Risks and Opportunities within Self-Study: A Presentation for the S-STEP SIG, American Educational Research Association, 2006

This paper documents a self-study research group from its inception, storying its development and impacts on the curricular lives of 11 participating educators individually and collectively. Drawing on the scholarship of the self-study tradition within educational research (Loughran et al. 2004), we see teacher knowledge as largely untapped and an important source for the improvement of teaching. Positioning participants to look at the sense and selves being made on a continual basis places reflexivity is at the heart of self-study. Our paper reveals multiple ways educators might engage reflexively, considering and reconsidering beliefs about the nature of learners, learning, teachers, and teaching, manifesting philosophies of education to be lived out/theorized within practice. A text emerges that deliberately foregrounds the work of reflexivity, examining the potential of intersections among theory, self-study, and concrete teaching/learning examples, elucidating educator professional development in action