Papers in this issue illustrate in a variety of ways the disciplined nature of self-study research. The issue opens with Amanda Berry's reconceptualization of teacher educators' knowledge in terms of tensions, and she names six tensions that she has identified in her work with preservice teachers at Monash University. She then illustrates this idea of tensions by focusing on one—the tension between valuing experience and reconstructing experience. The paper's conclusion forges links between the perspective of tensions and the growing sense that the contrast between phronesis and episteme offers valuable insights into moving teacher education forward.
The second paper, by Pauline Harris, offers an engaging account of a self-study that was waiting to happen. When she experienced the living contradiction of using didactic teaching approaches with the intention of encouraging prospective early childhood teachers to base their teaching on play, participation in a self-study group at the University of Wollongong helped her to identify and resolve a number of significant tensions. Only by drawing her students into the development of her pedagogy was she able to move beyond the initial contradictions.
While the first two papers of the issue focus on self-study by individual teacher educators, the next three papers illustrate the use of self-study by groups of people working in teacher education. Lori Olafson, Cyndi Giorgis and Linda Quinn report their self-study experiences of university‐school collaboration in a specially funded program at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Immersion in field experiences, curriculum integration, reflective practice and productive uses of technology were among the important elements of the innovation. Fine-grained analysis of a productive collaboration ultimately resulted in an understanding that the collaboration would have to end when the funding that made the program possible was withdrawn. Interesting conclusions about teacher educators' professional development are also offered.
Marianne Larsen of the University of Western Ontario reports and analyzes the self-study of a group of faculty who were involved in the first year of a new preservice teacher education program. Finding the time to study collectively the inaugural year's experiences was a major challenge that ultimately revealed rich details of the many dilemmas teacher educators face as it also helped to build a sense of community among the faculty.
Margaret Macintyre Latta and Gayle Buck also analyze and interpret the self-study experiences of a group of faculty, this time of 11 individuals working at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Four “intonations” are illustrated—actively making the self vulnerable, being accountable to self, approaching theory as working notions to be examined, and pursuing the pull of possibilities in teaching-learning situations. This report reveals in considerable detail the inner workings of a group engaging in self-study, leading ultimately to conclusions about the role of embodiment within professional development and our practices of teaching and learning.
When Deborah Trumbull and Kimberly Fluet worked together at Cornell University, they documented and then analyzed and interpreted the development of pedagogical knowledge associated with improving a preservice course intended to help prospective teachers develop greater awareness of their personal biases toward the practice context. Collaborative self-study with a critical friend enabled Trumbull to explore her own assumptions as she made changes to the course and documented their impact. Issues identified included the complexity of her expectations in individual assignments to students, levels of inference in classroom observations, inferences about pupil identity, the importance of multiple interpretations in the reflective process, and the moral component of phronesis.
Each of these papers demonstrates the disciplined nature of self-study research in teacher education. To highlight and extend the work of these contributors, we conclude this issue with a paper of our own in which we explore the potential of understanding teaching as a discipline in its own right. We explain our understanding of why teaching tends to be viewed in a restricted way in our schools, universities, and teacher education programs. We also develop the view that teacher educators are uniquely placed to benefit from investigating their own practices in order to help new teachers see the potential of viewing teaching as a discipline. We conclude that teaching is a discipline that finds its natural home in a teacher education context. As all the papers in this issue illustrate, self-study is one of the most appropriate methodologies for making explicit the knowledge that is generated when teaching is viewed as a discipline.