Teacher education faculty as researchers: Composing lives in context, a blend of form and content

This dissertation reports the socialization experiences of beginning teacher educators. I have been particularly interested to discover value systems, attitudes, and practices that impede or enhance development of "communities of difference" in educational organizations. Working from a critical, postmodern perspective, I regard organizational constructs, processes, behaviors, and actions of individuals as social texts. Four basic premises underlie this view of socialization: (1) Human action is a form of text that can be interpreted and understood; (2) readers interpret texts and assign meanings based upon their own history of experiences and cultural perspectives; (3) texts reference other texts, metaphorically and analogically; and (4) imagination precedes interpretation.; Using a life history approach to data collection, three beginning teacher educators have narrated their life-long processes of personal and professional development. The research supports a conceptualization of socialization as an ongoing, bidirectional process during which people and organizations adapt to each other. Acknowledging that reflexive researching involves discovering and articulating the emergence of the researcher's own worldviews in the processes, activities, and artifacts of researching, I have explored my own epistemic, ontologic, and axiomatic research perspectives and set the research report in the context of my own worldviews. Within the framework of self-study, I explore the possibility that conceptions of human studies research from within the paradigm of art, rather than of science, may open us to new ways of thinking about researching human experiences. Taking an artist-as-researcher stance toward data analysis and research reporting, I have experimented with representational forms appropriate to presenting research data. Biographical paint and collage representations of life history events are included as illustrations of the participants' life histories. In addition, in the second part of the dissertation, verbal portraits have been created by restructuring life history narrative accounts into a five part, postmodern screenplay. It is a polyphonic text in which multiple voices coalesce to describe educational experiences. Its hidden text are the political and historical events that define individual's lives in context.