Critical Friends, Collaborators and Community in Self-Study

A defining feature of self-study research and practice is its emphasis on collaboration with others (Lighthall, 2004). By purposefully seeking out and listening to the voices of others, including students, colleagues and critical friends, self-study researchers strive to “step outside themselves” (Loughran & Northfield, 1998, p. 14) to develop new insights and perspectives that can challenge and strengthen their own work. By making their learning public, they inform and advance the teacher education community. Most of the seven articles in this issue of Studying Teacher Education offer powerful illustrations of how collaboration is constructed and conducted in self-study and highlight the learning effects of working with others.

The first two articles report research conducted by teacher educators who examined aspects of their pedagogy of teacher education through working with others. Sharon Pittaway and Tony Dowden, two experienced teacher educators in Australia, investigated their concerns around a potential mismatch between their beliefs and practices related to written feedback on student assignments. Their five-year collaborative self-study is presented as a dual-narrative account documenting their developing understanding of feedback through together exploring the literature, investigating students’ perspectives and trying to better understand how their own views played out in practice. In the next article, another Australian, Sharon McDonough, explores the development of her pedagogy of mentoring as she takes on the dual role of teacher educator and classroom secondary teacher working with a group of pre-service teachers. Sharon uses the construct of third space to analyse and articulate her understanding and practice of mentoring across different sites of school and university. A key component of her self-study is her collaboration with a critical friend with whom she could clarify and test ideas and generate more complex understandings of her pedagogy of mentoring, within the safe space of their relationship.

The next three articles explore the experiences of beginning teacher educators collaborating with others to promote their learning about educational research and practice. Heidi Wiebke, a beginning teacher educator in primary science in the USA, collaborated with her experienced science teacher educator mentor, Meredith Park Rogers, to investigate how she might better understand and support the learning of her pre-service teachers and her own learning about becoming a science teacher educator. A shared journal between Heidi and Meredith became a useful tool for exploring and analysing their learning experiences, together. Next, the article by Shelley Murphy, Monica McGlynn-Stewart and Farveh Ghafouri illustrates the multi-layer learning that developed through working together as a group of doctoral students in Canada. Drawn together through their sense of isolation within their institution, they formed a writing group in which they supported each other as emerging researchers and, later, as teacher educators. Their group process illustrates a form of spontaneous, collaborative identity construction that influenced their research and their teaching. An interesting and contrasting approach is described in the next article, in which Brandon M. Butler, an experienced teacher educator and researcher in the USA, created a seminar for a group of doctoral students to support the development of their identity as future teacher educators and researchers. Written from the perspectives of the doctoral students, Elizabeth Burns, Christina Frierman, Katrice Hawthorne, Alisa Innes, and James A. Parrott, the article reports how their participation in coursework within the structure of a doctoral seminar influenced their understandings of themselves and the educational contexts in which they worked.

Two more articles complete this issue. Kathryn Grushka and Brieahn Young write from Australia to introduce us to the intriguing genre of perzines (personal magazines) as an arts-based approach to stimulating and supporting reflexivity and identity development in teacher education. Their collaborative self-study using perzine pedagogy with their preservice teachers highlights how affective dimensions of teaching can be accessed and examined as important sources for learning about teaching. Their article represents an important example of how broadening the base of approaches that we use to examine experience can help us better understand more about the experience of learning to teach and, in this case, the often-neglected dimension of affect. In the final article, a team of seven teacher educators explore their efforts to understand and enact culturally responsive pedagogy. Working in the USA, with its range of diverse cultures, Heejeong Sophia Han, Eugenia Vomvoridi-Ivanović, Jennifer Jacobs, Zorka Karanxha, Andrea Lypka, Cindy Topdemir, and Allan Feldman worked individually and collaboratively to make progress on this important topic. They offer an interesting set of distinctions between preparing educators to use culturally responsive pedagogy and using culturally responsive pedagogy to prepare educators, in primary and secondary education and in higher education. They are refreshingly clear about the challenges and tensions arising from the responses of some students to their efforts to change their pedagogies to be more culturally responsive.

We hope you find that this issue stimulates your thinking about some of the ways that working with others in self-study of teacher education practices is understood and enacted, and how this defining feature of our work might be further elaborated and developed both within the self-study community and more broadly within other teacher education contexts.