Contemplative Auto-Ethnographies As Transmutational Means?: A Teacher-Action Research Project Exploring the Long-Term Impacts on Social Work Student's Personal, Professional, and Ethical Development

Background and Purpose: Transformative models of education recognize the importance of teaching practices that do not dismiss, reduce, or silence students’ humanity but contribute to an authentically caring critical literacy that advances holistic growth and development. Anti-oppressive contemplative pedagogies are crucial for transformative aims, recognizing the importance of nontraditional instructional approaches that privilege texts and forms of knowledge often most relevant to student-learners, that of their lived experience. Despite such recognitions, there is a deficit of research exploring specific forms of holistic instruction.

Responding to this gap, this teacher-action research project partnered with student-participants to investigate the effects of contemplative autoethnographies as a tool for transformative learning. Specifically, this project explored how graduate social work students made sense of their learning using contemplative autoethnographic inquiry and how this process impacted their personal and professional development.

Methods: Contemplative autoethnographies were implemented as an optional final assignment in Human Behavior and the Social Environment (HBSE) to help students examine experiences of alienation, oppression, or other forms of social injury and develop strategies for mobilizing hope and healing. Correspondingly, this learning endeavor foregrounds the lived experiences of traditionally silenced identities and taboo or stigmatized experiences, allowing students to story their experiences (auto), situate them within broader social and cultural contexts (ethnography), and approach this critical inquiry process with attention to the embodied and affective dimensions (contemplative).

Six in-depth semi-structured individual interviews were conducted with graduate social work students (ages 22 to 55) who opted to complete this assignment (out of 14). The majority of participants identified as White (83%, 17% "Latinx"), cis-gendered (83%, 17% "non-binary"), heterosexual (83%, 17% “queer”), and female (67%, 33% male). Interviews were conducted five months after course completion, lasted approximately 90 minutes, were audio-recorded, and transcribed using professional services. Through an inductive thematic content analysis, transcripts were analyzed through three coding cycles using software-supported (ATLAS.ti) analysis.

Findings: Findings reveal that contemplative autoethnographies provided empowering experiences for social work students, highlighting how this learning tool functioned as both an agentic healing and professional development process. Notably, findings suggest this learning activity helped transform experiences of suffering, stigma, and trauma, strengthened professional competencies, increased self-compassion, and promoted insight into the dimensional complexity of mental health needs, including skillfully learning how to relate to resistance and discomfort. Ultimately, participants shared how this inquiry process played a crucial role in their personal and professional development and highlighted the criticality of learning how to navigate one’s internal terrain; in the words of one participant, “If I can understand how to heal myself, I can give people, within reason, better tools to heal themselves.”

Conclusion and Implications: This study suggests that contemplative autoethnographies can offer a humanizing learning strategy where students can re-story complex, taboo, and adverse life experiences often marginalized in traditional teaching and learning spaces. Ultimately, these findings hold pedagogical and practical implications for social work and generate a call for further social work scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) to understand the mechanisms, risks, and benefits of anti-oppressive contemplative pedagogies and practices.