Linda May Fitzgerald

Self-Study As Teaching

The title of this chapter reflects an interesting connection between the process of self-study and the process of teaching, the notion that self-study is indeed teaching. With self-study, the teacher – whether in a classroom in a school setting or in a classroom at a university – searches for connections between beliefs and practices with a desire to make positive meaningful change in the learning environment. This chapter makes the case for self-study as teaching. To make this case we use the story of one teacher-researcher, an associate professor of literacy education at a teaching university in the Midwestern United States. She will share her journey into self-study through the spiraling nature of her research focus: self as the evaluator, effective practice process, actions in practice related to beliefs, and the construction of self. Through the story of her journey we will examine the similarities across the cyclical dynamics of research, of reflection, and of teaching.

Self-Study and Diversity

The two volumes of Self-Study and Diversity serve as landmarks on the journey of the self-study methodology and community in responding to issues of diversity, equity and social justice in teacher education.

Talking Teaching and Learning: Using Dialogue in Self-Study

Two of the great North American rivers, the Mississippi and the Missouri, form the east and west borders of our state, and all of the nine tributary river systems within its borders were flooding at historic levels at the time we were writing this chapter. Since metaphor is one hallmark of our self-study method, river and tributary imagery lent themselves to a description of the origins of our method. Our entry into self-study was rather accidental, being the confluence of three distinct experiences: (a) a bi-weekly seminar in 1994–95, facilitated by the university’s teaching enhancement center to help new faculty be intentional about instructional choices as they began their careers; (b) regular meetings of the team of faculty members teaching sections of a foundations development course for beginning preservice teachers, some members of which were also new faculty; and (c) a partnership between Melissa (a member of the latter group) and Deborah Tidwell, as they prepared to attend the first international meeting of the Self-Study of Teacher Education Practices special interest group. Members in these overlapping groups recognized common interests and proposed a weekly lunch meeting in the spring of 1995. The primary purpose of these early meetings was collegial support and sharing teaching tips and tricks. Group discussions focused on the various trials and tribulations common to most new faculty: managing a 9-hour teaching load while pursuing scholarly work and responding to service demands; making sense of instructor evaluations; coping with challenging students; coming to terms with the nature of the students in our particular context (well-schooled passive learners); and negotiating our relationships with the tenured faculty within our departments. Initially, none of us saw these meetings in terms of collaborative scholarship on teaching. However, as Melissa began the self-study that she would present at the first Castle Conference (Tidwell & Heston, 1996, 1998), she suggested that we use Fenstermacher’s (1994) practical argument technique to focus our group’s inquiry

Talking Teaching and Learning: Using Practical Argument to Make Reflective Thinking Audible

Abstract According to Fenstermacher (1994), simply engaging in reflection is an inadequate way to facilitate change in teaching practice. Practitioners must work together to consider whether their practice aligns with their intent. Faculty teaching a diverse variety of teacher preparation courses (child development, early childhood curriculum, classroom evaluation, educational psychology, classroom management, and school, community and family relationships) met regularly to discuss their beliefs regarding educational philosophy, teacher education, constructivist pedagogy at the college level, and authentic assessment. The structure of these discussions required us to make our reflections public and subject to review by the empathetic, but critical, others in the group. In this paper, we will describe the process we have used to explore our thinking about our teaching practice and student learning. We also discuss how this process has made an impact on our practice and how we think about our practice. Impl...

Transforming Teacher Preparation in Early Childhood Education: Moving to Inclusion

In this paper, we describe our efforts to transform the early childhoad education major and the early childhood special education major into a single unified major. This unified major is intended to prepare early childhood educators to address competently the educational needs of botb children with and without disabilities in a general education classroom. We describe the events occurring at both the state and university levels that led to our efforts, and the progress we bave made during the first year of our work. We also identify several future challenges that we will soon confront.

Identifying Implications of Tensions in a Series of Collaborative Self-Study Groups

Drawing on 14 years of collaborative self-study group work at their university, East and Fitzgerald reviewed the data, stories and findings from that collaborative work, seeking to go beyond those original stories to identify practical implications of the tensions that emerged and played out within the various groups. Findings were shared and reinterpreted by a colleague, distant both literally and figuratively, who named taken-for-granted aspects of the work and provided alternative perspectives to expand our understanding. This review of our self-study groups refined our understanding of the nature and process of collaborative self-study work in which we strive to support each other with the objective of helping each other change our practice. Our analysis can inform others who want to pursue collaborative group self-study. Additionally, in going beyond our stories, we found that the tensions in our work mirror the tensions in the larger self-study field as it considers its relationship to mainstream educational research.