Self Study

This special issue of the South African journal Perspectives in Education offers a collection of articles by self-study researchers who are located across diverse disciplines in higher education institutions in South Africa, Canada and the United States of America (USA). The collection begins with contributions from teacher educators (Sandra Weber, Linda Van Laren and Lesley Wood), moves on to work done in the domains of Drama (Tamar Meskin and Tanya Van der Walt) and Graphic Design (Lee Scott) and, finally, to trans-disciplinary self-study (Corrine Knowles, Thenjiwe Meyiwa et al. and Anastasia Samaras et al.).

ENGLISH: This autoethnographic self-study describes my interpretations of multicultural awareness, with special attention to multilingual awareness (MLA), based on my interactions with 52 students in the context of two literacy courses over a period of one year. An autoethnographic self-study provided an avenue to harness my reflections on practice and to study the ways in which my practice reflected awareness of my role as an educator. Findings from my teaching videos, written responses to students, and student evaluations suggested that my communication patterns with students reflected certain elements of multicultural awareness, as displayed by my attention to individual predispositions, cultural practices and personal stereotypes. The findings also appeared to indicate that multicultural and MLA interacted to reflect facilitation and symbiosis. Facilitation seemed apparent in my awareness of differences among students’ cultures and my own as I monitored my linguistic processing. Symbiosis appeared to emanate from the recognition of how my response to individual predispositions facilitated my application of conversational strategies based on feedback. This, in turn, heightened my attention to stereotypical attitudes and behaviors. Implications for multicultural teacher education include the benefits of using autoethnographic self-study to scrutinize educators’ awareness in practice as they determine the impact of this awareness on their instructional roles in multicultural teacher education. By extension, the study suggests that autoethnographic self-study research can provide additional lenses through which to interrogate monolithic perceptions of diversity in multicultural teacher education.

SPANISH: Este self-study autoetnográfico describe mis interpretaciones de la conciencia de la multiculturalidad, con atención especial a la conciencia del multilingüismo, sobre la base de mis interacciones con 52 estudiantes en el contexto de dos cursos de alfabetización en el transcurso de un año. El self-study autoetnográfico proveyó una manera para focalizar mis reflexiones sobre la práctica y para estudiar los modos en que mi práctica reflejaba un tipo de conocimiento sobre mi rol como educador. Los hallazgos que surgen de las grabaciones en video de mi enseñanza, reacciones escritas de los estudiantes y sus evaluaciones muestran que mis patrones comunicativos con los estudiantes reflejaban ciertos elementos de una sensibilidad por lo multicultural, como mi atención a predisposiciones individuales, prácticas culturales y estereotipos personales. Los hallazgos también parecen indicar que esta sensibilidad por lo multicultural y lo multilingüe interactuaban para reflejar facilitación y simbiosis. La facilitación aparecía fuertemente en mi conciencia de diferencias entre las culturas de mis estudiantes y la mía, mientras monitoreaba mi procesamiento lingüístico. La simbiosis parece emanar del reconocimiento del modo en que mi respuesta a predisposiciones individuales facilitaba mi aplicación de estrategias conversacionales basadas en la retroalimentación. Esto, a su vez, focalizó mi atención a actitudes y comportamientos estereotipados. Algunas de las implicancias para la formación docente multicultural incluyen los beneficios del uso del self-study autoetnográfico para examinar la sensibilidad de los educadores en práctica, al tiempo que determinan el impacto de esta sensibilidad en sus roles docentes en la formación multicultural de profesores. Por extensión, el estudio sugiere que la investigación en self-study autoetnográfico puede proveer lentes adicionales a través de los cuales interrogar percepciones monolíticas de la diversidad en la formación docente multicultural. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/17425964.2016.1143811

As teachers and teacher educators, we hope to model an inquiry stance. Our prior experiences suggested an educative value in collaborative self-study for graduate students who were also practicing teachers. To build on this, we invited social studies teacher candidates to learn about taking an inquiry stance through self-study. This collaborative self-study of teaching practice took place in varied school contexts and within a student teaching seminar course. Our goal was for the preservice teachers to engage in systematic inquiry into their practice. As teacher educators, we hoped to learn about our own practices and the ways we encourage an inquiry stance during student teaching. Learning outcomes for six of the preservice teachers and the three teacher educators are presented in this article.

We worked together as a group of four researchers at two different institutions to explore scrapbooking as a tool for professional learning about HIV and AIDS curriculum integration in higher education. Through a scrapbooking activity we individually and collectively made visible experiences and understandings of being HIV and AIDS curriculum integrators that are hard to put into words. We used found poetry as a research practice to gain deeper understanding of HIV and AIDS curriculum integration, while also learning more about how visual and literary arts-based methods can enhance individual and collaborative professional learning. Our scrapbook pages and poem offered a multifaceted, nuanced portrayal of curriculum integration as complex, challenging and rewarding. Through collaborative interactions and sharing of our personal images of HIV and AIDS curriculum integration we were able to extend our professional learning in a supportive and creative manner, which fuelled optimism and agency.

We are teacher educators and researchers in South Africa. In our doctoral studies we used
self-study methodologies to improve our professional practice in relation to the challenges of
teaching and learning in the South African HIV and AIDS context. This article demonstrates
how we, as teacher educator-researchers, explored the “afterlife” of our doctoral research.
We used self-selected exemplars from our own doctoral theses as research artefacts to
investigate the relationship between our doctoral research and our professional development
and practice. We combined memory-work and reflexive dialogue, using questions posed by a
fictitious critical friend to examine our exemplars that consisted of short pieces of writing
from our doctoral theses. We concluded that our dialogic memory-work method allowed for
collaborative exploration of the afterlife of our doctoral research and this, in turn, facilitated
our professional practice growth as teacher educator-researchers in the South African context
of HIV and AIDS.

This article reports a self-study of multicultural identities in a public high school ethnic studies class and a university multicultural education course in Hawai'i, a unique multicultural setting in which no ethnic group is in the majority. Participants are the two authors and 117 of their high school and university students. Three important findings emerged from constant comparison analysis of students' and authors' personal multicultural narratives, reflections, and coursework. First, a personal-constructivistcollaborative approach to self-study in an intellectually safe classroom environment provides both students and teachers with a context for challenging their socially constructed assumptions about race, culture, and ethnicity and supports the unpacking of previously held stereotypes and biases. Second, the students' narratives are transformational teaching texts. The formal and informal sharing of personal stories helps students and teachers to be more thoughtful about the complexity of identities, develop new understandings of their own and others' multicultural identities, and gain a critical consciousness about the connection between self-understanding and prejudice reduction. Third, self-study is a multicultural pedagogy that promotes social perspective taking, tolerance, and understanding of diversity through personal transformation. The article concludes by encouraging multicultural educators to transform traditional classroom pedagogies so that the journey to understand other people begins with the self.

This special issue of Educational Research for Social Change  (ERSC) foregrounds the relational dimensions and complexities of research reflexivity through articles that offer critical perspectives on enacting reflexivity in educational research across academic disciplines and institutional contexts in South Africa and internationally.