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APRIL 2001 13
Guidelines for Quality in Autobiographical Forms
of Self-Study Research
by Robert V. Bullough, Jr. and Stefinee Pinnegar
methods into education, and the redefinition of validity as trust-
worthiness or accuracy (see Lincoln & Guba, 1985). Although
debate still rages, a radically different understanding of the nature
of research and subject/object relations has emerged. Some argue
that subjects can no longer be studied as if they are atemporal
(outside of time), determinant (predictable), or static (unchang-
ing). For those working within the “Fifth Moment” in educa-
tional research, questions of context, process, and relationship
have moved toward the center of inquiry: “This center lies in the
humanistic commitment of the qualitative researcher to study
the world always from the perspective of the interacting individ-
ual” (Lincoln & Denzin, 1994, p. 575).
Many researchers now accept that they are not disinterested but
are deeply invested in their studies, personally and profoundly.
The general point was made within the education literature over
four decades ago by Ross Mooney in a landmark piece, “The Re-
searcher Himself” (1957). Addressing the “inner drama” of re-
search, Mooney wrote:
Research is a personal venture which, quite aside from its social
benefits, is worth doing for its direct contribution to one’s own
self-realization. It can be taken as a way of meeting life with the
maximum of stops open to get out of experience its most poignant
significance, its most full-throated song. (p. 155)
He went on to say: “We want a way of holding assumptions
about research which makes it possible to integrate the pursuit of
science and research with the acceptance and fruitful develop-
ment of one’s self” (p. 166). Who a researcher is, is central to
what the researcher does.
The second is the influence of the Reconceptualist movement
in curriculum studies (see Pinar, 1975). In the belief that one al-
ways teaches the self, Pinar (1980, 1981) engaged in a rigorous
self-exploration through a method he labeled “currere,” seeking
the roots of his self-understanding and therefore achieving an
understanding of education. Although highly controversial, the
Reconceptualist movement engaged a generation of young, now
middle-aged, academics in work that helped legitimate the study
of self as a foundational practice. One need only briefly peruse
early numbers of The Journal of Curriculum Theorizing to find
ample support for this conclusion. As these educators have ma-
tured, their influence has grown, and with growing influence has
come the power to shape the educational discourse.
Pinar drew on psychoanalysis and developments within Con-
tinental philosophy to ground his early inquiries. A third influ-
ence on the move toward self-study has been the growing in-
volvement of international researchers in teacher education who
bring with them diverse intellectual traditions, mostly tapping
The authors situate the origins of self-study in four developments
within education: the growing prominence of naturalistic inquiry
methods, the rise of the Reconceptualist movement in curriculum
studies, the increased involvement of international scholars in teacher
education research, and the re-emergence of action research and its
variations. They focus on autobiography and correspondence (e-mail,
letters, recorded conversations) not only because these are the dom-
inant forms of self-study but because of the demands they present for
producers and consumers. The work of C. Wright Mills (1959) is
used to provide a framework for determining what makes a piece of
self-study writing research. Mills argues that personal troubles can-
not be solved as merely troubles, but must be understood in terms
of public issues and history (p. 226). Insights are drawn from literary
conventions. A set of guidelines are provided for consideration by
self-study researchers in their quest for greater quality.
In the Beginning
When the Self-Study Special Interest Group (or SIG) of the
American Educational Research Association was formed in 1992,
few members anticipated that it would grow as rapidly as it did.
Currently it is one of the largest SIGs, boasting over 200 mem-
bers, each concerned in one way or another with self-study. The
origins of self-study in teacher education go deep into the trans-
formation that has taken place in teacher education research over
the past quarter century. As Lagemann and Shulman (1999) re-
cently wrote, “Today the universe of discipline-trained and often
discipline-based scholars has increased to include, among others,
anthropologists, linguists, and economists, and the educationist
camp has been increased by the addition of more and more prac-
titioners, especially principals and teachers.” Further, they note
that the “keeping of journals in written or video formats, the writ-
ing of autobiographies, and the presentation of research in other
narrative forms is now more and more commonplace” (p. xvi).
Self-study represents this trend away from modernism and its as-
sumptions about legitimate knowledge and knowledge produc-
tion toward broadening what counts as research.
Drawing on our own experience and understanding, self-study
emerged from the convergence of at least four developments
within educational research. The order in which we discuss them
is arbitrary. The first is the remarkable transformation that fol-
lowed the introduction of naturalistic and qualitative research
Educational Researcher, Vol. 30. No. 3, pp. 13–21
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EDUCATIONAL RESEARCHER
14
the humanities rather than the social sciences. Van Manen (1980)
brought from the Netherlands an interest in phenomenology
and the nature of experience. Clandinin and Connelly (2000)
heightened awareness of the narrative nature of knowing and the
place of story in teachers’ development and understanding of
practice: “Experience is what we study, and we study it narra-
tively because narrative thinking is a key form of experience and
a key way of writing and thinking about it” (p. 18).
Action research in its many variations represents a fourth in-
fluence. Originally situated firmly within the established empir-
ical traditions of social science research (Corey, 1953), in recent
years the focus has broadened and the boundaries between re-
search and thoughtful practice have blurred. Cochran-Smith and
Lytle (1993), among others (e.g., Gitlin et al., 1992), have de-
veloped models of teacher research that make it impossible to
maintain established researcher/practitioner distinctions. Each
study requires a new negotiation of participant roles and rela-
tionships. Not surprisingly, many teacher educators have found
that crossing the line between assisting teachers to study their
practice and studying one’s own comes easily, almost naturally
(Miller, 1990).
These influences coalesced in the 1980s. Pockets of interest
formed and connections between like-minded educators who
often felt as though they were outsiders began to be made at
conferences. Jack Whitehead and Pam Lomax in England, Jeff
Northfield and John Loughran in Australia, Tom Russell and
Ardra Cole in Canada, the Arizona Group composed of former
graduate students who met at Arizona, and Gary Knowles, then
a graduate student at Utah, among many others, found one an-
other. Many of those who first worked in self-study were young
scholars, mostly female, mostly experienced teachers then teacher
educators, who were committed to improving teacher education
and schooling while struggling to negotiate the pathway to
tenure and promotion. This struggle took place just when many
universities were increasing their demands for scholarship and
publication to achieve tenure. The questions that grabbed hold
of these teacher educators were quite different from those typi-
cally valued by the academy. The questions that inspired the
imagination of those who engaged in self-study work revolved
around how their practice as teacher educators could be improved.
They anticipated a conclusion that is now commonplace: that
teacher development is the essence of school reform (Bullough
& Baughman, 1997). Thus, a small but growing movement was
born and the struggle for legitimacy began.
Signs of Success, Questions of Direction
and of Definition
In his 1998 Vice Presidential address, Ken Zeichner acknowl-
edged self-study as one of five categories of “work in the new
scholarship of teacher education” (1999, p. 11). The unique fea-
ture of self-study is that “the voices of teacher educators [are
heard]” (p. 11). Former President of the British Educational Re-
search Association, Jack Whitehead, adds: “The strength of this
group is in its use of story and vivid metaphors in accounts of their
own professional lives” (1995, p. 115). The future of self-study,
as Zeichner observes, appears bright: “These studies represent a
whole new genre of work by practitioners that we will be hearing
a lot more about in the years to come” (p. 11). Signifying grow-
ing legitimacy, a few journals like Teacher Education Quarterly
published self-studies, as did Teaching Education in its early years.
The influence of the movement has touched more mainstream
journals and one expects that over time self-study research will in-
creasingly have an influence on teacher education undergraduate
and graduate programs and program development efforts.
Yet even as the signs of success mount, debate internal to the
movement rages. Each time the SIG meets, one topic invariably
enters discussion: “What is self-study?” “How can we tell whether
a study is a good one?” One hears beginning professors lament a
rejection of a submitted self-study journal article. Often, an ac-
cusatory finger is pointed toward journal editors who are pre-
sumed to exist in a time warp of rigid standards and social sci-
ence prejudices. The lament strikes an odd chord: Certainly
something other than editor prejudice may explain rejection,
particularly since self-study articles have been published in many
of the major education journals.
Determining just what it means to be involved in self-study
research has proven very difficult. Claims to “voice” are inade-
quate, perhaps even misleading. To be sure, “self-study” has a
common sense appeal: Shouldn’t teacher educators study their
own practice, since one’s practice is, as Charles Taylor (1981)
suggests, who we are? For those who initially organized the SIG,
part of the appeal of membership was the core belief and ethical
commitment that if researchers in colleges of education are to
study the development of teachers they should publicly declare
their own role in that development. To point out the rigidity of
preservice teachers’ beliefs, for instance, without accounting for
the lack of real ongoing long-term commitment to the develop-
ment of beliefs about teaching on the part of teacher education
generally and in one’s own program specifically is to “blame” the
student and to absolve oneself of responsibility. Self-study points
to a simple truth, that to study a practice is simultaneously to
study self: a study of self-in-relation to other.
For both good and ill, self-study’s appeal is grounded in the
postmodern university’s preoccupation with identity formation
and a Foucault-inspired (see Colin, 1977) recognition of the link-
age 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?
When Does Self-Study Become Research?
We begin with a quote from C. Wright Mills:
Know that many personal troubles cannot be solved merely as
troubles, but must be understood in terms of public issues and in
terms of the problems of history-making. Know that the human
meaning of public issues must be revealed by relating them to per-
sonal troubles and to the problems of the individual life. Know
that the problems of social science, when adequately formulated,
must include both troubles and issues, both biography and history,
and the range of their intricate relations. (1959, p. 226)
Mills argues that “Every man [is] his own methodologist!” (p. 123)
and, further, that methods must not prescribe problems; rather,
problems must prescribe methods (p. 72).
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Mills’s conception of research provides helpful guidance as we
consider what is self-study research and what it ought to accom-
plish. Mills suggests that there is an important relationship be-
tween personal growth and understanding and public discourse
about that understanding. He articulates clearly something we
mention in conversation but often ignore in our practice (both
teaching and research) in education: that for public theory to in-
fluence educational practice it must be translated through the per-
sonal. Only when a theory can be seen to have efficacy in a prac-
tical arena will that theory have life. However, as Mills warns,
articulation of the personal trouble or issue never really becomes
research until it is connected through evidence and analysis to the
issues and troubles of a time and place. It is our view that biogra-
phy and history must be joined not only in social science but also
in self-study research. When biography and history are joined,
when the issue confronted by the self is shown to have relation-
ship to and bearing on the context and ethos of a time, then self-
study moves to research. It is the balance between the way in
which private experience can provide insight and solution for
public issues and troubles and the way in which public theory can
provide insight and solution for private trial that forms the nexus
of self-study and simultaneously presents the central challenge to
those who would work in this emerging area.
Quality self-study research requires that the researcher nego-
tiate a particularly sensitive balance between biography and his-
tory. While self-study researchers acknowledge the role of the self
in the research project, echoing Mooney (1957), such study does
not focus on the self per se but on the space between self and the
practice engaged in. There is always a tension between those two
elements, self and the arena of practice, between self in relation
to practice and the others who share the practice setting. Each
self-study researcher must negotiate that balance, but it must be
a balance—tipping too far toward the self side produces solip-
sism or a confessional, and tipping too far the other way turns
self-study into traditional research. The balance can be struck at
many times during the self-study process, but when a study is re-
ported, the balance must be in evidence not only in what data
have been gathered (from self and other) and presented, but in
how they have been analyzed, in how they have been brought to-
gether in conversation. Otherwise, there is no possibility of an-
swering the “so what” question, the question of significance, that
wise readers ask and require be answered. This was the charge
against Pinar’s (1980, 1981) early work. For the researcher, the
issue is what end of the scale a study will occupy, what sort of
study—from confessional to traditional research—will be most
fruitful for moving scholarship on and practice in teacher edu-
cation forward and not merely assisting one’s own practice. It is
the question that is asked that determines what sort of study is
conducted.
Self-study researchers stand at the intersection of biography
and history. The questions self-study researchers ask arise from
concern about and interest in the interaction of the self-as-
teacher educator, in context, over time, with others whose inter-
ests represent a shared commitment to the development and nur-
turance of the young and the impact of that interaction on self
and other (Hamilton, 1998). Ultimately, the aim of self-study
research is moral, to gain understanding necessary to make that
interaction increasingly educative.
Problems of Publication and Questions of Quality
One possible explanation for the problem of publication in self-
study discussed above is that the work may lack significance and
quality. Put differently, perhaps the questions asked lack signif-
icance and fail to engage reviewer imagination and the questions
answered are not found compelling, are purely personal, or are
not answered in compelling ways. There is another and more far-
reaching possibility: that an adequate grounding and authority
for this work have yet to be formed. The loss of methodological
innocence in educational research and the increasingly polyglot
nature of the research community noted earlier certainly opened
a space for self-study inquiry. However, criteria for making a case
for quality have yet to be identified. More established forms of
research find grounding in methodological traditions and pre-
ferred forms of scholarly reporting. If a researcher can show that
she has followed conventions with care, including recognized
methods of inquiry, then she can assert the authority of her claims.
Self-study is a mongrel: The study is always of practice, but at the
intersection of self and other, and its methods are borrowed.
Thus in order to assert authority the study must do so from the
frame or frames of the borrowed methodology as well as from the
virtuosity of scholarship established in the piece of writing itself
(Pinnegar, 1998).
Scholarly integrity requires that where methods are borrowed,
established research practices be respected. Although the label
“self-study” makes evident the centrality of the researcher self in
the article and in the methodology, the standards of scholarship
of the embraced tradition still must be met. A claim to be study-
ing oneself does not bring with it an excuse from rigor. Never-
theless, hybridization of methods and the subjectivity introduced
by the acknowledgment of the researcher “self” may sometimes
cause difficulty in evaluating quality.
Standing between biography and history and relying on bor-
rowed methods, self-study researchers face unique methodolog-
ical challenges. Methods blend, and with blending comes dif-
ficulty in establishing authority grounded in methodological
traditions. Moreover, what counts as data expands greatly, and
researchers face the difficulty of representing, presenting, legiti-
mating, analyzing, and reporting one’s own experience as data—
and of doing so in honest, not self-serving, ways. Seeking to es-
tablish authority on the basis of borrowed and mixed methods
demands much of the researcher. Thus, self-study researchers
inevitably face the added burden of establishing the virtuosity
of their scholarship within and through the writing itself; lack-
ing established authority each researcher must prove herself as a
methodologist and writer. The challenge of virtuosity is not only
a matter of skillfully employing established research methods. It
also involves the form in which the study is organized and the
skill with which an argument is made and a story told.
Biography and Self-Study Research
Because of the prominence in self-study work of narratives, we
focus on the intersection of narrative methods, those most con-
nected to literature, that seem to hold particular promise for
richly representing the self. But, an even greater reduction in our
area of concern is necessary. Narrative research traditions are di-
verse and encompass methods developed in folklore, psychology,
literature, history, anthropology, and education. Differences
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16
arise in data collection, analysis, and presentation among these
approaches. Given such diversity it is not surprising that there is
no clear definition of what counts as narrative, nor are the lines
between narrative methods and the results of social science and
historical inquiry clearly drawn. In an article, “On Narrative,”
Fenstermacher (1997) reviewed a collection of papers on narra-
tive and narrative inquiry. Even after reading the collection, he
found himself wondering, what is a narrative and how would he
judge whether one was good or not? Thus, in this article our es-
pecial concern is with biographical research and writing, of
which autobiography is a form (Kridel, 1998). Biography, Edel
(1984) citing Nicolson argues, is “the history of lives as a branch
of literature” (p. 38).
Despite the growing importance of narratives in education
generally, literary traditions have seldom found a place in the
work of those who engage in self-study and seek to publish the
results of their inquiries. While promising, these traditions are
more elusive than their social science counterparts. What, after
all, makes a story worth reading or a portrayal powerful? We are
reminded of a quip by W. Somerset Maugham that underscores
the difficulty of establishing quality standards for narrative self-
study and the importance of virtuosity: “There are three rules to
writing the novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are”
(quoted in Brodie, 1997, p. 15). The same question ought to be
asked of self-studies: What makes a self-study worth reading?
Even as we pose this question we know our answer will not be
fully satisfactory.
Guidelines: Autobiographical Self-Study Forms
We write in full recognition of the difficulty of our task, hoping
that we can illuminate the challenge of doing quality self-study
research particularly of those forms that rely on narrative and,
even more specifically, on biographical data. In our attempt to
shed light on potential pathways to quality, we will draw pri-
marily on recognized literary traditions that are used to discuss
what makes for an effective narrative. We focus on autobiography
and correspondence, e-mail, and recorded conversation. These
forms of narrative clearly dominate the work of those who claim
to be doing self-study research; they capture the concern with
“self” that distinguishes this body of research. Correspondence
in self-study represents a kind of intellectual autobiography of
the moment where the foreground frequently is a person grap-
pling with a set of ideas that participants care deeply about. Ad-
ditionally, correspondence nicely illustrates how much of the
data for self-study prove slippery and are fraught with danger.
Much of what we say in the autobiography section will apply to
studies using correspondence because in self-study the researcher
is one of the voices in the conversation. We will identify what we
think are useful guidelines for establishing quality, guidelines that
we believe point toward virtuosity in scholarship. Each guideline
is italicized and followed by a brief discussion of its value and im-
portance. At the outset it is important to note that the guidelines
are closely interrelated.
Autobiography
Guideline 1: Autobiographical self-studies should ring true and en-
able connection. Part of what makes education-related biograph-
ical writing attractive to readers is the promise of recognition and
connection. A space is formed for readers’ experience that throws
light on one’s self and one’s connections to others. Annie Dillard
(1989) articulates the goal for readers that biography and self-
study writers both seek:
Why are we reading if not in hope that the writer will magnify and
dramatize our days, will illuminate and inspire us with wisdom and
courage, and the possibility of meaningfulness will press upon our
minds the deepest mysteries, so we may feel again their majesty and
power. What do we ever know that is higher than that power
which, from time to time, seizes our lives, and reveals us startlingly
to ourselves as creatures set down here bewildered? We still and al-
ways want waking. (pp. 72–73)
Guideline 2: Self-studies should promote insight and interpreta-
tion. Exploring autobiography from an interest in education and
as a genre, Graham (1989) illuminates the challenge of autobio-
graphical writing:
Augustine to Rousseau, Vico to Goethe, all experienced some point
of crisis at which time their lives underwent a wrenching. At this
nodal moment, the course of life is seen to have connecting lines
that were previously hidden, a new direction becomes clear where
only wandering existed before. . . . [T]he writer’s retrospective view
discerns a pattern in experience, otherwise the autobiographic func-
tion becomes mere self-orientation. . . . Where self-discovery or self-
orientation predominates, the genuine autobiographical act of see-
ing the essential wholeness of life is missing. . . . Past life is therefore
being rearranged . . . retrospectively interpreted, in terms of the
meaning that life is now seen to hold. (pp. 98–99)
Thus, as self-narrative, autobiography has a great deal in com-
mon with fiction. But as Graham argues, for autobiography to
be powerful it must contain and articulate “nodal moment(s).”
For self-study researchers these moments are those central to
teaching and learning to teach. Autobiography, like fiction, re-
veals to the reader a “pattern in experience” and allows a reinter-
pretation of the lives and experience of both the writer and the
reader. To be powerful this pattern must be portrayed in a way
that engages readers in a genuine act of seeing the essential whole-
ness of life, the connection of nodal moments. In seeing, the
reader is enabled to see self and other more fully.
Polkinghorne (1988) articulates three levels of narrative: ex-
perience, telling, and interpreting. But he asserts that the purpose
of the telling and interpreting is to enable the reader to experi-
ence the narrative as if they lived it with the insight of the inter-
pretation. As Graham observes, “the untruth of fiction may be
more powerful and more significant than truth” (1989, p. 101).
Thus, the truth of a well-rendered autobiography is deeper than
the life itself. This deeper truth is found when Mills’s challenge
to link biography and history is successfully met: the connection
of the particular finding or moment to the larger frame of shared
experience. As a result the reader experiences or re-experiences
and better understands the influence of institutional restraint on
teachers, for instance, or perhaps the effects of narrow norms of
publishing on teacher educator priorities.
Guideline 3: Autobiographical self-study research must engage his-
tory forthrightly and the author must take an honest stand. Lopate’s
(1995) discussion of the art of the personal essay sheds further
light on the aesthetic standard for powerful self-study research
and adds an additional guideline. A successful personal essay must
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APRIL 2001 17
have a “pleasurable literary style,” be an example of “formal
shapeliness,” provide “intellectual sustenance,” and be “honest”
(p. xxv). For Lopate a quality personal essay should have a con-
science that
arises from the author’s examination of his or her prejudices. Essay-
ists must be able to pass judgment, or else their work will be tooth-
less. . . . The idea is to implicate first oneself and then the reader in
a fault that seems initially to belong safely elsewhere. (p. xxxi)
Guideline 4: Biographical and autobiographical self-studies in
teacher education are about the problems and issues that make some-
one an educator. Considering plot reveals an additional guideline,
one that is more than formal or academic. When reading an auto-
biography, readers seek an answer to the question, “What kind
of story is this?” In self-study, the story takes multiple forms, usu-
ally a story of becoming a teacher educator. Tom Russell (1997)
writes such a story. The narrative form, “a setting-complication-
resolution structure” (Nespor & Barylske, 1991, p. 810), is con-
structed around Russell’s struggle to learn to teach, to under-
stand just what teaching is, and his confrontation with the
complexity of his task. It is a journey of personal development
and of occasional disappointment wherein Russell reveals his
prejudices and engages history. We found the story interesting
first because we know and respect Tom Russell and second be-
cause his journey has paralleled ours at critical points—nodal
moments—from encountering action research to confronting
robust and seeming impervious beginning teacher assumptions
about teaching and learning, what he dubs “barriers to learning
to teach” (p. 41): teaching is telling; learning to teach is passive;
discussion and opinion are irrelevant.
Guideline 5: Authentic voice is a necessary but not sufficient con-
dition for the scholarly standing of a biographical self-study. While
arguing for a “person-centered history” of education some years
ago, one of us wrote, drawing on an insight gained from Erik
Erikson’s Young Man Luther, “that individuals are victims, vehi-
cles and, in a sense, ultimately resolutions to the cultural dilem-
mas they experience, dilemmas which run through and around
them” (Bullough, 1979/1989). Part of the appeal and value of
autobiography comes when a life is recognized as a form of res-
olution, for either good or evil, of life’s dilemmas. The dilemmas
are human dilemmas, but the narrative is a teacher’s or a teacher
educator’s story. The self-study researcher, as Edel tells us of
biographers, “must analyze his materials to discover certain keys
to the deeper truth of his subject—keys as I have said to the pri-
vate mythology of the Individual. These belong to the truths of
human behavior” (1984, p. 29).
As we engage the text we reason narratively (Bullough &
Baughman, 1997). We recognize Russell’s story and his dilem-
mas as in some ways our own, the plot resonates and we read on.
Quickly we recognize what sort of story he tells, and know that
in some ways our life story and his interconnect and illuminate
one another, story against story. Without the admission of prej-
udice, without the “nodal moments” Graham discusses, the story
would not be worth reading by teacher educators let alone be
worthy of publication.
Now that increasingly larger numbers of stories of learning to
teach are being written—stories that are thematically alike, over-
lapping in content and form—the question arises: Why should
one story or another be written and shared? William Faulkner
once commented that he never knew what he thought about
something until he read what he’d written on it. To be sure there
is value in autobiography to the writer; autobiography is a means
for personal development, whether teacher educator or teacher
education student (Bullough & Gitlin, 2001). Those engaged in
self-study recognize this value: “We engage in self-study work be-
cause we believe in its inherent value as a form of professional de-
velopment” (Cole & Knowles, 1995, p. 147). But this does not
mean that a particular piece of autobiographic writing ought to
be published.
Guideline 6: The autobiographical self-study researcher has an
ineluctable obligation to seek to improve the learning situation not
only for the self but for the other. As we read teacher educator auto-
biographies, our own included, we find ourselves asking: “If we
didn’t know this person, would we care, would we read on?” It
is, as Graham suggests, when self-discovery or self-orientation
predominates, when, as we have suggested, balance is lost and the
writer slips into confession or worse, egoism, that the answer is
most likely to be “no.” At such times, aesthetic value might keep
us reading, but still we expect more: We expect to find evidence
of honestly engaging issues we recognize as central to teaching
and teacher education.
Guideline 7: Powerful autobiographical self-studies portray char-
acter development and include dramatic action: Something genuine is
at stake in the story. As we have said, we might choose to continue
to read an autobiography simply because it is a delight. We need
to say an additional word about the aesthetic standard applied to
self-study. Standards of good fiction are apt here. From our read-
ing, it appears that 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 emotional significance” (Burroway, 1987,
p. 13). The linearity and simplicity of the story form undoubtedly
appeals to the training of teacher educators, particularly for those
grounded in the sciences, psychology, teaching methods, and his-
tory. Mostly, it’s chronology: “I finished. . . . Then I . . .” The pref-
erence among teacher educators for story over plot does not nec-
Determining just what
it means to be involved
in self-study research
has proven very difficult.
Claims to “voice”
are inadequate, perhaps
even misleading.
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essarily bring with it emotional flatness, however. Generally speak-
ing, fiction “tries to reproduce the emotional impact of experience”
to move the reader (Burroway, p. 78) and so should life writing
and the published autobiographical self-study. Given how emo-
tionally and intellectually challenging learning to teach is, whether
emplotted or storied, high adventure ought not be out of reach.
Like several of the tales of the first year of teaching told in The
Roller Coaster Year (Ryan, 1992), teacher educator self-studies
might be read less for their story line than for their emotional im-
pact (“I see that I am not alone”) and for pleasure.
The difference between the story form and the plot lines of
fiction may be under-appreciated in narrative self-study re-
search. It is our belief that the neglected plot line literary form
may enable special insight into learning to teach and teaching.
In particular, the desire to portray critical incidents in life by
writing about teacher education practice may be best expressed
in this form, where linearity gives way to a different sense of
time, where emotion drives action. This form is especially sen-
sitive to the unpredictability and volatility of teaching and learn-
ing to teach.
In either form, a good narrative grips the reader, who loses in
language her sense of time, place, and sometimes even of sepa-
ration: form and content blend. However, we suspect that to
read self-studies in this way, as aesthetic and as emotionally
charged objects, is unfortunately rare. The reader’s first intent
when approaching a self-study is to learn something from it; if
aesthetic pleasure follows, all the better. Seldom is it expected,
only hoped for.
Character development is part of effective narratives. McConnell
gives a piece of advice when writing fiction: “Dramatic action
should appear lifelike and natural to the character. Focus on cer-
tain critical moments that reveal characters’ moods and anxi-
eties” (1986, p. 216). Action takes place in a series of scenes,
where the character confronts a problem or a situation within a
setting:
[A] character is well described, is a really living character, when
readers are made to feel that they know him well and still want to
know more about him. This may sound like a paradox, but the
moment readers feel that they know him sufficiently, that they
know him well enough, that they don’t need or want to know any-
thing more about him, then that character becomes uninteresting
and dead in life and in fiction. (Vivante, 1980, p. 25)
Guideline 8: Quality autobiographical self-studies attend care-
fully to persons in context or setting. The character in a narrative
invites reader connection or distance, as does the scene, situation,
and action. If the reader is to connect with the story, it is through
these four elements. In many self-studies, scene and situation are
taken for granted when they ought not to be—departments,
schools, universities, colleges, and cultures vary, as do characters
and their actions. Like actors, scene and situation carry history.
Within the scholarly discourse, understandings of scene and sit-
uation may be the most important contribution of a particular
story. Thus, if we use a literary framework to judge autobiogra-
phy, we should expect the author to appropriately explore the di-
mensions of literature that are most likely to provide insight into
the wholeness of the autobiography of teacher education being
told as well as insight into the context within which the teacher
educator lives and works. Without attention to context, the
reader will struggle to make connections and conclusions will in-
evitably lack grounding.
Guideline 9: Quality autobiographical self-studies offer fresh per-
spectives on established truths. In self-study autobiography there is
always a tension between the self and the self in action in relation
to the other. The account itself will not contain all of the auto-
biography; it is censored with a purpose that must not be self-
serving. Not surprisingly, many first-year teacher stories and
autobiographies of teacher educators are hero-stories told from
the framework of the “romantic hero.” Frye’s (1957) discussion
of the four heroic modes attends to the tension between the obli-
gations between the self and the other in the development of a so-
ciety. The narrative of the romantic hero is the story of a person
who is more capable than their society and who resolves the con-
flicts of that society by being victorious on a quest. Escalante’s
story in Stand and Deliver is an example. While such romantic
quest stories can be intensely interesting, their sameness may
make them emotionally flat and intellectually uninteresting.
In contrast, consider the work of Loughran and Northfield
(1996). Northfield provides an account and analysis of his expe-
rience as a university teacher educator returning to teach in a
junior high math/science class. He purposely set forth to reveal
the “typical and troubling” in teaching. Furthermore, after his
analysis, he turned the work over to his colleague and collabora-
tor for further critique. Upon publication, pained by the ways in
which the book revealed his idiosyncrasies and inadequacies,
Northfield said, “I really am a pretty good teacher even if you
can’t tell it in the book” (personal communication, 1995).
The point here is to suggest that the themes, characters, and
plot lines (and story forms) of the tragic, ironic, and comedic
hero are promising and powerful means for telling educators’
tales; they frame and direct character development in fresh ways.
A major theme of the tragic hero is the isolation of the hero from
society and the ways in which the dynamics of something greater
and more powerful than the hero lead to her isolation and demise
(for example institutional and societal demands). Tragic heroes
usually end up leaving teaching. For teacher educators the tale is
one of flaws becoming history and tradition.
The ironic hero story is a valuable mode for teacher educa-
tors, because it is a narrative form which allows a focus on the
failed, the difficult, and the problematic and which does not re-
quire the tragic end or the heroic romantic return (Campbell,
1968). Placier provides such a self-study, titling segments of her
piece “Fiasco #1” and “Fiasco #2” (Placier, 1995). Ironic heroes,
like Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, represent the common person
who may in fact be overwhelmed by society. In such stories we
learn much about the difficulties of a society, but the hero may
at the end remain trapped in society’s troubles and woes.
The mode of the comedic hero is a tale of transformation well-
suited for the plot line of successful stories of teacher education
reform and also student teaching, since in these stories the hero
uses the forces of society to transform, reunite, and integrate so-
ciety. Frye (1957, 1982) organizes these modes into phases which
show promise for eliciting and promoting a more realistic, com-
plex, and complete narrative of teacher education than the com-
monplace and simplistic romantic hero pattern embraced by
many beginning teachers and teacher educators. This is sug-
gested by Lopate (1995) when he writes,
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Just as the personal essayist is able to make the small loom large, so
he or she simultaneously contracts and expands the self. This is done
by finding the borders, limits, defects, and disabilities of the partic-
ular human package one owns, then pointing them out, which im-
plies at least a partial surmounting through detachment. . . . [T]he
fulsome confession of the limit carries the secret promise of an al-
most infinite opening out. The harvesting of self-contradiction is an
intrinsic part of the personal essay form. (p. xxviii)
He speaks further of the personal essayist as one who dives into the
“volcano of the self and extracts a single hot coal to consider and
shape” (p. xxix). In such writing the enemy is self-righteousness be-
cause it slows down and distorts the dialectic of self-questioning.
Like cowboy movies, often there is a sameness born of our
shared time and place to the stories of learning to teach, which
can dull interest. We are reminded that Star Wars came along
and revitalized the traditional cowboy story line and an old story
became new. Similarly, stories of learning to teach, representing
different but similar scenes, situations, themes, and points of
view, become fresh when told through new eyes. We still recog-
nize the story, but we engage it differently.
In summary, although the final story of being or becoming a
teacher educator never will be told, we believe that more power-
ful narrative self-studies will follow careful attention to the guide-
lines we have identified: A self-study is a good read, attends to
the “nodal moments” of teaching and being a teacher educator
and thereby enables reader insight or understanding into self, re-
veals a lively conscience and balanced sense of self-importance,
tells a recognizable teacher or teacher educator story, portrays
character development in the face of serious issues within a com-
plex setting, gives place to the dynamic struggle of living life
whole, and offers new perspective.
Correspondence, E-mail, and Recorded
Conversations
For the most part, correspondence, e-mail conversations, and
recorded conversations present the same set of difficulties to re-
searchers we have noted above since in self-studies they are each a
form of autobiography. We will attend to two issues in this sec-
tion, both related rather closely to the standards for self-study auto-
biographical writing already presented. The first is that the self-
study researcher has to edit the text and yet not present an
interpretation that contradicts or that would be contradicted and
repudiated by a complete reading of the data. This is an issue of
conscience as well as of reliability and honesty. As Edel (1984)
states, “The personages exist; the documents exist; they are givens
to the writers of lives. They may not be altered. To alter is to dis-
figure” (p.15). The second issue is that what is produced should be
at least an interesting if not a provocative read, thus the value of al-
ternative perspectives. In part this relates to the guidelines noted
above, but here, we are discussing a different form of presentation.
Guideline 10: Self-studies that rely on correspondence should pro-
vide the reader with an inside look at participants’ thinking and feel-
ing. Several published self-studies have taken the form of corre-
spondence (e.g., Arizona Group, 1994, 1997; Cole & Knowles,
1994). On the surface, like published and edited correspondence
such as that of John Dewey and Arthur Bentley (Ratner & Altman,
1964), readers are invited into an intimate, intense exploration
of ideas and issues. The promise to the reader is that access will
be given to the inside of an idea and its human grounding, how
ideas unfold in interaction and how relationships and under-
standing change in unanticipated ways as a result. Moreover,
when truth is told, pathways to program improvement that have
proven false are revealed long before the sort of data social sci-
ence researchers would recognize as legitimate are in. These are
powerful promises, and point to a few of the reasons why the
Dewey/Bentley correspondence among many others is interest-
ing and worth reading. A correspondence that takes place over
years brings additional advantages of depth and richness. The
promise to readers is that something special will be revealed.
When considering self-studies of this sort, we find ourselves
asking what advantage this format brings over the more tradi-
tional article form, which insists on logical organization, clear
focus, and direct attention to the “so what” question. First we
would assert that these articles should also possess and commu-
nicate to the reader organization, focus, and attention to the
question of significance, as we have already stated. When they do
not, editors take responsibility for providing readers the needed
context, which includes careful attention to both characters and
setting. Attention to these issues is complicated by a danger in-
herent in publishing correspondence. Dewey and Bentley may
have anticipated that their letters would some day be published,
but they certainly did not write as though they anticipated other
readers. Neither man wrote looking over his shoulder. Points
were made to and for one another, and the aim of pushing to-
ward a greater clarity and shared understanding is ever present.
Focus is maintained by the intensity of each man’s interest as well
as the philosophical issues they shared, and the logic of their in-
teractions is embedded in the problems they sought to solve,
evade, or get over, as Dewey (1910) argued.
Unfortunately, we have learned from reading self-studies that
take this conversational form that writing when looking over
one’s shoulder produces odd and dishonest prose. Readers sense
the functioning of impression management, self-censorship in
the hope of portraying the romantic hero, perhaps, and some-
times posturing driven not by friendship but by anticipation of
an unknown and perhaps unfriendly critic. The freshness of hon-
est and lively interaction of people who care deeply for one an-
other and about places and ideas tends to be replaced by stilted
prose, in some respects almost indistinguishable from more tra-
ditional academic writing. By carefully attending to an unknown
critic, the door is opened to criticism of another kind: that the
correspondence fails to meet a standard we have not yet discussed,
that of intimacy and openness. The form becomes more like an
exchange of memos than of letters, and there is a tendency to-
ward superficiality in argumentation—a scattering of thoughts
that do not coalesce.
Guideline 11: To be scholarship, edited conversation or corre-
spondence must not only have coherence and structure, but that co-
herence and structure should provide argumentation and convincing
evidence. Our criticism of correspondence does not necessarily
mean that this form of data presentation is flawed for self-study.
It is not. However, this form is seductively simple and ought not
be embraced unless its promise can be met in intimacy and in-
terest and in demonstrating in compelling fashion how teacher
educators struggle with ideas and practices as they seek to better
understand teaching and teacher education. A further danger is
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EDUCATIONAL RESEARCHER
20
that the tilt toward self and a celebration of relationship will re-
place engagement with history. At such moments, the balance
Mills sought for research is lost: Biography and history do not
connect.
In defining what is story, Leitch (1986) describes how we live
our lives in middles—somewhat like an unarranged soap opera.
As researchers in self-study we designate and arrange data into
the slots of middle, beginning, and end. It is relatively easy to
present conversation or correspondence in linear fashion. How-
ever, drama may offer a better model for organizing recorded
conversation or correspondence for readers. In either case, the
reader of the study, like a member of an audience, needs to be
able to deduce the storytelling elements from the conversation
and context provided.
Guideline 12: Self-studies that rely on correspondence bring with
them the necessity to select, frame, arrange, and footnote the corre-
spondence in ways that demonstrate wholeness. It is important to
remember that unlike the Arizona Group project (1994, 1997,
1998), the Dewey and Bentley correspondence became someone
else’s scholarship, the editors’. The editors demonstrated schol-
arly virtuosity through the selection and arrangement of the let-
ters. It was the editors’ actions that transformed what was data
into research. When editing transcripts of conversation and cor-
respondence what is absent or omitted can be as important as
what is present. In order for a self-study of this kind to count as
scholarship, the evidence for what the conversation reveals must
be provided in the conversation and the description of the par-
ticipants (characters) and setting.
Guideline 13: Interpretations made of self-study data should not
only reveal but also interrogate the relationships, contradictions, and
limits of the views presented. Articles that emerge from collections
of letters and are presented as a collection of correspondence pre-
sent significant problems for readers. One of the most serious is
liveliness and interest—how readable is the collection and does
it engage the reader’s interest and attention? If the letters are not
written by famous people and read because of who they are or
what they accomplished or perhaps witnessed, does the collec-
tion make a significant contribution to understanding of the field
of teacher education and the problems of teacher educators? Back
to our standards for self-study autobiographies: Are readers en-
abled to gain new understanding of fundamental issues in teacher
education or being a teacher educator? Do the letters, typically
written by “ordinary” professors of teacher education, reveal some-
thing important about the profession or practice of teacher edu-
cation? Is there evidence that while drawn from a larger collec-
tion, the letters have been appropriately—honestly and with good
conscience—edited and arranged? Can the reader be certain that
the major themes of the correspondence are represented com-
pletely and complexly and that elements of the letters which
would have provided an alternate or contrasting view have not
been eliminated? Do the letters reveal accurately the individual
voices of the correspondents? Does the juxtaposition of the let-
ters and any exposition from the arrangers present a sufficiently
deep analysis of the correspondence? Are the letters sufficient as
“evidence” for the pattern and truths the collection of letters as
a whole is supposed to illuminate? For those who serve as editors
of a set of letters, recorded conversations, or a collection of e-mail
correspondence, the interpretative task is formidable as they seek
to join biography and history.
Guideline 14: Effective correspondence self-studies contain com-
plication or tension. Finally, the voices in the correspondence
should represent disagreement as well as agreement; the reader
should expect that something important is represented, else the
correspondence would not have been published. Powerful and
engaging exchanges provide the reader an emotional and intel-
lectual home in the writing of one of the correspondents or in
the space between where the ideas are interrogated and the bal-
ance created between biography and history. When something
of genuine importance is at issue, it is likely there is intellectual
sustenance to be had. The converse is also probably true.
Conclusion
Self-study as an area of research in teacher education is in its in-
fancy. Its endurability as a movement is grounded in the trust-
worthiness and meaningfulness of the findings both for inform-
ing practice to improve teacher education and also for moving
the research conversation in teacher education forward. Like
other forms of research, self-study invites the reader into the re-
search process by asking that interpretations be checked, that
themes be critically scrutinized, and that the “so what” question
be vigorously pressed. In self-studies, conclusions are hard won,
elusive, are generally more tentative than not. The aim of self-
study research is to provoke, challenge, and illuminate rather
than confirm and settle.
Self-study framed as autobiography or conversation places
unique and perhaps unusual demands on readers; and it de-
mands even more of those who seek to produce it. While the
guidelines we have discussed are suggestive, clearly they are not
definitive. We take them seriously both as readers and producers
of self-studies and believe they offer direction for improving the
quality of self-study work that relies heavily on biographical data.
Like all research, the burden of proof is on those who would con-
duct and hope to publish autobiographical self-studies. As we
have said, articles need to be readable and engaging, themes
should be evident and identifiable across the conversation repre-
sented or the narrative presented, the connection between auto-
biography and history must be apparent, the issues attended to
need to be central to teaching and teacher education, and suffi-
cient evidence must be garnered that readers will have no diffi-
culty recognizing the authority of the scholarly voice, not just its
authenticity.
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AUTHORS
ROBERT V. BULLOUGH, JR. is Professor of Teacher Education at
Brigham Young University and Emeritus Professor of Educational Stud-
ies at the University of Utah. Correspondence may be sent to him at the
Center for the Improvement of Teacher Education and Schooling
(CITES), 149 McKay Building, Brigham Young University, Provo, UT
84602-5060. His areas of specialization are teacher education and de-
velopment and curriculum studies.
STEFINEE PINNEGAR is Associate Professor of Teacher Education at
Brigham Young University, Department of Teaching, 215 McKay
Building, Provo, UT 84602. She specializes in teacher education,
teacher thinking, and self-study.
Manuscript received August 9, 2000
Revisions received January 23, 2001; February 5, 2001
Accepted February 6, 2001
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