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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Bildung
- Sprache: Englisch
Praise for What Our Stories Teach Us "In her new book What Our Stories Teach Us, Linda Shadiow invites college faculty to use their personal and professional stories to reflect more critically and meaningfully on their teaching practice. Guiding her readers with a gentle but sure hand, Shadiow painstakingly shows that by systematically examining our educational and pedagogical biographies from a range of perspectives, we gain deeper insight into the pivotal moments that enliven our teaching and sustain our commitment to ongoing professional growth. I expect to be learning from this humane book for many years to come." --STEPHEN PRESKILL, Distinguished Professor of Civic Engagement and Leadership, Wagner College "Essential reading for every educator who strives to be a better teacher. Shadiow's book offers us a fascinating process to mine our personal teaching and learning stories for the valuable lessons they contain." --JIM SIBLEY, Centre for Instructional Support, University of British Columbia "In this well-conceived and well-written book, Linda Shadiow gently guides faculty along a path toward unearthing the rich stories of their lives that offer deep and enduring insight into their practice." --DANNELLE D. STEVENS, professor and author, Journal Keeping: How to Use Reflective Writing for Learning, Teaching, Professional Insight, and Positive Change
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Seitenzahl: 312
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Series
Preface
Chapter Overview
A Note to Readers
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Chapter 1: Storied Contexts
Shifting Perspectives
Daily Story-Making
Shifting the Contextual Frames
Next Steps
Chapter 2: Living Stories
Storied Foundations
Next Steps
Chapter 3: Storied Accounts
Defining Terms
Responding to the Incidents
Telling Stories
Elaborating Critical Incidents
A Note on Process
Next Steps
Chapter 4: Seeking Patterns
Considering Vantage Points
Determining Initial Vantage Points
Describing Four “Commonplaces”
A Note on the Process
Considering Role Patterns across Stories
Role of Teacher
Next Steps
Chapter 5: Exploring Patterns
Introduction to Articulating Claims
Locating Claims
Claims within Critical Incidents
Naming the Claims
Next Steps
Chapter 6: Locating Assumptions
Map of Progress and Destination
From Critical Incident to Assumptions
Analyzing Incidents for Assumptions
Next Steps
Chapter 7: Exploring Paradigmatic Assumptions
Interactions among Categories of Assumptions
Looking Further into Critical Incidents
Next Steps
Chapter 8: Storied Teaching
Growing through the Process
Contexts
Tensions
Leaning into Growth
Next Steps
References
Index
Copyright © 2013 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Shadiow, Linda K., 1947– What our stories teach us : a guide to critical reflection for college faculty / Linda K. Shadiow. pages cm – (The Jossey-Bass higher and adult education series) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-118-10329-6 (cloth), 978-1-118-41620-4 (ebk.), 978-1-118-41877-2 (ebk.), 978-1-118-55402-9 (ebk.) 1. College Teaching. LB2331 .S4725 2013 2012048916
The Jossey-Bass Higher and Adult Education Series
Preface
A few years ago Sharon, my former graduate school office mate, and I were walking in the high country desert talking about our careers as college teachers. When rare opportunities like this arise, we often exchange stories about the avenues we are trying to open up for strengthening student learning. At the same time that we wound our way around a barely visible path, we also found ourselves on a path moving from current to more distant and less-visible stories. The contemporary incidents we began with kept reminding us of earlier stories from our teaching.
Not long after we shared offices in graduate school, I published a brief essay, “My Students as My Teachers” (1985). The essay consisted of a series of brief vignettes about how the students in classes I had as a teaching assistant contributed to my emerging knowledge of college teaching. In the decades since then I have become increasingly curious about why certain stories stay with me and why I find occasions to either write about them, tell them to others, or reflect on them when some current spark ignites a memory. I wonder what stories have accompanied you along the way, what stories reappear as you recall or possibly retell them? I wonder, what is it about these incidents that keeps them always within our reach?
One of these stories for me is a simple one about a conference over a grade on a student paper. Kirby, or so I called him in that 1985 essay, was a student in the first class I taught as a graduate teaching assistant.
Since this early experience I have read the literature on the benefits of reflecting on teaching. I have done so while seeking to understand how the choices I make in instances such as this one can create either some positive results or negative consequences for learners as well as for me. My reflection has taken the form of replaying classroom incidents in my head while rewriting the scripts, talking with colleagues, and submitting a few personal essays like “My Students as My Teachers” (1985) to professional journals. But it was during an afternoon conversation with a friend twenty some years after I had met Kirby that led to my seeing stories as something other than sentimental anecdotes with thinly veiled lessons.
Kirby's story stood out for me initially because of the unexpected reason for his request to talk.
As I saw it then, being Kirby's teacher meant the merits of my judgment should not be open to challenge for any reason. Kirby's role was to learn from my judgments, not to question them. I was not looking for dialogue of any kind. Classrooms, I believed, were intended as places for monologue where any hint at dialogue contained the threat of a challenge. As a new college teacher, I was seeking to avoid any such threat to my relatively slim margin of confidence. I have come to revisit this story in succeeding years, and each time I do I gain insights not possible at the time the incident happened. My fear as we walked back to my office that day, I think, was that classroom control could slip from my grasp. As you revisit stories from your own educational biographies throughout this book, there will be many opportunities to review stories for what new considerations analysis can reveal. One of the goals in this book is to provide “company along the way” (Welch, 1999, p. xvi) as you recall, retell, and then scrutinize your stories.
By revisiting this simple story over the years and by including it along with other stories as a part of a reflective process, I have come to see that it holds multiple surprises. In addition to the surprise reason Kirby had for asking to speak with me about his grade, after years of teaching I can acknowledge that my response focused on me rather than on him. At the moment I realized he was contesting an “A,” I was relieved not to have to defend myself in the same way I would have if his grade had been lower than he expected. I emerged from the office conference with my sense of control and authority firmly in place. As I continue to include this story with others in an ongoing process of reflection today, it contains much to help me learn about the ongoing presence of themes of control and authority in my work.
During our autumn walk my colleague and I talked about stories and insights such as this one. She urged me to merge my interest in stories with my interest in reflection. Here, she suggested, was a chance to explore the question that had been an inherent part of our conversations over the years since graduate school, and this has now become a central question of this book: “How can our growth as college teachers be aided by critical reflection on stories in our educational biographies?”
My stories like “Kirby's Paper” are woven throughout the following chapters in order to share with you the process that this book invites you to undertake. And there is a conclusion to Kirby's story. When I wrote the vignette, I relayed one last portion of the incident. At that time it had a single meaning, and now I can see another. Here is how Kirby's story ended for that semester and what I concluded at the time.
At the conclusion of the course Kirby proudly showed me a letter-to-the-editor he wrote for a class assignment that was published in a local magazine—the same magazine where his wife, a freelance writer, had a feature story published. At the end of my 1985 essay that included this incident, I commented that Kirby “taught me labels aren't forever” (p. 332).
I have come to see that there is an underlying story here that I initially overlooked. How I prescribed teacher and student roles actually framed how I experienced and now how I retell “Kirby's Paper.” This teaches me that my expectations for student-teacher interactions rested on my view of those individual roles, but those roles “aren't forever.” The project of this book is to begin with a recollection of just such stories.
The impetus for the book came from my ongoing commitment to being a better college teacher, a commitment I share with friends, colleagues, and many readers. We seek ways to understand college teaching. Many calls for reflection begin by directing us to take a careful look at classroom techniques we choose and actions we take in response to classroom events. The literature suggests that we do this through processes like keeping journals, thinking deeply about our practices, and considering feedback from students and colleagues. Although this book does not include a comprehensive review of this literature, it does draw on the classic and contemporary resources in building a process that speaks to the needs and benefits that such literature on reflection identifies. Moving from a desire to reflect critically on our teaching to actually doing so is something we will undertake together. Through understanding our own educational biographies we have the potential to illuminate our current work and its future directions. This book explores what I've discovered and what I believe is there for all teachers to uncover in their stories.
Chapter Overview
The ways that stories are built into the daily aspects of college teaching frame the recognition of our lives as story-builders. Amid the daily press of routines we are unacknowledged authors of stories in our classrooms and research, during office conferences, and in our hallway conversations. The stories embedded within our lifelong educational experiences are a part of how we author our daily stories, but subconsciously so. The context for this book's three-stage process of reflection on what our stories teach us is provided in Chapter One with an exploration of the ways in which story-building and story-telling are an inherent element in college teaching. Such contexts raise questions about what stories we bring to this work.
Using the contexts explored in Chapter One as a backdrop, Chapters Two and Three prompt the recapturing of past stories, those that come easily to mind like “Kirby's Paper” and those that we remember when we take the focused time to do so. Stage One in the reflective process in these two chapters includes collecting a repertoire of stories that are a part of how we tell ourselves and others about our teacher-selves. Within that repertoire are key anecdotes—critical incidents—with an emotional pull that sets them apart from other stories. While the stories play a role in reflection, the critical incidents identified in Chapter Three become the primary focus of attention for subsequent stages.
Measured by the reflective coding process I outline in this book, the “Kirby's Paper” story, while being memorable for me, does not reach a threshold of being a critical incident. It does, however, resonate with some of the underlying themes and assumptions that are revealed through an analysis of my critical incidents. Throughout the book I draw on critical incidents from my own repertoire of stories like “First Day,” “Students Applaud Students,” and “Shoulder-Shrugger” to bring the process of critical reflection into focus so others can learn from an analysis of their own.
Given a flourish of details that emerge around critical incidents in Stage One, the second stage invites the reader to consider the stories in unexpected ways. There is an iridescent quality to the critical incidents, as insights are gained in Chapters Four and Five. Insights garnered from one story refract off of the others as our angle of view shifts. The shifts come with looking at the presence of the students, teachers, and content in the critical incidents, and this enables a move from first seeing the stories as anecdotes to then acknowledging them as ancestors whom we have forgotten as a part of our professional family tree.
Chapters Six and Seven—Stage Three—move to a process of inviting the search for three levels of assumptions influencing our work. Stage Three engages the questions about where a pursuit of our stories’ roots can lead and what is found there. The concluding chapter circles back to the repertoire of stories identified earlier in the book and traces the connections from the stories we bring to the stories we build.
The process, while laid out in a linear fashion, involves more choreography than a dance-step diagram drawn out on a floor. By providing a guided invitation to reflect on stories undergirding our practices, this book accompanies readers on pathways that are defined by readers themselves. The three-stage process is an invitation to take a guided opportunity to consider personal touchstones that suggest ways to proceed in our teaching practices. It is not likely for us to have looked at a collection of our stories to see where their details offer dissonance or resonance, nor to have considered linking threads in a repertoire of our stories to see how we have developed as college teachers. Doing this seeks to build on the heart of curiosity, wonder, and commitment which we bring to our profession.
A Note to Readers
This book is recursive, with each chapter building on the previous ones and later chapters returning to earlier ones to glean additional insights. Given that, the process of moving to deeper understanding is built chapter by chapter and will be most productive when worked through in that way. The series of prompts point to stages, but the time, space, and approach necessary to proceed are so personal that they need to be individualized by each reader. The prompts, therefore, are issued as invitations. I invite you to guide yourself through the process, responding to a series of prompts in ways you find personally meaningful. You may choose to jot notes down at each step in order to reconsider them throughout the process, or you may elect to work through charts or diagrams or sketches (narrative or artistic). The work will ask you to trust yourself in finding the mix of approaches you use. Similarly, and at various times, you may find working in solitude will serve your process, and at other times you may be drawn to talking with others, telling stories you are remembering or exploring insights you are finding.
At each stage, woven into the process are examples from a variety of disciplines. Teachers of geology, sociology, business, education, and English, for example, have written essays in professional journals, which I use as illustrations of different junctures in the reflective process set out in the book. No matter what the discipline, the work of college teaching draws on a commitment to student learning, but one that is fed by a wellspring of stories.
The intended readers of this book are college teachers from all disciplines. Readers for whom teaching is a source of commitment, wonder, and curiosity will find avenues for exploring those qualities. The book may be a source for use by individual faculty members pursuing a deepening understanding of their teaching, but it may be used with one or more colleagues, or even by a group in a professional development setting. It can be used in a mix—sometimes in solitude and sometimes in shared settings. Graduate students in a class where they are reflecting on the origins of their teaching philosophies and commitments to the college teaching profession may also be guided in that search.
There are, I am sure, uses beyond these few that are mentioned because the book involves a personal dialogue with oneself—the choices about how and when to engage others in that dialogue are many. Like on the afternoon walks where my colleague and I continually share stories and pose questions about their presence and persistence, there is the need for a path to follow, even a faint one. This book was written to provide such an opportunity, but readers of this book are its coauthors. What can you learn from your own stories, as I did from “Kirby's Paper,” when you look more closely at them? How do they grow in meaning with each telling? I invite you to begin.
Acknowledgments
Yoin (yoh-EEN) is a Japanese word whose literal meaning is “reverberations that continue for a long time after a well-cast bell is struck” (Rheingold, 1988, p. 142). I found it in a collection of words and phrases for which there are no direct English translations (They Have a Word for It). I turned to this book because I was inarticulate in the face of trying to express my gratitude to those who have helped this book come to fruition. What I came up with (“there are no words to express my gratitude”) fails to capture the depth of impact and influence a wonderful collection of friends and colleagues have had on this work. In Rheingold's book, he attempts to translate the applied meaning of the word as it might be expressed in English: “Experiential reverberations that continue to move you long after the stimulus has ceased” (p. 142). It is in this sense that yoin begins to capture the extent of the impact of those involved in bringing this book to light. It is a privilege to acknowledge some of them here.
Countless numbers of students and teachers are at the marrow of this work. They have made innumerable contributions to my teaching, my thinking about teaching, and my writing about collective explorations of the students and teachers in my educational autobiography. I thank them for their patience and tolerance as I continue to grow in my work because of them.
Northern Arizona University was supportive in multiple ways. A sabbatical leave enabled me to give focused attention to this project, and the responsiveness of Cline Library to my requests for materials made it possible to do this work from a distance. During my sabbatical I was fortunate enough to have had brief residencies at Montana State University through the support of Carl Fox, and at Bemidji State University, with thanks to Joe Czapiewski for assisting with my last-minute request. NAU colleagues Susanna Maxwell, Cathy Small, Susan Longerbeam, Ro Haddon, and Gretchen McAllister have lent pivotal support for these ideas as they have evolved over a decade. For more years than most people know, Dan Kain and I have been colleagues, and his engagement in classrooms has enriched my own. Sharon Fagan's and my enduring friendship began when Professor Robert Shafer insightfully assigned us to share an office in graduate school at Arizona State. Since then she has been a formative influence on my trying to put into words the work we started doing when we taught English there. As the copy editor for early drafts, Eve Paulden had a sharp eye and approached the work with a combination of skill and care. When David Brightman of Jossey-Bass spoke to me at the earliest stage of the book, his enthusiasm and confidence fed my own. Maryellen Weimer is far more than a consulting editor. She was an early advocate who skillfully mentored me in the process of writing this book and has shepherded the development of its ideas; her guidance is present on every page, and our friendship extends beyond them. I am grateful to those I have mentioned here and countless others because in large and small ways they have made yoin a palpable reality in my life and work.
Even the concept of yoin cannot capture the profound influence my husband Bob Shadiow's partnership has had on my life. When I decided to move ahead in putting my ideas into a book his response was, “It's about time.” As he has done throughout my career, he listened to my reading of each chapter multiple times with an ear toward making the ideas come alive with clarity and passion. He unquestioningly supported my need for early morning solitude (and more bookshelves), and he provided balance with his insistence that we take walks even as I used those walks to untangle some of the ideas I was working on. His insight and support are present throughout the book. In fact, he is the author of the last line. And its sentiment is dedicated to him.
About the Author
Linda Shadiow came to her work as the director of faculty development at Northern Arizona University through a variety of avenues. She began her teaching career in a rural Minnesota community, moved to high school English teaching in Montana, and then worked as the English/language arts coordinator in the Montana Department of Public Instruction. She pursued graduate study in English and education at Montana State University and received her PhD from Arizona State University in 1982. She then returned to Montana as an English professor and during that time spent a year collaborating with a physics professor on a television series that focused on translating academic research for a general audience.
She accepted a position as associate executive director of the Center for Excellence in Education at Northern Arizona University (NAU) in 1985, where she is now a professor of educational foundations and director of the university's faculty development program. She has published widely and spoken extensively throughout her career with increasing attention to the stories that shape curriculum and instruction. She has been honored as NAU's faculty scholar of the year, administrator of the year, one of the Centennial Class of 100 representing key faculty who contributed to the university's first century, commencement speaker, and President's Award recipient, and has been named as one of the Outstanding Alumni of her undergraduate alma mater, Bemidji State University. Her university office recently relocated to the library at NAU, and as a consequence she is the proud holder of a key to the library.
1
Storied Contexts
“All there is to thinking,” he said, “is seeing something noticeable which makes you see something you weren't noticing which makes you see something that isn't even visible.”
(Maclean, 1976, p. 92)
On a plane to Phoenix, the woman sitting next to me turned and initiated introductions. Then she asked the usual follow-up question: “What do you do?” I responded, “I am a university professor.” Instead of the critique of contemporary education I have come to expect in such situations, she asked, “When was it that you decided to become a teacher?” There were a few perfunctory responses I could have made, but instead, I found myself telling her a familiar story (Shadiow, 2009):
There are three stories here: the story of the plane conversation, the story of my first attempts at teaching, and, less visible, the story of the “teaching school” itself—why was this the reminiscence I chose to tell? I have asked my siblings if they remembered my initial attempts at teaching—they do. I have asked them if they ever told their own story about those experiences—they have not. And now that I am a professor, what is it about this “Winter Saturday Classroom” story that not only has me remembering the details, but has me regularly retelling them? To paraphrase Maclean's words introducing this chapter, When I see something I am not noticing, I am led to see something that isn't even visible. Our stories have lives beyond the moments of their retelling.
I have learned that the process of recalling, retelling, scrutinizing, and analyzing these stories sheds new light on my teaching. This process invites me into a level of reflection resembling the nested Russian folk dolls where opening one reveals another and opening that one reveals yet another. The stories included here are among those that have enabled me to go “assumption hunting” (Brookfield, 1995), to undertake the task of reflecting on my actions in teaching (Schön, 1983), and to go “inward bound” in order to understand the “outward bound” (Palmer, 2007). My stories are intended to illustrate directions such an uncovering can take and to guide your engagement in a similar process. In doing this I refer to stories like “Winter Saturday Classroom” multiple times to show how my understanding of its impact changes. The challenge of paying attention to the autobiographical roots of educational practices is only rarely taken up in university settings (Greene, 1973), no more so now than when Greene made that observation forty years ago. We are most likely to reflect on individual events than we are on the patterns shared by such events.
Most of us find ourselves testing out and then sharing stories about the use of successful classroom strategies or assignments with another faculty member. When faculty colleagues do the same, we may reflect on the extent to which the strategies they describe are applicable to our own work. We are unlikely, however, to think about the shifting patterns in our teaching that the addition of new teaching techniques or the elimination of old ones precipitates. Doing so, moving more deeply into the nesting of stories, can precipitate an awareness of how our perspectives have come to be shaped.
Shifting Perspectives
There are clichés that characterize overarching shifts in teaching: moving from “sage on the stage” to “guide on the side” is a common example. Recently, a business professor described this transition by characterizing himself initially as an “imposter with the roster,” hiding behind an authoritarian persona but trying to move beyond being that “sage on the stage” (Starcher, 2010, p. 1). In this sense, Professor Starcher builds a new classroom story, and he tells that story to readers of the Teaching Professor (and likely to colleagues, family members, or maybe even strangers on planes).
Like Professor Starcher, we experience our careers as a process. Through this process we build a collection of stories that are indelible enough for us to tell others. We are not likely to consider, however, the role that these stories can play both in framing our teaching and in providing us with insights into the origins of our past, current, and emerging choices of classroom techniques. Simply put, when a new technique works, we incorporate it into our teaching repertoire; if we perceive that it does not work, we discard it. Often, we do one or the other without considering why the new strategy does or does not resonate with the teaching persona that we built in the classroom.
Harvard professor Sarah Lawrence-Lightfoot says that to substantively understand our teaching we “have to learn to recognize the autobiographical and ancestral roots that run through [our] school lives” (2003, p. 7). Some of the ancestral roots of our professorial practices come not just from our role as “teacher” but also from our role as “student.” We each have touchstone stories from our work in graduate school, for instance, about our intellectual and academic ancestors. When new doctoral students come into my office and hint about the lack of confidence they're feeling in those first graduate courses, I find myself often retelling this story about my own graduate school experience.
As an undergraduate student I felt my ignorance made me conspicuous. So much was unfamiliar to me as a shy, first-generation college student. While these feelings were mitigated somewhat with each course and each degree I completed, vestiges of them continued to echo in my head as I enrolled in a doctoral program. Even though I had been recruited by the professor who became my major advisor, I struggled to match my eagerness for advanced studies with the voice in my head that doubted I was up to the intellectual challenge. Shortly after I arrived on campus and got settled in the teaching assistants’ office, I decided to confront my insecurities and see what might lie ahead.
Even with roughly twenty years between the stories “Winter Saturday Classroom” and “Grad School Decision,” I find they share at least a couple of basic themes: the teacher held the power (as a student in the second story, I was metaphorically raising my hand asking for permission to leave the room), the teacher held the answer, and the answer was the key to achievement. The addition of the “Winter Saturday Classroom” story and the “Grad School Decision” story to the story “Kirby's Paper” in the Preface—only three stories from early in my educational biography—gives me a glimpse of the overarching narrative I bring to my teaching. These individual episodes contribute to a larger narrative that has an unacknowledged and unexamined role in my approach to teaching today. Clearly, my educational story has some roots in the “sage on the stage” model.
My reflection on these stories comes first from the stories themselves, then from the details in the retellings, and then from an initial step of analysis. This will not always be an easy or comfortable process, but you will find that it does lead to clarifying insights into themes in your teaching. This book provides a process for undertaking such reflection as a path toward growth. Before pursuing insights from the stories in which we are characters, looking at stories professors “write” as a natural part of their work heightens an awareness of the inherently storied nature of professorial lives. Seeking a deepened understanding of our teaching calls for a “systematic, thoughtful, thorough and objective analysis” (Weimer, 2010, p. 24). One way to undertake this work is to begin with the story-making that is an inherent part of our daily work.
Daily Story-Making
Although I have used some of my own stories to illustrate points in speeches and professional writings over the years, I was unaware of the ways I author stories on a daily basis in my work as a college teacher. This eventual realization opened my eyes to my own authorship of stories that were so close to me that I had not seen them: I painstakingly update my academic story in a curriculum vitae; each semester I outline what is essentially the story of a course in a syllabus; and as a part of my research I try to write clearly and convincingly about my findings and how I arrived at them. Once it occurred to me that I constructed such stories on a regular basis I began to think about my work slightly differently. Without consciously intending to do so, I came to analyze each of the items to see what I could learn. Eventually this led to my realization that the types of stories I wove into my speeches and writings could themselves be sites for analysis. It turned out to be one small step toward my work in scrutinizing such stories rather than just retelling them.
