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“To Seek Out Something More”: Knowing the Teacher-Researcher Self Differently Through Self-narrative Writing and Found Photographs

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“‘To Seek Out Something More’: Knowing the Teacher-Researcher Self Differently Through Self-narrative Writing and Found Photographs” by Daisy Pillay, Sagie Naicker, and Wendy Rawlinson showcases the power of found photographs for evoking, constructing, and reconstructing memory in written self-narratives. The exemplars are drawn from Sagie Naicker’s and Wendy Rawlinson’s doctoral research in South Africa. Sagie drew on selected photographs to examine how his disability identity influenced his leadership practice, and his journey as an activist seeking social justice for people with disabilities. Wendy’s found photograph evoked a bodily experience of being transported to a more imaginative space that triggered her curiosity for aesthetic pedagogical adventuring in her racially diverse classroom. Taken as a whole, the chapter demonstrates how, drawing multi-methodologically on self-narratives and the visual meaning making perspective of found photographs, the scholarship of self-awareness of teachers’ ways of being, knowing, and doing can make significant contributions to teacher professional learning.

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... I recognised "the way in which the individual establishes his relation to the rule and recognizes himself as obliged to put it in practice" (Foucault, 1985, p. 27). This critical moment, one that I have written about in more detail (Pillay et al., 2019), happened in my oral communication class where race and class were unintentionally foregrounded. I had recognised the need to connect more closely with students (Jawitz, 2016) because I could understand the gaping divide between who I was as lecturer and my students. ...
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