Kathleen Pithouse-Morgan

University of Nottingham | Notts

The author analyzes self-study research in Teaching and Teacher Education (TATE). An introduction to self-study of professional practice as scholarship and methodology is followed by descriptions of 10 selected articles. Next is a presentation of 10 self-study characteristics identified in the articles. The final analysis shows three broad self-stu...

We, a diverse group of South African academics, study embodied reflexivity through poetry, and this article is an account of poetic inquiry inspired by assemblages created by the participants in a symposium, Object Inquiry for Social Cohesion in Public Higher Education. As the symposium’s cofacilitators, we wondered how and what we might learn from...

We are three South African teacher educators who, in collaboration, have edited six collections of methodologically innovative self-reflexive educational research over seven years. For this paper, we asked: “What can we learn about our academic motivations from revisiting our editorials?” and “Why does this matter?” To promote collaborative creativ...

We are teacher educators and methodological innovators who have been practicing and facilitating co-creativity (collaborative creativity) for ourselves and for others through poetic self-study. This article examines our professional learning as editors of a journal special issue on poetic self-study scholarship. Our study was built on the conceptua...

The Self-Reflexive Methodologies Special Interest Group (SIG) of the South African Education Research Association (SAERA) has been active since 2014, with over 100 academics from more than 20 higher education institutions participating. The 10th Anniversary SAERA special issue of Journal of Education prompted an analysis of the SIG's educational sc...

Poetic Inquiry for the Human and Social Sciences: Voices from the South and North enriches human and social science research by introducing new voices, insights, and epistemologies. Poetic inquiry, or poetry as research, is a literary and performance arts-based approach. It combines the arts and humanities with scientific inquiry to enhance social...

I have collaborated with many people to develop a portfolio of work using the power of poetic inquiry for professional learning. I composed a pantoum poem for this chapter to retrace poetry’s contribution to my learning. The pantoum is a poetic bricolage of words and phrases from five professional learning poems published over six years. The bricol...

We are self-study research methodologists and teacher educators working across continents to enhance and broaden professional learning, knowledge, and practice. By witnessing and researching the value of multiple voices and stories interacting for profound professional growth, we developed the concept of polyvocal professional learning. Our polyvoc...

We, three South African teacher educators from research-intensive institutions, have been active in collaborative arts-inspired self-study research for over a decade. We share a commitment to tackling pressing social issues, like HIV and AIDS, within and beyond our local context. This study asked, “What can we learn by mindfully pausing and purpose...

In self-study research, numerous approaches are used, including collaboratively creative poetic inquiry. In this chapter, two teacher educators and self-study scholars consider how their polyvocal poetic play has helped challenge the status quo of method in researching professional knowledge and practice over the years. Looking specifically at thei...

Through self-study research, teacher educators, teachers, and other professionals reimagine their practice to contribute to new ways of knowing and doing. Self-studies can be performed in a multitude of ways and from a variety of viewpoints. Self-study’s methods and modes continue to evolve due to the methodology’s inherent freedom for exploration...

We are teacher educators who facilitate transdisciplinary self-study research in our home countries of South Africa and the United States of America. We have worked individually and with others to guide communities of university educators and graduate students interested in self-study research. We understand this transdisciplinary, transnational, a...

We explore autoethnography as a complex and potentially transformative methodology for understanding and enacting higher education. First, we position higher education in the context of global corporate managerialism and consider the possible effects of this on lived educational experiences and practices. In what follows, we each offer an account o...

This study explores the value of co-creative play spaces for faculty professional learning and development. Data are drawn from the researchers' coauthored publications, which utilized arts-inspired data generation modes. The pluralist methodological route and analysis results in design elements for professional learning captured through rich pictu...

We share the design and development of our transcontinental tapestry, which emerged from our individual and collaborative work in facilitating transdisciplinary self-study learning communities. Found poetry and a portfolio of our work in co-creativity served to deepen our understanding of collective creativity in polyvocal self-study and contribute...

We are teacher educators who facilitate and participate in transdisciplinary self-study research communities in our respective home countries of South Africa and the United States of America. Our comparable experiences first brought us together in 2012, intending to learn from each other’s work in facilitating these communities. Digital technologie...

The catalyst for this self-study research was the performance of a sequence of poems at a colloquium for South African deans of education. The poems portray my interpretation of my students’ stories of physically and emotionally painful experiences at the hands of their former teachers. My intention was to show how the creative possibilities of poe...

In my doctoral research, I studied my professional learning in action by teaching three graduate teacher education courses at a South African university. I took a narrative self-study stance toward research and pedagogy to explore my lived experience as a novice teacher educator. In this chapter, I present a short story of my doctoral journey and m...

My explorations in self-reflexive and arts-informed research have given rise to a distinctive formulation of poetic professional learning as a literary arts-inspired means of researching and enhancing professional learning. I have worked with many others, in South Africa and internationally, to cultivate a portfolio of work that engages the power o...

In this scholarly memoir, we use mosaic-ing as a metaphor to retrace research connections between and among memory-work, the arts, and professional teacher learning, charting the course of transcontinental methodological variations and considerations over time and space. We chronologically offer this retracing, looking back to some of our earliest...

The catalyst for the self-study presented in this paper was a recent university teaching portfolio in which I had to affirm my pedagogic values as a teacher educator. In the portfolio, I emphasised “dialogue and interaction within an open and supportive educational environment in which students and I can learn about, from, and with each other.” Put...

We, three teacher educators from a research-intensive South African university, have been immersed in collaborative arts-inspired self-study research for more than a decade. Recently, to learn from our experiences as facilitators of an HIV and AIDS education workshop at a local university of technology, we made our first foray into readers’ theatre...

The contributions to this themed issue explore both why and how educational researchers across different contexts in South Africa and the United States are enacting self-reflexivity through methodological inventiveness. The six articles are candid and engaging, offering vivid, detailed illustrations and descriptions of the researchers’ experiences,...

In this chapter, we share the design and development of “A Sense of Place”, which emerged from exploring place and identity in-between the very different contexts in which we live and work, in-between our distinct personal and professional experiences, and in-between disciplinary and methodological domains. We offer an account of a new episode in o...

This article offers detailed accounts of self-study research conducted by two South African teachers who used drawing as an arts-based method to gain insights from children in their schools. While much of the published research on drawing as a self-study method has involved drawing by teachers or teacher educators, the focus here is on two teacher-...

Storywork is an indigenous research practice of making meaning through stories. This article offers an account of storywork as a self-study method for educational research. It brings into dialogue the distinctive personal stories of two South African primary school teachers, S'phiwe Madondo and Ntokozo Mkhize, who engaged in self-study research wit...

This chapter draws on theoretical, literary, and artistic thinking to describe a multifaceted conceptualization of polyvocality in self-study research. It offers exemplars of enactments of polyvocal self-study research enacted across disciplines, institutions, and continents in large-scale faculty self-study higher education communities in the USA...

Storywork is an indigenous research practice of making meaning through stories. This article offers an account of storywork as a self-study method for educational research. It brings into dialogue the distinctive personal stories of two South African primary school teachers, S'phiwe Madondo and Ntokozo Mkhize, who engaged in self-study research wit...

We worked together to create a readers' theatre script as a vehicle for learning about using everyday objects to open up conversations in a workshop on HIV and AIDS curriculum integration research in higher education. Through creating the script and a series of interconnected dialogue pieces we uncovered experiences and understandings of productive...

This themed issue comprises a collection of object study articles, a review by Logamurthie Athiemoolam of the edited book, Object Medleys: Interpretive Possibilities for Educational Research (Pillay, Pithouse-Morgan, & Naicker, 2017), and a report by Nosipho Mbatha on the 6th annual international conference of the South African Educational Research...

“New Voices, Insights, Possibilities for Working with the Arts and Memory in Researching Teacher Professional Learning” begins with a prologue that tells a story of how the book editors—Kathleen Pithouse-Morgan, Daisy Pillay, and Claudia Mitchell—have engaged with their own learning, as well as with what the book can offer to others. The chapter go...

“Picturing a More Hopeful Future: Teacher-Researchers Drawing Early Memories of School” by Kathleen Pithouse-Morgan, Hlengiwe (Mawi) Makhanya, Graham Downing, and Nontuthuko Phewa brings together three exemplars from teacher-researchers who have used memory drawing as an arts-based method for self-study research. The three mosaic pieces offer diver...

“The Promise of Poetry Belongs to Us All: Poetic Professional Learning in Teacher-Researchers’ Memory-Work” by Kathleen Pithouse-Morgan, S’phiwe Madondo, and Edwina Grossi builds on the developing scholarship of poetic professional learning in the social sciences by exploring two exemplars of South African teacher-researchers’ poetic engagement wit...

“Stories Blending, Flowing Out: Connecting Teacher Professional Learning, Re-membering, and Storytelling” by Kathleen Pithouse-Morgan, Sandra Owén:nakon Deer-Standup, and Thokozani Ndaleni, offers written research accounts of engaging with oral storytelling as an arts-based community and family practice. The chapter brings together mosaic pieces by...

In South African public higher education, the miseducative legacies of the past weigh heavily. This article offers our learning as leaders of a multicultural community of university educators that seeks to contribute towards repairing the damages of a divided and discriminatory past by means of self-study research. Through a collaborative arts-info...

We have come to conceptualize our transdisciplinary, transnational, and transcultural interaction and reciprocal learning through self-study research as polyvocal professional learning. Our conceptualization of polyvocality has made visible how dialogic encounters with diverse ways of seeing, knowing, and doing can deepen and extend professional le...

In this chapter, I offer an account of another episode in my continuing professional learning journey. At the outset, I did not have a clearly expressed research question; rather, I just had a feeling that there was more to find out about my professional practice and myself. In the chapter, I illustrate how I used the literary arts-informed researc...

We are inspired by our international network of self-study colleagues who have expressed the disposition of openness in utilizing and generating various methods and tools to explore their inquiries and re-envision their practice. We too have embraced this openness and flexibility of how self-study research can be enacted through the use of multiple...

In this paper, we concentrate on our learning conversations as research supervisors of graduate students in our self-study community. Over the years, our evolving supervisory conversations have included up to 10 supervisors at a time (see Pithouse-Morgan et al., 2015). We regularly meet to discuss our supervisory practices and experiences, with the...

This book offers a collection of original, peer-reviewed studies by scholars working to develop a knowledge base of teaching and facilitating self-study research methodology. Further, it details and interconnects perspectives and experiences of new self-study researchers and their facilitators, in self-study communities in different countries and a...

This chapter frames the fourth section in Teaching, Learning, and Enacting of Self-Study Methodology: Unraveling a Complex Interplay. To begin is a description and background and contexts of transdisciplinary self-study learning communities in the United States (George Mason University self-study of teaching projects) and South Africa (the trans-un...

By means of reflections, dialogue, and visual images, this chapter brings together multiple voices and stories from the global self-study research community to illustrate how conversations across specialisations, institutions, and continents can contribute to university educators and leaders reimagining pedagogies and collaboration in transformativ...

This chapter brings into dialogue the perspectives of two South African teacher educators and their doctoral research supervisor. In focusing on arts-informed self-study research, the chapter demonstrates how researchers who might describe themselves as non-creative, and used to written rather than visual expression, can tap into the art world to p...

How do we get at the meanings of everyday (and not so everyday) objects, and how might these meanings enrich educational research? The study of objects is well established in fields such as archaeology, art history, communications, fine arts, museum studies, and sociology-but is still developing in education. Object Medleys: Interpretive Possibilit...

This is the result of a transcontinental exchange of ideas between Shauna Rak in Canada, Adelheid Camilla von Maltitz in South Africa, and Kathleen Pithouse-Morgan. Both Shauna and Adelheid are artists, researchers, and art teachers (artist–researcher–teachers). The chapter gives a storied, visually illustrated account of Shauna and Adelheid’s theo...

This chapter builds on and adds to a rich history of object inquiry in self-study research by teacher educators. The chapter brings together the voices of three Southern African teacher educators, Mandisa N. Dhlula-Moruri, Makie Kortjass, Thokozani Ndaleni, and their doctoral research supervisor, Kathleen Pithouse-Morgan. Through object monologues...

We begin with ourselves: artists, researchers, and teachers. We excavate our memories, seeking the landmarks of our stories of discovery. Material objects operate as talismans, stepping stones that guide us from concrete materiality into self-reflexive abstraction, windows for new ways of seeing.

We reflect on an online research conversation in which we dialogued about facilitating transdisciplinary self-study learning communities with university faculty in South Africa and the USA. We describe this virtual dialogue as thinking in space. Digital technologies made available new ways of connecting with each other between the continents in whi...

We explore how using the literary arts-based methodology of collective poetic inquiry deepened our own self-knowledge as South African academics who choose to resist a neoliberal corporate model of higher education. Increasingly, poetry is recognized as a means of representing the distinctiveness, complexity and plurality of the voices of research...

This chapter offers an insider account of a qualitative, narrative inquiry into my professional learning about teaching writing. My understanding of professional learning is aligned to Webster-Wright’s (2008) conceptualisation of authentic professional learning as “as embedded and constructed in the experience [emphasis added] of being a profession...

We offer an account of how we, a research team of three South African academics, have dialogued with multiculturalism and equity through collective poetic autoethnographic inquiry. The focus of the article is on our learning through reading and responding to published autoethnographies by three other South African academics. We share our learning a...

Object Medleys: Interpretive Possibilities for Educational Research follows on from a 3-day international research symposium held in Durban, South Africa in February 2016, organised by Daisy Pillay, Kathleen Pithouse-Morgan, and Inbanathan Naicker.

We worked together as a group of four researchers at two different institutions to explore scrapbooking as a tool for professional learning about HIV and AIDS curriculum integration in higher education. Through a scrapbooking activity we individually and collectively made visible experiences and understandings of being HIV and AIDS curriculum integ...

We worked together as a group of four researchers at two different institutions to explore scrapbooking as a tool for professional learning about HIV and AIDS curriculum integration in higher education. Through a scrapbooking activity we individually and collectively made visible experiences and understandings of being HIV and AIDS curriculum integ...

Our research focused on what it means to enact methodological inventiveness in self-study research, both collectively and individually, in order to take up critically the interplay of scholarship and practice in changing times and spaces.

Our primary objective in bringing our diverse experiences from the USA and South African projects into dialogue through collective self-study research was to gain insight into the network of the interconnectedness of our transcontinental experiences: the similar and dissimilar, the contiguous and non-contiguous, and the linear and nonlinear nature...

The meanings connected with becoming or being an academic are constantly shifting, on account of diverse forces that act on universities. In this article, we portray our learning as a research team of four academics (including one early-career academic) and a doctoral student who took a narrative inquiry approach to listening and responding to our...

We begin this chapter by re-examining the initial aesthetic memory-work research process through which we developed a paper for presentation to the Self-Study of Teacher Education Practices (S-STEP) Special Interest Group (SIG) at the American Educational Research Association (AERA) 2013 annual meeting (Pithouse-Morgan & Pillay, 2013). Next, we sho...

We are teacher educators working in South Africa and the United States. Collectively we explored and extended our understanding of methodological inventiveness in self-study research through an artful process we have named “virtual polyvocal research jamming.” We make explicit our extemporary, dialogic process, showing how we imagined and played wi...

Academic Autoethnographies: Inside Teaching in Higher Education invites readers to experience autoethnography as a challenging, complex, and creative research methodology that can produce personally, professionally, and socially useful understandings of teaching and researching in higher education. The peer-reviewed chapters offer innovative and pe...

I teach graduate courses in the specialisation of Teacher Development Studies at a university in South Africa. My students are teachers who teach in a range of subject areas at primary and secondary schools. There are also a few who teach at higher education institutions. Some of my students are veteran teachers who have been teaching for 20 to 30...

Academic Autoethnographies: Inside Teaching in Higher Education advances scholarship on autoethnography as a demanding, often unsettling, and necessarily imaginative research methodology that can produce personally, professionally, and socially useful understandings of teaching and researching in higher education. The book invites readers into the...

As an interdisciplinary team of educational researchers we explored pre-service science teachers' perspectives on using digital technologies and social media to address socially relevant issues in science teaching. The rationale for teaching socially relevant science was embedded in the concept of renaiscience, thus underscoring the need for scienc...

Polyvocal Professional Learning through Self-Study Research illustrates the power of " we " for innovative and authentic professional learning. The 33 contributors to this book include experienced and emerging self-study researchers, writing in collaboration, across multiple professions, academic disciplines, contexts, and continents. These authors...

We are teacher educators and researchers in South Africa. In our doctoral studies we used self-study methodologies to improve our professional practice in relation to the challenges of teaching and learning in the South African HIV and AIDS context. This article demonstrates how we, as teacher educator-researchers, explored the " afterlife " of our...

We explore how the participatory, literary arts-based methodology of collective poetic inquiry can facilitate awareness of, and insight into polyvocality in educational research. Using found poetry and haiku poetry, we present a poetic performance in which we engage with diverse voices that manifest in multiple data sources: a student participant's...

As an interdisciplinary team of researchers, we sought ways of encouraging discussion, reflexivity and generative thinking around HIV and AIDS integration in higher education curricula. We facilitated conversations in three higher education research settings through the medium of a digital animation based on a storyboard prepared in response to exp...

In South Africa, every postgraduate (master's or doctoral) student is usually assigned one academic advisor, known as a supervisor. “The traditional model is the apprenticeship model of individual mentoring. This model is usually supplemented by informal and ad hoc support programmes” (academy of Science of South Africa [ASSAf], 2010, p. 64).

Through self-study research, professionals seek out innovative and responsive ways of seeing, doing, and becoming. Self-study of professional practice has brought to centre stage the agency and lived experience of the professional in processes of learning and knowing (Hamilton, 2004).KeywordsTeacher EducationProfessional PracticeProfessional Learni...

Thinking in space: Learning about dialogue as method from a trans-continental conversation about trans-disciplinary self-study of professional practice The confluence of talents and where that meets for innovation is fascinating. Context Self-study research is paradoxically collaborative (LaBoskey, 2004; Loughran & Northfield, 1998) and we add tran...

This article provides a reflexive narrative account of a collaborative process of moving towards curriculum intellectualising in the context of diverse understandings of African scholarship in a South African university. We reflect on the journey we took in trying to make collective sense of postgraduate students' conceptions of African scholarship...

This special issue of the South African journal Perspectives in Education offers a collection of articles by self-study researchers who are located across diverse disciplines in higher education institutions in South Africa, Canada and the United States of America (USA). The collection begins with contributions from teacher educators (Sandra Weber,...

The emerging field of memory studies has been motivated by the desire to remember the past so as to change the future. Teachers, whether they are pre-service or inservice or teacher educators, have a key role to play in this future-oriented remembering because of their impact on the upcoming generation. A ‘looking forward through looking back’ way...

Much memory-work writing traces its origins to a systematic process of collaborative inquiry on female sexualisation undertaken by a group of feminist women in Germany in the 1980s. Other feminist researchers have since built on this work to explore gender and women's lived experiences. While a good deal of this work has continued to be collective,...

The authors of this article portray their learning as a group of eight academics who met to examine the roles and relationships of supervisors of postgraduate self-study research. In the article, they represent how through a metaphor-drawing activity they were able collectively to rethink their experiences and understandings of becoming and being s...

The articles in this special issue illustrate the significance and potential of enacting reflexivity in educational research. Questioning how to enact reflexivity in ways that can be transformative is a key component of educational research for social change in contemporary South Africa, as it is elsewhere if we are to take up critical issues of se...

We explore the place that the digital can occupy in teachers’ pedagogical practices around social justice and especially how memory-work can deepen and enhance teacher practices. Like Walter Benjamin, we see memory as being a medium for exploring the past and where the digital provides greater opportunities for teachers to work productively across...

Participatory educational research is generally characterised by a commitment to making a difference in the lives of those who participate in the research and more broadly, to promoting social transformation. This suggests a potentially fruitful synergy between participatory educational research and the multidisciplinary body of academic work on ge...

Productive Remembering and Social Agency examines how memory can be understood, used and interpreted in forward-looking directions in education to support agency and social change. The edited collection features contributions from established and new scholars who take up the idea of productive remembering across diverse contexts, positioning the wo...

What can a teacher do with a camera? What happens when teachers become "filmmakers? How can drawing become an entry point for ref!ection? How can autobiographical texts become pedagogical texts? And how can tools such as these contribute to teachers’ self-study in relation to addressing HIV and AIDS? Teacher educators at a number of institutions in...

This paper offers an account of our learning from using arts-based approaches in supporting graduate students in their research into memory-work and teacher development in a South African context. We have created a reflexive dialogue to depict a ‘playful’ inquiry into our co-learning. We constructed this dialogue from extracts from two audio-record...

Productive Remembering and Social Agency examines how memory can be understood, used and interpreted in forward-looking directions in education to support agency and social change. The edited collection features contributions from established and new scholars who take up the idea of productive remembering across diverse contexts, positioning the wo...

There appears to be a mounting consciousness in academia that knowledge production and the scholarly dissemination of knowledge do not necessarily lead to general well-being or improvement in society. In this article we start with ourselves by initiating an exploration into generative possibilities for becoming agents of social change through our o...

Using reflective letter-writing as a method of generating data, a group of four researchers embarked on a collaborative autoethnographic inquiry into the emotional dimensions of researching social aspects of HIV & AIDS. In this article, we use the medium of a narrative dialogue to represent and re-examine our reflective letter-writing method. The d...

The Transformative Education/al Studies project (TES) is a three-year, funded project led by researchers from three universities: a University of Technology, a Research-Intensive university, and a rural Comprehensive University. The project participants are academic staff members who are pursuing Masters and Doctoral studies and their supervisors....

In this article, we – a research team of academic staff and postgraduate students – take a narrative inquiry stance to explore what we can learn from one African international postgraduate student‟s stories of experience on a South African university campus. We use the medium of narrative vignettes – brief evocative scenes or accounts – to re-prese...

There is a growing realisation of the vital role that Higher Education institutions in South Africa can and should play in keeping students not only alive, well and productive but also prepared to face the multiple challenges associated with living and working in the context of the HIV & AIDS pandemic. This article reports on part of a larger resea...

This special edition of the Journal of Education draws on a contemporary concern with memory and pedagogy in South Africa – as we see, for example, in a themed issue of Perspectives in Education that examines how different “post-conflict societies”, including South Africa, engage with “the past as a pedagogical problem” (Jansen and Weldon, 2009, pp...

Self-study is an approach to the study of personal experience in a social context. What distinguishes self-study from many other methodologies for researching personal experience is that it focuses on the researcher’s own self and experience. Self-study research has so far mostly been initiated and conducted by teacher educators and teachers who st...