Stories told of and by teacher-researchers hold the potential to inform members of both academic and school communities with concerns about teaching and learning. The author's self-study and an embedded case study constitute this thesis. The latter is an instrumental, single-case (Stake, 1998), seeking to offer insight into teacher learning. It is framed by theories of cognition (Sternberg, 1998), adult learning (Mezirow, 1991), narrative (Gudmundsdottir, 1995), teacher-research (Connelly & Clandinin, 1999), and self-study (Hamilton, 1998). This thesis presents my experience as a teacher-researcher engaging in self-study, asking: "What do I care about in education?" (Whitehead, 1993). / In conducting my inquiry, I have become interested in knowing the following: (1) What have I learned? (2) How do I represent my learning? (3) How shall I take my learning forward? / Learning is understood to mean "the process of using a prior interpretation to construe a new or revised interpretation of the meaning of one's experience in order to guide future action" (Mezirow, 1998, p. 6), and is seen in terms of improvement to professional practice. In examining the self-study report of my colleague, Nancy, the question "How is learning evidenced in the narrative report of the teacher-researcher engaging in self-study?" is addressed. A claim is made that, as teachers engage with questions about what they care about in education, they are learning. Data for my self-study include narrative accounts, artifacts, and images. Data for the embedded case include a co-constructed narrative account, photographs, a tape-recorded conversation, and interview and concept map collected between January 2000 and July 2003. Narrative data in the embedded case study were subjected to inductive and deductive analyses. Confirmatory evidence was sought in the conversation and interview, which were analyzed similarly, and the concept map, which was interrogated deductively. It may be seen that the stories of teacher-researchers inquiring into practice offer evidence of transformative learning (Mezirow, 1991), which may initiate and constitute living educational theory (Whitehead, 1993), and provide insights to those with interests in teacher education.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.85190 |
| Date | January 2005 |
| Creators | McBride, Judith B. |
| Publisher | McGill University |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Coverage | Doctor of Philosophy (Department of Educational and Counselling Psychology.) |
| Rights | All items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated. |
| Relation | alephsysno: 002223645, proquestno: AAINR12907, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
Page generated in 0.0108 seconds