Self Study as Timely and Timeless

Abstract

Self-study practitioners critically and reflectively examine themselves, their practice and the contexts in which they work. Quality self-studies, such as the six articles in this issue of Studying Teacher Education, are situated in the present moment yet engage perennial questions in teaching and teacher education. The ‘self’ figures prominently in the Self-Study of Teacher Education Practices. Most studies implicitly or explicitly explore practitioner identity, voice and/or agency. While the treatment of self may be timeless in S-STEP, it may be time to revisit our conceptions of self. Oren Ergas was an outsider to ‘self-study’ when he stumbled upon the S-STEP Special Interest Group at the American Educational Research Association conference in 2018. Oren’s questioning was welcomed by S-STEP stalwart Jason K. Ritter. Together, Ergas and Ritter (2020) embarked on a journey to examine the self in teacher education that has resulted in an edited volume, Exploring Self toward Expanding Teaching, Teacher Education and Practitioner Research, that features chapters by notable voices in self-study. ‘Expanding the Place of Self in Self-Study through an Autoethnography of Discontents,’ their article in this issue, is a timely reconsideration of the self in self-study in the form of an autoethnography of Oren and his discontents. They conclude by considering the implications of their scholarly examination of the treatment of self in self-study by identifying implications for ontology, epistemology, ethical commitments, and methodology and authority of self. While there is much that is fresh in this article, Oren and Jason situate their ideas as ‘accentuations’ of claims made in seminal works in self-study, notably Bullough and Pinnegar (2004) on ontology of self in self-study and by LaBoskey (2004) on practices of self-reflection and self-transformation. Nothing could be more timely than an article on Covid-19. ‘Self-study,’ as Berry and Kitchen (2020) wrote in the editorial for issue 16(2) of this journal, ‘has important contributions to make in these times for documenting the experiences and insights that come from radical educational change’ (p. 123). We posed three questions: