The Scholar-Practitioner within: Reflexivity, Positionality, and the Productive Tensions of Insider Research in TVET Leadership Inquiry

This article is a methodological reflection on a doctoral qualitative study of instructional leadership and graduation outcomes in public TVET (Technical and Vocational Education and Training) brigade centres in Southern Botswana. I conducted the study while serving as a principal in the same system. Rather than treating insider status as a bias to disclose and set aside, I develop productive positionality. This is a reading in which interpretive insight and confirmatory risk are not opposed quantities to trade off. They are the same closeness seen from two sides, held in tension rather than resolved. The central argument is that a reflexive safeguard earns credibility only when a specific, retrievable record shows it changed an interpretation. Merely reporting that a safeguard was used is performative rather than substantive reflexivity. I examine four safeguards against this standard, and against a relational standard drawn from Chilisa’s African ontology. That second standard asks whether the resulting account stays accountable to the centres it describes. Only one safeguard, the cross-case analytical protocol, meets the evidentiary standard in a way I can substantiate. The other three do not, and I name that shortfall directly rather than conceal it. This partial result is the article’s primary contribution. It shows the distance between practising reflexivity and proving it later, which most positionality writing leaves unexamined. The analysis also distinguishes substantive from performative reflexivity and offers guidance for scholar-practitioners in TVET and similarly regulated systems. Both are offered as one worked case rather than a validated model.