Navigating Teacher Professionalism in Autoethnography: Ethical and Occupational Dilemmas in Professional Learning Reflections

Ongoing professional learning and engaging in practitioner-based research are characteristic qualities of teachers’ transformative professionalism. Autoethnography may align with the objectives of promoting autonomous adult learning through systematic reflection to enhance professional practice. Through an autoethnographic method, I generate a vignette disseminating my experiences as a public school teacher engaging in autoethnography as a reflective professional learning strategy to bolster my pedagogical/collegial practices. Findings generated via my reflective inquiry demonstrated that autoethnography may advance teachers’ transformative professionalism through autonomous exercise of knowledge and self-directed learning, and may bridge the gaps between theory and praxis in educational contexts. However, my vignette further revealed the confining tensions in which organizational professionalism ideology may simultaneously control and impede the scope, content, and dissemination of teachers’ autoethnographies, resulting in subtle forms of self-censorship. Further, this study generates new methodological insights into the procedural construction of a teacher’s autoethnography, specifically revealing the ethical challenges I navigated as a teacher engaging in autoethnography, a process that necessitated difficult decision-making regarding my own willingness to be occupationally vulnerable and measures to safeguard students’ confidentiality. Consequent to this inquiry, I generated practical recommendations to guide teachers interested in engaging autoethnography as a learning reflection tool and outline considerations to ensure authors’ physical, emotional, and occupational safety.