Autoethnographic Study as a Research Methodology for Constructing Meaning in a Science Project-Based Learning Classroom

Abstract

In contemporary science education, learning is increasingly understood as an active, experiential, and meaning-making process rather than the mere accumulation of measurable outcomes. Within this paradigm, project-based learning (PBL) has gained wide recognition for its potential to cultivate scientific understanding, systems thinking, and collaborative practices among students. Nevertheless, research on PBL has largely privileged quantifiable indicators of achievement, often rendering invisible the lived experiences, tensions, negotiations of meaning, and subtle transformations that emerge within everyday classroom practice. This article contends that a fuller understanding of project-based science learning requires closer attention to learning as it is lived, felt, and interpreted from within the classroom. To address this methodological and epistemological gap, the article proposes autoethnography as a productive and generative research approach for science education. Positioned as both practitioners and researchers, teachers are invited to engage in systematic self-reflection and narrative inquiry, drawing on their insider perspectives and lived experiences to examine project-based science classrooms at a deeper level. Autoethnographic inquiry foregrounds experience-oriented questions, such as what teachers come to understand through moments of uncertainty, conflict, or insight, and how their emotions, beliefs, and positionalities shape pedagogical decisions and classroom interactions, while situating these personal accounts within broader social, cultural, and institutional contexts. The article presents a conceptual and practical framework for conducting autoethnographic research, encompassing the formulation of experience-centered research questions, the generation of data from lived practice, interpretive and reflexive analysis, and the crafting of scholarly narratives. It also critically examines the methodological strengths of autoethnography in illuminating the internal meanings and complexities of learning processes, alongside ongoing challenges related to subjectivity, trustworthiness, and ethical responsibility in representing personal and relational experiences. Ultimately, this article invites researchers and educators to reconsider whose knowledge is recognized as legitimate in science education research and to view teachers’ lived experiences not as anecdotal accounts, but as a vital and rigorous site of inquiry capable of contributing to learning and development at the levels of the individual, the classroom, and the broader science education system.