Exploring the collaborative in a collective self-study

This paper emerges from the work of a group of teacher educators, the Developmental Physical Education Group (DPEG), at the University of Edinburgh. Building on the group’s earlier professional learning (Jess & McEvilly, 2015) and self-study (Jess, Atencio & Carse, 2016) research, this current collective self-study is part of a collaborative longitudinal project investigating the potential of practitioner inquiry as an approach to teacher professional learning. The aim of the collective self-study was to investigate our practice to find out how we support teachers to engage with practitioner inquiry and the extent to which our practice contributed to this being a participative, situated, and transformative professional learning experience for us and the teachers. The self-study focus of this research also enabled us to further develop ideas around the collaborative nature of self-study that had emerged from a previous (and still ongoing) self-study (Jess, Atencio & Carse, 2016).