Category Archives: autobiography

Another Look at Teacher Stories and Autobiography

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This morning I read an interesting book chapter by William Ayers (1992) on teacher stories and autobiography. I found some important points that I want to store and explore here on the blog.

“… Our stories are never neutral or value-free, because they are always embedded in space and time and people, they are necessarily infused with values, forever political, ideological, and social. Our stories occur in cultural contexts, and we not only tell our stories, but in a powerful way our stories tell us. Interrogating our stories, then – questioning and probing our collective and personal myths – is an important pathway into exploring the meaning of teaching” (p. 35).

One of my roles as a researcher working with narrative is therefore to read and reread the stories placed before me in order to gradually unearth the political, ideological and the social connotations embedded in the text. What is told and left untold can reveal for example, priorities, beliefs, understandings and aspirations. In addition, I must learn to discover these elements in my own narratives, not an easy task.

Another challenge lying ahead of me is to explore the cultural context in which the stories are created and told. In my Masters thesis I often took this cultural element for granted and did not focus enough on the unique professional and personal setting in which each story was framed. Similarly, I often forget to explain frameworks and customs which are unknown to a reader unfamiliar with the Israeli education system.  

“Teaching is not a single story: the attempt to pursue the perfect study of teaching that will once and for all sum it up is a fool’s errand… teaching is more than the action of the teacher, because it is essentially interactive and c0-constructed, it is always expanding, always changing, and must always include students’ stories. Perhaps rather than trying to sup up teaching neatly, our goal should be to expand the natural history of what teaching is. Making our collective story richer, broader and more complex may also allow greater intentionality, reflexivity, and thoughtfulness in teaching choices” (p. 44).

This is a powerful reminder of the importance of studies of teaching and learning which portray these processes as a colorful kaleidoscope, ever moving and changing, not necessarily symmetrical or neat. Exploring the meaning in teaching means examining the unique, the complex, the dynamic and the messy.  Looking closely at the intricate details of teachers’ lives in different settings and stages allows us to grasp a better understanding of teaching. I am hoping that my research will add to this ever growing mosaic.

“Teachers have a special responsibility for self-awareness, for clarity and integrity, because teachers are in such a powerful position to witness, influence, and shepherd the choices of others” (p. 47).

This special responsibility is one that should be talked about explicitly in teacher communities. In the past, when encouraging teachers to tell teaching stories and write reflective texts, I did not make use of this important perspective. I will give thought to including this is future professional learning courses. 

“People are always in process, growing, understanding, changing, developing, disintegrating, reincarnating, choosing and refusing. There is a sense of incompleteness, of striving, of moving into the future. Autobiography is a useful piece in this movement, for autobiography creates the possibility for a dialogue grounded in different realities. telling lives and hearing lives can enrich our history and make possible our future. It is perhaps, particularly important in discussing something as complex, holistic, and immediate as teaching, something for which we lack an adequate, embracing language. Lacking language, many people are willing to reduce teaching to isolated behaviors, to fractions, to numbers. Autobiography is an antidote. It is unabashedly personal, connected, alive, struggling, and unfinished. It is the foundation upon which we can build what we will”  (p. 48-49).

I like the way Ayers connects “lacking language” and the reduction and teaching and learning to clean-cut statistical information.

I am constantly becoming more aware of this concept of “incompleteness” or “unfinalizability” as Bakhtin put it. The stories I told a year ago are different from those I am telling today and those I tell when my thesis draws to a close will be different again. My research project, like my teaching and my learning, is dynamic and ever changing.  I am curious to see where my professional experience and learning will lead me.

P.S.  I have chosen to ignore the politics in the life story of William / Bill Ayers and to concentrate on the ideas encompassed in one book chapter he wrote. Thanks to Yankel who invited me to rethink this issue.  William Ayers is not a person I identify with or wish to be identified with.

Reference:

Ayers, W. (1992). Teachers’ stories: Autobiography and inquiry. In E. W. Ross (Ed.), Teacher personal theorizing: Connecting curriculum, practice, theory and research (pp. 35-39). Albany: State University of New York Press.

Mapping our stories: Teachers’ reflections on themselves as writers

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Am I a writer? Are all bloggers writers? Are teachers who write narratives about their experiences writers? Are students writers? Are all academics writers? These questions have been keeping me busy over the past few days as well as those concerning the contribution of teacher-writing in the teaching of writing.

Now that the first draft of my methodology chapter is on paper, I am moving on. I have written a few narrative pieces and have also found some wonderful blog posts containing teacher narratives on writing and the teaching of writing. More about that later…

Frank writes about herself as a teacher before and after she discovered that she could and should write and also about the writing courses she runs for teachers. She proposes that teachers who do not see themselves as writers often have difficulties teaching writing to children. In her experience, teachers who do not write are less inclined to spend time on writing instruction and respond more to “lower-level corrections” (p. 185) in their students’ texts.   

The article mentions “writing apprehension” a term coined by Daly and Miller (1975, as cited in Frank, 2003).

Frank runs courses in which she uses a technique of neighborhood mapping to evoke personal childhood memories in preparation of writing narratives. In her experience, as a result of the writing experience and the group collaboration involved in the process, teachers begin to see themselves as writers and in turn improve their teaching of writing.

Frank describes her own story and I saw that in several ways it is similar to my own. I could have written the following few sentences about myself:

“I defined writing in narrow terms, believing that authors were gifted human beings. Because I did not see myself as ever being able to write like the authors I was reading, I did not identify myself as a ‘writer'” (p. 185-186).

Frank quotes Blau (1988) who explained that the difference between “basic writers” and “experienced, capable writers” is that the accomplished writers believe that what they want to say is significant enough to warrant writing about it.

Studies on how personal narrative and autobiographical writing can enhance elementary teachers’ lit instruction:

  • Blake, 1995
  • Brinkley, 1993
  • Florio-Ruane, 1994
  • Meyer, 1993
  • Wimett & Blachowicz, 1997

Frank quotes Blau (1988, p. 31):

“A central principle for the NWP is “that writing teachers must write: that their authority as teachers of writing must be grounded on their own personal experience as writers – as persons who know firsthand the struggles and satisfactions of the writer’s task”” (Frank, 2003, p. 187).

Frank observed that as the teachers in her courses gradually began to see themselves as writers, they began to take risks and concentrate more on the content of their writing than on mechanics. They became less apprehensive as they saw writing as a process, that revision could always improve a piece later.

As I read I was reminded of Parr’s distinction between private and public writing. Many of the pieces created in Franks courses began as private pieces and went on to further empower their writers as they transformed into public texts.

Again quoting Blau (1996), Frank writes:

“In his theory of revision, Blau (1996) acknowledges that writing is a difficult frustrating, and time consuming process that inexperienced writers see as evidence of their own incompetence. On the other hand, experienced writers know that frustration and feelings of incompetence are among the most difficult challenges of writing” (p. 192).

I think the most important point is made by Frank on page 193 . She proposes that it is not enough for a teacher to become a writer in order for him/her to improve their writing instruction, teachers must write and reflect on their writing process in order to bring about change in their classrooms.

“Learning about writing pedagogy andidentifying themselves as writers who could reflect on the difficulties of the writing process enabled them to change instructional strategies within their own classrooms…” (p. 193).

Frank, C. R. (2003). Mapping our stories: Teachers’ reflections on themselves as writers. Language Arts, 80(3), 185-195. Retrieved from http://www.ncte.org/pubs/journals/la

When does self-study become research?

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This morning I began looking into the area of self-study research. The article by Bullough and Pinnegar clarified for me what the role of the researcher is in this kind of work and explained what the reader is expecting while reading an autobiographical educational study.

The article gives 14 useful guidelines for ensuring that research of this kind is of a high quality. Personally I am quite daunted by the requirements and am not sure that I will ever be capable of  meeting them.  

 The article explains four historical developments which encouraged the onset of self-study research forms in education.

“When biography and history are joined, when the issue confronted by the self is shown to have relationship to and bearing on the context and ethos of a time, then self-study moves to research” (p. 15). There must be a balance made between the individual and public issues and interests. The writing must not be too self interested but at the same time not fall back to the distance of traditional research forms. This balance must be evident both in the data gathered and in its analysis.

Questions of authority:

“Self-study is a mongrel: The study is always of practice, but at the intersection of self and other, and its methods are borrowed. Thus in order to assert authority the study must do so from the frame or frames of the borrowed methodology, the standards of scholarship of the embraced tradition still must be met”. (Pinnegar, 1998 as cited on p. 15). 

Where is the difficulty?

“researchers face the difficulty of representing, presenting, legitimating, analyzing, and reporting one’s own experience as data – and of doing so in honest, not self-serving ways…” (p. 15).

“each researcher must prove herself as a methodologist and a writer” (p. 15).

Guidelines for autobiography (p. 16-19):

  1. Autobiographical self-studies should ring true and enable connection.
  2. Self-studies should promote insight and interpretation.
  3. Autobiographical self-study research must engage history forthrightly and the author must take an honest stand.
  4.  Biographical and autobiographical self-studies in teacher education are about the problems and issues that make someone an educator.
  5.  Authentic voice is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the scholarly standing of a biographical self-study.
  6.  The autobiographical self-study  researcher has an ineluctable obligation to seek to improve the learning situation not only for the self but for the other.
  7. Powerful autobiographical self-studies portray character development and include dramatic action: Something genuine is at stake in the story. (Standards of good fiction apply)
  8. Quality autobiographical self-studies attend carefully to persons in context or setting.
  9. Quality autobiographical self-studies offer fresh perspectives on established truths.

Guidelines for correspondence, E-mail, and recorded correspondence (p. 19-20):

  10. Self-studies that rely on correspondence should provide the reader with an inside look at participants’ thinking and feeling.

11. To be scholarship, edited conversation or correspondence must not only have coherence and structure, but that coherence and structure should provide argumentation and convincing evidence.

12. Self-studies that rely on correspondence bring with them the necessity to select, frame, arrange, and footnote the correspondence in ways that demonstrate wholeness.

13. Interpretations made of self-study data should not only reveal but also interrogate the relationships, ccontradictions, and limits of the views presented.

14. Effective correspondence self-studies contain complication or tension.

“A self-study is a good read, attends to the ‘nodal moments’ of teaching and being a teacher educator and thereby enables reader insight or understanding into self, reveals a lively conscience and balanced sense of self-importance, tells a recognizable teacher or teacher educator story, portrays character development in the face of serious issues within a complex setting, gives place to the dynamic struggle of living life whole, and offers new perspective” (p. 19).

                                                       This really says it all!

I will definately need to return to these important points if in the end I decide to do a thesis which involves self-study. 

Bullough, R. V., & Pinnegar, S. (2001). Guidelines for quality in autobiographical forms of self-study research. Educational Researcher,30(3), 13-21. Retrieved from http://edr.sagepub.com.ezproxy.lib.monash.edu.au/cgi/reprint/30/3/13