June 2019 Newsletter

S-STEP SIG Executive Committee

Chair: Kathleen Pithouse-Morgan

Chair-Elect: Christi Edge

Immediate Past Chair: Julian Kitchen

Treasurer:

Charlotte Frambaugh-Kritzer

Secretary: Valerie Allison

Program Co-Chairs:

Laura Haniford and Adrian Martin

Historian: Megan Madigan Peercy

Social Media Director:

Eliza Anne Pinnegar

Graduate Student Travel Support

Committee Co-Chairs:

Jeff Kaplan and Deborah Tidwell

President’s Message

Dear self-study colleagues,

I am honoured to take on the role of chair of the S-STEP SIG. In my academic journey, I have been fortunate to receive mentoring from many exceptional academic leaders and self-study scholars. This mentoring and scholarly collaborations with colleagues in South Africa and internationally have been essential to my learning and development. With this in mind, I am looking forward to working with the SIG community as we continue to cultivate a research environment that is supportive of achievements of others, particularly graduate students and early career academics. In this regard, I pay tribute to my immediate predecessors, Julian Kitchen and Hafdís Guðjónsdóttir, who are living exemplars of how professional support, scholarly partnerships, and friendships within the S-STEP community have contributed significantly to its growth, sustainability, and impact.

The S-STEP SIG is always very active at the AERA Annual Meetings. The SIG-sponsored sessions, social events, and annual business meeting give members opportunities to meet and discuss issues of self-study design, publishing, ethics, and best practices. Our SIG had a considerable presence at the 2019 AERA Annual Meeting in Toronto, with over 60 attendees at the business meeting and the SIG mentoring session respectively. Paper/symposia and roundtables sessions were also well supported. Overall, we had an average of 34attendees per session, which is very encouraging. We also received favorable feedback via our online post annual meeting survey. To illustrate

Well attended. Well organized.

Great breadth and depth of subjects.

The S-STEP SIG has truly been a place of professional and scholarly growth for me.

I was impressed with the rigor of the work and the increasing strength of the community of support.

As an attendee and participant at my first AERA conference, I found the researchers in the SSTEP SIG were so welcoming, approachable and helpful.

On behalf of the SIG Executive Committee, I would like to thank all those who responded to the survey to offer their comments and give a variety of constructive suggestions for future consideration. In addition, we are appreciative of the program co-chairs who worked tirelessly to organize and facilitate the SIG program. Thank you to Brandon Butler for his work over the past two years as program co-chair and to Laura Haniford as she moves into her second year. And we welcome Adrian Martin as he takes on the role of incoming co-chair. Laura and Adrian have put together an informative S-STEP SIG Call for Proposals and are looking forward to receiving many proposals before the deadline of July 10, 2019.

Once again, the SIG was fortunate to be able to offer travel support grants for graduate students presenting at the 2019 Annual Meeting. $ 350 each was awarded to Pavneet Bharaj, Megumi Nishida, and Sarah Wells Kaufman. We are grateful to the travel support committee co-chairs, Jeff Kaplan and Deborah Tidwell, for facilitating this award.

Two newly elected members of our SIG executive committee were announced on the eve of the 2019 Annual Meeting. We welcome Christi Edge to the position of chair-elect and Charlotte Frambaugh-Kritzer as treasurer. We are grateful to Tim Fletcher, the outgoing treasurer, for his meticulousness in overseeing the SIG finances. We are also thrilled to announce that Eliza Pinnegar has volunteered and been appointed as Social Media Director for the SIG. Appreciation is extended to Christi Edge, our outgoing webmaster.

In this issue of the newsletter, ably compiled once again by Valerie Allison, we are fortunate to have a thought-provoking Self-Study Talking Pointpiece by self-study of practice research luminaries, Stefinee Pinnegar and Mary Lynn Hamilton. We also offer a short profile of the SIG executive committee, with each committee member sharing her or his particular passion around self-study research. {To add a line or two on other pieces in the newsletter as they come in.}

Yours,

Kathleen Pithouse-Morgan

S-STEP Chair

Profile of the S-STEP SIG Executive Committee

Kathleen Pithouse-Morgan, Chair

I am a Professor in Teacher Development Studies at the School of Education, University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. I first came to know about self-study research through working as an editorial assistant for Claudia Mitchell on the 2005 book, “Just who do we think we are? Methodologies for autobiography and self-study in teaching”. Then I attended the Castle Conference in 2006 and felt that I’d found an academic home in the S-STEP SIG! For me, one of the great gifts of self-study research is an optimistic commitment to moving yourself somewhere new, with the intention of finding new ways in which professional learning and practice can happen. I am passionate about polyvocal self-study, whichdraws on literary and artistic thinking tomake visible how conversations across specialisations, institutions, and continents can contribute to reimagining professional practice and collaboration in pluralistic and creative ways.

Julian D. Kitchen, Past Chair

I am a Professor in the Faculty of Education, Brock University, Canada. I teach courses on professionalism and law, as well as social justice. This is reflected in books (Professionalism, Law and the Ontario Educator, Initial teacher education in Ontario: The first year of four-semester teacher education programs) and funded research on Indigenous education and admissions policies. SSTEP has been a vital part of my professional life since 2002 at the Castle conference. I am associate editor of Studying Teacher Educationjournal and lead editor of theInternational Handbook of Self-Study of Teaching and Teacher Education Practices, Second Edition. I am also lead editor ofNarrative Inquiries into Curriculum-making in Teacher Education, Self-Study and Diversity II: Inclusive Teacher Education for a Changing World andCanadian Perspectives on the Self-Study of Teacher Education Practices. I love belonging to a generous and generative community of teacher educators committed to studying their practice and improving teacher education in their universities and beyond. It has provided me opportunities to inquire into my professional identity as well as my classroom practices. As “there is no better way to study curriculum than to study ourselves” (Connelly & Clandinin, 1988), self-study allows me to puzzle over my personal and professional knowledge in action, derived from my experiences learned in context expressed in practice. I also love editing, as a means of engaging in the creation of knowledge about self and practice.

Christi Edge, Chair-Elect

I am a teacher educator, graduate reading program coordinator, and narrative inquirer in the School of Education, Leadership and Public Service at Northern Michigan University in the USA. Since learning about S-STEP research in 2011, I have been engaged in longitudinal, collaborative self-study with colleagues in reading, special education, and leadership and with practicing K-12 teachers in Michigan public schools. In 2017, I began a transdisciplinary self-study of online teaching practices inquiry group with university colleagues. Serving as S-STEP secretary 2016-2018 was a joyful way to become more connected to the broader S-STEP community and the research we are living and generating. As chair-elect, I am committed to continuing to serve our vibrant S-STEP community. Continuing to learn, grow, and discover motivates me to engage in self-study research. I enjoy how the dynamic interaction of teaching, inquiry, and collaboration with S-STEP researchers across campus, across the nation, and across the globe can result in deepened, broadened, and transformed understandings. My research interests focus on understanding how people learn from lived experiences. I am excited to be in the process of connecting narrative inquiry and S-STEP to articulate a framework for how educators can textualize their lived experiences to learn from and through them.

Valerie Allison, Secretary

I am an Associate Professor of Education at Susquehanna University, Pennsylvania, USA. I was first introduced to self-study research as I was completing my Ph.D. in 2006. I presented my first self-study inquiry (a collaboration with other new academics) at AERA in 2009 and have been active in the SIG since then. I continue to engage in self-study research because it provides me with the motivation and tools for continually improve my knowledge and practice as a teacher educator. Self-study has given me a platform for advocating for empowering education practices for vulnerable learners. I am passionate about teaching and research that has the potential to promote greater social justice and equity. In my research, most of which has been collaborations with similarly-motivated scholars, I strive to ask uncomfortable questions that uncover assumptions.

Charlotte Frambaugh-Kritzer, Treasurer

I am an Associate Professor of Reading and the Director of the Secondary Education Program in the Institute for Teacher Education at the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa (UHM), Honolulu, Hawai‘i. My first experience with self-study was when I used this method for one of my two research questions in my 2008 dissertation at Arizona State University. No one at ASU (in my department at the time) was familiar with this method, so I was “only allowed to explore self-study for one question” as there was concern if my methods would be rigorous enough. From there on, I became dedicated to this research method and it was when I landed my first tenure-track position at UHM I met Anne Freese.  She told me about the Castle Conference. I attended my first one in 2012 and I was hooked and wish I could go back in time to better defend how indeed self-study could have been rigorous enough for my dissertation. Mother Teresa has been paraphrased saying, “If you want to bring peace to the whole world, go home and love your family.” I translate this to my professional life…meaning if I really want to bring change to teacher education then I need to start with self. In short, self-study research has made me more reflective and vulnerable, which has resulted in me doing better. My passion has continued to change over time. I started out to transform my own pedagogical practice, which I still do, but I also want to contribute to the evolving methods of self-study, as evidenced in my recent co-authored work on critical friends.

Laura Haniford, Program Co-Chair

I am an Associate Professor of Secondary Education in the Department of Teacher Education, Educational Leadership and Policy at the University of New Mexico, USA. A colleague suggested adding a self-study component to a research project we were conducting. We presented this research at the Castle Conference in 2012 and for the first time I felt like I had a true academic community. We also recently published some of this work in a recent book edited by Cheryl Craig and Megan Madigan Peercy. I love teaching and working with teachers. I am fascinated by what it takes to teach well and am moved by the work done in Self-Study to systematically study our own teacher education practices and share that work with other committed teacher educators. I have become very interested in using self-study research methodologies to better understand the impact deprofessionalization and neo-liberal policies have on teacher education and teacher educators. Particularly, how does the current higher education environment impact my teaching identity and my ability to enact that identity.

Adrian Martin, Program Co-Chair

I am an Assistant Professor at the College of Education, New Jersey City University, United States. I first became familiar with self-study research as a doctoral student. The opportunity to engage in self-study research and collaborate with other self-study researchers (particularly Monica Taylor, Julian Kitchen, and Kathryn Strom) was meaningful and deeply influential in my scholarly development. Attending S-STEP sessions at the AERA Annual Meetings and the most recent Castle Conference affirmed that the S-STEP SIG is a wonderfully diverse, supportive, and nurturing academic community. I find that self-study research is a powerful and transformative approach to learning about and inquiring into my professional practice. As a teacher educator, self-study has allowed me to not only better understand and gain insight of my work with preservice and in-service educators, but to also theorize from this practice and consider the shaping effect of teacher education for P-12 schooling at large. I have long been drawn to the concept of teacher identity and better understanding the ways educators construct their professional selves. Building upon this, I am passionate about investigating teacher educator identity in self-study research via diverse theoretical frames. My aim is to apply the insights from such self-study inquiries to promote educational equity and social justice in school systems and teacher education.

Megan Peercy, Historian

I’m an Associate Professor in Language, Literacy, and Social Inquiry at the University of Maryland, College Park (USA). I have been a member of the S-STEP SIG since 2012, and have been engaged in self-study research since that time as well. My interest in self-study was prompted by a return to full-time secondary classroom teaching for one year, and I was searching for a way to examine how re-experiencing the classroom informed my work as a teacher educator. Self-study presented a rigorous and meaningful way to do this. It is fascinating to me to consider questions about how practice evolves and changes, and the kinds of impact that has on teacher educators, teachers, and students, as well as the implications it has for one’s individual practice, programs, and policies. My questions all revolve around how to foster teacher learning and development over the course of their careers and self-study facilitates examination of my own practice as well as ways to contribute to big questions in our field around theory and practice, pedagogies of teacher education, and more.

Eliza Anne Pinnegar, Social Media Director

I have been part of the S-STEP research community since 2008. I began by attending the S-STEP Castle Conference as an undergraduate. I connected with the community and felt a resonance with the research presented. For me, Self-Study allows for the opportunity to deeply examine my own practice and my place in academia, imagining new ways to move forward and new insights. I am passionate about doing research that furthers S-STEP research using narrative methods and working with other professionals from around the world.

Inviting Self-Study of Practice research: Encouraging colleagues to move beyond traditional scholarship

Stefinee Pinnegar & Mary Lynn Hamilton

In 1985 Polkinghorne wrote Narrative knowing in the human sciences.This book argues the failure of traditional psychological research indeed all psychological research to appropriately treat, respond to and heal their patients. About the same time, Stefinee was asked to present about S-STTEP research to a group of teachers in the BYU partnership, after the meeting a woman whose husband does consulting for business asked for references she could give her husband. She said, “This is exactly the kind of research that those doing business consulting need to produce, because the theoretical and traditional scholarship in the field is just not helpful. We already know that Loughran, Clift, Tidwell, Allison, Manke, Ramierez and others have used S-STTEP methodology to study their work as administrators. Samaras and Pitthouse-Morgan for over ten years have engaged colleagues across their campus and others in studying teaching practice in higher education. We know as S-STTEP researchers that uncovering assertions for action and understanding contribute significant knowledge and new understandings to research in teacher education (just look at the Louighran & Hamilton and Clandinin & Husu Handbooks of Research in Teacher Education).

As we have read the arguments and work around post-truth, post-qualitative research that permeates current discussion in research across the social sciences, what we have noticed over and over in the subtext is the need for inquiries that use methods and methodologies of intimate scholarship one of which is self-study of practice. Social Science researchers and those in other practice fields have much to contribute and this methodology provides a basis for such work. We know that researcher/practitioners have embodied knowing and personal principles for action and interpretation within their spheres of practice, but without engaging in research processes and publishing what they know and understand this knowledge does not make an appearance on the  knowledge landscape of their disciplines or fields of practice.  As a community, our own published research studies have informed us, contributed to our practice, and contributed to the knowledge base for teacher education.

When we (Mary Lynn Hamilton and Stefinee Pinnegar) wrote Self-study as a genre of qualitative research, we talked extensively about the ways in which lawyers, nurses, doctors, business people, university faculty, consultants could contribute needed scholarship to conversations in their fields using self-study or practice methodology to uncover and make trustworthy their embodied knowing of their fields of practice. Throughout the book we attempted to focus beyond teacher education practice so that this methodology could be used in all forms of practical scholarship. As a community of scholars, we ought to share what we know about how to study practice, improve your own practice and contribute to Living Scholarship in other fields that involve practitioner researchers. we would encourage us all to share this wealth of scholarship.

S-STEP SIG Proposals for AERA 2020

Greetings Fellow S-STEP Members,

The most recent AERA Annual Meeting was a wonderful success for the S-STEP SIG! The sessions and individual presentations showcased a variety of self-study research by scholars from around the world. As program co-chairs, our aim is to continue this success with AERA 2020 to be held in San Francisco. The number of proposals submitted is an important factor in deciding the number of sessions allotted to each SIG. As such, we encourage S-STEP members and others interested in self-study to submit a proposal for next year’s conference.

The S-STEP SIG seeks proposals for papers, roundtables and symposia/sessions. Innovative session designs are encouraged. The submission deadline is July 10th. Proposals are submitted via AERA’s website (aera.net). We recently sent out a call for proposals outlining tips for a successful proposal, please consult this document prior to submission. Please contact one of us if you did not receive this call for proposals or if you would like it resent.

The S-STEP SIG is an inclusive and welcoming community; we invite scholars and education-practitioners of diverse backgrounds and with diverse academic interests to explore and share their self-study inquiries. Much of the success of our program comes from the pool of proposals submitted. Whether you have shared your self-study research with the SIG at past conferences, or if the 2020 conference will be your first AERA meeting, we encourage you to submit a proposal and become a member of our SIG. This is also an excellent time to share with your graduate and doctoral students about the S-STEP SIG and support their entry into our community.

Thank you to everyone who volunteered to review proposals. At this time, we would also like to invite members of our SIG to serve as session chairs and discussants. Such a contribution demonstrates service to the academic community and is critical to the success of our SIG’s program. Please visit the AERA portal to volunteer to serve as chairs or discussants.

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact us.

Sincerely,

Laura Haniford (Haniford@unm.edu) and Adrian Martin (amartin6@njcu.edu),

S-STEP Program Co-Chairs

Recent Publications

Martin, A. D. (2019).  The agentic capacities of mundane objects for educational equity: Narratives of material entanglements in a culturally diverse urban classroom. Educational Research for Social Change, 8(1), 86-100.  http://dx.doi.org/10.17159/2221-4070/2018/v8i1a6

Martin, A. D., & Strom, K.J. (Eds.) (2019).  Exploring gender and LGBTQ issues in K12 and teacher education:  A rainbow assemblage.  Charlotte, NC:  Information Age Publishing

.https://www.infoagepub.com/products/Exploring-Gender-and-LGBTQ-Issues-in-K-12-and-Teacher-Education

Call for September 2019 Newsletter Items

It is time to gather information and announcements for our September 2019 S-STEP newsletter. Please send all publications, news, announcements, celebrations, calls for publications, job postings, etc. to S-STEP secretary, Valerie Allison, at allisonv@susqu.eduby September1, 2019, to be included in theSeptember newsletter.