I began this section with the heading, “The Key to the Closed Garden,” mainly because it was suggestive of my experience regarding my choice of a self-study research methodology. Mary, in the novel, feels that once she finds the key to the secret garden, she will then be able to open the door and her curiosity about what is behind those high walls of the secret garden will be sated.
Similarly, I felt that my curiosity about my role modelling would also be appeased if I found the research methodology that best suited my research purposes as outlined in the next section.
15 “The Key of the Garden” (Burnett, 1969, p. 50).
40 2.2.1 Searching for the Key16
I titled this subsection “Searching for the Key” to portray my search for the most suitable research methodology for my study. I show how I searched for an initial understanding of my research methodology.
From my initial reading on self-study of teacher education practices, I learned that self-study research could enable teacher educators like myself, who wished to study their teaching practice in order to acquire a broader understanding of it (Pinnegar, Hamilton, & Fitzgerald, 2010). I anticipated that self-study research would be crucial for my professional development because it would lead to improvements in my teaching as I explored my practice while at the same time engaging in academic dialogue through making my research public as work in progress (Samaras, 2011).
Beck, Freese, and Kosnik (as cited in Lassonde, Galman, & Kosnik, 2009, p. 10) described self- study as “an inquiry-oriented approach that is personal, reflective, collaborative and constructivist.”
From this, I understood that given that self-study was described as inquiry-oriented, I would be asked probing questions about my practice, for example, “How can I improve my practice?” The word, personal, in the definition denoted that the research would be about me and conducted by me.
The word, reflective, indicated that having identified a problem in my teaching practice, I would need to reflect on the problem and seek solutions to resolve or minimise the problem. From collaborative, I understood that reflecting with others was a key requirement of self-study research (Loughran, 2004). In my understanding, self-study was described as constructivist because new knowledge would be constructed as I sought alternate ways of improving my teaching practice. The significant role of social constructivism, as described in Chapter One, was also highlighted for me because I understood that I would be studying myself in relation to my practice. My practice would include my students, my colleagues, and significant others whom I would call critical friends.
Hence, I realised that my self-study research process would have to be “interactive” because I would have to work collaboratively with others to develop new knowledge (La Boskey, 2004, p. 843). In my self-study research, I would have to ask critical questions about my pedagogic practice concerning my actual teaching activities in the field of teacher education. I would also have to be open to questions about my understandings of my teaching and learning through making public the learning being generated by my self-study inquiry. This is a distinguishing element of self-study
16 “Searching for the Key” (Burnett, 1969, p. 50).
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research because making public learning about teaching student teachers could be beneficial to the teacher education community (Korthagen & Kessels, 1999).
I learned that while self-study research is “self-initiated and self-focused” (La Boskey, 2004, p.
842), it would permit me to study not only my own practice but also to explore my students’
learning—two very important factors that constantly engage with each other. This interchange between these two factors was alluring because I anticipated that it would allow my pedagogy to become an integral whole instead of being divided into fragmented pieces (Samaras & Freese, 2006). I also became aware that I would be the researcher conducting the research and a participant in the research itself, and that the focus of the research would be on me and on my practice as it was unfolding (Samaras, 2011).
As Samaras and Roberts (2011) highlighted, over the years, teachers and teacher educators have lamented their lack of input about decisions taken that affect them directly. I understood that there was not much as a teacher educator that I could do about this situation because I lacked the power to change the national education system. However, through my reading on self-study research, I realised that instead of focusing on broader issues over which I had no control, I would acquire the power, through my self-study research process, to change myself (Samaras & Roberts, 2011). I am in charge of my classroom and if I could acquire the power of reinventing my educational practice through my self-study research (Mitchell & Weber, 1999), and role model this for my students, then I would have done my bit to improve the education system (Samaras & Freese, 2006). Hence, I had understood self-study should be “improvement aimed” (La Boskey, 2004, p. 844).
In consulting literature on self-study research, I was enlightened that there were numerous methods that I could adopt (Samaras, 2011). These different research practices for enacting self-study, while being different, can complement each other, for example, interviews, personal experience, participatory research, narrative enquiry, co-/autoethnography, and artistic methods, among others (Lassonde et al., 2009). However, Feldman, Paugh, and Mills (2004) and Feldman (as cited in Lassonde et al., 2009) emphasised that with self-study research, irrespective of the method used, the self must be at the forefront of the study.
From my reading (Samaras, 2011) and my interaction with critical friends who were using arts- based methods, I was inspired to use arts-based methods in my self-study to generate and represent data to answer my research questions. Leavy (2009, pp. 2–3) explained that arts-based approaches
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to research can provide “engaged ways in which theory and practice are intertwined.” Arts-based methods draw on the visual and performing arts such as collage, painting, drawing, music, dance, and role playing, as well as on literary arts-based forms such as poetry and narrative (Leavy, 2009).
I was initially intimidated by an arts-based approach, but I learned from researchers, for example, Gerstenblatt (2013) and Butler-Kisber (2008), that any novice could cut and paste images and text on a surface to represent their learning through a collage. This did not require any artistic or creative flair, nor did it require previous experience in the arts.
To generate data to answer my first research question on what could have influenced my role modelling, I decided to use a personal history self-study approach by recalling and recounting specific episodes, people, places, and events in my life history that could have influenced me and shaped me to role model in certain ways (Samaras et al., 2004). I decided to compose a personal history narrative by drawing on a range of sources, namely, old photographs, new photographs of old places and people in my family, artefacts, and journal entries where I recorded my thoughts and feelings during my research process (see Chapters Three to Six).
To generate data for my second research question on what I was role modelling for my students, I videotaped my lectures, reflected on the videotapes, and recorded my reflections in my reflective journal. In addition, I gathered evidence from students in the form of a reflective questionnaire, the institution’s lecturer evaluation surveys that are completed every year by students, and conversations with critical friends and colleagues. I involved the students in an activity where they had to choose and draw a metaphor of me as their teacher educator and provide an explanation as to why they chose that metaphor (see Chapter Seven).
To generate data for my third research question on how I could develop as a more productive role model, I adopted a social constructivist approach in my teaching of accounting pedagogy with my second- and third-year students. I videotaped my lessons and recorded my reflections in my reflective diary. I involved students in the metaphor drawing activity again, and held conversations with my critical friends and colleagues and recorded those reflections in my reflective journal (see Chapters Seven and Eight).
In composing my narrative portrayals of my personal history and my pedagogical explorations (as presented in Chapters Three to Nine), I drew on Coulter and Smith’s (2009) advice on the use of literary elements to keep my readers reading to the last page. Barone (2008) described such
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narratives as “narrative constructions” (p. 456) because representing and analysing data in the form of a story is more aptly known as “textual arrangement” (p. 456). What he meant by this is that unlike conventional research reports which are concerned with how factual knowledge is presented (often in the form of tables), a narrative construction depicts experience thus allowing the researcher more room for interpretation, and giving the reader the opportunity to view the educational occurrences from varying perspectives and with a piqued interest.
I therefore paid attention to the literary elements of characters, actions, viewpoints, plot, and setting (Coulter & Smith, 2009). This helped me to carefully consider the relationships between myself and the people I included in my narratives in ways that could offer “the concrete detail of setting, actors, and actions to render the narrative persuasive and coherent as a whole” (p. 588).
Given that this was my first encounter with the arts as research, I felt invigorated by the prospect of experimenting with different art forms and the ideas informing arts-based research methodologies because I found the arts to be enthralling. My sentiments echoed those of Eisner (2008, p. 23) who highlighted that art is “evocative, provocative, emotional, and at best, arresting.” Moreover, Eisner pointed out that “the arts stimulated, refined, and conveyed meanings that could not be expressed in any other form of representation” (2008, p. 23).
Referring back to the novel, The Secret Garden, Mary eventually finds the key. For Mary, finding the key is quite a momentous event and I shared Mary’s joy. She is so overwhelmed that she keeps the key in her pocket for a few days, hugging the secret to herself because she cannot believe that she actually has the key to the secret garden. Mary is lost in the wonderment of the mystery behind that closed door. Likewise, having found the key of self-study research, I was lost in the wonderment of the mystery of what my personal history and arts-based methodological approaches might unearth about my role modelling. But before I discuss that, in the next section, I explain the context in which this study took place.