Lesley Coia

Uncovering Our Feminist Pedagogy: A Co/Autoethnography.

What does it mean to be a feminist educator? How would we know if we were? We call ourselves feminist teachers and yet we have not focused on this identification and its influence on our teaching in some time. In this self-study, we set out to look at our practice-using co/autoethnography. As our study progressed, we began to realize that our research methodology seemed to align more with feminist principles than did our teaching. We became increasingly aware of how our methodology illuminated areas of our practice that may well have remained hidden. With our attention now on co/autoethnography itself, with its embrace of the autobiographical notion in sociopolitical context and an evolving epistemology, we were attentive to how co/autoethnography is itself a feminist research methodology. As we retrace our journey to this realization, we share this co/autoethnographic self-study.

Let’s Stay in the Swamp: Poststructural Feminist Reflective Practice

In this chapter, a reimagined conception of reflective practice is used to think about and improve our practice as teachers committed to addressing issues of social justice. Co-/autoethnography is described as an approach that utilizes insights from Schon through a poststructural feminist lens. This perspective invites a notion of reflective practice that returns us to Schon’s swamplands where reflection is at its most generative and effective.

A Co/Autoethnography of Feminist Teaching

We approach self-study as the people we are: We take from our self-studies what we can. We are reminded of Deleuze (1990/1995) writing about the students who took his courses: “nobody took in everything, but everyone took what they needed or wanted, what they could use” (as quoted by St. Pierre, 2004, p. 139).

Addressing Gender, Feminism, and Queer Theory Through Self-Study of Teacher Education Practices

In self-study of teacher education practices (S-STEP), our research begins with the self (Loughran, 2004). It is self-focused and self-directed in order to reconceptualize practice. As practitioners researching ourselves, the notion of the self is necessarily complicated, and while it would be unwise to attempt a definition of self that all self-study researchers would accept, it is clear that the self of self-study is not conceptualized as static or isolated.