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.

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.

Maxine Greene & the Rising Importance of Narrative in 1991

In a Foreword to Carol Witherell & Nel Noddings’ 1991 book Stories Lives Tell, educational philosopher Maxine Greene says the rising importance of narrative coincides with the rising importance of “voice,” of heteroglossia, of dialogue, and of inviting participation.

So, a question to explore: What is the connection between story and acts of inclusive communication? Is narrative a form of non-hierarchical and inviting communication (or, at least, closely affiliated with it)? Or, are inclusive forms of communication types of narrative?

citation:  Maxine Greene. Foreword. Stories Lives Tell: Narrative and Dialogue in Education. Eds. Carol Witherell & Nel Noddings. New York: Teachers College Press, 1991. ix-xi.

Complex Social Relations: Harriet Katz on Stories

Harriet Katz writes about story as an element of law student professional development. In that context, she argues that effective communication—for her that means communication with law students; to us that means communication between educators—requires an ability to truly listen to and not pre-judge others; we need to see things from other people’s perspective. Stories are particularly good at helping us see and hear things from another’s point of view.

As part of her discussion, she points out that stories contain many people: not just characters but also the narrators and audiences. The narrators, in turn, make choices about which stories to tell and which details within those stories to reveal to the audience.

This got me thinking about a difference between stories (i.e., narrative discourse) and arguments (i.e., rhetorical discourse).

In the study of rhetoric, the communication event is said to contain three elements: the speaker (the rhetor), the message, and the audience. Of the three components, the first (the speaker) and the last (the audience) are people and, hence, they comprise the social relations within the communication event.

In a narrative there is the narrator (corresponding to the speaker), the story (corresponding to the message), and the audience. Here too, like rhetorical discourse, the narrator and the audience are people who comprise a social relationship within the event. But there are other people involved, too: specifically the characters within the story. Therefore, there are additional social relations between the narrator and the story characters, as well as between the audience and the story characters.

Although I have yet to spin out the implications of the different social relations between rhetorical and narrative discourse, I suspect they will have some impact on using story in educational professional development.

citation: Harriet N. Katz. “Stories and Students: Mentoring Professional Development.” Journal of Legal Education 60.4 (May 2011): 675-686.

Jennifer Moon on Using Story in Education

Jennifer Moon's book Using Story shows how story is a complex social and communicative phenomenon with multiple conditions, purposes, and effects. While explaining the use of story in higher education, she touches on the characteristics of story that I believe are useful when considering it as a professional development tool. I’ll highlight six of those characteristics and add some of my own thoughts.

One, stories are an implicit and connotative form of communication. Certain elements of the story are difficult to put into language; they are contextual and deal with ideas manifest in specific and concrete situation. As a result, important elements of the story are conveyed symbolically. Description in a story exists to make the story work, not to inform or persuade the audience.

Two, stories happen within a frame that separates them from reality. The frame is part of what gives meaning to the events within the story; the frame is the setting and it’s also the underlying principles that determine which events and which characters are relevant to the story and relevant to the lessons the story conveys.

Three, stories present representative norms and behavioral expectations just as much as (or maybe even more than) they convey factual information. We like to say that stories (esp. myths and folktales) tell us what and why nature is the way it is (e.g., a story that explains the origins of a particular mountain in the shape of a bear). But really, many stories actually help us navigate the complexities of living in nature by showing us the moral and behavioral alternatives we face in day-to-day living.

Four, stories are good for studying underlying assumptions as well as alternative actions and implications. Assumptions, implications, and actions are not always explicit to us in the same way as clear explanation or explicit argumentation. Because stories trade in the currency of implicit and symbolic ideas, they anthropologically reveal our underlying beliefs about and what we expect will result from our actions in the world here and now.

Five, stories tend to express the exceptional as opposed to theory which expresses the commonplace. Stories are about change: unexpected change in the status quo or needed change in the face of stagnation. Stories reveal and give meaning to the exceptional events that interrupt the stasis of the commonplace.

And six, stories are correlated with identity; hence, changing a story might be correlated with changing personal and institutional identity. Obviously stories chronicle events, but those events happen to the characters of the story, to people. The events aren’t as important as what the events mean to the characters; the characters’ identities are in play as a result of the events that happen.

citation: Jennifer A. Moon. Using Story: In Higher Education and Professional Development. New York: Routledge, 2010.