Learning through teaching : a narrative self-study of a novice teacher educator.

Abstract

This thesis reports on a small-scale, qualitative study of learning through teaching in three postgraduate modules in Education at a South African university. In the thesis, I take a narrative self-study stance toward research and pedagogy to explore my lived experience as a novice teacher educator. I illustrate my research journey by tracing the development of my key research question and re-examining my research and curriculum design processes. I use the medium of a ‘narrative self-study research collage’ to represent and engage with a range of data derived from my experience of teaching in the three modules. The thesis makes two unique contributions to the education field. The methodological contribution is the use of a textual collage, which draws on visual and language arts-based approaches to educational research, as a medium for data representation. The creation of the collage and its presentation in this thesis contributes to the ongoing development and exploration of alternative forms of data representation in educational research. The conceptual contribution of the thesis is the conceptualisation of my teaching-learning-researching experience as educative engagement. This conception of educative engagement offers a new way of looking at pedagogy and research in academic teacher education. In addition to these two unique contributions to the field of Education, the thesis adds further understanding and impetus to the growing body of work that seeks to explore and value the teacher self and teachers’ self-study in the context of lived, relational educational experience.