Abstract

Discussions on the ethical considerations of self-study often seem entangled with its status as a methodological approach. Institutional Ethical Review Boards, IRBs, may adopt strangely inconsistent stances – either claiming that doing self-study research will automatically cause an unmanageable power imbalance within a teacher education program or claiming that self-study work does not require ethical review because it is not actually research. Perhaps part of the confusion of IRBs lies in the fact that self-study research presumes an existing ethical commitment to teaching and learning. In his seminal chapter exploring the intersections between ethical considerations for self-study research, Mitchell (2004) noted that society has already yielded considerable ethical autonomy to those who teach by virtue of requiring teachers, and by extension teacher educators, to take the well-being of children as their primary concern. In many ways, theon, those who aim to study their practice do so because they take their ethical commitment to children seriously – it is, as Pinnegar and Hamilton (2009) have argued, an ontological commitment.