The writer's journey : research and transformation

This chapter explores the premise that the scholarly significance of a revitalised dialogic culture in research education can be explicitly built in to preservice teacher education pedagogy. Specifically, it explores how dialogic encounters with self and others are both explicitly and serendipitously operationalized as pedagogical moments in teacher-writer researcher education. McAlpine and Amundsen (2009: 124) signify the role of dialogue for the professional self: What students experience in the academic workplace is guided by both complementary and competing motives and goals. Individuals are shaping an understanding of the academic self, based on a constant dialogue with the communities with which they wish to become identified … and with which they may find themselves in tension. Teachers who write and research are weaving professional repertoires of practice through reflective critique of their own and others ideas expressed in art works, cultural installations, plays, poetry, short stories, thesis documents, journal articles and even book chapters. Expressing themselves through such diverse genres enables an ever-evolving criticality that intertwines personal and professional nourishment that is essential for capability development (Sen, 1999 & 2010). Education research workforce capability development is significant in the context of national and international higher education policy agenda in research, teaching and learning (Bexley, James, Arkoudis, 2011; Edwards, 2010; Shulman, Golde, Bueschel & Garabedian, 2006). Accordingly, the development of teacher-writers could be viewed as a verdant site for researcher education.In this chapter, preservice teachers are framed deliberately as early-career teacher-writers, researching their practices as both writers-for-self and teachers of writing for others. They are already ‘in-service’ as teacher-writers as the introductory notes to this book attest. Teacher education academics constitute another group of teacher-writer researchers contributing intellectual strength to this book. Collectively and individually, these teacher-writer researchers are constructing their writing as sites and sources of knowledge production.