Keywords

Introduction

This chapter traces the development of self-study of teacher education practices through the lens of the biennial Self-Study of Teacher Education Practices Castle Conferences. It is an eclectic drawing together of threads that have resonated with us as we read and reread the 12 conference proceedings and reflected on the essential nature of a 4-day residential conference in a fifteenth-century castle in southern England. Writing this chapter has been an opportunity to return to the Castle, not to document a history of self-study or to write a systematic review of the conference papers but rather to turn the proceedings over and over again – to examine, diffract, and rethink events in order to see our past anew and to imagine what our future may hold. The collective Castle Conference proceedings are a rich repository of self-study of teacher education practices in and of themselves. The analysis of these papers, along with our memories of editing the proceedings and attending the Castle, captures some of the nuanced experiences, diversity, hidden gems, and forgotten stories that have been shared at the Castle. These are the stories told by teacher educators about their practice as they communicate their commitment to creating knowledge and understandings that can contribute to a better education. We retell these stories drawing on the Castle papers as much as possible to capture the essence of self-study.

The authors of this chapter have been involved in numerous roles in many of the Castle Conferences: editing, authoring, reviewing, collaborating, presenting, and participating. The task of reviewing the proceedings and writing this chapter was both daunting and engrossing. Reviewing the proceedings brought back memories of how papers were presented and received, but this record is obviously incomplete because there are always presentations that one cannot attend at a conference. Reading the papers, even at a superficial level, revealed too many treasures to catalogue, and doing so might have meant presenting the work in some linear static form. In our culling, we know too well that many people and papers have been omitted. We were mindful that other authors would take specific foci of self-study of teacher education practices as the basis of their contribution to this Handbook. Our remit was to consider the Castle Conferences from within and to give a personalized reading of these multifarious biennial events.

This chapter begins with a history of Herstmonceux Castle and segues to how it became a home to the self-study of teacher education practices research community on a biennial basis. Traces of the Baders’ commitment to social justice and thirst for knowledge are echoed in the bricks and mortar of this grand building. The Castle, with its gracious formal gardens and woodland park, provides the physical context for delegates to come together for a 4-day residential conference that is unlike any other. We also acknowledge the benefactor’s story. Alfred Bader gifted the Castle to his alma mater, Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada, in recognition of the education he received there as a refugee.

The method used to parse some 700 papers over 12 conferences is described in the next section. A spreadsheet of titles and authors of papers provided a backbone for the structuring of this chapter. Many ideas and trends emerged from inputting data into this spreadsheet. Worrying about them, playing with them, and sharing them with others, these ideas began to coalesce around three themes. These themes are named and then detailed. As far as is practical, we have used text from the Castle conference proceedings to illustrate and add substance to these themes.

Our Castle, our home. The first theme addresses the role of the Castle Conference as a physical context that affords and nurtures an enduring community, which every 2 years reassembles and reinvigorates itself. The Castle is likened to the home of self-study research for a purpose. For self-study researchers, it has become a safe haven where they are invited to listen, argue, debate, challenge, and reassure in-house in order to go forth into the wider academic community with confidence. As is the case with any home, there are certain characters who have been instrumental in setting the tone at these gatherings. Their influence is considered through the lens of their participation at the Castle Conferences although it extends well beyond this in the self-study literature. There are threads that hold the community together at a very personal level, for example, the camaraderie and commitment to teaching that ensure the Castle Conference is a vibrant and engaging opportunity to share experiences and learn from one another.

The second theme captures the diversity that struck us, both as we turned over and returned to the papers in the proceedings and as we remembered our experiences there. In another theme we explore the wide ranging backgrounds of participants, the variety of methods and pedagogies they have used, and their often inventive options for presenting self-studies. However, in this theme we have drawn on the proceedings themselves as a means to convey the diversity thread that runs from the Baders’ commitment to social justice in their original intention for the use of the Castle, into a future in which we hope to welcome even more international representation. Making sense of the diversity, particularly as representative of socially just practice, led us to select some exemplar papers that galvanized our collective desire to do better, to be better, and to transform education for the better. At the Castle Conference, the authors are supported, questioned, acknowledged, and affirmed in their respective quests to address these issues. In the presentations the participants respond to the multiple challenges that are laid bare.

The third theme considers legitimacy, which emerged more from the processes surrounding the papers than from the papers themselves. Self-Study of Teacher Education Practices (S-STEP) emerged as a Special Interest Group (SIG) in the American Educational Research Association (AERA) at a time when the research establishment was being challenged to accept qualitative methods as worthy, if not preferable, for driving improvement in teaching and learning. This theme considers two faces of legitimacy – facing outward as a discipline to be taken seriously among other disciplines, not just education as a field of, say, psychology, and facing inward as individuals strive to have their self-study work taken seriously in their academic careers. The Castle provides a safe space to develop the theory and methods proper to education as a discipline in its own right. It is a place where academics can share, innovate, and experiment with ideas while also meeting their institutions’ demands.

A Short History of Herstmonceux Castle

Herstmonceux Castle was a product of Norman England. Sir Roger Fiennes, Treasurer of King Henry the VI’s Household, was granted the license to build in 1441 for his services. Herstmonceux Castle was constructed over the next century of brick (and is now the oldest such building in Britain). A moat, 4 central courtyards, and 140 rooms completed its medieval splendor. In 1776, having fallen into debt, Fiennes’ descendants reduced the Castle to a picturesque ruin by demolishing and repurposing the interior. It remained uninhabited until the early twentieth century when it was restored and made fit for habitation by private owners. From 1946 until 1989, the grounds were home to the British government’s Royal Observatory. Light pollution from the nearby towns put an end to this being a premiere location for astronomical purposes, but an interactive science center and several small telescopes are reminders of a previous purpose (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1
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Herstmonceux Castle

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Herstmonceux Castle is now modernized and functions as an international study center for many different groups of students from Queen’s University and around the world. Every 2 years, up to 150 self-study delegates drive through English countryside, take up residence, and self-study research rules for 4 days. There is something that is both comforting and challenging about being admitted to this particular bastion. Outward appearances are imposing. Delegates see the Castle reflected in a moat. There is a narrow bridge leading to a grand door. However, this is a faux entrance rarely opened to admit visitors. Access is gained through a smaller door to the left of the Castle. Once admitted to the inner sanctum, there is scope to explore the gardens and rooms, to relax, and talk candidly about self-study research’s trials and tribulations. Every 2 years, the Castle serves its purpose to enfold and nurture self-study researchers from around the world.

The serendipitous course of events that led to the Castle being donated to Queen’s University, Canada, in 1992 by a self-made millionaire and philanthropist Alfred Bader and his wife Isabel is also worthy of mention in this review of self-study through the lens of the Castle Conferences. Alfred Bader, a Czech Jew, was sent as a teenager from Austria to England to escape Nazi persecution in 1938. Two years later, he was sent to a Canadian internment camp for European refugees as a possible fifth columnist (Garbett and Ovens 2018). While in the camp, Alfred sat matriculation exams and applied for entry to three Canadian Universities. McGill rejected him because their Jewish “quota” was filled. The University of Toronto rejected him because the chemistry department was doing sensitive war work. Queen’s University accepted Bader, and it was here that he completed undergraduate studies in science and art and a Master’s degree in science. He then moved to Harvard for his doctoral studies in organic chemistry. Bader met Isabel, the love of his life, on board a ship in 1949 when they were travelling back to England. A 9-day whirlwind courtship resulted in a marriage proposal, which Isabel regretfully declined because of religious differences. Her book, A Canadian in Love, was based on the 80 letters she wrote to Alfred between 1949 and 1950. Alfred went on to meet and marry his first wife, and together they had two sons. Nearly 30 years later, Alfred reconnected with Isabel, who had never married. She had worked as a teacher close to Herstmonceux at Bexhill in Sussex since their parting. Alfred’s first marriage broke down, and he married Isabel in 1982. Isabel and Alfred have since dedicated themselves to investing in research and scholarship and supporting the arts. The vision that underlies the Bader International Study Centre (BISC) reflects the Baders’ “commitment to offering students a challenging global education infused with social justice, a thirst for knowledge, and civic responsibility” (https://www.queensu.ca/bisc/about-us/heritage/). It is a vision that informs the ethos inherent at the Castle Conferences.

The inception of Self-Study of Teacher Education Practices (S-STEP) predates the first Castle Conference by several years. A Special Interest Group was first mooted by Beth Herrmann, an American academic, at the 1992 American Educational Research Association (AERA) Conference in response to papers presented by teacher educators Tom Russell, Stefinee Pinnegar, Mary Lynn Hamilton, Peggy Placier, and Karen Guilfoyle. Their papers “pricked the consciousness of many teacher educators as the right issues were being raised at the right time and in the right place” (Loughran 2004, p. 15). Identifying, naming, and acting upon the issues of concern for teacher educators (e.g., learning to teach about teaching, teaching in meaningful ways, and ensuring practitioner research was accepted by the academy) became touchpoints. In this rich, fertile ground, the seeds took root and, given the conditions of the Castle Conference, began to flourish (see Loughran 2004, pp. 13–17 for detail).

How the conversation from AERA was translocated to a Castle in the UK to become a biennial conference was something of lucky happenstance. In July 1994, Tom Russell, a professor of education at Queen’s, had visited Herstmonceux to see the new offshore campus for himself. He showed photos of the Castle to Stefinee Pinnegar and Mary Lynn Hamilton when they met shortly after at an action research conference hosted by an academic, Jack Whitehead, in England. Unsurprisingly, the thought of having a conference in a castle caused a great deal of excitement. According to folklore and Janet Richards, co-editor of the first Castle proceedings in 1996, they declared, “We have to have a conference there,” and so it came to pass. Since the first Castle Conference in 1996, scholars from around the world have come together for the common cause of enhancing teacher education practices, for sharing knowledge, and promoting teaching ideals. If the original intent of the Bader International Study Centre was to broaden the views of the students who attended extramural courses, that vision has been enacted through the sharing of ideas internationally about self-study of teacher education ever since.

Method of Writing the Chapter and Parsing the Data

Writing about the history and development of self-study through the particular lens of the Castle Conferences has been an absorbing endeavor for us, as authors of this chapter. Fossicking through more than 700 papers in 12 conference proceedings (1996–2018) revealed too many treasures to catalogue, and doing so might have meant presenting the work in some moribund form. The breadth captured in the written artifacts is in itself overwhelming. Wanting to acknowledge and respect the contributions of so many authors is daunting. Coupled with intimate knowledge of the multifaceted nature of each Castle Conference – including the participatory collage workshops, embodiment and dance performances, readers’ theater, and poetry recitals – the task of representing this work is truly mind-boggling.

The first step in organizing the papers for analysis was to render 12 conference proceedings, capturing snapshots of self-study’s development over 22 years into a spreadsheet detailing dates, people, topics, and a numerical count of the number of references in each paper. Initial themes emerged through an exploratory phase of skimming the titles, authors, and content. These themes were further revised and refined, induced from the data set and from our own values, theoretical orientations, and personal experiences of the Castle Conference. Some themes resonated more strongly with us than others and became the mainstays of this chapter. These themes are by no means all-encompassing, but we are confident they draw attention to the unique contribution that the Castle Conferences have played in the history of self-study as a research movement.

After consolidating the themes, each of us skimmed the proceedings, inserted tabs (physically or electronically) to mark important passages or appropriate contributions related to a theme. We then re-reviewed the proceedings for text that spoke to the themes. This aggregated data was then shared among the authors of this chapter and, along with the spreadsheet, became the basis for the first draft of this chapter.

Three main themes emerged that we explore in this chapter. The first is the development of a community that nurtured self-study researchers within the Castle’s walls. There have been many academics who have presented at Castle Conferences and who, by their scholarship and determination to keep teaching at the forefront of their purpose, have strengthened a flourishing community. In a sense, they have created a home at the Castle. The second theme illuminates diversity within the self-study community and speaks to understanding the role of teacher educators as critically reflective practitioners working with diverse learners and preparing new teachers to work with diverse learners and in diverse settings. These self-study contributions simultaneously illuminate the differences between – people, settings, and topics – so that the similarities can be appreciated. The third theme is the legitimatio n of self-study as research methodology that draws on a variety of methods depending on the purpose. This theme speaks to the crusade that is waged internally and externally to claim rigor and scholarship. There have been founding, tentative principles of self-study as methodology, succeeded by a second generation of principles, which has provided stability for the research methodology. A further generation of principles is now emerging in the richness of the community. We now explore each of these themes in more detail.

Theme 1: Castle Conference as Context – Creating a Home at the Castle

A Place Apart

Creating a community where teacher educators can meet to discuss ideas and explore their understanding of teacher education and its practices has been a mainstay of the biennial Castle Conference. The editors of the first conference proceedings (Richards and Russell 1996) wrote that this was “the first publication originating from a conference devoted entirely to self-study research,” and they invited the reader to “imagine the luxury of residing in this castle and spending four wonderful days sharing ideas and initiatives with colleagues who work in varying educational roles and contexts worldwide?” (p. vi). A residential conference in a Castle certainly is a unique and fanciful setting, but it is the structure and format of the conference that stands it apart from most others. The early organizers had met informally to discuss what they liked most and least about other conferences they had attended. One result of that conversation was that there have never been keynote speakers. Everyone, luminaries and neophytes alike, are allotted 1 h to share their research in a way that engages the audience as co-learners. There has always been an understanding that the audience will be ready and willing to interact with presenters and their ideas. In order to support a meaningful discussion, the papers are made available before the conference so that the delegates can read them and come prepared to ask questions and participate in discussion and exchange.

The thought that this might descend into a conference where the audience was talked to for an hour at a time was an anathema to the community, professing as it did that there was more to teaching than telling. A further feature of the conference organization has been that only four or five sessions run parallel. Because the number of conference delegates is restricted to no more than 150, the audience for each session typically numbers between 20 and 35 people. There is an understanding among participants that they will distribute themselves equitably among presentations. This idea is reinforced by Tom Russell’s note on the Castle Conference website for first-timers:

If a room is full because we did not guess which authors or titles would attract the greatest numbers, remember there are other sessions that would be thrilled to have you join in and increase their audience size. Even if there is space to sit, if you can see that a room already has a large audience, go looking for a room that needs a bigger audience. (https://sites.google.com/site/castleconference2010/Home/thoughts-for-first-timers)

Audiences are also naturally constrained by the size of the rooms, several of which have a capacity of 35–40.

Physical constraints aside, another important difference between this and other education research conferences is the luxury of time – flexible, unrushed, and indulgent time. Teacher educators gather from all corners of the world to discuss challenges, share successes, and celebrate teaching in presentations. The Castle provides a physical space for creating a learning community of self-study researchers who are willing to question, clarify, take risks experimenting with innovative approaches, and examine and reframe their views about teaching and teacher education practices.

The early Castle Conferences welcomed a wide variety of presentations – dance, readers’ theaters, plays, poems with trumpet accompaniment, half-baked ideas, collage workshops – and a variety of participants. Some participants were not clear about what self-study was but were willing to give it a try in exchange for an exotic teachers’ “summer camp” in a castle. For example, Joe Senese had a chance encounter with the call for proposals for the second conference in 1998 and was intrigued by the setting. Enlisting three fellow practitioners from his Midwestern USA high school, they submitted a proposal not only to the conference program committee but also to their high school for funding, to share their Action Research Laboratory as a model for professional development that could be extended to preservice teacher education (Senese et al. 1998). They were somewhat surprised that they were both accepted and funded and had no idea what to expect. The overwhelmingly higher education participants, however, were delighted to have secondary school teachers, and the welcome given to their presentation began a run of return trips for Joe for all but one of the following Castle Conferences.

For each of the conferences, specific instructions are given to presenters encouraging them to interact with their audience – to use them as sounding boards for ideas, converse, discuss, suggest, and challenge. As Rachel Forgasz and John Loughran (2018) noted:

We consider the Castle conference as an invitation to do more than simply present a self-study paper; we aim to create a pedagogic experience that will engage participants in the study, both cognitively and emotionally… we draw attention to how pedagogic intent, practice and interpretation interact to create outcomes not always envisaged. (p. 370)

Conversations continue past the scheduled hour of presentation time, over coffee or tea, daily meals, and evenings in the Castle’s pub. The sense of collegiality supports the development of deeper understanding and respect for what we profess to know and do. It is this combination of time, space, place, and ethos that ensures that the Castle Conference participants enrich their professional work and nurture the collective community.

Indeed, the papers in the Conference Proceedings were always intended to be “the first part of a two-part communication, the second part of which [was] the 50-minute presentation each presenting author [made] at the Castle Conference itself” (Lighthall 2004, p. 199). Explicitly seeking engagement and participation from the audience is evident in many papers. For example, Donna and Jerry Allender’s paper (2008) ends, “In the session … the participants in pairs will role-play … Afterwards, let’s talk about what we’re learning from all this talk” (p. 16). Susan Constable and colleagues (Constable et al. 2008) “call upon our colleagues to build on our insights as we improve teacher education by improving teacher educators” at a personal and professional level (p. 76).

Jean McNiff (1996) prefaced her paper presented at the first Castle Conference with:

This is not a well-formed paper. It is a way into an area that I would like to develop. I have offered opinions about why I think the area is important, and how its importance might be justified, but I am only now beginning to research it seriously. I would therefore like to take the opportunity of our conversations at the Castle Conference to share ideas with you and invite you to give me feedback on the work so far, as well as suggestions as to how it might be taken forward. (McNiff 1996, p. 1)

She concluded:

I would be grateful to you if you could give some thought to what you do when you are listening, so that we may share our ideas at the Conference. I would be grateful for your insights to help me move forward. (p. 4)

Twenty years after Jean’s comments, the dialogue among participants across space and time is as strong as ever. In their 2016 contribution to the Castle, Anastasia Samaras and her colleagues thanked 21 conference participants who had enhanced their conversation through found poems written at the previous S-STEP conference (Samaras et al. 2016). One such poem entitled “The Self-Study Movement” captures the essence of the Castle Conferences for many delegates. We come together to discuss and share the challenges and trials of teaching and researching our teaching in order to improve it. This is fundamental to inhabiting the space where our research and teaching are inextricably combined.

One life changed

What can it do?

To make a difference?

To impact and inspire?

We tell stories

To develop an ethical position

To produce our best true selves

Not just our intellectual selves

A whole body experience

That feels real

Adding to each others’ learning

Breaking down the status quo

Living in a world where our research is

Being creators of social change

For the future university

For the public good (p. 167)

It is often difficult to convey that which “feels real” in the written work. Juanjo Mena and Tom Russell reviewed all 65 papers in the 2014 conference and presented their preliminary findings at the final session. They later published their work (Mena and Russell 2017) stating that all papers were improvement aimed, generated knowledge, and were self-initiated as have come to be recognized as hallmarks of self-study research according to LaBoskey’s (2004) much referenced chapter. Three-quarters of the papers reviewed were collaborative in some way or another. However, Juanjo and Tom wrote that even though all papers mentioned trustworthiness, “about 40% failed to explain how it was achieved. Simply mentioning trustworthiness does not ensure credibility to those who do not attend a study’s presentation” (p. 115). Therein lies the rub. Those who do attend presentations can attest to the considerable richness and nuanced exposition that is not easily captured in the written artifacts. The knowing laughter of being able to identify with the presenter’s conundrum, nods of agreement when a particular finding rings true, and tears of compassion when empathy abounds – these sentiments are difficult to transpose to the written word. Katharine Childs (2006) wrote:

I believe storying to be a form of meta-communication because it aids in communicating experience – and because of that, it creates community. A story is not simply words, but the relationship between words and our experience. Community and caring grow when people share experiences. Stories create bridges between people’s experiences. When someone tells us a story, even though the actual details of the experience it talks about are different from ours, there are times when we feel a certain resonance between the experiences. It is this resonance that helps us connect and relate to them as being similar to our own. (p. 53)

Many conference delegates return to the Castle numerous times and reaffirm their commitment to the community through sharing their stories of trials and tribulations. Self-study research is a way for teacher educators to ensure that learning about teaching teaching in all its complexity and confoundedness is kept to the fore. This is not to suggest that self-study is a matter of telling stories. Self-study must be more than this. As John Loughran (2008) explained, telling stories is a first step toward constructing knowledge. At the Castle Conference, teacher educators hone their story telling capabilities in order to articulate their growing understanding to a wider audience. Participating and contributing at the Castle is a means for self-study researchers to rehearse arguments and forge new understanding so that they can carry on the crusade, often in what can seem to be uncharted and/or unsupportive territory.

One such well-rehearsed argument is the transition from teacher to teacher educator or nontenured to tenure-track positions. Within the Castle’s confines, delegates seek counsel from those who have already accomplished such feats. Over meals and breaks, there are colleagues ready to share their expertise as members of doctoral advisory committees, senior academics who play a part on promotion and selection panels, and others who have refined their skills in crafting funding proposals, vitae, and research proposals. Reading self-study accounts of how such deeds were accomplished by peers and colleagues enables others. In the foreword to William and Hayler’s edited book Professional Learning Through Transitions and Transformations, Robert Bullough (2016) wrote that:

hero narratives hold the potential for inspiring readers and listeners to recall lost commitment and faded ambitions and to reclaim themselves as authors of their own destinies… to reimagine themselves as better than they are or thought they might be and thereby suggest that they too can act heroically. (p. v)

Supporting and championing others is par for the course, and with the support of the community, self-studiers forge ahead. An example of the importance of community support is evident in Dawn Garbett’s (2012) self-study. Dawn sought promotion based on research-informed and evidence-based teaching and staked “a claim for self-study research to be recognized as more than reflective practice and for theorized teaching to be accorded status” (p. 124). She borrowed the image of Crusader Rabbit from Stefinee Pinnegar’s collaborative work (Arizona Group et al. 1994) and spoke with senior academics at the conference about how best to mount her campaign. Although unsuccessful in her first two attempts, she persevered and was ultimately successful. Her self-study emphasized that being able to combine teaching about teaching and researching teaching together in a cohesive whole was a worthy pursuit in and of itself. Self-studies are typically driven by the desire to improve one’s teaching or understanding of an issue rather than the imperative to publish or perish. If recognition in the academy is also forthcoming, it can be considered a bonus rather than the raison d’être. Undertaking a self-study as part of academic gamesmanship and churning out publications lest one perish is not sufficient motivation for the authenticity demanded by a self-study and the demand that transformation of one’s practice be a, if not the, goal.

Others use self-study to respond to and understand their dynamic workplaces. For example, Laura Haniford and Penny Pence (2016) engaged in a self-study to reconcile their differences in an institution that was undergoing organizational change:

[T]heorizing how this happened is important for us in understanding our own frustrations, feelings of disempowerment, and times of profound disengagement. Teacher education programs are always fraught with outside exigencies and our schools with ever changing contexts. We must develop theories to guide us, but these theories must be in a state of constant evolution and address both personal and collective issues, honoring all those involved. We believe that self-study can be an ethic for program participation. We have come to value disagreement as a way into clarifying our work, rather than as something to be stifled or avoided. (p. 178)

There are so many examples of self-study scholars who use this conference to work with and through managing the challenges of institutions’ demands and personal motivations and who are willing to rehearse and articulate their learning to enhance our collective ability to understand commonalities in our practices. As was foretold in the early conference proceedings, there has always been a connection through our work that underpins the conferences:

Learning through self-study is a process with no real end-point. For each of us the journey is different and, although our paths continue to cross in many ways, they are also divergent as issues and experiences influence our understanding of teaching and learning about teaching differently. (Hamilton et al. 1998, p. 1)

Fundamental to self-study’s aim is to improve pedagogical practice and to add to not only our own but also others’ understanding of this complex task. Five teacher educators (Constable et al. 2008) have captured how powerful studying one’s own practice in concert with others can be. Striving to become adaptive experts, they wrote:

Routine experts learn to do something well and continue to use the same approach with greater efficiency over time. Adaptive experts, in contrast, are willing to change their core competencies. Change, while beneficial in the long run, can be emotionally as well as practically disruptive in the short run. Our self-study unveils efforts to move beyond the stance of routine experts who develop an approach to teacher education that works and stick with it, in order to become adaptive experts who continually reshape their expertise. (p. 75)

They wrote that the experience of being part of a self-study group was:

valuable and satisfying. Conversations were dynamic and allowed members to express frustrations and to celebrate successes … Self-study within a group context provides the right level of challenge and support, promoting professional growth while cushioning the emotional blows that are a natural by-product of moving into uncharted territory. (p. 76)

For those who attend the Castle Conferences and join the community of self-study scholars committed to teaching, this support and challenge is magnified exponentially.

Scholars at the Castle

Coming together as a community of scholars on an equal footing to share and discuss ideas and experiences requires openness and authenticity. Full professors, deans of faculty, program leaders, doctoral students, school-based teachers, and teacher educators mix with ease. Pivotal in nurturing this open-minded stance and willingness to learn from one another have been certain key players. These scholars have been instrumental in setting the direction and tone of the Castle Conference. Tracing the influence and impact they have had on the conferences through each iteration has been beneficial to understanding how the conference has remained vibrant. Tom Russell, John Loughran, Stefinee Pinnegar, and Deb Tidwell are four such notable scholars who have contributed at least one presentation to each of the conferences (1996–2018). Their influence has seeped into the foundations of the Castle Conference. There have been many scholars who have shone at the Castle Conference, but we acknowledge these four as guiding lights from the very first Castle Conference. As we now explain, each has had a different influence on the proceedings and essence of the conference.

Tom Russell, as a full professor at Queen’s University, liaised with the proprietors to convene and host the first 11 conferences. He co-edited the Castle proceedings in 1996 and 2000 and authored or co-authored 21 presentations at the Castle Conference between 1996 and 2018. Tom has co-authored with more different colleagues from within his institution, Canada, and internationally than any other presenter at the Castle Conferences. For example, he has written with his department chair, school teachers, college professors, former students, colleagues from Queen’s and other Canadian universities, as well as colleagues in Australia, the USA, Spain, and Chile.

Tom’s research is grounded in his wealth of practical experience. Tom has always been focused on making a positive difference to his students’ learning journey in the long term although, as he, and many other self-study researchers, have realized, “teaching’s greatest mystery is the fact that we have no control over what our students make of what we say and do as we teach” (Russell 1997, p. 41), much less what they are going to remember about the teaching in years to come. Some of his student teachers have gone on to complete their doctoral studies and become teacher educators and leading self-study scholars themselves. Shawn Bullock is one such former student-cum-colleague. Tom first presented with Shawn in 2006 about the assumptions they both had as they continued to learn about teaching (Bullock and Russell 2006). Shawn has since co-authored 13 papers with 10 different collaborators and has 17 papers published in the conference proceedings.

Tom’s teaching must be replete with treasured moments as student teachers have responded to his pedagogical turns. He wrote about one such moment thus:

Learning from time to time, usually in unexpected ways at unexpected moments, that some new teachers did “catch the message in my teaching” and express it in their own teaching sustains my conviction that how I teach should be the message that teacher candidates take from my classroom. If they also remember how much teacher education consumes me as it also fascinates and puzzles me, then I have successfully shared my professional passion for teacher education. (Russell 1997, p. 46)

The self-study community has been privileged to witness this unfailing passion for teacher education through his presentations and participation in every Castle Conference.

Special acknowledgment must also be made of Tom’s approach to fostering the collaborative and supportive Castle Conference ethos. His has been an unassuming hand at the helm, but his warmth and attention to detail has ensured the smooth running of all of the conferences. In conference organization, Tom has been supported by his wife LaVerne who has specialized in planning excursions to places of historical interest in the English countryside. These bus trips, organized for the day of the opening of the conference and for an afternoon during the conference, afford an opportunity to reconnect informally with previous participants and to make new acquaintances. These, and other aspects of the social program, help to foster a self-study camaraderie.

Equally influential and prolific in the wider teacher education community is John Loughran. He is a longtime champion and advocate of self-study research. John and Tom Russell’s connection extends to the time when John was on sabbatical in the fall term of 1995 at Queen’s University and observed every class that Tom taught. Their discussions centered on how they could help beginning teachers learn to teach. John and Tom were the founding co-editors of the self-study journal Studying Teacher Education . John was also an executive editor of Teachers and Teaching: Theory and Practice for many years. He has published and initiated much self-study work with Routledge and Sense Publishers and is the editor for the Springer published book series, Self-study of teaching and teacher education practices. It is through these outlets with John’s endorsement that many self-study research projects have achieved wider dissemination. John has supervised numerous doctoral students and encouraged them to attend the Castle Conferences to share their work. Like Tom’s doctoral student, several of John’s former doctoral students, for example, Amanda Berry, Robyn Brandenburg, and Dawn Garbett, are now regular conference contributors, collaborators, self-study researchers, and editors themselves. John and Tom Russell co-edited the conference proceedings in 2000.

John’s contribution to Castle Conference presentations is characterized by the insightful and astute questions he poses to challenge and provoke an audience, a presenter, and/or himself. John’s insistence nudges self-study researchers to move beyond telling stories to answer the “so what?” question and encourages them to act and transform their practice. For many, this has become a litmus test to measure the worth of a self-study. Does it have catalytic validity (Lather 1986) in as much as it re-energizes and refocuses attention on teaching? Does this research project make a difference – for the teacher educator, for the students, or for the institution? Most importantly, does the self-study add to the development of knowledge about practice (Loughran 2008)? In this paper John wrote:

The point of this argument then is that the stories of these teacher educators’ work are helpful, and readily identifiable by others, as ways of doing teaching teaching.

However, it is the learning derived of researching their practice that leads to the production of new knowledge of teacher education practices. This knowledge is not so much propositional by nature, rather it is such that it helps to frame understandings of practice as problematic and dynamic. In so doing, they build on the work of others (both within and outside the field of self-study in productive ways). Therefore, the knowledge developed, offers real possibilities to others because it does not define outcomes as being right or wrong, or the best way to approach a given situation, rather the knowledge is framed such that it informs themselves and other teacher educators about ways of considering what they do, how and why, so that they might bring their own professional judgment to bear on their practice in their context. (p. 220)

John went on to ask the conference delegates:

So as members of the self-study community, how do we continue to challenge our work in relation to views about the nature of the knowledge we produce from both a personal and collective perspective? How do we intend to push the boundaries of what we have learnt from self-study so that it can be structured and shared in ways that will invite further interrogation and development? It is crucial that we do not stop questioning the so what of self-study. (p. 220)

Stefinee Pinnegar is another example of a generous scholar who has collaborated with numerous people over the course of the conferences to push self-study research, methodology, and thinking in multiple different directions. Since 2014, emerging self-study researchers have had the opportunity to attend a preconference workshop, which has been orchestrated and organized by Stefinee. Together with a team of experienced colleagues, they have mentored other scholars and supported them to finesse their self-studies. Stefinee has also brought former students into the self-study fold – scholars who have gone on to contribute to the community such as Mary Rice, Shaun Murphy, and Ramona Cutri. Stefinee has also co-edited two volumes of the proceedings (2010 and 2012). Her work outside of the conference proceedings, through journals, books, and chapters, is prolific. Stefinee and her longtime self-study colleague, Mary Lynn Hamilton, have collaborated numerous times on conference presentations that have challenged self-study methodology. Many of their contributions have been creative and participatory such as at the 2016 conference where they presented what could be framed as a retrospective catalogue of their work together in an installation that spanned three “Deleuzinal moments.” They invited conference delegates to view and engage with their art installation during the conference and to share their own experiences at an afternoon session on the last day. Their work was announced in the program but was not published in the proceedings:

In this work we excavate our experiences nested within our many contexts (universities-teacher education-life) and explore our catalogue of experiences in relation to our practice across our careers. Our purpose is to unravel tensions among theoretical perspectives, personal experiences and academic choices using visual representations of our maps of destiny. We anchor our work in three identity sites along our landscape: a) experiences in our academic homes, b) collaboration among critical friends, and c) interactions between the academy and our desires for BECOMING strong teacher educators. Our particular experiences reveal the vicissitudes of academic life and our understandings of BECOMING. (Hamilton and Pinnegar 2016, conference programme)

Deborah Tidwell’s development as a self-study scholar is an example of the trajectory followed by many committed to self-study research. She began as a reflective practitioner, applying action research methods in single-authored studies. Deb faithfully attended annual AERA SIG sessions and biennial Castle sessions and stepped into service and then leadership positions in both overlapping groups. In so doing, she moved from the periphery to inhabit the center of self-study. Deb has co-edited three Castle Conference Proceedings (2004, 2006, and 2008). She has worked with doctoral students, practicing teachers, graduate students, and colleagues in other universities. Identifying self-study scholars whose AERA or Castle papers fit themes of diversity or methodology, she invited them to contribute to books she co-edited, with particular attention to giving junior scholars a wider opportunity to become established in self-study publications. A particularly poignant collaboration with Hafdis Guðjónsdóttir gave a lasting voice to their dear friend, Mary Dalmau, helping Hafdis to edit the latter’s final book (Dalmau et al. 2017). One of Deb’s many strengths is her empathy and support of newcomers to self-study. She is very talented in helping novice researchers identify what is important in their work and how to keep moving it forward. Deb is a doyenne held in high esteem by the community.

The influence of these key scholars has extended across conferences, continents, and contexts. Such generosity and genuine interest in one another’s research has set an example that others follow. Many repay their gratitude or express their willingness to contribute through mentoring others and collaborating in an ever-widening network. Opportunities to collaborate are often initiated at the Castle Conference but extend well beyond the Castle walls. Spin-off edited books around themes that are first talked about around the dining hall table are a testament to the generative and productive nature of the conferences. At the fore is the abiding drive to enhance teacher education practices and contribute to our knowledge about teaching teaching.

Holding the Castle Community Together

What are the threads that have held the self-study community together? One of the most endearing traits of self-study researchers is their ability, if not their compunction, to be authentic about their travails. As Donna and Jerry Allender commented in the first conference proceedings:

The space between comfortable and uncomfortable is where significant learning occurs. This is especially true for self-study. For this reason, we have spent substantial energy over the years on creating and finding the kinds of community that support our efforts. (Allender and Allender 1996, p. 14)

At the Castle Conference, the Allenders found a place where they could share ideas and deepen their understanding of their life’s work. Anyone dipping into the conference proceedings finds many examples of teachers who share moments of retrospection, such as something a student or colleague has said that makes a profound difference to the way they view their work, and importantly their priorities. In the retelling, their learning also has the ability to teach us. One such example is a contribution by Allan Feldman (2000). His study was sparked by a doctoral student who asked to discuss her proposal with him at a conference. He said he could spare 25 min. Her poem in response to this chunk of time compares the value of 10 min more. The poem concludes with the line “Take care…It is not the amount of time my friend, it is the quality of time” (p. 64). Allan’s ensuing self-study considered his experience of time. He acknowledged his lack thereof stating:

I had reached a new level of being busy – I now know that there were things that I just would not get done. Why is that true and what does that mean? Why is it that my life as a teacher educator feels like it is slipping into the future? Why does it feel like time’s arrow has become a rocket? (Feldman 2000, p. 62)

Many in the audience would have nodded their heads in agreement. Allan claimed there is a time crisis in teacher education:

because there is not enough time to do what is being asked of us and what we feel responsible for or obligated to do. Teacher education is a caring profession. To do it right means to have enough time to work directly with students and teachers, to listen to what they say, and to use our expertise to give reasonable advice. But teacher education has entered the mainstream of the university, and we, as teacher educators are required to “produce knowledge” through research and other scholarly activities… for many of us… engaged in self-study of our teacher education practices, our desire to engage in these activities has a moral basis. We want to inquire into our practices to learn more about the nature of teaching, teachers and teacher education because we believe this will lead to better lives for students, teachers and the others engaged in schooling. (p. 63)

He offered no suggestions to ameliorate the crisis. We suspect that little has changed in the intervening years; if anything there are even more pressures on our collective energy and resources. Perhaps, encouraged by Feldman’s research, the delegates may have taken a moment to consider their own responses to the demands of academic life and slowed time down – however briefly – to gain a new perspective. It seems that such is the lot of an academic and scholar but – even more so – a committed teacher educator.

The notion of teaching as a caring profession echoes throughout the proceedings. As Jean McNiff (1996) wrote: “listening to the message in the spoken words but also the message in the unspoken values. And the actions in which the words are offered speak louder than the words themselves” (p. 4). Jean also wrote that “the literature of self-reflective practice is rooted in the idea of care, that practitioners make a moral commitment to improving their work, which itself arises from a commitment to act in the other’s best interest, to care” (p. 4).

In the first conference, there was a large contingent from Queen’s University. In fact, 8 of the 43 papers were linked to Queen’s University. Tom Russell and Rena Upitis, the newly appointed Dean of Education, co-authored a paper that detailed how a community had been fostered through an honest and frank exchange of emails. This reflection from Tom about one exchange between himself and Rena is underpinned by the sense that we are all positioned in different ways in any community:

In a university community, it is easy to identify “the new and the vulnerable” in the form of those who are working for tenure. Often these people are young, but this is not necessarily the case. Having been awarded tenure after six years some 13 years ago, I have to accept the fact that I am not new here. Yet I remember those early years very clearly, and felt “new here” far longer than most people seemed to credit me with being new. We who are “older” are easily painted with a single brush, when in fact we vary enormously in our relationships to whatever community exists around us. We who are “older” are not a homogeneous community in any sense beyond mere “been around a long time.” Although much has changed in Rena’s first year on the job, we are still a community with disparate views about the relevance of research in a Faculty of Education that, some say, should first and foremost be known for good teaching. We have still not resolved the “common sense notion” that doing research means neglecting one’s teaching. (Russell and Upitis 1996, p. 140)

Perhaps more than anything else, self-study of teacher education practices research has given Castle Conference delegates wherewithal to combat the prevailing idea that doing research means that teaching should be relegated to lesser importance. For self-study researchers, the Castle Conference is a haven where we can luxuriate and let our passion for teaching in concert with research run amok. Thus, the Castle Conference has become a communal space where researchers in teacher education can gather to take risks, reveal vulnerabilities, and speak honest truths about researching and practicing teaching without fear of judgment or reprisal. The building itself contributes to this sense of safety and openness, as its distinctive castle properties lend an “otherworldly” atmosphere to the conference, far removed from the stresses of daily academia. Clearly, however, it is the participants themselves, supported by the conference programmers, who have nurtured this community and created this open and supportive space. Just as the Castle has seen many changes, so too has the community changed and developed. As Rachel Forgasz and John Loughran (2018) pointed out:

the Castle Conference creates opportunities for self-study researchers to be safe from: personal criticism; marginalisation; rigid pre-ordained structures; and, the pressure of conformity. Perhaps more significantly, an environment that offers safety from all of these oppressions then simultaneously creates possibilities in terms of safety to: take risks; innovate; be vulnerable; and experience learning through uncertainty. (p. 372)

A thirst for new knowledge and an openness to learn from multiple others remain at the heart of the self-study community. There are many who interrogate and worry at the challenges and issues that are constant in teaching teaching in dynamic and diverse contexts.

Theme 2: Celebrating Diversity at the Hearth of Self-Study Practice

The theme of diversity in the Castle Conference papers emerged from an initial review of the proceedings. In concert with the original commitment of the Baders, offering all students an educative experience infused with social justice and civic responsibility aligns with the desire to teach in ways that make a difference for all. At every Castle Conference, there has been an eclectic mix of delegates who share a passion for improving teaching, but this common disposition aside, the contexts, challenges, and characters are diverse. The contributions differ enormously in scope and intent. For example, one may celebrate a student teacher’s response to a child, unable to use spoken language, who eye-points her preference for which hat to wear in a play (Johnson 1998). In another, as a result of their research, teacher educators may make the statement that Whiteness is an issue for their teaching because it is both figuratively and literally in their face (Griggs and Tidwell 2012). A multicultural research group from a politically fraught country reiterates the message that teaching is always relational (Barak et al. 2016). In 2014, a group of 16 researchers produced a collective self-study on gender, feminism, and queer theory in education (Abi-Hanna et al. 2014). Supporting teachers to adopt frameworks that challenge heteronormativity in schools and embrace LGBTQ youth was the focus of a workshop (Taylor et al. 2018). Even though the stories that self-study researchers tell are specific to themselves and their contexts, what other self-study researchers take away from the stories is germane to their own practice. This is a case of “I tell my story for me, you hear my story for you” (East et al. 2009, p. 61). In this section, we return to the “so what?” question that self-study researchers ask of themselves and their colleagues. As Tom Russell (1997) has stated, How I teach is the message . That is, students take a great deal more from who we are and how we interact with them rather than what we may present as content knowledge. Self-study researchers’ understanding of this powerful and enduring message underlies the following section where we discuss the importance of self-study for improving teaching for all students.

The Importance of Self-Study for Socially Just Practice

Self-study researchers are intent on improving their practice, and a focal point often is finding their way to integrate social justice into their courses. Enabling preservice teachers to interact with pupils of diverse cultural, ethnic, or racial backgrounds in respectful and supportive ways is a recurrent issue in Castle contributions. Acknowledging personal trials and challenges at the Castle Conference is a way for delegates to expose their vulnerability and discover innate strengths. As Vicki LaBoskey (2004) wrote:

We all have issues to overcome, “isms” to undo, strengths to enhance, limitations to minimize in our ongoing efforts to construct and reconstruct our identities as teachers and teacher educators for social justice. Thus, this research stands to benefit all of us concerned about teacher identity formation and transformation. (p. 175)

Ensuring that “education contributes to the promotion of equity, peace, social justice and the universal realization of human rights” (Tudball 2004, p. 251) is a project important to many people. Libby Tudball’s study was set in the context of internationalizing a teacher education course to support Australian teachers to be active in socially just ways in a diverse world. Preparing teachers to take their place on a world stage takes on particularly complex dimensions in some contexts. One such context was explored by Israeli colleagues (Barak et al. 2016). This collaborative group studied how they could create a respectful and safe multicultural learning environment for themselves and their Arab and Jewish students. Through their self-study and ongoing research, they exposed blind spots within their professional space that led toward testing and modification of their assumptions, understandings, and ways of being and becoming as educators. As part of this ongoing collaboration, Bobbie Turniasky, Smadar Tuval, and Dina Friling (2018) discussed the tensions inherent in working together:

Exploring and addressing [cultural identity] is crucial for personal and professional development but is dependent on trust between the participants. Trust is difficult to build and easy to destroy. As teacher educators, we walk the fine line between the costs and benefits of encouraging authenticity and a connection to our surroundings, and building a temporary, semi-insulated learning environment. (p. 226)

Walking this fine line and juggling the need to be authentic with students alongside the need to maintain a sense of professional self-preservation is one thing; being willing to critically focus attention on the issues that self-study research surfaces makes articulating findings even more challenging. For example, Linda Fitzgerald (2004) acknowledged the inconsistencies in her teaching about diversity and examined possible reasons for them. Taking Russell’s How I teach is the message to heart, she wrote:

I tell my students that still, all these years later, I am a racist in many ways, but I am committed to being aware of and to working against my racism consciously and conscientiously to the best of my ability…. Although I have worked hard to cultivate an awareness of my defensiveness about race, my reflections and other data about my teaching lead me away from seeing this as the major explanatory factor for the times that I avoid directly addressing racial diversity. In particular, on the rare occasions in which I have students who are members of racial minorities, I find it easy to address racial issues with them directly (they nod approvingly at my “I’m a racist” story.) However it is in those very semesters that I am most likely to avoid addressing publicly race in the class. (p. 109)

In exploring the reasons why she felt reluctant to address these issues, Linda talked honestly about her “lack of knowledge and skill in preventing color-evasion and power-evasion” (p. 111). She urged other participants at the conference to develop plans of action in order to address issues raised through diversity in their practice as teacher educators. In doing so, she highlighted how difficult it is to walk our talk but also how important it is that we continue to try to do so.

Such honest appraisal and insight is a hallmark of self-study. Self-study research enables teacher educators to examine their practice and to support one another to take steps to transform it. This is typified by Anne Freese and Amber Makaiau’s (2012) self-study. As they wrote:

Sharing our challenges and breakthroughs gave us confidence to keep trying. We shared our beliefs, personal experiences, and biases. We did not always agree, but we had one another to use as a mirror to challenge our assumptions about Hawaii as a racial paradise. … As we immersed ourselves in our ongoing study of our practice, we learned more about ourselves as well as new ways to encourage a “personal, constructivist and collaborative” approach with our students. This approach helped the students frame and reframe their assumptions about “the others” by realizing that issues of drugs, racial biases, violence, disability, and marginalization are not somewhere else, but are right in our own classrooms. Such insights broadened their thinking in terms of how we need to confront our biases and help our students better understand themselves and others. We learned how aspects and characteristics of self-study can have a significant place in our teaching about multiculturalism, particularly because it creates a direct, personal connection to us and the students. Most importantly, we learned that self-study is not an additive to our teaching, but rather it is an integral part of what we believe and how we teach. Through our increased awareness we can be better positioned to assist our preservice teachers to meet the needs of their students. (p. 116)

And so, we turn to discuss some of the challenges that self-study research has wrestled with through the Castle Conferences. As Vicki LaBoskey noted, we all have our own “isms” to undo in our own contexts, but underneath this is a common desire to improve education and educational practices.

Telling Our Diverse Stories: Large and Small, but Never Insignificant

Issues that self-study researchers have presented over the course of the conferences range from institutional and programmatic dilemmas to those that are more personal in nature. For example, addressing the challenge of enacting change at a personal and institutional level was the focus of Morwenna Griffiths’ (2000) longitudinal study. She noted how slowly change happened and, indeed, how little changed in her own project to integrate a social justice approach to teacher education – for her colleagues and, on reflection, for herself. She followed up her colleagues after 3 years and found:

Sometimes they re-told incidents and sometimes they repeated intentions about what they might do now. Most of them had the same kinds of concerns and focus of interest that they had had previously. Those who began by being most interested in race, gender, class, special needs or sexuality remained focused on that. So at the level of the personal (the small tale) and at the level of the larger political structure (the tall tale), had much changed? I thought I, myself, had changed my own mind as a result of the project. I could even think of examples. And yet I can see plenty of instances where what I have done could equally be said to be ‘the same old story’, even if with a new twist. (p. 97)

Change is invariably slow and painstaking. It is also often very elusive. Even though on the face of it one might think that changes are being wrought, this can be little more than a facade. Mary Lynn Hamilton’s (1998) contribution to the second Castle Conference drew from the literature on culture and difference, beliefs, and autobiography to explore how teachers from the dominant culture might learn to better communicate with ethnically diverse students in schools. As a result of the work with her colleagues, Hamilton put forth the idea that many students operate under the “Tinkerbell tenet” of teaching, that is:

a strongly held belief that something will occur solely on the strength of that belief, like the saving of Tinkerbell in the 1950s version of Peter Pan. In this play …, Peter plaintively invites the audience to “help save” Tinkerbell with the words––“If you believe, if you really believe…”––as if the simple act of believing might save this dying sprite. (p. 119–120)

Mary Lynn admitted that her self-study informed her that she too suffers from the Tinkerbell tenet of teaching and that she had made assumptions about her students based on her belief that “things would ‘just work out’” (p. 120). She became frustrated because her hopes for her students’ greater understanding of diversity and racism in schools did not match her lack of ability to provide opportunities for them to learn about these issues due to institutional constraints. She continued to explore this mismatch in the third Castle Conference. There were many factors involved in the reform of a program, which Mary Lynn Hamilton (2000) acknowledged could be both overwhelming and intimidating. Although she had a mandate to enact change at her institution, her colleagues’ responses to calls to support social justice were lukewarm: ‘“I don’t want you to think that I don’t support social justice …’ or ‘maybe if we just use other terms…”’ (p. 111). Their responses suggested that racism played a part in thwarting her attempts. Mary Lynn challenged other white scholars to confront privilege and injustice wherever possible in their practices and their workplaces because these matters don’t “just work out” by themselves. It takes fortitude and perseverance to keep moving forward, whether this is at an institutional level or on a personal level with ones’ students.

Various self-study researchers have challenged their audiences, through their presentations and writing, to “walk our talk” with regard to anti-racist teaching and to encourage students to critically reflect on their own biases and assumptions. Just as there are lukewarm responses from colleagues, students can also push back and argue from a privileged position. Michael Vavrus (2004) explained that despite having 80% of the teacher candidates in his course comment that they had become more aware of their “racialized perspectives” (p. 252), there were students who could not, or would not, see the world around them in all its rich diversity, nor how they themselves were positioned with respect to others:

Six percent, all white women, expressed abstract colorblind concepts that helped them to avoid questioning their own social positions. The other 14% of the sample did not address any issues related to their racial identity as related to their teacher identity formation. The primary reason was an overt denial of the relevancy of the relationship between one’s identity formation as a teacher and one’s racial identity. Two of those students, both white males, eventually left the program by the end of the second quarter. (p. 256)

Despite this frustration, the overall tenor of this paper (and many others) is that teaching that explicitly addresses issues such as racism can have a profound impact. It can facilitate an awareness of professional identity and reinforce the importance of knowing yourself, as one of Vavrus’s student teachers wrote:

I failed to realize that individuals have to look inside themselves to find their own racial identity and where they are positioned in society before they can take the responsibility of nurturing another human being. [I cringe] at the dominant Anglo practices that I embraced as normal, just, and accepted throughout the years. (Vavrus 2004, p. 256)

If this is the transformation in our students’ professional identity that we hope to get them to work on, then we must continue to push them, as well as ourselves, to become more self-aware.

Self-study is so often a driver to understand and act upon our own biases. For example, Timothy Spraggins (2004), an African-American male educator, pondered his choices for dealing with minority students. He asked whether his method of interaction with them reproduced subconscious and internalized prejudices:

Does this mean that I just might also regard black men students as more likely to create trouble for themselves and less likely to accept responsibility for doing so? Was this subtly communicated to me during and internalized from my early teachings? I have functioned under the premise that my educational and professional experiences, along with my personal reflections on both fronts, push me to seek, to stand with, and to purge my own flaws as best I can. This journey, however, has pressed me to accept a new possibility: not only have I not purged myself of certain prejudices but I cannot see the very ones that inform important aspects of my personal and professional identities. There is a possibility that deeply buried yet audible voices whisper to me that these black men are pre-disposed to trouble and that the only way to reach them is to yell and show them who is in charge. While I must sit with and seriously deconstruct this possibility, I remain disturbed and embarrassed by its possible influence on my practice. (p. 227)

Spraggin’s paper provoked self-study researchers to consider the question, “What if we can’t change the way we respond because we are so deeply entrenched in repeating the lessons [learnt in our own childhood]?” It is a question that gnaws away at other self-study researchers. For example, Valerie Mulholland (2006), from a lineage of Canadian settlers, wrote, “I can forgive myself for being emotionally affected by sentimental pioneer stories, but I cannot excuse my complicity in reproducing the discourse that continues to oppress and restrict the lives of others [First Nation people whose land they occupy]” (p. 196). Despite these challenges, the conference proceedings reveal that self-study researchers frequently seize the opportunity to examine such issues of importance in their own practice and disseminate their findings because they view these issues as critically important to good teaching.

Cynthia Nicol and Lisa Korteweg (2010) described their attempts to integrate indigenous perspectives in their respective institutions. They both prepared non-Aboriginal teachers to teach in Canadian schools through culturally responsive approaches to educating Aboriginal students. Cynthia and Lisa shared their vulnerabilities and concerns about their legitimacy in the process and invited others to consider their positionings and stances in terms of taking responsibility for sharing knowledge of the history of Aboriginal issues in Canadian education. They concluded their paper with insights about how the process of self-study helped them to come to the conclusion that they were on the right track for moving forward toward culturally responsive pedagogy, despite the fact that this idea is neither linear nor well-defined:

We, as teacher-educators and teacher-researchers, must take seriously the critical need for the development of courses and professional development that integrate respectfully Indigenous epistemologies as well as develop activities/assignments that prompt decolonizing reflexivity by the teachers. It is a difficult task for which many of us as teacher-educators are not manifestly ready. Yet our results indicate that teacher professional development programs can open up participation by non-Aboriginal teachers in cultural experiences so that participation might strive to be more culturally responsive. We present these research projects and our own critically reflexive dialogues in the hopes of offering some sort of educational direction and teacher education responsibility, one that could contribute to the larger and deeper project of humanizing curriculum across cultural differences. Our journey taken is not a linear path of steps. It instead provides a set of dilemmas, insights and possibilities for both living with and teaching culturally responsive pedagogy. (p. 186)

Writing Our Wrongs: A Safe Place to Be Vulnerable?

Yet the question remains: Why is diversity such a difficult theme to work with? We know that teacher educators find it challenging because they have repeatedly said so when presenting studies on this theme. The wide variety of possible student and contextual diversities, the delicate task of representing everyone’s point of view, and the fears of misrepresenting groups or individuals all add layers of stress associated with focusing on multiple variants of diversity in teacher education. And yet, self-study researchers continue to do this work because they support the critical importance of acknowledging diversity in education and of teaching their students to be mindful of diversity in their own teaching. What makes the Castle Conference special for those who are passionate about teaching in ways that acknowledge and nurture diversity is that it provides a safe place to test ideas and gauge audience responses, including reflections and research on diversity in education. Participants can learn from one another about what has been possible, fruitful, problematic, and productive. Acknowledging personal trials and challenges at the Castle Conference is a way for delegates to expose their vulnerability and discover innate strengths, allowing them to push beyond the individual diversities and focus on what is important to teacher education: humanity, relationships, and caring about each other.

Self-study demands a level of self-awareness and criticality that is rarely experienced in other research methods, perhaps because the self-study community encourages and supports willingness for researchers to expose their vulnerabilities. In her study with Jan Guidry (Guidry and Corbett-Whittier 2000), Connie Corbett-Whittier’s example, quoted below, invited the reader to empathize with the sense of frustration and exhaustion she felt:

In Kansas, education faces many challenges. The most controversial are those that question the division of Church and State. Several groups are involved in attempts to influence legislation and regulations in ways that would weaken this separation; collectively, these groups are referred to as the Religious Right…. I had a student last semester who is an active member of the Religious Right. I was exhausted after each class. For the first two weeks he followed me to my car after class believing that if he just kept talking I would see that he is correct in his views…

The negative experiences cited lead to the positive outcomes. For me, I realized the importance of knowledge and my personal relationship to it. I want to learn everything and I want my students to share my passion. To teach is to be passionate about learning… my purpose is not to change others’ beliefs, but to provide ways for them to ensure that the beliefs they espouse are truly their own. (p. 102)

Jan and Connie concluded with a vision statement:

To better teach children and adults in this new century, we must no longer be afraid to address bias and stereotypes directly. We need to be explorers of a new, exciting diverse global community. Confronting our stereotypes will not only aid us in challenging students, but it will aid us in becoming better learners, teachers, and better people in general for the millennium and beyond. (p. 103)

We can only hope, given the current state of world affairs, that self-study strengthens our conviction that teachers can and do make a difference in the lives of their students. In the next example, to illustrate the point that teacher educators can and do make a difference, we consider Deb Tidwell’s (2000) contribution to the third Castle Conference. Through journaling and reflections, Deb looked at different ways of valuing students in her courses and how this approach affected her understanding of their learning. By doing so she was able to closely examine her expectations of three students in particular in order to better understand what she believed was effective teaching. Particularly powerful was her critique of her attempts to reach Martin, an undergraduate student who could be profiled as at-risk. Martin arrived for the first class late; he was the only African-American in the class; he was largely ignored by his peers; he had difficulty being punctual or handing in assignments on time; he started to miss lectures and one-on-one meetings that had been arranged in an effort to halt his failing trajectory. Martin, in response to an initial survey of interests, had stated:

that he had experience working with preschool children for three summers, and wanted to teach in Florida or Texas working with kindergarten through third grade levels. Under the category “something unique about you,” he stated “I never give up on any one.” He explained that in his life experiences, people had given up on him when he knew he could do things. He had trouble following directions, but if people took the time to explain things to him, he did “alright.” (p. 238)

Deb tried to support his academic journey and chronicled her work through journaling and instructional documentation. Despite her best efforts, “by the middle of the semester, Martin had missed 5 out of 16 class meetings, and 4 out of 7 personal meetings with me. Martin withdrew from class at midterm” (p. 239).

Deb voiced fundamental questions germane to all teacher educators about the “purpose of higher education: Is it an environment that should be shaped for all students, or is it a unique environment for students possessing institutionally preferred knowledge? Is this a cultural issue or a quality issue?” (p. 241). In her presentation, Deb shared her frustration with not being able to articulate a meaningful way to value this student in her course and her lack of success in understanding his learning. Bringing this story to the Castle Conference allowed Deb to see the situation as one of many possible outcomes of her study and an opportunity for her learning more about her students generally and acknowledging her efforts at valuing their perspectives, rather than seeing herself as a failed teacher educator.

Researchers exploring their own experiences with diversity have also found a space at the Castle to dialogue with others about their challenges of fitting into White-majority university settings. Barbara McNeil (2010) described her journey of resistance to historical discourses that labelled her racially while she worked as a school librarian and then as a teacher educator. She explored the difficulties of integrating social justice perspectives in her teaching and the open resistance some students have to a nonwhite professor who insists on engaging students in anti-oppressive dialogues about White privilege and racial discrimination in schools and society. She wrote:

This paper grows out of a self-study that explores my public and private worlds as a racialized Other. It traverses my lived experience as an African-Canadian teacher-educator and how I represent myself in a faculty of education in Western Canada where the space is mapped and produced as white. (p. 160)

Barbara’s study led her to more fully understand the many complex issues facing professors who do not fit the stereotypes that students may expect to see. She also found a way forward to reimagine how to interact with students who questioned her authority and place in the academy.

The dialectical nature of the interpretive frames used in my self-study suggests that charting an anti-oppressive course forward implicates individuals (professor and students) and the institution. As I examine the experiences I shared earlier, I see that I did not take the time to sufficiently understand my teaching context and map a course of how to operate strategically and effectively within it. I did not see that, unlike my white colleagues who generally fit the students’ image of who can be a professor, I would need to act with more caution in introducing and undertaking issues related to race, social justice, and equity. (pp. 160–161)

Once she felt ready to share her findings, Barbara discovered supportive colleagues who gave her confidence to work toward building better relationships with her students.

Lis Bass (2002) posed thought-provoking questions at the beginning of her chapter:

I wanted to do a workshop on race and self-study with a colleague who is multi-racial, but ultimately he felt it was important to focus his work, to develop his scholarship in a “safer” environment. Most of us would be upset by the idea that the castle is not a safe place for working with issues of race; but then again, most of us don’t understand why self-study is white. Given our goals for better classrooms, our diverse students, and the diverse situations that they are going to teach in, how can we make self-study a better place for people of color? (p. 20)

Lis described her own life experiences where she tried to live her beliefs and values as a person who supports diversity and equity and the difficult consequences that ensued for her. Her auto-ethnography permitted her to reach out and examine the academic experience of herself and others through a critical lens. Lis wrote, “The power of writing a narrative, using it to do self-study, is that it is a process and a pathway towards change” (p. 20). Has the Castle been a safe place for teacher educators such as Lis to interrupt their narratives and to teach and learn from one another? Lis wrote that she was afraid that she had so many experiences outside the norm that others would discount her and not see their own stories as empowering them to do diversity work. While her experiences were not similar to most self-study researchers, the climate of the Castle Conference permitted a frank discussion about how each individual needs to find his or her own way into exploring diversity.

It was evident to the authors of this chapter and we anticipate will be clear to the reader also that diversity within the context of self-study research contains a broad range of meanings that is difficult to contain within clearly defined parameters. Self-study researchers are focused on many aspects of diversity because understanding our students and the students they will eventually teach is crucial to building the positive relationships necessary for optimal learning. What emerges from all of the papers discussed in the above section is that the self-study research that has been presented at the Castle Conference over the years has been focused on understanding teacher education practice, including all of the people involved in that practice, in order to improve it.

Theme 3: The Legitimation of Self-Study – Raising the Self-Study Child

In this theme we make explicit the struggle to ensure that self-study can take its rightful place in the research arena. It must be noted that we are now welcoming self-study researchers who have been taught by second-generation self-study researchers, who themselves have been influenced and taught by the earliest proponents of self-study. Hence, there is an implicit legitimacy inherent in this longevity. Many self-study researchers are proud to trace their research lineage through their Castle Conference associations. We now have third-generation members of the self-study of teaching and teacher education practices community, perhaps doctoral students doing self-study dissertations with professors who had done self-study dissertations. For them, the issue of whether or not self-study was a legitimate form of research that could be accepted for a peer-reviewed publication might be hard to understand. However, before there was a handbook for qualitative research, or a Carnegie Project for the Educational Doctorate, the goal of legitimacy for self-study research and its practitioners was not guaranteed.

In the proceedings of the first Castle Conference, Ardra Cole and Gary Knowles (1996) pointed to the challenge of legitimacy for self-study:

How do we, as a community of researchers committed to self-study both in theory and in practice, create a legitimate space for ourselves and our work both within our own institutions and within the broader teacher education and academic communities? (p. 68)

Their question also sets up the two faces of legitimacy of self-study: one facing outward as an academic discipline to be taken seriously among other disciplines and facing inward as individuals who strive to have their self-study work taken seriously in their careers. Ardra and Gary captured well the struggles to be taken seriously in those early years:

How is the status quo challenged by self-study? Those of us who have had our self-study work (or other reflexive accounts) reviewed for publication by unsympathetic contemporaries can attest to the conserving nature of the review and publication process. Collectively, we are all too familiar with having our work characterized as “narcissistic”, “self-indulgent”, “egocentric”, “solipsistic”, and so on ….The reward structure of the academy is straightforward and, for the most part, universal. Publications are most meritorious; the more the better, of a particular perspective, style, or genre, and in prestigious refereed journals.... Research, by extension, should follow the scientific doctrines of positivism and meet criteria of objectivity, measurement and quantification, predictability, and generalizability, and be presented in relatively detached, impersonal ways. Self-study research is antithetical to all of these principles…. Publicized research that is both personal and practical in its orientation not only endangers the reputation of the academy but also is, by virtue of its very nature, part of a political agenda to challenge traditional conceptions of what counts as knowledge and research. (pp. 70–71)

Eleven conferences later, the sense that self-study researchers are crusaders, intent on politicizing teacher education and positioning self-study as a scholarly endeavor, has lessened, for the most part. At each Castle Conference, we celebrate more and more publications, doctoral students defending self-study dissertations and getting jobs as assistant professors, successful bids for tenure and/or promotion, and moves into administrative roles – department head, dean, director of teacher education, and more. One might be tempted to think that legitimacy is no longer an issue. There are, however, counter stories, such as Dawn Garbett’s (2012) multiple bids for promotion detailed in the Community theme above. And it continues, for example, in Brandon Butler’s (2016) documentation of his institution’s reluctance to acknowledge self-study research as scholarly work. Brandon was advised to use more rigorous qualitative methods in his work as he pursued tenure. In a personal communication serving as an epilogue to this story, he reported:

In response to the feedback received from review committees, I completed several articles that used more “traditional” qualitative methods deemed appropriate by senior faculty. However, I ignored the feedback for the most part. Having “proven” that I could conduct a wide array of qualitative studies, I returned to research largely dominated by self-study. And for good reason. I had already built a research trajectory with self-study and an increasing presence within the field and positive relationships with those who conducted self-study. As a result, I received highly positive external review letters and easily achieved promotion and tenure – even though two years before I was told by an administrator that I would never achieve tenure as a self-study scholar.

Nevertheless, in over two decades of Castle Conferences, the striving for legitimacy has had enough successes that in a follow-up to the call for papers for the twelfth biennial conference, the program chairs felt compelled to remind authors that “we are committed to pushing the boundaries through fresh thinking. The conference organizers wanted to emphasize that the community is never settling for ordinary and is always challenging ourselves to exceed expectations,” explaining that “The theme Pushing boundaries and crossing borders: Self-study as a means for knowing pedagogy encourages delegates to explore how the methodology of self-study can be challenged, enriched, and/or extended by new theories and ways of thinking” (https://mailchi.mp/22b81683e709/castle-conference-newsletter?e=4918ed6663). Is self-study in danger of becoming too comfortable or even complacent in its current level of legitimacy in teaching and teacher education practices? Is there a new generation of self-study beginning to form under the radar that will need to engage its own fight for legitimacy? Perhaps a closer look at the ways legitimation played out in Castle Conferences and beyond will help us to be alert to answers to these questions.

Legitimacy: Facing Outward

Departing for the moment from the grounds of Herstmonceux, a brief look at the matrix from which self-study arose might give the issue of legitimacy a broader context. One ancient form of establishing legitimacy is, as it is called in India, the guru parampara, the lineage from teacher to student, who then becomes teacher to more students, through the ages. One mimeographed template for the dissertation of education doctoral students used to require a historical section in the first chapter of the dissertation, and many such documents a half century or more ago located the topic of research in a line starting with the pre-Socratics, or even with Confucius, or at least with Rousseau or Dewey. While no longer quite so ritualized, historical contexts still are found in many descriptions of self-study theory and methods. Indeed, we started this chapter with the history of the Castle, and in this section of the Handbook, Cheryl Craig and Gayle Curtis (Chap. 3, “Theoretical Roots of Self-Study Research”) trace the theoretical roots of self-study, historically. Therefore, a brief history of struggles for legitimacy for education research might be useful in understanding some of our current practices and in preparing for continued relevance in the future.

The concept of legitimacy is one that involves power; it is a political issue. Who has the power to decide legitimacy is a question that has never been answered for long without a challenge. In An Elusive Science: The Troubling History of Education Research, Ellen Lagemann (2000) provided more than a century of background that might serve as a context for self-study’s quest for legitimacy. In the early years of the twentieth century, John Dewey’s laboratory-school-based approach to education research was more complex than the behaviorism of educationists, like Edward Thorndike, who used quantitative methods and looked for lawlike regularities. The latter sought:

to be just as scientific as their university peers, while also gaining the status and authoritativeness of established professionals, especially doctors …. what is best described as Thorndike’s triumph and Dewey’s defeat was an important event in the molding of educational scholarship. (Lagemann 2000, pp. 21–22)

Practitioners of education – teachers at all levels – were subjects of researchers, not researchers themselves, and the questions driving the studies came from the disciplines, not from teachers’ interests or needs. However, even so, in the “contested terrain” of the disciplines versus education not being seen as a discipline, “when educational scholarship was professionalized, it was viewed with contempt by noneducationists; when it was discipline-based, it was shunned by students, who wanted ‘recipes for practice’” (Lagemann 2000, p. 179).

This situation started to change in the last quarter of the twentieth century when the hegemony of a narrow positivist psychology began to be challenged for its inability to go beyond the individual as unit of analysis and explain the complexity of educational systems, of teacher-student relationships, and of social and cultural forces. In 1982, Ray C. Rist, in the Institute for Program Evaluation of the US General Accounting Office, famously took to task “the limitations in the view that ‘what cannot be measured cannot be important’” (p. 439). He pointed to the dissolution through the 1970s of the scientific method of experimentation as the only legitimate method for educational research and the rise of the application of qualitative methods to educational questions and processes. The Qualitative Research Special Interest Group of AERA was established several years after Rist’s statement. Qualitative Inquiry in Education: The Continuing Debate (Eisner and Peshkin 1990) was the result of a conference at Stanford University in 1988. In the introduction to their book, the editors described the lingering power of quantitative methods in education:

Notwithstanding noteworthy progress in the development and reception of qualitative research, the tradition has denigrators who remain uncomfortable with a nonquantitative approach to research. At best, they are uneasy with what they view as a rival paradigm: They are reacting to the fact of competition. At worst, they dismiss it as unworthy of the name of scholarship: They are reacting to the perception that science is _______. They fill the blank, and it happens to contain what they do….In the encounter between quantitative and qualitative researchers, albeit a lopsided one favoring the former, the politics of method emerged …. It involved, as politics always does, power, resources, control, policy making, and personnel. (p. 2)

Continuing this rise of qualitative methods from the 1980s into the early 1990s, educationists with roots in disciplines outside of psychology began to reconceptualize education. For some the work was primarily theoretical, applying critical theories influenced by Marxism and the Frankfurt School. For others, the models for new ways of framing questions and for carrying out research came from participatory action research in labor and from other movements where the practitioners were respected and enlisted as co-researchers. Together with a flurry of new AERA special interest groups, including no less than four with “critical” in their names, which both used qualitative research methods and stated social justice aims for improving education, self-study took its place in the academy.

Publications of handbooks not only witnessed but further conferred methodological, if not disciplinary, legitimacy to methods used in self-study – first the Handbook of Qualitative Research (Denzin and Lincoln 1994) and a decade later, the first handbook of self-study, International Handbook of Self-Study of Teaching and Teacher Education Practices (Loughran et al. 2004). Peer-reviewed journals began to accept and publish self-studies, and in 2005, self-study’s own journal, Studying Teacher Education, issued its first volume. Despite these bulwarks to protect the growth of legitimacy for self-study, individual tales like Dawn Garbett’s (2012) and Brandon Butler’s (2016) make clear that the job is not done. They attest to a continuing need to make the case to powerful decision-makers at individual institutions that self-study is an accepted and acceptable method of research, worthy of reward with hiring, tenure, promotion, and gradually taking on those positions of power by scholars of self-study themselves. Thus, we return to the Castle to trace the ways in which legitimacy has been addressed internally in the Castle Conference community.

Legitimacy: Facing Inward

While the second theme of diversity emerged as a distinguishable theme in titles of papers across the proceedings, only one title directly addressed legitimacy: “Legitimising living standards of practice and judgment: How do I know that I have influenced you for good?” (Whitehead 2000). Reporting on his progress since the 1998 conference, Jack Whitehead described the long process of getting acceptance for his action research as a dissertation, having “learnt about creative compliance in meeting standards of originality of mind and critical judgment in graduating with his Ph.D. from the University of Bath in June 2000” (p. 252). Even looking for synonyms of legitimacy in titles – authorization, authority, regulation, and so on – failed to surface other papers along those lines.

Given the autobiographical nature of self-study, however, a number of papers have included as content, if not as focus, data about opposition encountered in career development as a self-study researcher. The examples of Dawn Garbett (2012) and more recently of Brandon Butler (2016) provide data about continuing issues of legitimacy of self-study in bids for tenure and/or promotion in the academy, particularly in research-oriented rather than primarily teaching-oriented institutions. In response to the needs of participants to have more than “just” a conference presentation to count as scholarly work to show to their employers, a number of changes have occurred over time in Castle Conference procedures.

The first few conference proceedings primarily were means for participants to share papers with each other, available when they arrived at the Castle, assisting in making decisions about sessions to attend and encouraging the audience to come prepared with questions or comments. But they became a springboard for wider distribution. Informally, proceedings editors would identify contributors who adhered to the conference theme and then invite them to expand their papers to chapter length for inclusion in a series of books that arose from the conferences. However, with the fourth conference, in 2002, requests from members for a more prestigious entry on their curriculum vitae led to securing an ISBN number, which has continued for all subsequent Castle Conference volumes. And, with the fifth conference, in 2004, to accommodate the needs of an increasing number of participants whose home institutions would not reimburse their travel otherwise, a double-masked peer review process was instituted for both the proposals and the resulting papers. While continuing the masked peer review, the next step in increasing prestige for conference papers (as far as institutions define it) began in 2016 with the papers appearing as chapters in a bound book published in advance of the meeting. However, from 2018, the book of Castle papers will only be available in electronic form, with no hard copy format at all, with open access on a website. The decision to shift to an open access web repository was made in order to maximize exposure of the work to an outside audience. Given the importance at some institutions of citations to one’s publications as a factor in bids for tenure and promotion, chapters that can be downloaded are more available to a wider audience. Earlier proceedings that were only in paper form have been digitized, so that all proceedings are now accessible on the Castle website (https://www.castleconference.com/conference-history.html).

One Castle Conference tradition is that on the last morning of the conference, a plenary session is held in which all participants engage in debriefing the conference highlights, pinpointing areas for improvement, brainstorming themes for the next conference, and other activities for the general welfare of the community. In 2004, at the close of the fifth conference, the editors asked for feedback on the new double-masked review process. A concern was raised about the wording of questions for reviewers to answer about the proposal or paper being reviewed: Might they constrain the process so much that nontraditional papers would be eliminated? Three people who in the past had been among the more creative presenters – having used art, music, and video – volunteered to join the questioner in coming up with a better form for reviewers to use. In 2006, the sixth conference did include nontraditional papers or presentations at the end of the proceedings as had been done in 2004 to accommodate participants who did not have a standard research paper (e.g., an invitation to a visual presentation of a photo inquiry, works in progress to which participants were invited to give feedback). However, starting in 2008, the proceedings only included full papers, virtually all with a standard research paper format. As the Castle Conference procedures for accepting contributions from delegates evolved to ensure that they are rigorously reviewed by peers and that the work is of a high scholarly standard, might some of the support for research in progress and for nontraditional formats have been muted, if not lost?

One of the contributing factors to a more rigorous review process is the physical limitations of the Castle venue. The conference has continued to grow in its popularity, but the number of attendees is restricted by the Castle site to 150. In 2018, there were 125 proposals submitted – a similar number to 2016 when there were 120. This was a considerable increase from 2014 when 93 proposals were submitted. The authors of 70 proposals were invited to submit full papers – with a final acceptance rate in 2016 and 2018 of around 50%. This acceptance rate compares with 73% in 2014, 77% in 2010, and 66% in 2008. The average number of accepted papers across the years is 58 papers, always constrained, in addition to the quality assurance of the review process, by the accommodation limit of 150 (see Table 1 below).

Table 1 Castle Proceedings descriptive statistics
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One of the results of the tighter review process seems to be an increase in citations in the reference list. Once self-study researchers no longer needed to look outward at critics and be apologetic for using qualitative rather than quantitative methods, the guru parampara, the list of “begats” in which an author positioned herself or himself by using citations, spoke to a more internal audience. The literature review that establishes a conceptual framework as well as empirical precedents for the research question and the methods used to answer it now is scrutinized by reviewers whose judgments determine what counts as self-study research worthy of competitive slots on a limited program. And at least some reviewers recommend that the writer add self-study citations if they are notably lacking in the conceptual framework or methods. Although each of the first four proceedings had at least one paper, if not a mode, with no reference list, after the masked peer review began, all papers had at least a minimum of two references cited and a mode of ten or more (see Table 1). Over time, while there were fluctuations depending on the measure of central tendency, numbers of references cited have risen, even as they began to be counted against the total word limit (see Fig. 2). The first editors asked for minimal references in their call for papers for the proceedings:

Fig. 2
figure 2

Average number of references in papers by Castle Conference year

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In light of the editor’s request to minimize references in order to make easier her task of collecting papers via e-mail, I will merely cite the names of various writers whose work has strongly influenced this piece. (Trumbull 1996, p. 143)

In an email about the second conference, sent out by Tom Russell in February 1998, the editors set a word limit of 2500 plus a 100-word abstract, with no specifics about references. They explained:

This limit is necessary given the large number of presentation papers and our attempt to keep the printing costs down. The papers are more likely to be summaries than fully elaborated papers. The abstracts will facilitate thematic organization. Presenters are free to bring longer copies of their papers to Herstmonceux for distribution at their session.

From 2002 until 2016, the 3000-word limit excluded references; in 2016, the word limit rose to 4000 but now included references (see Table 1). When citations continue to rise even when the trade-off is to have fewer words in text, is this evidence that expectations about the nature of the contribution have become more traditional? Or perhaps are reviewers encouraging more conservative or traditional approaches? On the other hand, may it just be a function of the success of self-study, that more and more publications offer more and more connections for a researcher to make to work that has gone before? In that case, self-study could be following the recommendations that Kenneth Zeichner (2007) made for ways “to accumulate knowledge across these individual studies in a way that will influence policy makers and other teacher education practitioners” (p. 43).

As self-study scholars and practitioners continue their work into the future, there is a danger that the review process could reproduce the politics of method such that, to paraphrase Elliott Eisner and Alan Peshkin (1990), “They are reacting to the perception that [self-study] is _______. They fill the blank, and it happens to contain what they do” (p. 2). Instead we need to keep questing for “how the methodology of self-study can be challenged, enriched, and/or extended by new theories and ways of thinking” (Castle 12 call for proposals as quoted above). While facing outward, self-study seems to have found a legitimate place within qualitative research methodologies and among those who acknowledge that education is a discipline with theory and methods proper to itself, not just a field in which other disciplines apply their theories and methods. But at any institution in which teachers and teacher educators conduct self-study research, individuals may yet find people in power who question their claims to have self-study count in the advancement of their careers. One challenge for self-study as it moves forward is to balance the need for criteria that claim legitimacy in such a way that individuals are supported to develop as self-study scholars but without constraining what counts as self-study so much that it prevents the expansion and development of self-study itself.

Conclusion

In discussing what stood these conferences apart from the others, one of the authors recounted her first experience of attending a Castle Conference – one that is no doubt shared by others. The excitement of seeing the Castle was quickly followed by disappointment that the actual accommodation was in the “rather dumpy” Bader International Study Centre halls of residence set a 5-min walk away through the woods. Walking alone to the Castle for the first shared meal was pleasant, but entering the dining hall was daunting. Everybody seemed to know everyone else. People were talking and laughing like long-lost friends as they queued for the buffet-style meal. And then, right behind our neophyte delegate – a friendly face, a warm smile, and sincere greeting. “Is this your first conference? Will you join me? I want to hear all about you!” This was a genuine invitation to share self, to engage in conversation, and to discuss teacher education. In that exchange, our first-time Castle Conference attendee was welcomed to the community and was no longer alone. This camaraderie and sense of being at home is an abiding memory for many delegates.

The tranche of self-study of teacher education practices research gathered together in the conference proceedings represents the work of a community that seeks to understand the knowledge created on a day-to-day basis at the microlevel of education as individuals grapple with the complex nature of practice. Every self-study has at its core an imperative to improve practice and to enhance learning opportunities for teacher educators, student teachers, and, in turn, the students with whom these professionals interact and for the institutions and systems in which they work. Self-study researchers are inquiring professionals, deeply committed to understanding themselves and their practices for the purposes of the improvement of education. Focusing on one’s self is perhaps the hardest transition to make as a practitioner-researcher. It can seem far less demanding to research someone else’s practice and to measure their effectiveness or impact rather than holding oneself to account.

As we look toward future conferences, we are mindful of where we have come from. In the beginning, pioneers innovated and adapted qualitative methods such as action research and reflective practices. This was a time of dynamism and flexibility. As noted, many so-called self-studies in the conferences prior to the 2004 Handbook (Loughran et al. 2004) would not have made the cut in later proceedings. They did not adhere to Vicki LaBoskey’s (2004) criteria. The second phase of the Castle Conference era, spanning the middle decade, saw a consolidation around, and fidelity to, a standard fare. Both stages are vital to establish a robust community. In the latter stages, through the editorship of Dawn Garbett and Alan Ovens (2014–2018), there has been a conscious effort on their part to encourage self-study researchers to return to more innovative approaches and a willingness to push the boundaries of what is and isn’t considered acceptable to the community. In this “coming of age,” self-study researchers are now positioned to extend, challenge, communicate, and promote their own blend of practitioner research. They are also in a position to give voice to others and to acknowledge, respect, and respond to voices different from their own.

In this chapter, the authors have highlighted events, papers, and people to give a reader a sense of the vibrancy of Castle Conference. Self-study has evolved and flourished within this enclave. Self-study researchers have picked up the rallying cry that teaching about teaching is a scholarly endeavor. They have gone forth to spread the word as though their professional lives depended upon it.

Cross-References

Theoretical Roots of Self-Study Research