Linda Shadiow on Stories as Faculty Learning (part 2)

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:

Linda K. Shadiow. What OurStories Teach Us: A Guide to Critical Reflection for College Faculty. SanFrancisco: Jossey-Bass, 2013.

Linda K. Shadiow. “CriticallyReflective Teaching: Excavating Assumptions and Pratices.” POD AnnualConference, St. Louis, Nov. 2010.

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.