A Critical Co/Autoethnographic Exploration of Self: Becoming Science Education Researchers in Diverse Cultural and Linguistic Landscapes

Abstract

This chapter illustrates the process of collaborative autoethnography (co-autoethnography) we used to construct space, in order to critically explore ourselves, and the contexts we study. Through a co-autoethnographic process, we aimed to better understand our positioning in our lived experiences and to generate an understanding of how reflective critical research approaches could transform us, as well as the communities in which we were immersed. In this chapter, we share the process of our collective analysis of autoethnographic narratives (Coia L, Taylor M, Co/autoethnography: Exploring our teaching selves collaboratively. In L. Fitzgerald, M. Heston, D. Tidwell (Eds.), Research methods for the self-study of practice (pp. 3–16). Netherlands: Springer, 2009), which stemmed from our experiences living and conducting education research in multilingual and multicultural contexts. Our ethnographic method of data collection, analysis, and interpretation was generated from our journeys as researchers – moving to, living, and conducting research in culturally and linguistically diverse (CLD) environments. We share this process, and some lessons we learned, with the hope that other researchers may find co-autoethnography a cathartic methodology to explore and challenge their own perspectives relative to cultural and linguistic diversity in their lives and in their research.