Transformative pedagogy for intercultural research

I bring to my research supervision a pedagogy that endeavours to engage professional educators in transformative learning. Transformative learning involves development of high level thinking skills (such as metaphorical and dialectical reasoning, critical reflective thinking, epistemic uncertainty, poetic imagination), heightened critical cultural awareness, and strengthened agency/authority of one's cultural capital and cultural knowledge. In this presentation I will outline how research can be reconceptualised as transformative professional development, especially for overseas students resident in Australia who are engaged in postgraduate educational research. \n \nThe main focus will be on the use of autoethnographic intercultural inquiry, in which the researcher works at the 'hyphen' between self and culture and in which 'the field' comprises the researcher's cultural lifeworld experiences. I shall illustrate how autoethnographic inquiry can afford practitioner researchers the means of exploring critically and creatively the cultural situatedness of their own professionalism. The creativity of the self study research experience can be enhanced considerably by using literary writing styles (eg., impressionist and confessional tales, fictive stories) and by writing with a view to compelling one's prospective reader to think critically about his/her own pedagogical assumptions.