A Helping Hand(book)

Articles in academic journals offer contemporary accounts of the field with a view to informing future understandings. At the same time, authors typically ground their work in established theories and methodologies, as well as situate it in relation to other scholarship.

As the field of education continues to expand, it is difficult for a single scholar to know the theoretical and methodological roots of education, let alone keep up with current trends. Handbooks play an increasingly important role in helping scholars connect their studies to related work. For example, the International Handbook of Teacher Education, edited by Loughran and Hamilton (2016), situates teacher education in history (Placier et al., 2016), pedagogy (Korthagen, 2020), and subject matter knowledge (Rollnick & Mayhunga, 2016). Furthermore, it offers thematic chapters on areas of specialization such as the practicum (White & Forgasz, 2016), reflective practice (Rodgers & LaBoskey, 2016), assessment (Smith, 2016) and social justice (Chubbuck & Zembylas, 2016). Drawing on such a reference book helps authors frame their work for journal readers interested in teacher education.

Self-study, as an established field within teacher education, has its own Handbooks to guide both novice and established scholars. The International Handbook of Self-Study of Teaching and Teacher Education Practices, edited by Loughran, Hamilton, LaBoskey and Russell (2004), has informed the work the education academic community, including contributions to Studying Teacher Education, for many years. Chapters on the nature of self-study (e.g. Tidwell & Fitzgerald, 2004) and professional knowledge (e.g. Hamilton, 2004) have helped teacher educators understand self-study and provided compelling insights into the field. Chapters on representing self-study in research and practice both direct researchers to relevant work and became regular citations in methodology sections of articles; notably, the five criteria for designing well-executed self-studies in LaBoskey’s (2004) ‘The Methodology of Self-Study and Its Theoretical Underpinnings’. While some chapters in this Handbook remain foundational to self-study, the passage of time means that the first edition no longer represents the most recent developments within the self-study discourse community.

This year, the International Handbook of Self-Study of Teaching and Teacher Education Practices, Second Edition, edited by Kitchen, Berry, Bullock, Crowe, Taylor, Guðjónsdóttir, and Thomas (2020), was published. This second edition, divided into six sections over two volumes, will prove a valuable resource for scholars interested in understanding, practicing, and referencing self-studies of practice. As a means of introducing the Handbooks, the six articles in Studying Teacher Education, 16(3) are framed in relation to the six sections of the Handbook.

In Part I: Foundations of Self-Study of the International Handbook of Self-Study of Teaching and Teacher Education Practices, Second Edition, section editor Amanda Berry (2020) locates self-study as ‘very much at a threshold moment in terms of its development’ (p. 4) as it has become well established thanks to a substantive body of work, yet its impact remains limited. The chapters in this section both document the development of self-study and address how it can continue to develop. ‘How to maintain the particular character of and unique forms of [self-study] while at the same time aiming to contribute to the mainstream of educational research?’ (p. 4), according to Berry, is an enduring tension.

The first article in this issue of Studying Teacher Education does a fine job of striking this balance. ‘Examining the Tensions between Rapport with Pre-Service Teachers and Authority in Becoming a Teacher Educator’ is an interesting and insightful self-study by a new science teacher educator, Andrea Phillips, working with her doctoral advisor, Meredith Park Rogers. Although she began as an undergraduate biology instructor, Phillips was deeply committed to going beyond curricular questions to pedagogical ones. Phillips felt she had established a good rapport with her classes, but as ‘her role of authority became more apparent, the closeness she initially felt dwindled,’ leading to tensions in her practice. This prompted Phillips ‘to examine the relationship between rapport and authority, and to determine whether rapport acts as a barrier to maintaining authority in the classroom.’ As Butler and Branyon (2020) observe, teacher educators conduct self-studies because they think that ‘developing an understanding of self as educator involves seeing the self through the eyes of those who observe you in practice’ (p. 149). Phillips and Rogers, in puzzling over their practice, combine developing deep professional understanding with subjective educational theory (Kelchtermans, 2009) through the use of Relational Cultural Theory and the framework of deliberate relationship. By making contributions to both self-study and the wider literature on relationships with preservice teachers, this study exemplifies crossing the threshold while maintaining the character of self-study.

Part II: Self-Study Methods and Methodologies, edited by Shawn Bullock, explores the range of approaches used in self-study to examine questions of practice. Fletcher (2020) identifies hybridity in methods of data collection and analysis as ‘a central feature of self-study’ (p. 269). Notable in self-study, Fletcher continues, is the ‘privileging of personal experience’ (p. 275) alongside interactivity with critical friends and collaborators. Bullock (2020) makes critical friendship and collaboration the focus of his introductory chapter, arguing that they are foundational to exploring personal and professional experiences ‘in public ways’ and to learning to ‘give way to new experiences, new ideas, shifting pressures, and the ontological demands of a robust, reflexive practice’ (p. 265).

The second article in this issue, ‘A Collaborative Self-Study with Critical Friends: Culturally Proactive Pedagogies in Literacy Methods Courses’ by Carin Appleget, Courtney Shimek, Joy Myers, and Breanya C. Hogue, is a powerful example of collaboration and critical friendship across institutions. These four teacher educators, who met at a national conference, shared a commitment to culturally responsive teacher education and decided to collaborate in this important and challenging work. In their self-study, they sought ‘to do more than add learning events’ to their implementation of Culturally Proactive Pedagogy. They challenged each other to engage in continual personal reflexivity through ‘critical conversations with colleagues using the Pose, Wobble, Flow (P/W/F) framework (Garcia & O’Donnell-Allen, 2015).’ Their article shows them engaged in the difficult work of social justice teaching while simultaneously modelling their framework. Through critical friendship, we were ‘inspired to try new things,’ became more ‘reflective of our own practices,’ and provided much-needed accountability and support.” This collaborative self-study exemplifies interactivity as a means of becoming stronger by giving way alongside critical friends.

The third article, ‘Tensions and Caring in Teacher Education: A Self-Study on Teaching in Difficult Moments’ by Adrian D. Martin, like the previous article, reflects an increased focus on social justice in the self-study of teacher education practices. An entire section of the new Handbook, Part III: Self-Study and Teaching and Teacher Education for Social Justice” edited by Monica Taylor, is devoted to social justice themes and pedagogies. In the opening chapter, Taylor and Diamond (2020) acknowledge that social justice teaching is ‘challenging, emotionally taxing, and at times risky’ (p.p. 512). At the same time, it is in communities like S-STEP that we have the collective support to cultivate the courage and commitment to keep working through these issues” (p. 312). This section challenges us as a community to engage in this endeavor and offers us insights into the issues and stories of teachers engaging in the work, including Adrian Martin (Martin & Kitchen, 2020). In this issue of Studying Teacher Education, Martin draws on a critical incident about a class discussion of gender normativity in curriculum and classrooms to gain insight into how teacher educators can acknowledge sensitive content, convey an intent to facilitate learning (as opposed to indoctrination), and recognize when further discussion of a controversial issue is pedagogically no longer productive. The strength of this chapter is the richness of Martin’s interactivity with his students and his depth of reflection on the incident. It demonstrates that self-study is particularly well suited to grappling with the challenges of enacting social justice in teacher education, especially when the practitioner is well grounded in social justice theory and the pedagogy of teacher education.

Self-study is deeply rooted in the context of teaching and teacher education. ‘As teacher educators, we typically began in a discipline’ (p. 767) according to Crowe (2020), and, as we often teach specific subjects in our programs, it is important that we attend to specific disciplinary frames and ‘expand self-study by drawing on disciplines to come together, to learn together, and to change practice in new ways’ (p. 766). Given the importance of subject disciplines, and the richness of discipline specific self-studies, Part IV of the Handbook is titled, Self-Study across Subject Disciplines. Section editor Alicia Crowe has organized chapters by expert teacher educators in disciplines such as language, social studies, technology and mathematics. These chapters, along with many articles in Studying Teacher Education, are framed around incidents and practices in specific disciplines while offering insights to all teachers and teacher educators.

The fourth article in this issue, ‘Written Feedback as a Relational Practice: Revealing Mediating Factors’ by Signe E. Kastberg, Alyson E. Lischka, and Susan L. Hillman, is a case in point. The authors situate themselves as mathematics educators and nest the discussion of receiving feedback in the specific context of the mathematics classrooms; the examples from class and the dialogue among the authors is content and context specific. The insights offered convey to all of us how written feedback can be used to foster relationships with preservice teachers that promote curricular understanding and pedagogical development. The authors also model critical friendship as simultaneously supportive, critical, and forward-facing. They conclude, ‘As teacher educators, we have the power to be conscious of the ways our content identities, assignment structures we create, and our programmatic accreditation goals shape written feedback practice. Further, we have the power to challenge these factors in collegial conversations that shape our programs.’ Overall, this article addresses all four themes identified by Schuck and Brandenberg (2020) in their survey chapter on mathematics teacher education: challenging beliefs, pedagogical innovation, collaboration, and the personal professional journeys of mathematics educators.

Most self-studies occur within teacher education programs. Part IV of the International Handbook of Self-Study of Teaching and Teacher Education Practices, Second Edition, titled Self-Study in Teacher Education and Beyond, features chapters on important components of teacher education programs, such as practicum, portfolios and program leadership. It also looks beyond teacher education to self-study in teaching and higher education. Section editor Julian Kitchen (2020b), like Berry in Part I, seizes on the publication of the Handbook as a threshold moment. He challenges the community ‘to look beyond individual studies to the bigger theoretical, methodological, and practical questions that should engage the field on the 2020s and beyond’ (p. 1025). Chapters affirm the rigor of self-studies since the first Handbook while challenging us to think more deeply about the epistemology of practice (Martin & Russell, 2020), challenges in engaging in self-study (Ritter & Hayler, 2020), and programs as a whole (Kitchen, 2020a)

The fifth article, ‘A Playlist as a Metaphor for Engaging in a Collaborative Self-Study of Mathematics Teacher Educator Practices’ by Crystal Kalinec-Craig, Jaime M. Diamond and Jeffrey C. Shih, is another solid example of collaboration across institutions, as well as an innovative disciplinary study set in the mathematics teacher education classroom. The authors use video clips of children solving mathematics problems ‘to help teacher candidates attend to nuanced aspects of teaching and learning mathematics.’ Each author describes a video clip and offers a rationale for its use. After their co-authors (serving as critical friends) respond to the clips and rationales, they revise their approach in response. The article also addresses the multilayered challenges involved in doing self-study (Ritter & Hayler, 2020), notably the personal challenge of being vulnerable, the messiness of complexity, and institutional challenges within the academy and school systems. Kalinec-Craig and her colleagues, in sharing their pedagogy, research methods, and findings, look outward to how all teacher educators might ‘incrementally evolve their practice’ to cross the threshold to richer collective practices.

In Part VI: Self-Study Across Languages and Cultures of the Handbook, section editors Lynn Thomas and Hafdis Guðjónsdóttir (2020) challenge the self-study community to broaden and deepen self-study by crossing borders. These borders include language, as the dominance of the English language privileges certain scholars and communities. The chapters in this section address the challenges of dialogue across language and culture as opportunities to enrich everyone’s understanding of self-study and teacher education by learning from practitioners and researchers from a diverse range of contexts. Self-studies from Europe, Asia, Africa and South America are prominently featured in this section. Crossing borders, according to Thomas and Guðjónsdóttir, is about more than geographic boundaries. Thus, they also feature chapters from English language authors who examine ‘alternate cultures within their own institutions’ (p. 1334).

The final article in this issue represents the crossing of cultural and institutional borders. “Learning with and from Others: Self-Study of Teacher Education within a Landscape of Practice by Anne O’ Dwyer, Miriam Hamilton, and Richard Bowles is situated in an Irish university and involves two self-studies by early career teacher educator O’Dwyer with critical friends. One study is conventional (elementary science teacher education), while the other involves coaching the intervarsity ladies football team. The authors found that the ‘brokering of learning at the intersection of both practices illuminated opportunities for new learning experiences’ by ‘enabling a better understanding of practice, developing empathy and dropping the façade to support learners.’ The authors are part of a recent yet active community of Irish self-study practitioners who join sports pedagogy (sport and education) with self-study. As the Handbook chapter on self-study in Europe reports, this group is ‘interested in extending their investment in self-study’ ‘across programs and department collaborations’ and with ‘physical education teacher educators nationally and internationally’ (Lunenberg et al., 2020, p. 1388). This article by O’Dwyer and her colleagues connects to both interests. They conclude that ‘this research has evidenced the value of teacher educators crossing these boundaries within the landscape of our TEP to inform and improve relational teaching practices.’

As editors, we encourage self-study researchers to accept the helping hand offered by Handbooks such as the International Handbook of Self-Study of Teaching and Teacher Education Practices, Second Edition as they frame their work for publication in journals and books.