1 SELF-STUDY THROUGH PERSONAL HISTORY Anastasia P. Samaras, Mark A. Hicks, and Jennifer Garvey Berger George Mason University, Virginia Published in The International Handbook of Self-Study of Teaching and Teacher Education Practices Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht, The Netherlands The International Handbook of Self-Study of Teaching and Teacher Education Practices, 2004 Website: http://www.wkap.nl/prod/b/1-4020-1812-6 The International Handbook on Self-study of Teaching and Teacher Education Practices is of interest to teacher educators, teacher researchers and practitioner researchers. The two volumes offer an encyclopedic review of the field of self-study; examines in detail self-study in a range of teaching and teacher education contexts; outlines a full understanding of the nature and development of self-study; explores the development of a professional knowledge base for teaching through self-study; purposefully represents self-study through research and practice; illustrates examples of self-study in teaching and teacher education. Abstract The profession of teaching, historically, has struggled with the degree to which the personal experiences of the teacher can or should influence classroom practice. This chapter explores the benefits of including “the personal” both for the teacher and student. Personal history – the formative, contextualized experiences of our lives that influence how we think about and practice our teaching – provides a powerful mechanism for teachers wanting to discern how their lived lives impact their ability to teach or learn. In this chapter, the authors explore the historical evolution of personal history self-study, the misconceptions that often limit its potential, and the multiple ways in which it can promote deeper learning. Specifically, this form of self-study can be used to: know and better understand one’s professional identity, model and test forms of reflection, and finally, push the boundaries of what 2 we know by creating alternative interpretations of reality. The benefits of this method are further illustrated through a case study of the lived experiences of a teacher educator surfacing her own struggle to unpack how her identity impacts her teaching and her quest for modeling self-study as she reshapes a preservice teacher education program. To know the past is to know oneself as an individual and as a representative of a socio-historical moment in time; like others each person is a victim, vehicle, and ultimately a resolution of a culture’s dilemmas. (Bullough and Gitlin, 1995, p. 25) Personal history self-study is increasingly becoming an essential methodology towards teacher educators’ personal and professional growth and especially to improving their teaching practice and impacting their students’ learning. Through a personal history self-study approach, professors and their students are able to reconstruct significant life events to inform them of their professional identity formation and to help them make meaning of their pedagogy and the connections of their practice to theory. In that process, teacher educators are finding a need to model to show and not just tell, that life- long learning is vital for the teachers’ professional development. In collaborative teaching and research circles, teacher educators are using critical reflection on their practice with feedback from their students on their perceptions of the changed teaching practices. This work is nestled in the institutional contexts that both challenge and support teacher educators as they experiment with diverse and non-traditional pedagogical and research methodologies. This chapter on personal history self-study is informed by the widely shared belief that teaching is a fundamentally autobiographical act (Finley, 1998; Goodson, 1998; Jersild, 1955; Knowles, 1998; Pinar and Grumet, 1976). Most importantly, personal history self-study researchers are providing support 3 for the notion that who we are as people, affects who we are as teachers and consequently our students’ learning. The teacher’s day is filled with individual complexities, dilemmas, and choices that are too improvisational to be scripted with rational guidelines and processes (Greene, 1986; Pinar, 1980), although many have attempted to create such scripts. Because of this improvisational nature, the connections between external processes or theories and actual action in the classroom are not always linear (Clark & Yinger, 1979; Clark & Peterson, 1986); instead, beginning with Dewey (1933;1938) in the 1930s and continuing especially in the last several decades, the work of many researchers has been to find the genesis for teacher action deep in the personal histories of teachers (e.g., Goodson, 1980; Knowles and Reynolds, 1994). These teacher educators in whose number we count ourselves believe that an examination of the personal history of teachers and teacher educators is a key piece in transforming teacher action and ultimately transforming the educational experiences of schoolchildren everywhere. These teacher educators also study their teaching while exploring the sociocultural (Vygotsky, 1978) milieu that has impacted their practice. As we write this chapter on personal history self-study, our own context too plays an enormous role in our view of the field and our belief in the necessity of personal history self-study for teachers and teacher educators alike. For the three of us who circulate drafts of this chapter at coffeehouses, faculty meetings, and through e-mail, unpacking our own personal history through self-study is not an option or luxury but a necessity. Unlike many who find their work in the academy to be isolating, we find our work to be filled with talk and collaboration. The intensity of our collaboration comes 4 form the structure of Initiatives in Educational Transformation (IET) 1an innovative professional development program for practicing K-12 teachers designed to encourage teachers to rethink their professional role and to transform through active reflection and self-study. In this non-traditional program, we co-create every piece of curriculum and co-teach every class. Together, we question our everyday taken-for-granted practice as we reconceptualize the practice of teachers’ professional development. We have witnessed first-hand how personal history self-study enhances teachers’ personal and professional development and contributes to professional renewal for teachers as well as ourselves. In this chapter we are most concerned with how teacher educators are making a difference in teacher education through their personal history self-studies. We open our chapter with earlier research which has influenced and intersected with personal history self-study research. We then turn our discussion to three major reasons why teacher educators find personal history self-study a necessary and generative form of research. While these categories are certainly neither exclusive nor singular, they have helped us name some of the ways self-study can help transform teaching and learning. In these loose, overlapping categories, which emerged from a review of the literature, personal history self-study is used for: 1. self-knowing and forming and reforming a professional identity 2. modeling and testing effective reflection 3. pushing the boundaries of teaching. 1 See: Sockett, H., DeMulder, E. K., LePage, P., & Wood, D. (Eds.). (2001). Transforming teacher education: Lessons in professional development. New York: Bergin and Garvey. Also see www.gmu.edu/iet 5 These three section reviews are offered to illustrate and elucidate the valuable ways personal history self-study can help change teacher action and contribute to the teacher knowledge base. After the section reviews, we share a case study that highlights each of these very purposes. We invite our readers to do what we ask our students to do to consider the “so what” of research, its practical applications to their teaching so that they might better know their teaching selves. We close the chapter by raising questions about the future of personal history self-study. Historical Outgrowth of Personal History Self-Study The interaction between teachers’ thinking and beliefs and their actions in the classroom is not a new subject. In his examination of thinking, John Dewey (1933) claimed that reflective thinking, “converts action that is merely appetitive, blind and impulsive into intelligent action (p. 17) [italics added]”. His premise, that unexamined thinking leads to acts based in random or irrational beliefs or ideas, has been trumpeted by many who wish for more purposeful action on the part of teachers and others (Perrone and Traver, 1996; Sprinthall, Reiman, and Thies-Sprinthall, 1996; Zeichner, 1996; Zeichner and Liston, 1987). Dewey’s early interest in thinking (and its relationship to belief) was not taken up by those who studied teacher practice, however. In fact, Sprinthall et al. (1996) claim that, “Not until relatively recently has the importance of the teacher (p. 666) [italics added] in the process of education received adequate theoretical and research attention”. Sprinthall et al. (1996) trace research on teacher practice through examinations of earlier paradigms of research on teaching. They discuss the “trait and factor model,” 6 which focused on “studies of fixed personality characteristics”; the “dynamic model from the psychoanalytic tradition,” which saw “current behavior as an overdetermined function of very early experience”; and the “process-product model,” which tried to link student outcomes to specific, measurable teacher practices (p. 666). They conclude that “the paradigms were insufficiently robust to provide adequate understanding for program development” (p. 666). After years of looking for other factors that might influence the way teachers teach, researchers and teacher educators have returned to studying in more complex ways the connection between what teachers think and believe and the way they teach (Carter and Doyle, 1996; Kagan, 1992; Nespor, 1987; Pajares, 1992; Richardson, 1996). Unlike those who enter professions such as law or medicine, teachers begin their work with vast amounts of personal history in their future workplaces (Pajares, 1992). These past experiences create hidden personal narratives about education, school, and schooling that have a profound and sometimes intractable impact on the way teachers teach their students. Teacher educators sought in many different ways to uncover or explore these hidden narratives which are so central to teacher practice. Early work in personal knowledge and the nature of knowing (e.g., Polanyi, 1958), teachers’ socialization (e.g., Lortie, 1975), changes in teachers’ lives and careers (e.g., Ball and Goodson, 1985), teacher beliefs (e.g., Munby, 1983), teachers’ practical knowledge (e.g., Elbaz, 1981; van Manen, 1977, 1994), the development of teachers’ self-concepts (e.g., Nias, 1989), teachers’ stories (e.g., Ashton-Warner, 1963; Bullough, 1989), and more recent work in teacher educators’ life-histories (e.g., Ayers, 1993; Foster, 1997; hooks, 1996; Miller, 7 1998; Neuman and Peterson, 1997) all laid a foundation for understanding the role of personal narrative in demystifying teaching and its political and social constraints. Theories on adult development (e.g., Kegan, 1982; Kitchener and King, 1981) and women’s development (e.g., Belenky, Clinchy, Goldberger and Tarule; Bateson, 1990) broadened the knowledge base about the ways adults grow and change over time and also emphasized the importance of self-reflection for the growth of consciousness and increasing capacity for abstraction and perspective-taking. The connection between personal reflection and action was also a vital ingredient in the growth of personal history self-study. Schön’s (1983) early work on reflective practice was extended by Russell and Munby (1991) to examine the authority of experience in learning to teach. An outpouring of work in action research (e.g., Carson and Sumara, 1997; Kemmis and McTaggart, 1982; Wells, 1994; Whitehead, 1995) and teacher reflectivity (e.g., Bullough, 1989; Calderhead and Gates, 1993; Clift, Houston, and Pugach, 1990; Cruickshank and Applegate, 1981; Goodman, 1984; LaBoskey, 1994; Tom, 1985; Valli, 1992; Zeichner and Teitelbaum, 1982) all played a role in teachers’ thinking critically about how their actions might be interpreted from multiple perspectives, although not necessarily drawing the connections from the personal experiences that led them towards those actions. Similarly, the growing awareness of the political nature of all forms of research led to studies that explicitly derived from feminist methodologies and worked towards including alternative pedagogical viewpoints and issues of social justice (e.g., Haug, et al., 1987; Hulsebosh and Koerner, 1994; Reinharz, 1992; Weiler, 1988, 1991). Researchers began to address the role of authority in teachers’ lives and a need to 8 examine personal experience as both a source of knowledge and as a political commitment to oppressed groups. Clandinin and Connelly’s (1994) use of story narratives to awaken and educate the self and others highlighted the power of telling and retelling a component of much of personal history research as did the work on narratives by Casey (1995), Florio-Ruane (2001), Witherell and Noddings (1991) and Jalongo and Isenberg (1995). What most distinguishes personal history research from other research on education is that the researcher is not simply the one with the Ph.D. who works in the university; instead, researchers are all people, in the academy or in K-12 schools, who study themselves and the relationship between their own stories and their current teaching practice. Arguing for insider knowledge or the experiential knowledge of teachers as valuable and legitimate research, personal history self-study researchers make the case that knowledge does not reside only in academia or outside of teachers’ lives (Cochran- Smith and Lytle, 1993; Gitlin, Peck, Aposhian, Hadley, and Porter, 2002). Rather, life histories legitimize the personal voice of the writer and also require teachers to be critically reflective, authentic, and attuned to outside interpretation promoted through discourse with others (Fendler, 2003, p. 22). Perhaps because so many previous forms of educational research inform personal history self-study, defining its boundaries is a tricky task. Wary of Kennedy’s (1989) warning that reflection is variable and subject to idiosyncratic and self-interested interpretation, Loughran and Northfield (1998) clarify the intersection of reflection and self-study and note: 9 Reflection is a personal process of thinking, refining, reframing, and developing actions. Self-study takes these processes and makes them public, thus leading to another series of processes that need to reside outside the individual. Self-study can be considered as an extension of reflection on practice, with aspirations that go beyond reflection and even professional development and move to wider communication and consideration of ideas, i.e., the generation and communication of new knowledge and understanding. Reflection is important in self-study but it alone is not self-study. Self-study involves reflection on practice. (p. 15) Still, even with Loughran and Northfield’s helpful explanation, the many-pronged histories and purposes of personal history self-study have made the field open to misinterpretations and misconceptions from many different fronts. In the next section, we clarify what self-study is and the nature of this methodology. Afterwards, we provide research examples to demonstrate these definitional components set within a discussion of the major contributions of personal history self-study to the field of teacher education. What is Personal History Self-Study? We refer to personal history as those formative, contexualized experiences that have influenced teachers’ thinking about teaching and their own practice. Personal history research is reviewed as the historical or life experiences related to personal and professional meaning making for teachers and researchers. This includes both the autobiographical and life-history research of teacher educators’ personal history work about themselves as well as teacher educators’ work in using a personal history approach 10 with their teacher-students towards improving teaching practice at both K-12 and university levels. Holt-Reynolds (1991) notes that a major purpose of personal history self-study is to move away from generalizability and towards real learning, and explains: It is not reasonable to expect that every conclusion based on the personal experiences of one individual will be appropriate to generalize to all students. Some of the beliefs that preservice teachers bring to their study of teaching will, in fact, be based on insufficient data and will, therefore, be invalid for generalizing to larger groups of students Changing, challenging, enlarging, informing, and reforming the premises upon which preservice teachers base their arguments become our primary and legitimate concerns. (p. 21) A review of the research reveals that personal history self-study serves this very purpose and especially because of the nature of this methodology as: (1) collaborative, (2) contextualized, and (3) conducted through diverse methodologies of qualitative research that have sometimes led to misconceptions about its usefulness. This confusion led to a clearer articulation of its components and purposes. The Collaborative Nature of Personal History Self-Study Personal history self-study is about self-knowing towards personal and professional growth that is necessarily enriched through conversation and critique within a self-study community of scholars. Eisner (1991) talks about how personal biographies make it possible for individuals to experience and interpret the world from multiple perspectives as they recognize and alter their frames of reference. But the self-studier