Choosing My Own Adventures

Abstract

I teach graduate courses and supervise graduate students' research in the academic specialisation of teacher development studies at a South African university. My students are teachers with diverse educational backgrounds, teaching a variety of subjects in schools and higher education institutions. My scholarship is grounded in teacher professional learning. In my doctoral research, I studied my own professional learning through teaching in three graduate teacher education courses. I took a narrative self-study stance toward research and pedagogy to explore my lived experience as a novice teacher educator (Pithouse, 2007). My intention was to add further understanding and impetus to the growing body of work that explores and values the teacher self and teachers' self-study in the context of lived, relational educational experience (see, for example, Samaras, 2011;Loughran, Hamilton, LaBoskey, Russell, 2004). I created a "narrative self-study research collage" to represent and engage with a range of data from my teaching in the three courses (Pithouse, 2007, p. 44). The methodological contribution of my thesis was the development and use of this textual collage, which drew on visual and language arts-based approaches to educational research, as an alternative medium for data representation (Eisner, 1997). With the collage, I intended to give a vivid, evocative, multifaceted account of my experience of learning through and from