrates the power of “we” for innovative and authentic professional learning. The 33 contributors to this book include experienced and emerging self-study researchers, writing in collaboration, across multiple professions, academic disciplines, contexts, and continents. These authors have noted and reviewed each other’s chapters and adapted their contributions to generate a polyvocal conversation that significantly advances scholarship on professional learning through self-study research. Building on, and extending, the existing body of work on self-study research, the book offers an extensive and in-depth scholarly exploration of the how, why, and impact of professional learning through context-specific, practitioner-led inquiry. The chapters illustrate polyvocal professional learning as both phenomenon and method, with the original research that is presented in every chapter adding to the forms of methodological inventiveness that have been developed and documented within the self-study research community.

Expanding the memory catalogue: Southern African women's contributions to memory-work writing as a feminist research methodology

abstract Much memory-work writing traces its origins to a systematic process of collaborative inquiry on female sexualisation undertaken by a group of feminist women in Germany in the 1980s. Other feminist researchers have since built on this work to explore gender and womens lived experiences. While a good deal of this work has continued to be collective, there is also more recent feminist memory-work writing that draws on ‘individual’ memories. From the outset then, memory-work writing has been positioned as an explicitly feminist methodology. To date, international scholarly conversations about memory-work writing as a feminist methodology have tended to be illustrated by exemplars from the academic ‘North’ – Europe, the USA, and Canada. We consider a range of exemplars of southern African womens written memory-work – as presented in published literature and unpublished theses and dissertations – that we see as contributing to a transnational ‘catalogue’ of methods for provoking feminist memory-work writing. We draw on this work to identify some generative strategies for, and features of, feminist memory-work writing. Our discussion also explores the potential significance and challenges of using such a methodology in southern African contexts, particularly in the context of a social change framework.

'Walking our talk' : exploring supervision of postgraduate self-study research through metaphor drawing

The authors of this article portray their learning as a group of eight academics who met to examine the roles and relationships of supervisors of postgraduate self-study research. In the article, they represent how through a metaphor-drawing activity they were able collectively to rethink their experiences and understandings of becoming and being supervisors of postgraduate self-study students. They used a metaphor-drawing activity to gain further understanding of self-study supervision, while also learning more about how visual methods can assist in self-study research. Significantly, in their drawings the supervisor was portrayed as a partner working with the student during the supervision process, rather than as a provider of expert knowledge. Through collaborative interactions and sharing of their personal images of supervision of postgraduate self-study research with critical friends, they were able to reconsider their practices in a reflexive manner that provided insight into possibilities for enhancing their supervisory roles and relationships.

Learning about Co-Flexivity in a Transdisciplinary Self-Study Research Supervision Community

In South Africa, every postgraduate (master’s or doctoral) student is usually assigned one academic advisor, known as a supervisor. “The traditional model is the apprenticeship model of individual mentoring. This model is usually supplemented by informal and ad hoc support programmes” (Academy of Science of South Africa [ASSAf], 2010, p. 64).

Productive Remembering and Social Agency

Productive Remembering and Social Agency examines how memory can be understood, used and interpreted in forward-looking directions in education to support agency and social change. The edited collection features contributions from established and new scholars who take up the idea of productive remembering across diverse contexts, positioning the work at the cutting edge of research and practice. Contexts range across geographical locations (Canada, China, Rwanda, South Africa) and across critical social issues, from HIV & AIDS to the legacy of genocide and Indian residential schools, from issues of belonging, place, and media to interrogations of identity. This interdisciplinary collection is relevant not only to education itself but also to memory studies and related disciplines in the humanities and social sciences.

A Self-Study of Connecting through Aesthetic memory-Work

In developing the title of this chapter, we were influenced by these words from E.M. Forster’s (1910) novel, Howards End: “Only connect! … Live in fragments no longer” (p. 183). For us, these words encapsulate a shared personal-professional learning experience that began in April 2012 when we were sitting next to each other on the floor in a packed American Educational Research Association (AERA) conference venue in Vancouver and we heard Elliot Eisner answer a question about the value of arts-based educational research with these words: “The opposite of aesthetic is anaesthetic!”

The Power of “We” for Professional Learning

Through self-study research, professionals seek out innovative and responsive ways of seeing, doing, and becoming. Self-study of professional practice has brought to centre stage the agency and lived experience of the professional in processes of learning and knowing (Hamilton, 2004).

Self-Knowledge Creation Through Collective Poetic Inquiry: Cultivating Productive Resistance as University Academics

We explore how using the literary arts-based methodology of collective poetic inquiry deepened our own self-knowledge as South African academics who choose to resist a neoliberal corporate model of higher education. Increasingly, poetry is recognized as a means of representing the distinctiveness, complexity and plurality of the voices of research participants and researchers. Also, poetry is understood as a mode of research analysis that can intensify creativity and reflexivity. Using found poetry in the pantoum and tanka formats, we provide an example of a poetic inquiry process in which we started off by exploring other university academics’ lived experiences of working with graduate students and came to a turning point of reflexivity and self-realization. The escape highlights our evolving understanding that collaborative creativity and experimentation in research can be acts of self-knowledge creation for nurturing productive resistance as university academics.

Breathing Under Water

The preceding chapters in this book exemplify polyvocal professional learning through self-study research as phenomenon (what) and method (how). Overall, these transdisciplinary exemplars comprise a complex conversation about supporting and enacting professional learning, with self-study methodology at the centre.