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Abstract
This qualitative action research self-studys purpose was to examine how one department chair and teacher leader in one public high school (grades 9-12) used reflective practice as a method of professional development to inform and negotiate the multiplicity of her position as part-administrator, part-colleague, and part-teacher. Undertaken from an insiders positionality and with a critical theory frame, this study also examined how a department chair, committed to an educational philosophy that promotes democracy, dealt with the hierarchies within her position and the organizations structure. This study made two arguments: 1) enacting the department chair position is an existential practice in which the person negotiates a multi-layered, contingent space, 2) and reflective practice is an essential means for the department chair to do that work. The practitioner-researcher was the studys primary participant, but fellow teachers, department chairs, and administrators served as co-participants. Data was collected via ethnographic methods, including an attitudinal survey, interviews with the schools former and current principals, a professional reflective journal maintained by the research-practitioner, two videotaped department meetings, collected email and other role-related artifacts, and a daily professional action log. The practitioner-research wrote the data, using reflective vignettes and re-storied scenes from the data set and her own memory, to conduct an inductive analysis, using Bakhtins (1981, 1986) conceptions of heteroglossia, hybridity, and becoming, furthered by Freirian (1970) theory. The studys conclusions included that a department chair lives in heteroglossia, continually negotiating the various tensions acting upon it, but able to privilege certain tensions to further emancipation for all members of a schools organization. With the role in a state of continual becoming, no fixed professional training is apt for the role; instead, reflective practice provides a means for a practitioner to develop her work in the midst of it, making contextualized and authentic meaning. As a liaison position, the department chair roles is an untapped resource for principals to build democratic school communities focused on individual potentials and achievement.