In my previous post, I summarized
the first half of Linda Shadiow’s book What Our Stories Teach Us, and described
how educators can use stories as a tool for professional learning. This is accomplished
by, first, identifying stories of “critical moments” within our professional
life, and second, analyzing those stories to uncover their significance. Now I'll
continue this summary by describing the process of locating the underlying
ideology revealed by the story.
Once you have identified a story
and analyzed it, the third step is to use the story to identify the claims and
assertions underlying your educational practices. Specifically, you try to
understand what your story reveals about what you think about education, about
yourself, about your methods and teaching style, and about your students. In
short, your story exemplifies values, and you want to figure out what those
values are and what they mean.
A story’s values are disclosed
through (among other things) turning points in the story (moments that mark a
clear before-and-after sequence in the plot), dialectical tensions, and
dissonances. For example, stories may exemplify tensions or disconnects between
opposing inclinations such as: intentions to act vs. actual behavior, what an
educator wants to do vs. what they should do, actions that are good for us vs. actions
that are good for students, and routine or ordinary events vs. extraordinary or
unusual events.
The benefit of story analysis is
that it shows to us the frameworks that underlie our teaching practices.
Thereby we have a better feel for which of those frameworks we want to keep in
place or strengthen, and which one we might want to reconsider or change.
And then, ironically, analyzing
our stories of educational moments creates new stories (i.e., that time we
analyzed our stories) that we reflect upon and share later on.
Shadiow also presented many of
these ideas at a POD Network (Professional and Organizational Development Network) conference in 2010. The conference materials show that the session
followed the book by encouraging session participants to identify an
educational story, analyze the story for its components, and search for the underlying
frameworks revealed by the story.
In the session description, Shadiow
argues that educators may seek to make positive changes in their mid-career teaching
practices, but may not have an easy way to accomplish that change. The
solution, she offers, is to apply an auto-ethnographic analysis of one’s
teaching stories to uncover or excavate the ideology or framework that allows
for change.
The remaining pages of the
conference session materials include handouts and worksheets that show the kind
of story analysis she advocates throughout her book.
citations:
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