Re-visioning one's Narratives: Exploring the relationship between researcher self-study and teacher research

Abstract

This paper is concerned with the relationship of self-study to a non-self-study methodology used in a teacher study. The study was intended to involve 18 kindergarten to Grade 12 teachers in “bringing memory forward” through looking back on their narratives, producing an autobiography and discussing familiar texts in relation to unfamiliar ones. Conceived separately from the researcher's self-studies, this methodology can be traced back to the researcher's own memory work. The paper explores the complex relationship between researcher self-study and teacher research, arguing that one builds on the other but that pedagogical, theoretical, and methodological reasons exist for also keeping them distinct. The primary pedagogical reason is to allow teachers the freedom to acknowledge the stories that have been formative for them and to critically engage those narratives.