A Story is Not Just a Story: Many ways to go beyond the story in self-study research

The impetus for this special issue was John Loughran's presentation at the 2008 Seventh International Conference on the Self-Study of Teacher Education Practices (also known as the Castle Conference). Loughran implored us to go beyond the story to consider how our work speaks to contexts and issues beyond our immediate situations. As a consequence of Loughran's appeal, many conference delegates began to think about their work in a new way; from discussions at the conference it became evident that many were keen to take up this challenge to go beyond the papers they had presented. As Associate Editors of Studying Teacher Education, we felt the importance of this call and revisited the proceedings to select for this special issue a set of articles that had wide appeal and showed potential for going beyond the story. We issued a challenge to the authors to return to their conference papers to prepare research articles that go beyond the story. This special issue is the result of their efforts.

What comes to mind when we hear the term story? It can conjure up images of fairy tales, murder mysteries, potboiler dramas or fantasies, all of which can transport us to a different realm. Story is a powerful medium and Chambers, in his groundbreaking text Booktalk: Occasional Writing on Literature and Children, offers many insights into the place of story:

Like every other creative activity, thinking requires raw material. I don't know about you, but I find I can never get enough raw material of my own. I take most of what I need from other people. On my own I am just not enough – in experience or knowledge or imaginative capacity or language. To put it another way round: thinking isn't really a self-contained, individual activity at all. It is a shared process. We are all members of the human think-tank. … It is with word, by words, through words that we make sense of ourselves. (Chambers, 1985, p. 5)

Chambers values stories because he believes they can help us understand who we are and how we fit in the world. Story has long held a prominent place in self-study work because, as Chambers argues, stories help us understand how we view ourselves and how we understand our relationships with others. Yet our task as researchers is not simply to tell stories. They often provide the context and may draw the reader into the article, but we do our research a disservice by beginning and ending with the story. In his introduction to this issue, Loughran comments on the powerful relationship between stories and research that, on the one hand, can be enriching yet, on the other hand, can limit us:

There is always the danger that the story of doing the self-study can easily become the main focus, or the inadvertent reported outcome of the project… If that is the case, then the knowledge that might be derived from doing self-study may be overlooked as the story takes precedence. (Loughran, this issue)

Loughran's call to the community to pay more explicit attention to the knowledge developed through self-studies echoes the challenge posed by Zeichner (2007) to report our studies in ways that more clearly demonstrate what we have learnt about key issues and practices in teacher education, and to connect our work to the mainstream of teacher education research. Connections across studies that “consciously build on the work of others” (p. 37) can make a significant contribution to valuing the work of teacher educators, building a professional knowledge base and influencing policy and practice. As we worked through the process of organizing this special issue, we came to recognize that responding to this challenge is not a straightforward task.

When we set about organizing this special issue we had a preconceived idea of how our authors would take up the challenge to go beyond the story. As we received drafts of their articles, we quickly realized that they had each interpreted the challenge differently. At first we were daunted: would we be meeting our objectives with all these variations on the theme? Yet as we stepped back we realized that our authors had offered us an important message through their interpretations of what it means to go beyond the story. Just as self-study research can take many different forms (Lassonde, Galman, & Kosnik, 2009; Tidwell, Heston, & Fitzgerald, 2009), going beyond the story is not a cookie-cutter formula. The eight articles provided us with a range of different models. We realized that the authors' return to their papers with a new mandate enriched their data analyses in ways that we could not have imagined at the start of this process. Perhaps we were thinking of a more scientific framework whereby our authors would develop generalizable findings about teacher education that others could use in almost all settings. We naively thought that the findings could be mapped in a straightforward way onto other programs or other self-study research that could lead to links between programs. The responses developed in the articles in this issue illustrate that going beyond the story is a more complex task than we initially anticipated, a task that requires both maintaining a commitment to the richness of one's local context and drawing insights that go beyond that context in ways that are meaningful to others.

As researchers we often follow a familiar cycle: pose a research question, gather data, analyze the data, write a report, and then move on to the next project. Even with self-study methodology that is part of a continuing cycle, we rarely have the time to go back or luxury of going back to the original data set and analyzing it after having presented it at a conference and engaging with others about it. Including these additional steps in the process seemed to give our authors permission to see their data differently and thus to draw new insights from their work. Our request became a powerful incentive to make their work more accessible and useful to others. We now realize that this is an important way of going beyond the story.

From the summaries that follow, readers can see that the articles in this issue cover a wide range of topics that address many aspects of teacher education. Running through the articles are themes that speak to teacher educators and self-study researchers about the nature of their professional knowledge, about how practice is enacted and about the conditions that sustain or limit opportunities for learning.

Kelly Donnell tells the poignant story of being a new teacher educator as she describes the challenges she faced when teaching a required foundations course using a text chosen by others. While the dilemmas she faced were set out clearly in her original story, in this version she clearly identifies two tensions, her voice and confrontation, and her handling of them. Her findings should be useful to many others, especially new teacher educators who may find themselves in a similar situation, because she clearly delineates the challenges and outlines how she could have proceeded.

The article by Cynthia Nicol, Janice Novakowski, Feda Ghaleb, and Sarah Beairsto investigates the delicate dance that comprises the relationship between a pedagogy of care and a pedagogy of inquiry in the context of a mathematics methods class. Through a collaborative participatory self-study, these educators wonder what a mathematics teacher education course that is inspired by an ethic of care and inquiry might look like. They ask each other and the reader, “What are the tensions and the possibilities?” Their intriguing study takes the reader beyond the walls of the method class as they pose the same question of themselves and, more generally, of those who work in collaborative self-study groups. Their findings offer a strategy for better understanding the challenges and experiences of balancing care and inquiry in living inquiry-oriented caring within practice.

Barbara Henderson examines the intricacies of providing mentorship to four graduate teaching assistants working with her in an Early Childhood Education program. Her self-study opens up interesting questions about what it means to be a teacher educator mentoring others in the teaching role while also seeking to improve one's own practice. Henderson comes to recognize the multiple complexities that she must attend to as she works within the layers of power relationship in the class. Her study breaks new ground in beginning to theorize the mentoring relationship between the teacher educator and graduate assistants.

Nathan Brubaker revisited data that he gathered on a particular course where he reconceptualized the entire set of assessment and grading practices. His example of letting students make contracts with him regarding their assignments was interesting in itself; by revisiting the data he was able to identify three lessons learned that other teacher educators could use. By revisiting his data set after engaging in discussions about the experience, he was able to lift himself out of the immediacy of the teaching situation and its emotional encumbrances.

Deborah Roose focuses on her 18 years as an administrator. Her longitudinal data set is a goldmine that many self-study researchers will envy. The first phase of her research involved classifying the entries in her journals and gaining some insight into her work as an administrator. Her critical friends at the Castle Conference provided suggestions on how to revisit the data in a different way by following particular threads and focusing on six-year chunks.

Katheryn East, Linda Fitzgerald, and Mary Manke explore the nature of group process by re-visiting 14 years of data collected from collaborative self-study groups operating at East's and Fitzgerald's university. Their study builds on previous layers of investigations of their group processes and offers a new lens through which they begin to problematize the question of how the functioning of these groups has and has not served self-study on their campus and in their own research. As a critical friend distant from their immediate context, Manke challenges Fitzerald and East to uncover the hidden assumptions and taken-for-granted aspects of their accumulated data. Their article presents an interesting example of going beyond story to address the bigger picture questions of who should do self-study and how self-study can be both a closed and an open community. Their article offers thought-provoking challenges and tensions around these questions.

Janneke Geursen Ari de Heer, Fred Korthagen, Mieke Lunenberg, and Rosanne Zwart explore the question of whose needs are served through self-study and how those needs can be understood and responded to appropriately in a collaborative self-study context. This multi-layered study presents insights developed from individual self-studies conducted by two teacher educators and a self-study conducted by the facilitators about the nature of the support that helps or hinders the process of working with others. Their conclusions go beyond their immediate situations to speak about frictions that are encountered in facilitating collaborative self-study research, including friction experienced only by facilitators as they work with participants.

Bobbie Turniansky, Judith Barak, Smadar Tuval, Ariela Gidron, and Ruth Mansur bring together three self-studies in their article. By revisiting the stories of the researchers working in their teacher education program, they aimed to identify commonalities across the stories. Through the re-analysis of the three studies, they were able to identify three dimensions or tensions commonly experienced in collaboration: territoriality, knowledge, and values. Without revisiting their data they would not have made the links between the separate studies nor would they have been able to characterize the complexity of collaborative space. They provide fresh insight into the challenges of working collaboratively.

The articles in this issue address a range of topics, yet the common feature throughout is that the authors derived principles that can be useful to other teacher educators. We believe that their stories, insights, and principles will help to advance the field of teacher education. Samaras and Freese (2009, p. 7) commented as follows on the development of self-study research:

Like any new field of research, self-study has gone through growing pains and stages of development marked by a need for a shared understanding and shared language around the field of self-study. Self-study scholars have thought deeply about the nature of self-study, what it involves, and what distinguishes it from other types of research.

We see this special issue as another step in the evolution of self-study research. The stories and analyses provided by the authors have deepened our understanding of teacher education and the role of the teacher educator.