Richard D. Sawyer

Situating Teacher Development: The View from Two Teachers' Perspectives.

Abstract Using a narrative inquiry methodology, this 10-year study examined the situated nature of two teachers’ development. Research questions examined how the teachers situated their own learning, how they developed discourse communities for teaching and learning, and how they used tools in their work. Findings suggest that the following elements of situational learning were central to their development: questions that they drew from their practice; a balance between autonomy and collaboration found in peer collaboration focused on questions drawn from practice; the use of language and inclusion of new perspectives within discourse communities; improvisation and experimentation in practice, and support from administrators. A striking finding was that these teachers’ practice developed among multiple and sometimes contradictory pathways.

Teacher decision-making as a fulcrum for teacher development: exploring structures of growth

Abstract This study followed three diverse teachers – an elementary, a high school English and a mathematics teacher – over a 10-year period in the classroom. Framed by more emergent and situated notions of teacher development, this study has examined the role that teacher agency and decision making play in teacher development. Over time, each of the three teachers began to teach in a ‘new key’. Many factors and contexts contributed to this process. Paramount to this change were the complex choices they made in their practice that reflected their questions about student learning. Secondly, each of these teachers held a love of the process of teaching for learning. In addition, each of these teachers established powerful collaborative contexts for themselves and for their students. It was found that, over time, these teachers developed a powerful cycle of support for themselves, combining their craft knowledge, classroom questions, collaboration, reflection and decision making.

Teaching through Duoethnography in Teacher Education and Graduate Curriculum Theory Courses

In this chapter we discuss how we have incorporated duoethnographies in our teaching to assist our students in an examination of their teaching beliefs and practices. We explore both the teaching of education courses and duoethnography as a methodology as we simultaneously introduce both, adapting lessons to the various types of student who we have encountered. Reflexivity, openness to uncertainty, vulnerability, diversity, placeholders, points of view, and assessment criteria are some of the emergent themes.

Dialogic Reflection: An Exploration of Its Embodied, Imaginative, and Reflexive Dynamic

We began this project to explore a critical question in practitioner preparation: What are innovative practices of reflection in professional education intended to expand approaches for professionals to work with diverse others? In this project, we draw from the work of Schon and Dewey to include reflexivity—often a desired but elusive practice—as an additional goal of reflection. Reflexivity is the acknowledgment of an individual situated within a personal history within the real world. Hence, self-reflexivity is the act of personal change within a real-world context. This chapter draws attention to four essential practices for enacting this personal change. They are solitary reflection, ongoing inquiry, perpetual problem solving, and dialogic practice. We highlight how the contributing chapters fit into and oftentimes overlap between these essential practices while presenting creative ways to (self) reflexively navigate through professional educational situations. In each contribution, what became apparent was that as practitioners expanded their approaches to work with diverse others, they created contexts for dialogic imagination, self-examination, and reflexivity.

In Search of an Artistic Curriculum Identity

As people go through major shifts in their lives, they often refer to their experience in earlier time periods as “in a different life.” This notion of disconnect between parts of one’s lived experience is problematic in that it reduces imaginal sources of conception and meaning making. This chapter explores this topic by examining the use of duoethnography in a curriculum studies class. One duoethnography in the class was conducted by Lida Dekker and Melody Rasmor, titled, “Nursing an Artful Practice: Finding the Aesthetic Groundings of our Practice.” In this study they examined earlier, artistic aspects of their identity, within the context of their current professional identities as nurse educators. This exploration led them to an awareness that their artistic sides, subordinated by current duties and responsibilities, were still present in their lives, contributing to their professional behavior. Stage two of the duoethnography presents a second study in which Richard Sawyer, Melody Rasmor, and Lida Dekker deconstruct the first study as text, examining it in relation to perceptions of classroom-and-life-history curriculum. In this discussion they examine how this class-based duoethnography reframed their perceptions of it as curriculum, illuminating a new process of cultural-and-personal imaginal reconceptualization.

Dialogic Interdisciplinary Self-Study Through the Practice of Duoethnography

A number of scholars have begun to use duoethnographies—a dialogic and relational form of research—to examine their own beliefs and perceptions in relation to their curriculum, classes, and professional behavior. Working in tandem with their duoethnography partner, these scholars seek to restory and reconceptualize their perception of these beliefs and of practice. This chapter explores the value of duoethnography to the study of interdisciplinary practice. This value is premised on the view that the “findings” of research are an artifact of its form: dialogic and relational forms of research help to (1) facilitate deeply emic, personal, and situated understandings of practice and (2) promote personal reflexivity and changes in practice. This chapter presents theory underlying duoethnography and, drawing from the subsequent chapters of the book, offers a number of examples of duoethnographies of practice.

Introduction: The Efficacy of Duoethnography in Teaching and Learning: A Return to its Roots

Since its debut in 2003 (Norris & Sawyer, 2003), duoethnography has become a widely known research methodology, through which people of difference reconceptualize their histories of a particular phenomenon in juxtaposition with one anOther. The first publication (Norris & Sawyer, 2004) examined sexual orientation but wasn’t even labeled as a duoethnography until republished in 2015 (Sawyer & Norris, 2015a). After a few initial conference presentations, colleagues in attendance requested more details regarding Joe’s and Rick’s dialogic approach that resulted in a second set of presentations discussing their emergent methodology. By 2005, a name was created (Norris & Sawyer, 2005) and, over time, a series of emergent tenets were articulated (Norris, 2008; Norris & Sawyer, 2012; Sawyer & Norris, 2013, 2015b).

Desperately Seeking Self-Reflexivity: A Critique of a Duoethnography About Becoming a Postcolonial Teacher

Throughout my teaching life I have challenged myself to become a critically reflexive educator. In this paper, I discuss my work to become a postcolonial educator. Postcolonial education does not mean that educators no longer engage in colonial acts or teach in colonial ways. Rather, it means that educators constantly critique and become aware of their engagement in such acts, both inside and outside the classroom. In this paper, I discuss a duoethnography I conducted in which I examined, as a critical case, an old lesson plan that I wrote and taught as a public high school English teacher in San Francisco. I examined the particular lesson plan as an example of what I thought was possibly my LEAST colonial curriculum. As part of this discussion, I first review duoethnography as a methodology of choice, then examine the duoethnography as an artifact of an attempt to become a postcolonial educator. I conclude by exploring and critiquing my personal process of reflexivity.

Strains and Sensibilities: Art and Romanticism in Educational Research

A review of Touching Eternity: The Enduring Outcomes of Teaching by Tom Barone, New York, Teachers College Press, 2001, The Art of Writing Inquiry, edited by Lorri Neilsen, Ardra L. Cole, and J. Gary Knowles, Halifax, Backalong Books, 2001, Writing Research/Researching Writingby Gary William Rasberry, New York, Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., 2001, and Being, Seeking and Telling: Expressive Approaches to Qualitative Adult Education Research, edited by Peter Willis, Robert Smith, and Emily Collins, Flaxton, Queensland, Post Pressed, 2000