The Handmaid’s Tale: Using Literature and Online Journaling to Facilitate a Self-Study of Feminist Identity in an International Research Collective

ABSTRACT

This article explores how five international colleagues from the USA, Canada, China, and Japan use self-study methodologies and online journaling to systematically examine the tensions surrounding the lived experiences of feminist academics in diverse global contexts. It draws from the theoretical foundations of critical qualitative inquiry, self-study, feminist epistemologies, and fiction as research. The main research questions guiding the study are: what is the role of self-study and journaling in an international research collective?, how can contemporary literature inform a self-study about the intersection of gender and career?, and in what ways does journaling with international partners support personal and professional development of multicultural teacher educators?. For 6 months, the authors explored these questions with one another in an interactive online journal. Collaborative analysis of the journal entries produced three major themes: fiction as self-study, scholarship as hope, and scholarship as freedom. The article concludes with the authors’ personal views on the importance of online journaling and self-study among educational researchers who are interested in finding tools and structures for navigating the contemporary women’s movement within academia.     

Student-Directed Assessment of Knowledge Building Using Electronic Portfolios

Despite emphasis and progress in developing collaborative inquiry in computer-supported collaborative learning research, little attention has been given to examining how collective learning can be assessed in computer-supported collaborative learning classrooms, and how students can have agency in assessing their own collaborative process. We propose that assessments should capture both individual and collective aspects of learning and be designed in ways that foster collaboration. We describe the design of student-directed electronic portfolio assessments to characterize and “scaffold” collaborative inquiry using Knowledge Forum?. Our design involved asking students to identify exemplary notes in the computer discourse depicting knowledge building episodes using four knowledge building principles as criteria. We report three studies that examined the designs and roles of knowledge building portfolios with graduate and Grade 12 students in Hong Kong and Canada. The findings suggest that knowledge building portfolios help to characterize collective knowledge advances and foster domain understanding. We discuss lessons learned regarding how knowledge building may be fostered and provide principles for designing assessments that can be used to evaluate and foster deep inquiry in asynchronous online discussion environments.     

Supporting One Another as Beginning Teacher Educators: Forging an online community of critical inquiry into practice

Four novice teacher educators working at different universities in the USA and Canada used online journaling and dialoguing combined with feedback from their students to explore their practice and new roles as teacher educators in new contexts. Their priorities included modeling critical reflection and enacting democratic practices. They chronicle their struggles and successes over the course of an academic year. The authors' online community provided a viable and valued venue for self-study. Findings include insight into their taken-for-granted assumptions, how their instructional efforts were interpreted by others, and the impact that their collaborative efforts had on each researcher's professional development. The authors include implications for universities and colleges regarding the format and structure of mentoring of junior faculty.     

Why Self-Study? An Exploration of Personal,Professional, and Programmatic Influences in the Use of Self-Study Research

ABSTRACT

How does a teacher educator come to engage in self-study research? In this article, the authors seek to answer this question by investigating the personal, professional, and programmatic influences that drew one teacher educator to self-study. The authors used critical friendship to investigate the first author’s introduction to self-study, with data collected through collaborative journaling and regular meetings. Influences for the authors included struggles with outsidership and expectations, teaching from an others perspective, and weathering programmatic shifts. Experiences presenting this study at the 2018 Castle Conference are shared, along with lessons learned from the presentation. Generally speaking, some who attended the presentation saw their initial use of self-study as part of a healing process; others were unsure of their impetus but plan to reconsider their introductions to self-study. Further study of scholars’ introductions to and motivations for engaging in self-study research may improve our understandings of this aspect of self-study scholarship.     

Reflexive deliberation in international research collaboration: minimising risk and maximising opportunity

International research collaboration raises questions about how groups from different national and institutional contexts can work together for common ends. This paper uses issues that have arisen in carrying out the first stage of an international research project to discuss a framework designed to map different kinds of multi-national research collaboration in terms of increasing complexity and increasing time to research outputs. The paper explores factors that enable and that constrain progress in carrying out collaborative research. The paper highlights the complex interplay within research practice of factors that derive from institutional structures and those that appertain to individuals as agents. It uses the personal and collective reflexive deliberations of the authors, to demonstrate that as the complexity of the research interface increases, and as the time to research outputs increases, so structural risk increasingly develops into agentic risk, and that structural risk becomes increasingly required to be managed through agentic action.     

The Influence of the Core Practices Movement on the Teaching and Perspectives of Novice Teacher Educators

This collaborative self-study examines the influence of engagement in the core practices movement on the course designs, instruction, and perspectives of three novice teacher educators at a large mid-Atlantic research university. Through core practices work, we integrated repeated cycles of analysis, practice, and reflection into our courses, ultimately becoming more deliberate and responsive in our planning. We engaged in more in-depth inquiry into our teaching as we inquired into the core practices with our teacher candidates and also noticed an enhanced use of shared language. Core practices work influenced our perspectives on the work of teacher educators by reaffirming our belief in the complexity of teaching and teacher education, raising important questions about the relationship between commitments and core practices and underscoring the value of learner-centered practices in teacher education. The finding of this self-study suggest that core practices present an opportunity to engage novice teacher educators in reflection, collaboration, and inquiry central to teacher education.     

文化回应性教学国际研究现状与趋势——基于WOS数据库的文献计量分析

在文化日益多元的今天,文化回应性教学备受关注。应用计量可视化软件HistCite 分析Web of Science检索平台SSCI数据库收录的文化回应性教学研究文献,绘制了文献引证关系图谱,对相关研究进行分析。研究发现:文化回应性教学研究自2006年后总体呈稳步上升趋势,美国是该领域学术研究最具代表性的国家;研究聚焦于文化回应性教学的内涵理解与课堂实践,文化回应性教学与教师教育;研究内容不断细化、深化与多元化。加强文化回应性教学的理论基础研究,重视本土建构与国际视野的互动研究,增强基于证据的文化回应性教学实施效果研究,推进教师文化回应性教学能力培养的追踪研究是未来的趋势。     

在线协作学习中的集体责任与个体生成角色

文章结合社会网络分析法、内容分析法和统计分析法,通过实证研究分析了在线协作学习中集体责任和个体生成角色的发展动态,及其对知识建构过程的协同促进作用。研究结果表明,在线协作学习过程中,集体责任的三个特征(参与意识、协同交互、均衡发展)与个体生成角色(探究引申、知识促进、知识整合、探究管理)的分布形态之间存在相互促进、动态演进的复杂关系,且两者共同影响协作对话本质。探讨在线协作学习中集体责任与个体生成角色之间的关系,有助于创设在线协作学习环境,并为知识建构提供策略性参考。     

Culturally Responsive Pedagogy in Higher Education: A Collaborative Self-Study

In this article we discuss findings from a collaborative self-study of how seven teacher educators define, enact, and navigate their roles as culturally responsive educators across various programs within a higher education institution. All participants conducted an individual interview with another team member and engaged in prolonged team meetings in order to understand and conceptualize culturally responsive pedagogy (CRP). Findings include the participants' difficulty with defining CRP in higher education; the importance of modeling and building relationships with students when enacting CRP; tensions related to students and institutions; and professional and personal opportunities to continuously evolve. The findings begin to fill in a void for an articulated framework of CRP beyond P-12 classrooms and illustrate the type of support and professional development higher education institutions need to provide for teacher educators to actualize this work.     

Tensions of Reimagining Our Roles as Teacher Educators in a Third Space: Revisiting a Co/autoethnography Through a Faculty Lens

This co/autoethnography uses our lens as university faculty to examine how engaging in a year-long self-study with mentors nurtured a complicated third space where we could together begin to reimagine our roles as teacher educators. Two secondary faculty members and a doctoral assistant used co/autoethnography to revisit a collaborative self-study with mentors to better identify both the individual and programmatic complexities that arise when a third space is opened and we are invited to reinvent our perspectives and responsibilities as co-teacher educators. We ask two questions: What happens when faculty facilitate a third-space teacher education program with mentor teachers? How does this third space influence the teacher education practices in an urban teacher residency program? We present a series of tensions about our work together as teacher educators in the third space. They include professional into authentic relationships, authority into collaboration, collaborative agency into individual agency, and apprenticing to master teacher into apprenticing within a collective. Following findings about each tension, we discuss how we as faculty navigated each tension. Finally, we consider the implications of our work for all field-based teacher education programs.     

Thinking with Posthuman Perspectives in Self-Study Research

In this study, we set out to explore processes of individual and group becomings of a self-study collective over time and distance, and with/through technology. Born out of a self-study project in one of our early doctoral courses, our self-study community has evolved over several years to one that is hybrid in nature. As we have continued our collaboration through online media, a tension arose at the juncture of our fundamentally relational work together, our need for the physical, embodied aspect of learning and self-study and the hybrid, often disembodied, experience provided by substituting online meetings for those conducted in-person. In this article we explore these tensions through pivotal moments and lines of flight in our self-study work over the past year. To frame these moments, we draw on ideas from posthumanism, which offers ways to conceptualize our collective as a multiplicity, account for the relational and material aspects of our work, address the agency of non-human actors (such as technology) in our collaboration, and consider our self-study practice a dynamic, complex, contextualized, situated phenomenon.     

Towards Contextual Experimentation: Creating a Faculty Learning Community to Cultivate Writing-to-Learn Practices

In order to explore ways to integrate new pedagogical practices, five faculty members created an informal faculty learning community focused on writing-to-learn practices, an inquiry and process-based writing pedagogy. The faculty members learned the writing-to-learn practices together, periodically met to discuss how they implemented the practices, and reflected on each other’s instructional methods in the contexts of their own experiences. The faculty members engaged in a self-study in order to understand how the collaborative nature of the learning community helped them to learn and use the new teaching practices. After participating in a series of workshops together, they shared written reflections about their experiences of employing the practices in their own classrooms. The findings of this study reveal that participation in a faculty learning community provided an engaging and effective way to learn and make use of new pedagogical practices. Participants gained practical adaptive strategies from each other, felt supported in their experimentation with the new practices, and analyzed more deeply the ways in which the new practices could be integrated into their teaching. The authors describe how an informal faculty learning community can be an effective tool for faculty to research, learn, and analyze the learning of specific pedagogical practices.     

Using Self-Study to Develop a Third Space for Collaborative Supervision of Master's Projects in Teacher Education

Teacher education is constantly being renewed in response to continuous social, economic and technological changes. In 2008, teacher education in Iceland was extended from a three-year to a five-year master's degree program and this significantly increased the number of students at the master's level. To respond to these changes, 3 university-based teacher educators organized collaborative supervisory meetings for 18 master's students during the school years 2012–2014. We used self-study methodology to analyze our progress and inspire our development as supervisors. The goal was to gain a better understanding of how we learn together in collaborative supervision and to develop, adapt, and change our teaching and learning practices. Data included reflective notes and journals, recordings of students' and supervisors' meetings, e-mails, tickets out of class, and material from Moodle. Constant analysis of data was conducted with personal reflection and collective discussion, using theories to scrutinize data. Our findings show that, by working together on supervisory issues, we expanded our resources, strengthened our collaboration and trust, developed our professional identities, and improved our collective supervisory efficacy. We discovered that self-study provided an in-between space for us to explore cultures, roles, and visions as we collaboratively contested, defined and recreated our roles as supervisors.     

Fostering collaborative teaching and learning scholarship through an international writing group initiative

The research presented here explored the experiences of participants in an international collaborative writing group (ICWG) initiative that ran in conjunction with the 2012 International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (ISSoTL) conference. The ICWG sought to cultivate collaborative pedagogical scholarship by bringing together a range of international academics to co-author articles on teaching and learning topics of shared interest. Data were collected via online surveys at the beginning and end of the initiative and interim focus groups/interviews. In addition to suggesting that the ICWG is an effective means of fostering collaborative writing, the results point to a number of factors that might also influence collaboration in other contexts: modes of collaboration, opportunities for social dialogue, developing a shared vision and voice, and leadership. Implications and applications of the findings, as well as areas of further research, are discussed.     

Changing roles and identities in the construction of a community of mathematical inquiry

In the current shifts in mathematics classrooms, teachers are challenged to use effective pedagogy to develop inquiry communities in which all participants are offered opportunities to engage in the reasoning discourse of proficient mathematical practices. The challenge for teachers is to know how to implement these pedagogical changes. This article outlines how a teacher and researcher worked together in a collaborative partnership using a purposely designed communication and participation framework as a tool to scaffold development of collective reasoning in the inquiry community. The findings illustrate the interconnections between the teacher’s beliefs, past experiences, and current, and future expectations for her diverse students. Explanations are provided of how different, often conflicting, voices emerged including one that drew on the teacher’s cultural knowledge. This provided many learning opportunities for the researcher as the teacher developed her students’ voices in culturally appropriate ways.     

Biculturalism 101: A Self-Study Exploring Culturally Responsive Practice

ABSTRACT

There has been strong advocacy for teacher educators to be culturally responsive in their teaching, but less attention has been focused on the process and journey of becoming more culturally responsive. In this self-study, two teacher educators enrolled in a year-long, foundation-level Māori language course to learn the indigenous language of their country. Putting themselves into roles as students in a bicultural context was a powerful way to learn about Māoritanga and culturally responsive pedagogy, which they then applied in their own teaching. Data were generated through regular reflective journal entries, with significant moments being identified, discussed, and shared with their critical friend. Discussion highlighted that interactions in a bicultural context generated a great deal more than rudimentary language skills. By incorporating aspects of their experiences into their teaching, Dawn and Alan were able to examine the rationale for their actions as an important commitment to modelling culturally appropriate pedagogy for their students. They acknowledge that their status will always be as “other” but they have respectfully navigated paths to ensure that they practice in ways that are sensitive and appropriate to their rich bicultural context.     

The role of narrative in culturally responsive literacy education – a collaborative project in U.S. and Palestinian preschools

This one-year collaborative study examined the role of narrative in promoting new forms of culturally responsive literacy learning in two contrasting international preschool contexts. The qualitative project was carried out by a U.S.-based teacher educator and a Palestinian-based teacher educator who examined the benefits of culturally responsive children's literature, child-centred and open-ended questions, narrative-based dictation and art activities, and co-constructed stories between parents and children. The findings indicate that small-scale changes in the use of narrative in literacy pedagogy can strengthen the classroom as a literacy community, foster culturally valued modes of thinking that deepen children's connections to stories, and strengthen children's engagement with a culturally responsive sense of aesthetic representation. The study's implications emphasise the power of narrative to deepen young children's engagement with literacy in contrasting international settings, and the productive role of cross-cultural collaborative research to diversify current definitions of high-quality early literacy education at the global level.     

Journal Writing with Web 2.0 Tools: A Vision for Older Adults

This article describes how Web 2.0 technologies may facilitate journaling and related inquiry methods among older adults. Benefits and limitations of journaling are summarized as well as computer skills of older adults. We then describe how Web 2.0 technologies can enhance journaling among older adults by diminishing feelings of isolation, promoting collaboration, establishing learning communities that overcome physical boundaries, and facilitating storage and dissemination of resources. The article concludes by identifying several factors that must be anticipated when using these technologies and provides ideas to overcome privacy, access, and posthumous management.     

Forming shared inquiry structures to support knowledge building in a grade 5 community

This study explores the reflective processes by which a grade 5 science community co-constructed shared inquiry structures to focus and guide its inquiry about human body systems over a school year supported by a collaborative online environment. The co-constructed structures included a list of collective wondering areas as the shared focus of inquiry and models of the inquiry process in the form of “research cycle.” Qualitative analyses of field notes, classroom videos, student notebooks and interviews elaborate the evolution of the inquiry areas and the “research cycle” model as well as students’ adaptive use of the structures to guide deeper inquiry. Content analyses of students’ individual research questions and collaborative online discourse indicate that students used the structures to develop more advanced inquiry and make productive contributions. The results contribute to elaborating a reflective structuration approach to co-organizing and sustaining long-term, open-ended inquiry in knowledge building communities.     

Space for performing teacher identity: through the lens of Kafka and Hegel

In this study, we argue that a teacher has a crucial role in leading students into collaborative inquiry‐learning practices. While many studies have given the impression that students are able to engage in inquiry processes on their own, the role of social practices and teacher guidance often remains unexplained. However, even when the pedagogical setting is organized toward collaboration and student‐driven inquiry, it does not mean that students will, as a matter of course, collaborate and take collective responsibility for their own learning. This research has been conducted by a teacher and researchers, and reports on the teacher’s impressions about organizing and promoting a computer‐supported collaborative inquiry process in her classroom of the fourth and fifth grade levels of a Finnish elementary school. The ‘Artifact Project’ was collaboratively designed together by the class teacher and researchers, but the teacher was responsible for implementing and adapting plans in practice. The aim of the ‘Artifact Project – the Past, the Present, and the Future’ – was to support students’ (n = 32) understanding of the diversity of artifacts. Students were asked to analyze artifacts within the cultural context, to study physical phenomena related to them, and to design future artifacts. A collaborative learning environment, Knowledge Forum, facilitated the activities. During the process, the teacher wrote weekly in a reflective project diary. The template of the diary guided the teacher to reflect on the issues that she considered important at the writing moment: the organizing practices, topic content and process stages; how the classroom community functioned; as well as the role of technology as a support for the process. The contents of the diary were analyzed with qualitative content analysis with the help of AtlasTi software. This study depicts an experienced teacher’s practices, her efforts to promote pupils’ cognitive responsibility for advancing their collaborative object‐oriented inquiry process themselves. Instead of trying to control all aspects of pupils’ learning, the teacher assumed the role of an organizer concerning collaborative progressive inquiry and designing activities. Organizing and supporting activities were based on a continuous following of the pupils’ states of process. Knowledge Forum structured the process and mediated activities, and rendered their objects visible and accessible to the whole learning collective. We suggest that in order to expand and scale up advanced inquiry practices, teachers’ usually invisible work in guiding and directing classroom practices has to be made visible and should be analyzed in detail.