Imaginary Critical Friends

Three Perspectives on Practice
Self-StudyCritical FriendsDiffractive AnalysisPostqualitative Research
In this paper, I elaborate an approach to self-study undertaken on one’s own. I strive to foster inner critical friendship to defamiliarize my teaching practice enough to explore what might otherwise remain unseen. In doing so, I imagine myself in dialogue with the ideas of others, following two models for the process. I bring new theories to explore existing data and the conclusions I drew, to ask new questions, and to reposition myself: posthumanism, postcolonialism, and culturally sustaining pedagogy. I offer ruminations on the tensions I experienced, and while only a glimpse, they might provide inspiration for how this practice extends what’s possible for us to see in ourselves. I suggest this alternative to the critical friend approach to self-study, not in critique of the practice, but because I believe collaborators are not always easy to find. Conclusions include discussion of how the presentation of self-study as an act undertaken on one’s own might help prospective practitioners to entertain the idea of taking up this research tradition; how the borders and margins may contain the most insight, and so to embrace different methodologies is to strengthen our collective knowledge; and how postmodern texts are active and polyphonic, thus challenging the notion that sole authorship is indeed research done alone. New insight is available through different theoretical and methodological approaches, and I cast authors as my imaginary friends—our critical friendship provides a means for me to critique and reconstruct my practice.

Introduction

In this paper, I elaborate on an approach to self-study undertaken on one’s own. I strive to foster inner critical friendship (Ergas & Ritter, 2021) to defamiliarize my teaching practice enough to explore what might otherwise remain unseen. In doing so, I imagine myself in dialogue with the ideas of others, like Thomas’ (2018) search for her voice, following two models for the process (Jackson & Mazzei, 2013; Collier et al., 2015). I offer this rigorous alternative to the critical friend approach to self-study, not in critique of the practice, but because I believe collaborators are not always easy to find.

Critical Friends and the Self

Much of the great work in the field of self-study of teacher education practices (S-STEP) has utilized the support of critical friends (LaBoskey, 2004, p. 819). While one might assume that self-study occurs in solitude, the reality is just the opposite. Ergas and Ritter (2021) discuss how it may be that S-STEP practitioners and educational researchers are always striving for scientific legitimacy, a broader theme of the social sciences and their “physics envy” (they cite Philips, 2014): the distanced, objective researcher should not be written into the research.

However, subjectivity is part of being a researcher. Davidson (2012) explores a few iterations of subjectivity within research, concluding that the self is not a simple, static identity, nor is it rightfully or successfully cast aside for purposes of scientific objectivity. The self has a vitally important place in my work.

Beyond arguments for including the self in research, working alone may be construed as less rigorous. Denzin’s (1978) notion of investigator triangulation suggests as much, wherein the quality of data analysis is safeguarded through inclusion of multiple researchers and their unique perspectives. However, as an early career scholar, at times I have found it difficult to establish relationships for collaboration. Working by myself has been at times more feasible, a defense mechanism, or my preference.

I’m curious about the dearth of sole authorship within the field of S-STEP and offer a distinction between collaboration (i.e. with partners in research) and contribution (e.g. the support of editors and reviewers). Recently, I have undertaken generative, fulfilling collaborations, but I don’t imagine I’m the only one who has struggled to find reliable partners in research. Yet, it seems that critical friends are the rule, not the exception.

Ergas and Ritter (2021) asked, “What do self-study scholars mean when their research entails a focus on ‘self’?” (p. 4). They found that while the central feature of S-STEP may be the study of “one’s self, one’s actions, one’s ideas” (Hamilton & Pinnegar, 1998, p. 236), self-study researchers are “not only the selves doing the research, they are the selves being studied” (LaBoskey, 2004, p. 842). So, collaborators serve as a “sounding board” because of “the difficulty of assessing one's own practice and reframing it” (Schuck & Russell, 2005, p. 107). The goal may be overcoming the difficulty of self-assessment to reframe practice, which I attempt here.

Lighthall (2004) and later Diacopoulos and colleagues (2022) identified collaboration as a fundamental feature of S-STEP. In the interim, Studying Teacher Education devoted an issue that “affirm[s] the power of collaboration in self-study” (Kitchen et al., 2019, p. 94). I have benefited greatly in my teaching and my research from outside perspectives offered by critical collaborators, so the “power of collaboration” is not lost on me.

As a faculty member, my educator preparation program requires peer observation with written feedback. This feedback has not yet pushed me to encounter the unseen nuances of my practice, as Buchanon and Mooney (2022) experienced, so these exchanges do not constitute the deep inquiry that self-study calls for when promoting a collaborative methodology. Further, I am the only literacy teacher educator. Certainly, there are opportunities for cross-disciplinary collaboration that can be fruitful for improving practice (for example, Hohensee & Lewis, 2019; King et al., 2019), but intradisciplinary community is, for many of us in smaller programs, the realm of annual conferences of professional organizations.

I also wondered about the academic precariat: those piecing together employment as part-time faculty across multiple institutions and even state lines. Without the institutional resources to support research and funding for conference travel, are collaborations with critical friends possible? I honestly don’t know. I do know, however, that between my multiple research projects (some collaborative), teaching and service responsibilities, and family life with a toddler, critical friendships can sometimes be difficult to schedule—all within a larger context, as Bullough (2021) mentions, of pandemic and the isolation and Zoom fatigue that accompany it.

All this to say, the power of collaboration is real and I genuinely appreciate it. But it isn’t always practical, preferable, or even possible. Ergas and Ritter (2021) articulated my concern well:

The merit of collaborative efforts and critical friendship notwithstanding, we argue that these are options, not prescriptions. The more these become emphasized as standards, the more self is eroded. There are ways to cultivate a more trustworthy self in self-study that do not necessarily depend on others (p. 18).

Their elaboration of “Inner Critical Friendship” operates mainly at an ontological level, and I have found Pinar’s (1994) currere a helpful means of articulating the epistemological features of self. Here, I hope to cultivate a “trustworthy self” in a practical sense—from a methodological point of view. How can I develop an inner critical friendship that allows defamiliarization so I might explore the unseen nuances to assess my practice?

Process and Subject of Inquiry

I used two models to structure my inquiry, which takes the form of a diffractive analysis—a breaking-apart to learn more about constitutive parts. First, Jackson and Mazzei (2013), “plug in” by imagining three theorists “reading over our shoulder and asking a series of questions” (p. 265), allowing them to go beyond “interpretive imperatives that limit so-called ‘analysis’ and inhibits the inclusion of previously unthought ‘data’” (p. 262). In other words, I imagine questions from theorists to help me probe deeper into my practice, beyond where my personal blinders might create a false horizon.

Similarly, Collier and friends (2014) applied three methodologies to a data excerpt. They note that “reflexivity is not straightforward, and carrying out reflexivity in isolation can create additional challenges” (Collier et al., 2014, p. 390). I face those challenges as I explore a data excerpt in isolation by plugging in three theories. I began this project “unsure of where it would take” me, and understood it as “a process that has no clear conclusion” (Collier et al., 2014, p. 392). I am exploring data, evoking questions, and experimenting with an analytic process with the hope that it might inspire curiosity among prospective self-study researchers to not be dismayed by limited access to critical friends.

Context of the Study

Not long ago, I examined my practice as a teacher educator implementing a service-learning project in which prospective teachers engaged with the cultural and linguistic diversity of our local community through a language tutoring program (McCarthy, 2021). Now in a new but similar context—a teacher education program at a predominately White institution—I have begun to revisit some of my past thinking, informed by current scholarship in S-STEP and new theoretical frameworks.

Vital to this revisiting is a fluid notion of self across time and vantage points. By looking back at the self that was, I identify new possibilities for the becoming (Berry, 2020) self while troubling the notion of the self. As Bullough (2021) testifies, “Rich and diverse resources make comparison possible and fruitful as means for exposing the ‘Me’ and its voices and for revealing and perhaps correcting distortions of the ‘I’” (p. 10). Comparison through a new view of an old self-study allows me to fruitfully interrogate my practice. This re-imagining of my work in the past informs my work in the future, re-casting that work through diffractive introspection.

Originally, I had collaborated with a community tutoring program to provide an opportunity for prospective teachers to gain experience with multilingual learners. Self-studies into teacher educators’ critical practices around preparing prospective teachers to engage with students from marginalized populations have recently contributed to self-study (e.g. Maestranzi et al., 2021; McCarthy, 2018; Morettini et al., 2019). The original pedagogical project took place at a large state university in the American Midwest.

Now, as I pause at the threshold of a new semester in a new context that feels familiar, I bring new theories to contemplate my takeaways from that initial study, “inviting…writers to walk alongside me as critical partners” (Thomas, 2018, p. 329). I center the concept of diffraction. Mazzei’s (2014) diffractive analysis “emphasizes difference by breaking open the data…by decentering and destabilizing…the subject, interpretation, categorical similarity” and results in “multiplicity, ambiguity, and incoherent subjectivity” (p. 743). Diffraction therefore offers another perspective, and in addition to reflection, it may provide new ways of understanding self and others, and data. Where reflection imagines a unified, unitary self, diffraction asks us to see difference (i.e. the other) within.

I had intended for the service-learning experience to allow prospective teachers to experience—in an authentic way—the diversity of the world, literature, and their future classrooms. My initial argument was that authenticity is paradoxical in teaching: striving for authenticity often precludes the possibility of achieving it; the organic emergence of authenticity is excluded by an intention to create it (McCarthy, 2021). Now, at the threshold of a re-viewing and diffractive analysis, I come with new questions.

Like Maestranzi and colleagues (2021), who suggest we have a “responsibility to prepare ourselves via self-work before we attempt to engage teachers in critical discussions and reflections” (p. 19), I feel the urge to trouble my subjectivity and to find the interference patterns within my past reflections in preparation for new teaching. Like Morettini and colleagues (2019), who found that researchers’ prior expectations and modeling shaped outcomes and responses to critical conversations, I strive to untether my expectations of what was from what will come.

Data Generation

Self-study practices (e.g. Loughran, 2005) guide this theoretical exercise in re-viewing, however, the project in its original form has concluded. This research follows the concept of diffractive analysis (Barad, 2014; Mazzei, 2014) to re-view that work and the self that engaged in self-study.

The original project was determined exempt by an Institutional Review Board. Participants were prospective teachers who were mostly White, monolingual, middle-class women, 19-20 years old—a common demographic description for students in university-based teacher education programs. The service learning project paired students in my class with members of the university community who were not native speakers of English. The sample I am re-viewing is what I described as an exemplar case. This student achieved what I had intended and more, but I also used the counterpoint of this example as the exception that proves the rule: my conclusions were reinforced, not rethought—until now.

Data Sample

Paige [was paired] with a Spanish-speaking partner from Colombia. Following Paige’s initial meeting with Sofi (a pseudonym), she was “very excited to be meeting with her once a week” and referred to Sofi as “a very sweet, genuine person who I know I will enjoy spending time with.” Paige was clearly ready to have a relationship that exceeded the course requirements.
Like most students in the course, Paige learned about where Sofi is from (Colombia) and how she came to the US. [As a result,] Paige’s investment in Spanish had tangible benefit, and Sofi had a valued/able fund of knowledge. While Paige was involved initially as a teacher—positioned as such through the program—her first meeting with Sofi established fluid power dynamics and reciprocity. As Paige recalled in her reflection [they engaged in translanguaging and an exchange of language]. Their relationship became one of reciprocity and interdependence, and allowed them both to have experiences that challenged the self/other binary, and was therefore quite authentic.
On the last day of class, Paige wrote that of all the course assignments and projects, the “most meaningful for me was meeting with my conversation partner.” I argue that it was meaningful because she developed an authentic relationship. Despite my role in providing the opportunity for that to happen, I cannot attribute her success to any guidance I provided. Otherwise, more students would have had similar experiences, and unfortunately, only a handful of the twenty-odd students came anywhere near to authentic relationships (adapted from McCarthy, 2021).

Three Perspectives

To engage in diffractive analysis of qualitative data is to “read…texts through, with, and in relation to each other” in order to “to pose a set of diffractive questions” (Mazzei, 2014, p. 744). Beyond the sociocultural theories that I applied in my initial analysis, I bring new theories to explore this data and the conclusions I drew, to ask new questions, and to reposition myself:

Like Thomas (2018), I found that “these works can provide comfort across the borderlands of discursive discomfort…while also ‘schooling’ us in the vocabulary we need to speak for ourselves” (p. 329). I offer ruminations on the tensions (Berry, 2007) I experienced, and while only a glimpse, they might provide inspiration for how this practice extends what’s possible for us to see in ourselves.

Posthumanism

In short, posthumanism is a rethinking of the centrality of human experience. We are connected to the biosphere and to material assemblages, communities, and people. I read Braidotti (2019) as part of an academic course, highlighted her words on the page, synthesized meaning across my teaching and personal worlds. The process was nonlinear, multivalent, and amorphous, but also one in which many readers similarly engage; at once common and idiosyncratic.

As I imagine Braidotti (2019) reading over my shoulder, she thinks of posthuman subjectivity. Subjectivity is an ensemble, so she asks me, What makes you think that Paige and Sofi existed separate from one another? Life is “co-constructed and jointly articulated in a common world” (p. 175). I wonder, are authentic relationships simply a way of understanding when humans have come to be together? Braidotti (2019) names the subject: “‘We’-who-are-not-one-and-the-same-but-are-in- this-convergence-together” (p. 182). I believe I started to understand this notion through the erasure of the self/other binary, but at the time I was unable to articulate a shift in subjectivity to thinking beyond the individual human as sole position.

In my practice, I never invited the partners, like Sofi, to attend our class. I never had everyone meet as a group. I never met any of the partners. I created the opportunity for the experience, but I never became part of We. I was never in it together with them. I concluded that there exists a paradox: if I assign students to experience something, they will not authentically and fully participate as if it were their idea; but if I don’t assign it, they wouldn’t experience it at all. Maybe there’s more to it than me sending them into an experience, hoping for the best. Perhaps I could become part of the ensemble, or better yet, perhaps the class and their partners could come together in ways that made visible the richness of relationships like Paige and Sofi had developed.

Braidotti (2019) writes of affirmative ethics: “Subjects are animated by the positivity of an ontological desire that orients them towards the freedom to express all they are capable of becoming” (p. 155). Writing off my assignment as paradoxical and out of my control seems rather cynical in retrospect. Perhaps there is a way to engage students, to produce authentic relationships in service learning. I just might need to keep trying, and in the process, to better position myself as part of We.

Postcolonialism

Postcolonialism emerged as a critical response to colonial thinking and organization of the world. Colonialism thrived on a unitary voice in the room, that of the colonizing European powers, capitalistic and patriarchal. Postcolonialism is the voice of the Othered, entering the conversation, critiquing theories and logics. Again, I read and tried to internalize the often dense concepts, concurrent with my own growth in critique of the axes of privilege from which I benefit. This process is unique to my identity work, but not exclusionary.

Spivak (1994) enters into conversation with Foucault, Deleuze, Marx, Said, and others in her articulation of ideological and material marginalization. Building upon my critique of my practice (that I never met the partners), the question I imagine her asking me is obvious: Why were the voices of the partners silenced? Are you not participating in the “continuing construction of the subaltern” (p. 90)? Many of the partners were, to use her phrase, “third world women” and my silencing of them is an example of epistemic violence. As a researcher, it wouldn’t be possible for me to understand the degree of authenticity of a relationship when I heard only from students in my class. As a teacher, I never processed the desires of the partners except through my discussions with the director of the program.

Revisiting my decisions at the time, in my defense I had a dissertation to write and any data outside of a researcher’s control (perhaps an imperialist tendency) were not guaranteed. After failed studies, I centered my research on my own teaching, my courses, and students involved in them. I didn’t want to pursue participants who may not respond. As a result, I designed their silence into my work. How often does this situation arise in self-study? When we intend to explore our own practices, do we silence the voices of students or other stakeholders? These are the contributors we cannot escape, even when collaborators may be difficult to find. Sadly, even if we cannot escape them, we do erase them.

Spivak (1994) concludes that “The subaltern cannot speak” (p. 104), but it goes against my purported philosophy to ensure that they cannot. While I don’t have the opportunity to rectify my silencing of the partners, I can strive to do better as a researcher in that regard. As a teacher educator, I can aim to include more voices and perspectives in my courses. While I consciously assign academic readings that represent the plurality of scholars, there are other stakeholders for whom I can share the podium: children, administrators, and teachers, for instance. I can also ask my students to seek out those voices as part of the assignments they undertake in my courses—in fact, I’m trying now.

Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy

The evolution of asset-based pedagogies has seen cultural relevance and responsiveness and then began to focus on sustaining culture through our teaching. As Paris (2012) is the only theorist here whose work I had read at the time of the original study, I have engaged in these concepts with students and colleagues for a number of years, including: “What is the purpose of schooling in a pluralistic society?” (Paris, 2012, p. 95). This question brings me to an oft-encountered fork in the road: K-12, where my students will end up teaching; or college, the context of my course. As this has remained a tension throughout my work as a teacher educator, I consider it in relation to this tangible moment in my teaching.

As for K-12, Paris (2012) is pretty clear: our pedagogies should “support young people in sustaining the cultural and linguistic competence of their communities while simultaneously offering access to dominant cultural competence” (p. 95). In re-viewing my analysis of Paige’s case, she exemplified a quality that is often missing among pre-service teachers: an inclination toward multilingual thinking, or valuing the ways of knowing and being that accompany being a speaker of multiple languages or languages other than English. Paige was ready to learn and improve her Spanish, and that open-mindedness may apply to future students. Recreating Paige’s experience for other pre-service teachers would help develop that mindset and the resulting interest “in sustaining and extending the richness of our pluralist society” (Paris, 2012, p. 96). I want to continue working toward this goal with students, even though I have no institutional power to, for example, require a foreign language minor.

When I consider Paris’ question in the context of a predominantly White institution without foreign language requirements for education majors, I wonder about the missed opportunities. Our pluralistic society is not represented in many university-based educator preparation programs. I feel helpless in the face of recruitment and retention of teachers of color, and in the overarching national emergency of deprofessionalized, ridiculed, and under-resourced teachers. My own teaching practice does little to bring new students into the field, and I have no way to know if what I’ve done helps keep anyone in the classroom after they’ve become teachers. Those questions are beyond self-study, collaborative or not. I can choose to be affirmative and continually strive to be better.

Conclusion

There’s quite a bit I’m trying to express here, and I evoke more questions than I provide answers. I began with a discussion of how collaboration appears to be the norm in the field of self-study. To me, the presentation of self-study as an act undertaken on one’s own might help prospective practitioners take up this research tradition. I think it’s vital to the field that we continue to consider, using Ergas and Ritter’s (2021) terms, a range of options and that we not prescribe the means by which scholars contribute to the field. That argument is not new (see Hamilton, 2005; Thomas, 2018), but my hope is that I have added some practical methodological pieces to consider.

The approach I have undertaken to defamiliarize myself with my practice is also not new, as models for recasting experience through different theoretical (Jackson & Mazzei, 2013) or methodological (Collier et al., 2014) lenses have been effective elsewhere. I believe these models exist outside the mainstream in terms of influencing research design. I have hoped to bring these studies into focus for self-study practitioners. Further, one might work with colleagues to make diffractive analysis collaborative through shared readings to revisit reflections on teaching.

I also have the feeling that the continued efforts to raise the bar in terms of rigor, across studies arguing for critical friendship and elsewhere, come in reaction to the marginalization of self-study within the broader field of educational research. My experience suggests that the borders and margins contain the most insight, and so to embrace different methodologies is to strengthen our collective knowledge. It also creates new entry points to consider student learning: asking students to synthesize across readings and to view experiences through theoretical lenses outside of their usual could improve the rather banal reflections I tend to receive.

Finally, I have revisited an already completed, published study. My story of Paige becomes a twice-told tale, and it’s uncommon for qualitative data to undergo secondary analysis. “Under normal circumstances,” writes Nilges (2001), “publication represents at least a partial closing of the door on a given study” (p. 232). She goes on to discuss the widespread position that qualitative research

simultaneously constructs and mediates reality as information is filtered from field site, to paper, to text, to reader. It is methodologically unsound…to ignore what it means to “write-up” qualitative research at a point in time when a direct link between experience and textualization can no longer be assumed… (Nilges, 2001, p. 232)

Ultimately, postmodern texts are active, polyphonic, and bring the author and reader together through the text (Nilges, 2001). This polyphony is exactly the reason why I believe sole authorship is not equivalent to working completely alone: we stand on the shoulders of giants, and we gain insight from the passing conversations with colleagues as we settle into a professional development session. There are many voices represented here, despite my name sitting alone upon this paper.

New insight is available through different theoretical and methodological approaches. I am simply casting those authors as my imaginary friends, and our critical friendship provides a means for me to critique and reconstruct my practice.

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Mark D. McCarthy

Springfield College

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