Linda Shadiow on Stories as Faculty Learning (Part 1)

Linda Shadiow's book What Our Stories Teach Us is an exploration of the role of story and narrative in faculty development. She provides a thorough program for analyzing teaching stories in order to learn from them and improve our educational practices.

Early in the book Shadiow establishes a three-part pattern for working with stories in a professional development context: identify, then analyze, then interpret and use stories. In this post I describe the first of these steps and part of the second step; a later blog post will pick up where this post leaves off.

Shadiow begins by explaining why faculty should want to use stories as a part of their professional learning. In short, stories are an integral part of our teaching identities (our identities as educators). Professional development means we improve our use of skills, but more directly, professional development means we understand and change our teaching identities and our persona.

Analysis of stories helps us uncover and understand the assumptions we make that structure our teaching practice. Put another way, stories help us get at the autobiographical roots of our educational practice. In this way I can't help but think of stories as like anthropological artifacts of our educational ideologies.

Analysis of our teaching stories leads to what Shadiow calls "double-loop learning" which is hunting and questioning our pedagogical assumptions (as opposed to "single-loop learning" which is increasing our teaching efficiency via new teaching techniques).

Once we are convinced that collecting and using stories is an important part of our professional learning, we then need to collect and code those stories for their content. As part of this process, good questions to ask are: Why did you choose this particular story to tell? Why has this story stayed with you? Of all the stories you could tell, why did you choose to tell this particular story in this particular context?

Once you have selected a story to analyze, you move on to identifying patterns within the stories. Stories are made up of settings, plot events, and characters. The characters of our stories can be especially interesting; we should keep in mind there are multiple versions of us in and around the stories we tell. There is the individual who is telling the story and there is the individual who the story is about. There is us the protagonist; us the narrator; us the learning and us the teacher; us the self as we were back then and us the self as we are today.

In a later blog post, I'll continue this summary of Shadiow's book by describing more about story analysis and how to locate the assumptions that structure the educator's ideology.

citation: Linda K. Shadiow. What Our Stories Teach Us: A Guide to Critical Reflection for College Faculty. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2013.

Jean Connelly & Michael Clandinin on Stories within Narrative Inquiry

While this article mostly deals with narrative inquiry (which is largely tangential to my project on professional community), the authors do make four claims about story that can illuminate the nature and use of narrative in faculty development.

First, humans are storytellers who lead storied lives. I get two ideas--both related but still different--out of this sentence. One, humans as storytellers means we "naturally" tell stories or find it easy to do so, perhaps because we are so conditioned to it. Two, story is a way we make sense out of, or give meaning to, the seemingly random chronology of events that make up our lives. Insofar as being educators is part of our lives, stories give meaning to our work as educators.

Second, narratives add causality to the flow of life events. Again, here's my take: one of the ways we give meaning to our lives--as well as to our work as educators--is to construct cause-and-effect chains that help us understand influence and how things happen. We not only want to know what happened, but more importantly we want to know why. Causality helps explain why.

Third, the meaning of story is not in the events themselves but in the change from start to end. I've said twice above that stories are part of the meaning-making process we use to reflect upon our lives and our work. The events themselves are the individual plot moments within a story; the but the change from beginning to end shows the larger and longer arc of influence that runs through our work as educators. What events in a story are not as important as what those events mean.

And fourth, stories address general problems, but within specific instances. The things that are important to us are likely to be the things that happen to us over and over--the patterns of events we don't understand or that create problems. But solving problems or answering questions can't be done well on such a large and abstract scale because every situation and every person is different. Stories allow us to explore the "big questions" but in a way that doesn't get lost in abstractions and generalities. Stories are always about a specific instance of something happening; we generalize the specifics and the moral of the story to the general patterns of our lives.

citation: Micheal Connelly & D. Jean Clandinin. "Stories of Experience and Narrative Inquiry." Educational Researcher 19.5 (Jun.-Jul. 1990): 2-14.