Knowing, Becoming, doing as Teacher Educators: Identity, Intimate Scholarship, Inquiry: Volume 26

The purpose of this chapter is to make visible the similarities and differences among narrative, self-study of teacher education practices, and autoethnographic methodologies to generate clarity about when each methodology might be most appropriate. Using Margery Wolf’s (1992) A Thrice Told Tale as a heuristic to support our exploration, we look at a selected slice of data as if standing within each methodology. As we do that we consider ways that we might engage each methodology to push forward our thinking about powerful research. Our goal is to critically examine the processes that researchers use for the study and to explore the ways using particular methodologies in appropriate ways that can strengthen our thinking about professional knowledge.

This chapter analyzes our practice as researchers engaged in intimate scholarship using the Framework of Analysis (Pinnegar & Hamilton, 2009) as an analytic tool to scrutinize the trustworthiness of our research practice and to develop a deeper understanding of how S-STEP research establishes itself as trustworthy and rigorous scholarship. With the recognition of S-STEP research and other forms of intimate scholarship as genres of teacher education research (Borko, Liston, & Whitcomb, 2007), scholars engaged and other forms of intimate scholarship can turn to a more rigorous inquiry into and critique of our work in order to consider how we might improve our practice as researchers and support and strengthen the position and future of this research. For these reasons, we take up a critique of a particular S-STEP research study using the Framework for Analysis in order to explore both whether the work studied can be judged trustworthy and what such examination reveals about the process of establishing the trustworthiness of studies utilizing intimate scholarship methodologies.

The Zeichner Paradox presents the Self-Study of Teaching and Teacher Education Practices (S-STEP) research community and other researchers engaged in intimate scholarship with three challenges to the viability of our methodology: the development of questions significant to the larger research base of teaching and teacher education; the use of existing research to frame our questions; and the connection of our current research to the works of other researchers to inform our work. Based on identified exemplar studies, we demonstrate tools that might be used by researchers to strengthen the presentation of our work and explore the challenges to reveal links between and among them.