Abstract:

The field of teacher education is researched extensively from diverse perspectives and using multiple methodologies and theories to better understand the processes involved in becoming a teacher. One particular methodology that has firmly established itself in teacher education research is that of self-study— a research design based in the call for “educators to study and theorize their own professional practice as a means to improve education” (Sandretto, 2009, p. 91). Thus far, however, this methodology has been kept in relative isolation from strong theoretical framings such as Bourdieu's social field theory. In this paper, I propose that self-study and Bourdieu's social field theory (BSFT) create a productive pairing of methodology and theory, one that holds great potential for stimulating critical conversation in educational research and in the specific context of mathematics teacher education research.

The research discussed in this paper is a self-study of my practice as a faculty supervisor for secondary mathematics student teachers during their four-month school field placement. The purpose of the research study is to explore how the network of relations in (the field of) field experience shapes me as a supervisor and as a mathematics teacher educator, including how my own habitus and identity are being (re)produced through the discursive practices in/of the field. In this paper, I introduce my research in the field of teacher education in the context of proposing a new theory-methodology conceptualization which I refer to as a Bourdieu-informed discourse analysis (BIDA) (Author, in press).

The BIDA framework draws on a blend of self-study methodology, the conceptual tools of Bourdieu’s sociological theory, and a mathematics graph theory network analogy to unpack the structures and discourses of the field and my role as a faculty supervisor within that field. Combining aspects of critical discourse analysis (CDA) (Jäger & Maier, 2009) and Bourdieu’s own methodological approach to self-analysis (Bourdieu, 2008), the BIDA framework is conceptualized as a three-phase (tri-focal) lens to guide an interrogation of self-study data. The three lenses are: (a) the lens of the research object habitus and field, (b) the lens of the role of Others in the network, and (c) the lens of reflexivity. Ultimately, the pairing of self-study and Bourdieu’s social field theory works to trouble the discursive network of relations in (the field of) university teacher education field experience and my practice as a supervisor. In the broader context of educational research, the introduction of the BIDA framework contributes a dialectical methodology-theory construction to the field.

References:
[1] Author (in press).
[2] Bourdieu, P. (2008). Sketch for self-analysis (Translation by R. Nice). Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
[3] Jäger, S., & Maier, F. (2009). Theoretical and methodological aspects of Foucauldian critical discourse analysis and dispositive analysis. In R. Wodak & M. Meyer (Eds.), Methods of critical discourse analysis (pp. 34-61). London, UK: Sage.
[4] Sandretto, S. (2009). Theoretical and methodological tensions in a poststructural, collaborative self-study research project. Studying teacher education: A journal of self-study of teacher education practices, 5(1), 89-101.

Keywords:

Teacher education, Bourdieu, theory, methodology, mathematics education, self-study.