Sagie Naicker’s research while affiliated with University of KwaZulu-Natal and other places

“‘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.

In reflecting on the scholarship in educational leadership research, it appears that what counts as data in educational leadership research has generally been viewed very narrowly. The discipline has relied heavily on more traditional methods to produce data.