Quotes and Notes: Bullough & Pinnegar (2001)

Bullough, R.V., & Pinnegar, S. (2001, April).  Guidelines for quality in autobiographical forms of self-study research.  Educational Researcher, 30(3), 13-21.

The authors discuss the four conditions from which “self-study” emerged.  The importance of this emerging approach lies in the realization that “teacher development is the essence of school reform” (p. 14).  These conditions are:

1. The emergence of naturalistic and qualitative research methods in the field of education and the “redefinition of validity as trustworthiness or accuracy” (p. 13).
2. The reconceptualist movement in curriculm, particularly Pinar’s notion of currere.
3. The diversity of educational researchers who bring with them other standards and experiences with educational research.
4. The emergence of action research. 

I could argue that researcher development is the essence of research reform; thus articulating one justification for the study.  And, if my article is about the development of researchers and research, my subjects represent examples of – exemplars – to support my arguments (I know I should have already figured this out, but it’s starting to be clearer in my mind). 

Bullough and Pinnegar wrote:

self-study’s appeal is grounded int he postmodern university’s preoccupation with identity formation and a Foucault-inspired (see Colin, 1977) recognition of the linkage of person and the play of power in self formation.  Foucault offers a rationale for self-study work:  “if one is interested in doing historical work that has political meaning, utility and effectiveness, then this is possible only if one  has some kind of involvement with the struggles taking place in the area in question” (p. 64).  Self-study is explicitly interested research.  But beyond this, what is it?  What makes a piece of self-writing research?

Self-study is a balancing act between the personal and the historical, a combination which produces research.  At the level of research, self-study “does not focus on the self per se but on the space between self and the practice engaged in” (p. 15).  The purpose, according to the authors, of self-study is to “gain understanding necessary to make that interaction [between self-as-teacher educator and others] increasingly educative” (p. 15).  I suppose part of the interaction equation could include the interaction between self and method.

The authors offer the following guidelines for autobiographical self-study forms.  That is, autobiographical, self-study…

1. …should ring true and enable connection (p. 16).
2. …should promote insight and interpretation (p. 16).
3. …should engage history forthrightly and the author must take an honest stand (p. 16).
4. …be about the problems and issues that make someone an educator (p. 17).
5. …can be scholarly – one requirement being that they are written in an authentic voice (p. 17).
6. …researchers have an ineluctable obligation to seek to improve the learning situation not only for the self but for the other (p. 17).
7. …portray character development and include dramatic action:  Something genuine is at stake int he story (p. 17).^[1]
8. …attend carefully to persons in context or setting (p. 18).
9. …offer fresh perspectives on established truths (p. 18).
10. …that rely on correspondence should provide the reader with an inside look at participants’ thinking and feeling (p. 19).
11. …should have edited conversation or correspondence that is edited to maintain coherence and structure that ultimately provide argumentation and convincing evidence to be considered scholarly work (p. 19).
12. …that rely on correspondence bring with them the necessity to select, frame, arrange, and footnote the correspondence in ways that demonstrate wholeness (p. 20).
13. …and interpretations of self-study data, should not only reveal but also interrogate the relationships, contradictions, and limits of the views presented (p. 20).
14. …as correspondence studies, should contain complication or tension (p. 20).

The notion of story and story forms is prominent in this article and important, I think, for me to consider carefully as I approach this piece I am starting to write.  The authors write that (p. 17):

most self-studies that rely on autobiography embrace the story form rather than the plot lines of fiction.  “A story is a series of events recorded in their chronological order.  A plot is a series of events deliberately arranged so as to reveal their dramatic, thematic, and emotion significant” (Burroway, 1987, p. 13)

furthermore, these authors suggest that the use of plot (and plot lines) is “under appreciated” (p. 18) and it has the potential to “enable special insight into learning to teach and teaching” (p. 18).

1. see discussion below [↩]