A self-study contribution to a history of the self-study of teacher education practices

My self-studies of my teacher education practice began in 1973, with my appointment as a Lecturer in Education at the University of Bath, UK. Between 1973-1993 I explored my question, ‘How do I improve what I am doing in my professional practice?’ In 1993 I published a book on ‘The Growth of Educational Knowledge: Creating your living educational theories’ (Whitehead, 1993). In this I offer an analysis of my contributions to educational knowledge between 1973-1993, which I brought into S-STEP. These contributions included the original idea that individuals could create their own living-educational-theories (Whitehead, 1985, 1989) ‘as explanations of their educational influences in their own learning, in the learning of others and in the learning of the social formations in which the enquiry was located.’ The idea that S-STEP researchers could generate their own living-educational-theories provided the organising principle for a Special Issue of Teacher Education Quarterly in 1995 (TEQ, 1995). In 1999 my doctoral thesis (Whitehead, 1993) demonstrated the existence of a Living Educational Theory methodology that transcended limitations in social science methodologies for enquiries of the kind, ‘How do I improve what I am doing?’ I communicated this methodology (Whitehead, 2009a) within the limitations of a printed-text based medium for instance in a chapter in a book (Tidwell, et. al. 2009) and transcended these limitations in a multimedia paper on Living Theory methodology, published in the multimedia journal, Educational Journal of Living Theories (EJOLTS), (Whitehead, 2008). Over the course of my research between 1993-2014 I have consistently sought to make a contribution to the evolution of S-STEP in two ways. The first concerns the rationality of explanations of educational influence that include evidence of their influence in the learning of students. I am thinking here of the nature of the rationality in the unit of appraisal, living standards of judgment and the living-logics used by S-STEP researchers in their explanations of educational influence in learning. The second concerns the development of methods for clarifying and communicating the meanings of the embodied expressions of energy-flowing, ontological values as explanatory principles in explanations of educational influence. The paper is organised in terms of the Aims, Context, Methods and Outcomes.