Self-study in physical education: bridging personal and public understandings in professional practice

In a recent article in this journal, Brown (2011) advocated strongly for the use of self-study as an important aspect of continuing professional learning for those working in the field of health, sport, and physical education. He argued that there is a need for all practitioners (teachers and teacher educators) to re-focus their efforts on developing contextualised understandings of teaching and learning, particularly in ways that provoke them to think deeply about their practice. Similarly, we have also advocated for the use of self-study as a way of expanding conversations, knowledge, and understandings of teaching and teacher education practices (Ovens & Fletcher, 2014). In particular, we believe self-studies provide the means for enacting a politics of action in ways that are transformative for both knowing in action and for being a teacher or teacher educator. In this special issue we build on these calls and demonstrate how a growing number of educators from all career stages are engaging with self-study as an important aspect of their professional learning. The papers making up this collection help illustrate how self-study, through its focus on the interplay of scholarship and practice, positions teaching as something that is vital, complex, and in need of constant discernment and professional judgement. The collection also provides a valuable resource for others wanting to draw on self-study in their own inquiries into ‘provoking’ movement in their own teaching while also providing a means to publish work related to this methodology.

For those new to the methodology, self-study is a research genre centred on the role of the educator within professional practice settings (Ovens & Fletcher, 2014). It is a form of practitioner research in which the development of personal, pedagogical knowledge is facilitated through a careful examination of one's own learning beliefs, practices, processes, contexts, and relationships (Loughran, 2004; Vanassche & Kelchtermans, 2015). The contributors to this special issue have used these purposes to frame inquiries into their own practices, and by sharing their insights with readers and making them available for critique, they seek to validate their understanding of contemporary teacher education practice and contribute to building the knowledge base of pedagogies of PETE (O'Sullivan, 2014) and of teacher education research more broadly.

In using self-study, all contributors have in common a commitment to their own professional learning as teacher educators. They also share a common methodological approach and most integrate in their work, in varying ways, the following key characteristics of self-study research design: self-studies are self-oriented, focus on improvement, use multiple qualitative methods, rely heavily on collaborations or interactivity, and are validated by trustworthiness (LaBoskey, 2004). Importantly, however, contributors to the special issue also share dispositions about and commitments to teacher education that go beyond method, reflection, and professional learning (Tinning, 2014). As with our previous edited collection of self-studies (Ovens & Fletcher, 2014), contributors to this special issue share a common set of characteristics with other self-study researchers that enable their work to be identified as self-study. First, they are part of a professional community of practitioners who share, research, and evolve their own practice as teachers and teacher educators. Second, each takes an inquiry-oriented stance towards researching how she or he (that is, herself or himself) thinks, knows, and acts in the contexts in which they practice. Third, by turning the focus of inquiry onto the self, the practitioner researcher reflects a desire to be more, to improve, to better understand.

In capturing these features in their work, Vanassche and Kelchtermans (2015) suggest that self-study researchers must continually grapple with two main tensions in order to achieve their purposes: the tension between rigour and relevance on the one hand, and between effectiveness and understanding on the other. The first tension involves the practitioner researcher maintaining the necessary focus on the contextual dilemmas of the self-in-practice (relevance) but in a way that addresses criteria for high quality research – such as having strong theoretical and methodological grounding – and captures implications for the wider teacher education community (rigour). The second tension involves teacher educators balancing what Vanassche and Kelchtermans (2015) describe as an instrumentalist desire for effectiveness (for example, did something work well?) with a more complex understanding of the political and pedagogical problems of practice. The papers in this special issue each capture these tensions and showcase the fine line that self-study researchers walk in having their research acknowledge the personal, contextual, and emotional nature of their work in order to strive for personal growth while also making important contributions to the wider research community through sharing their nuanced understandings and making them available for critique.

These features require self-study researchers to interrogate and question their assumptions and open up new interpretations. This offers a challenging task because of the difficulty involved in changing the self; however, unless doubts, confusion, and uncertainties are laid bare by the researchers, self-study runs the risk of becoming a mechanism for self-justification, thus losing much of its potential for transformation for the individual and the field (Loughran, 2004). The desire for improvement is not only for the practitioner researcher to be more but also to improve understandings of the complexity of the work they are involved in. Improvement in this way necessarily involves considered engagement with new and alternative perspectives, generated through dialogue and interaction with others, be they students, critical friends, or key texts.

Despite self-study research being relatively new in health, sport, and physical education research, such has been the impact of self-study research in teacher education that we may feel able to move beyond times when self-study papers needed to come with an extensive justification of what the methodology is, how it is used, and so on prior to explaining how the research was conducted. While many in our research community may be unaware of the rich history of self-study, we believe that researchers should be able to, now, state clearly that their research uses self-study methodology without a lengthy pre-amble that justifies to reviewers and readers that self-study is an accepted methodology: it is. This comes with the caveat, however (as expressed by Vanassche and Kelchtermans), that researchers clearly explain the steps they went through, ground their work in theoretical and research literature, provide an audit trail of their data sources and analytic processes, and consider alternative interpretations of their findings. In short, because self-study methodology is now arguably more accepted by the field, it does not excuse self-study researchers from maintaining high standards of rigour in how they conduct and disseminate their work.

In times when many teacher educators experience a tension in conducting high quality teaching and research without wanting to neglect either (particularly the former in a bid to achieve the latter), self-study serves as a means to achieve both ends (Tannehill, 2014). It allows teacher educators to effectively serve two masters by better integrating contributions to their students directly through improved teacher education practice while also contributing to building the research and knowledge base for the field (Ellis, McNicholl, Blake, & McNally, 2014). With many self-study publications appearing in top quality journals, teacher educator-researchers can readily justify the ways in which studying their practice builds upon a solid base of research, and that their work makes contributions to the field of teacher education research.

Self-study provides glimpses into the black boxes of the professional contexts and situations in which practitioners work, and several of the papers in this special issue offer glimpses into processes of practice experienced by the authors. For example, Judy Bruce uses self-study to provide readers with a window into her experiences developing and implementing a service-learning situation with her students. Déirdre Ní Chróinín, Tim Fletcher, and Mary O'Sullivan demonstrate how critical friendship – as an important element of self-study research – and the use of multiple data sources can help teacher educators better engage with and understand the complexities and challenges of developing an innovation in PETE aimed at facilitating meaningful experiences.

Several papers in this special issue also demonstrate ways that self-study can serve as a useful methodological tool to help practitioner researchers confront and disrupt their assumptions about teaching, learning, and learners. Chris North uses self-study to help him reframe both his students’ and his own experiences and interpretations of the environment in outdoor education. This reframing allowed him to be more understanding of the different perspectives and backgrounds his students bring to the teaching–learning encounter and to consider alternative pedagogies to accommodate and challenge those perspectives. Kellie Baker examines ways in which self-study helped her interpret her own socialisation as a learner and teacher of dance in order to better understand and relate to the socialisation of her PETE students as they learned about teaching dance in her classes. Tim Hopper's research charts the progression of changes he experienced in relation to the progression of a course he taught for prospective elementary classroom teachers over eight years. Viewing learners, teachers, and content as parts of complex systems allowed him to reframe teacher education by shifting away from the preparation of certain types of teachers and toward the facilitation of certain types of learners.

Sara Flory and Jennifer Walton-Fisette provide insights into their practices as teacher educators who are committed to social justice agendas in PETE. The authors offer unique insights into the struggles faced by teacher educators as they negotiate their own and their students’ identities with challenging topics and subject matter. It is a great deal easier for researchers to implore others to discuss personally and politically sensitive issues with their students, however, Flory and Walton-Fisette show that putting these practices into action opens many more complexities and challenges.

Deborah Tannehill, Melissa Parker, Daniel Tindall, Brigitte Moody, and Ann MacPhail show how self-study can enable insights into the inner workings of a community of teacher educators in a PETE programme. In the paper, the authors deal with a tension inherent in collaborative, intra-programmatic self-studies: giving voice to the individual selves involved while also offering collective insights generated by the group.

A key to all of these papers, and indeed to any self-studies, is that each provides the individual selves involved in the research with the scope to more deeply understand her or his own practice while at the same time generating new knowledge and understanding of teacher education practice that is shared with members of the professional communities in which they are situated. Self-studies rely on their trustworthiness to be established by readers of the research, who consider the extent to which the contexts, situations, challenges, and insights shared resonate with their own experiences and understandings of professional practice. To this end, we encourage readers to share their own understandings and enter the debate to build more vibrant, nuanced, and deeper interpretations of teacher education theory and practice. And it will not be until we can make stronger and more durable connections between the findings of self-studies that self-study research can claim to impact upon prospective and current teachers and their students (Metzler, 2014; O'Sullivan, 2014; Zeichner, 2007).

Acknowledgements

We would like to acknowledge the following reviewers from the physical education and self-study communities who generously provided time and thoughtful critiques of the submissions to this special issue: Robyn Brandenburg, Mary Breunig, Erin Cameron, Renee Clift, Alicia Crowe, Rachel Forgasz, Nancy Francis, Arlene Grierson, DéirdreNíChróinin, Megan Peercy, Mikael Quennerstedt, Karen Ragoonaden, Kevin Richards, and Lee Schaefer.