A View
From The Field
How can my
knowledge be of use to other teachers? Back in the garage with my bullshit
detector – The Clash
Gary Williams� Educational
Enquiry (1) MA Unit, University of Bath. Submitted 26th January 2010
Abstract
In
2001 Catherine Snow (p. 9) argued that �Good teachers possess a wealth of
knowledge about teaching� and that �The challenge here is not to ignore or
downplay this personal knowledge but to elevate it�. This personal knowledge, she went on to argue, is a rich
resource that is largely untapped �Because we have no procedures for
systematizing it�. Snow believes that systemisation will provide the basis for
�Rejecting the personal anecdote as a basis for either policy or research� but
I believe that the resource she wants to tap into is most directly embodied in
the form she wants to reject.
Consequently, I want to use this module to challenge Snow�s rejection by
presenting a personal anecdote that embodies my values and understandings as a
legitimate contribution to education knowledge and a call to arms against
systematizing teachers� narratives. What follows is, I hope, a story of one of
my educational influences that embodies my values and understandings in such a
way that it enhances our knowledge of how we can tap into and augment teachers�
knowledge about themselves and their teaching. Let�s start somewhere near
the beginning.
The
Back Story
If
you really want to know, I didn�t want to be a teacher. To me teachers
were a different breed, shipped in from a place that
fashion forgot to impose education on us and bore us with things that they
thought were worthwhile. We were us and they were
something else. They didn�t
understand us and we didn�t understand why they wanted to do the job.
Don�t
get me wrong, they were well-meaning enough and they
struggled long and hard to educate us.
Some of them even managed to provide more than the occasional moment of
interest or enlightenment but, without fail, the method was the same –
and that is what we objected to.
We, of course, were too young and ignorant to have heard of Marshall
McLuhan or the medium being the message but we weren�t stupid and we knew what
we were supposed to do in every single lesson; namely sit still and listen to
the teacher, believe in authorities and remember facts. Before long most of us had got the
message.
Some
of us coped better than others with these arrangements. A few coped well enough to be viewed by
the teachers as what today would be called gifted and talented – although
they must have been eternally grateful for a gift that saw them mercilessly
abused by their peers for being teachers� pets. Most of us kept our heads below the parapets, tacitly
following the rules whilst engaging in guerrilla tactics to talk about what we
wanted to talk about and do what we wanted to do. A few, however, couldn�t cope. They wouldn�t do anything they didn�t want to do, they
wouldn�t keep quiet and they wouldn�t accept authority. They were Gods to the rest of us.
One
of these was Alex Stokes. Bottom
of the class in everything, Stokesy was in your face, unrelenting,
trouble. Always had been. When Stokesy couldn�t cope at primary
school he would storm out of the classroom and head for the top of the nearest
tree. We sometimes watched for
hours as the teachers tried to coax him down. By the time we got to secondary school, though, Stokesy
never ran. He�d stand and slug it
out, sometimes literally. If someone �Had a go at him�, he�d
tell them where to go. If
he couldn�t do something (which was most of the time) he�d do something
else. And if it was
boring, he�d make his own amusement. According to the teachers, Stokesy was good for
nothing but I learned differently on a cold, wet February in the Brecon Beacons
(Appendix 1).
Looking
back, there is much that fascinates me about Stokesy�s story. First, and most obviously, there�s a
story of an unrecognised talent pointing to the need for us all to work hard at
developing the eyes to spot everyone�s unique ability. Stokesy had always been an amazing
climber but climbing wasn�t on the curriculum so his talent was at best out of
sight and at worst an annoyance.
Too often our response to finding gifts and talents is like the Mulla
Nasrudin tale in which Nasruddin is found looking for something under a street
lamp. When asked what he is doing,
Nasruddin replies that he is looking for his key. After further questioning it becomes clear that Nasruddin
lost the key in a field but he is looking under the street lamp because �There
is more light here�. If we want to
recognise people like Stokesy we are going to have to start looking in
difficult, out of the way places as well as in the comfortable places with the
clearest view. And I want to
recognise people like Stokesy. Not
to recognise the talents of people like him is a social injustice and what is
true of our pupils is also true of our profession. Snow is right in as much as to persistently fail to
recognise and give credit to the knowledge of teachers is a scandal. However, if we continue to look for
educational learning under the abstract, generalized, systematized streetlamps
of the Academy or Aristotelian logic we will continue to find what we have
always found. The key to new
knowledge will only be found if we look in new places.
To
me, Stokesy has always pointed towards where those new places might be. Bottom of the class he may have been
but Stokesy always seemed to know where his own personal key was and he wasn�t
much interested in searching under anyone else�s street lamp. Many years later I bumped in to Stokesy
in a pub. He�d been expelled about
a year after the climb and gone his separate way but we recognised each other
and reminisced about that day in the Beacons. I told him that if only the teachers had spotted how good at
climbing he was when they were trying to get him out of trees he could have
climbed Everest by now. Stokesy
laughed and said that teachers couldn�t recognise anything except their own
reflection. �Besides,� he added,
�I wouldn�t have climbed Everest.
I�d probably have become a cat burglar�. I drank my beer happy in the knowledge that Stokesy�s
bullshit detector was still working.
Given
the constant negative messages he received I can only guess at where the
security to stand his ground came from but, be it bouncing down a cliff like
The Guns Of Navarone or finding something else to do when the lessons got too
much, Stokesy simply wasn�t interested in being anyone else�s reflection. Somehow he always seemed to understand
himself and his relationship to systems.
That, I think, is a rare gift and it is one he shared with me in all our
relationships – even if he was smashing my own street lamp most of the
time. It is a gift I have always
treasured and one I am trying to pass on by showing people that I understand
myself and my relationships to systems through storied moments contextualized
within a wider historical and social narrative that reveal some of my values
and understandings.
Stokesy
stood by what Jack Whitehead, in a personal e-mail to me, called �The energy
flowing values and understandings the individual uses to give meaning and
purpose to their life� every time he stormed out of a lesson and I am
attempting to show that I am prepared to stand by mine by producing a public
story that is structured in such a way as to embody my meaning. The intention in making this narrative
public is to captivate the imagination of the reader so that the injustice of
not �recognising� or �legitimizing� the stories of others resonates and forms
the basis for change. I am arguing
from personal experience that some people make sense of themself through story
and, if this is the case, to make a story illegitimate is to reject the
legitimacy of a life. To
reject an individual life such as Stokesy�s is a crime but to reject an entire
form of life story is tantamount to cultural genocide. This not only offends my values of
justice, tolerance and respect, it also crashes headlong into my understanding
of education as a life affirming practice in which our role is to help students
make sense of themselves and their worlds by engaging with their stories instead of
expecting them to engage with ours.
.
The
Unfolding Story
A
year or so after the Beacons experience The Clash began singing the words at
the head of this chapter and it seems to me that Stokesy had some sort of
in-built bullshit detector of his own. Dewey (1938/1997) stressed that the role
of the individual is assigned in an environment – what he is permitted to
do is what he will learn – and, for Stokesy, what he was permitted to do
was bullshit which meant that what he was learning was bullshit too. When we got those messages about
sitting still, being quiet, remembering facts and obeying the teachers just
about everyone except for Stokesy learned something. As Postman and Weingartner first taught me to recognise, the
trouble is that along with the lesson content we also learned that passive
acceptance is better than active criticism; that discovering knowledge is
beyond our power; that learning is an individual pursuit; that the thoughts of
our classmates don�t count; that there is always an answer; that voices of
authority are to be trusted more than independent speculation. Stokesy was right to kick against all
this because, in short, his bullshit detector had spotted that the real lesson
was that our thoughts didn�t count.
I am kicking against Snow because my bullshit detector suggests that her
real lesson is that we can�t trust teachers to tell their story for
themselves. It also tells me,
however, that to deny Snow the right to tell her story or to refuse to engage
with it would be hypocrisy so I�d better consider the story of story.
Plummer
(1983) points out that, �The telling of a tale of life is no new business�, and
examples of stories, in one form or another, can be traced back to
pre-history. Even autobiography,
which is the major modern genre for telling a personal narrative, has a history
stretching back at least as far as John Bunyan�s Grace Abounding and, arguably,
as far as St Augustine�s Confessions.
The telling of a tale of life is, indeed, nothing new but I am arguing
that personal narratives have the potential to take us to new practice by
reflecting on the embodied knowledge of teachers. Before we make that leap, however, we need to consider the
notions of narrative and reflection.
In
a recent issue of Educational Researcher on Discourse of Narrative Research
(Appendix 2), BaroneCoulter and Smith (2009) have focused on narrative
researchers as witnesses of injustice and agents of social change. In the
narrative above I am engaging with both these issues in relation to my
professional practice.
Clandinin
and Murphy (2009) focus on �Relational
Ontological Commitments in Narrative Research� and I shall be engaging with my
own ontological commitments in the narrative below as I reflect on a self-study
of my own practice. In this narrative I demonstrate my agreement with Clandinin
and Murphy�s claim that, �research texts need to speak to the everyday
experiences of researchers and participants to arrive at an
understanding of those experiences as "storied" phenomena
within social, cultural, institutional, and
linguistic narratives.� (p. 598)
Eakin
(1999) has shown that different kinds of storying produce different selves and
Bleakley (2000) backs this up by claiming that stories are told not only to
recount experiences but also to construct identity. Viewpoints such as these assert that stories are not neutral
and cannot simply be accepted because they act
to produce particular selves. The
medium, again, is the message.
Specifically, a personal-confessional tale acts to construct a stable, unitary
and transcendent self exercising sovereign power. It offers a humanistic self-discovery
story in which the �subject� is discovered, revealed or explicated. Personal narratives may appear to
provide a methodology that allows the voice of teachers to be heard but the
dangers are that they can merely reinforce the humanistic, existential tradition that
promotes an unproblematic �Know thyself through introspection� approach,
believing itself to be revealing identity or reflecting a �true�, �authentic�
self, free to tell its tales. A
quick glance at the bullshit detector, however, shows that this is not the only
story available. Consequently, it
is also not the only self or voice.
If we are to meet Snow�s challenge we need to recognise that teachers�
voices will themselves be constructs of a particular historical and cultural
narrative and reflect upon how those voices are constructed or positioned.
The challenge for teachers. therefore, is to
understand themselves and the way they are positioned within the education
system as well as Stokesy did all those years ago. Merely presenting an anecdote as a personal confessional
narrative will miss the opportunity and create a familiar modernist tale of
truth telling subject but if the tale could present the self as not only
something we are but also an object we actively construct there might be
hope. Such a tale would have to
ask questions about how the telling is producing (inevitably plural) identities
and pay attention to the fact that it is precisely the selection and
interpretation of story that brings the voice (identity) in to being but, if it
can do this, I
argue, the personal narrative can hold possibilities. If teachers can attempt to understand how their professional
selves are positioned in a social structure they can write themselves into what
Derrida (1990) calls �Difference�, at which point the process of personal
narrative becomes an aesthetic and ethical self-forming as an act of resistance
to dominant discourse. Then, and
only then, do we stand a chance of generating new knowledge or enhancing practice.
My
challenge to the teaching profession, then, is to produce a series of �local
narratives� or �small stories� that explore particulars in a historical or
cultural context in the way Lyotard (1984) envisioned. Elements of a teacher�s experience need
to selected, interpreted and presented within the
wider story of education precisely to bring voices (identities) into being and
help us remember ourselves. By
this I do not mean remember our past in order to �reveal� or �reflect� �true� or �authentic� selves but,
rather, remember that this I is here now, positioned in such a way and acting
in a certain fashion. The anecdote
is important because it is the �field text� that forms the basis of research
but it is not the end of the story.
By asking questions of the anecdote related to meaning, social
significance and purpose we can construct a personal sense of justification
that brings an �I� into being and allows it to connect with �they�. As Clandinin and Connelly (2000; p122)
have pointed out, �Injecting that I is not easy� because �Most of us are
astonishingly unclear about what our inquiry interests are and how to justify
them in personal terms� but finding the �I� in the research problem is the
heart of the matter. Inquiring
into the anecdotes that embody our personal experience is to engage in research
as a quest – a re-searching for a story that provides a self with new
meanings, understandings and relationships to others.
The
�I�s that are created in this form of research will necessarily change as the
story unfolds because each one of us is a plurality and we need to view the
process as fluid instead of thinking of it as being governed by theories,
methods or systems designed to produce clearly definable outcomes or
solutions. There will be no final
text or definitive I, only a series of interim texts to be shared and
negotiated with others. However,
remembering them and where they come from will draw attention to the fact that too
often we are not conscious of ourselves.
Too often �it observes�, �it laughs�, �it thinks�. We do not feel; this I is observing this, noticing this, thinking this. If we could truly remember ourselves
and bring the I into focus we might stand a chance of
really expressing our personal knowledge.
Remembering ourselves through personal narratives might even help us
wake up and remember ourselves in life as it is lived. If we did this there really might be
hope for us enhancing practice by, among other things, recognising that the
curriculum is the stories we tell our students, understanding that personalised
learning involves the meaning our students derive from those stories and
realizing that our purpose has something to do with consciousness.
The
small stories we tell and the identities we create will be personal myths, for
sure, but I see more hope in that than any grand truth on offer. Many social commentators argue that we
live in a demythologized world in which large numbers of us no longer believe
in an orderly universe governed by a just God and, for all its power and
precision, some of us no longer trust the unambiguous objectivity of the
Academy. In the midst of this
existential nothingness, we are challenged to create our own meanings and
discover our own truths as an act of ongoing psychological and social
responsibility. Our world can no
longer tell us who we are and how we should live so we must figure it out for
ourselves. For some of us this is done by arranging the episodes from our
scattered and often confusing experience into stories and understanding them in
terms of narrative unities and discontinuities. Encouraging others to do something similar could create new
meanings and point towards new practices which allow
students to tell their own story and enable them to better interpret the
stories of others. In order to do
that, however, we have to allow teachers to tell their personal stories or
anecdotes. Far from being excluded
as �The basis for either policy or research�, then, we have to accept that the
personal narrative is the foundation of everything – and I use the word
purposefully here because I think the Foundation Stage is where we get closest
to expressing these principles in practice. The personal narrative is the field text that is the
metaphorical equivalent of the field in which Nasruddin lost his key. Finding the key is a metaphor for
researching that narrative and creating new meanings. And, to labour the point somewhat, taking that key home is a
metaphor for positioning our inquiry beside other streams of thought or
inquires in the public arena.
The
joke, of course, is that even when we get home we�ve still got to figure out
how to unlock the door but at least we are not on our own anymore. Each story is, by definition, personal
and subjective but the text can be cut adrift from the final authority of the
writer because it is open to the varying interpretations of the reader (Roland
Barthes infamous �Death of the author�).
Making our personal knowledge and understandings public in the way I am
attempting to do, therefore, is likely to lead to a state of discussion, not
its end. Again, though, we will
find no absolute solution to the never ending story
because we are involved from the outset in the business of subjectivity and
interpretation. Instead we will
find ourselves in a space that approaches Lyotard�s dissensus and, for me, this
is optimistic because hope for change lies not in our agreements but in our disagreements. As Lubeck (1998) says, �Modern ways of
thinking orient us to value stability, certainty and consensus��.yet,
arguably, we are most likely to grow in our practice when we are exposed to
different interpretations and different ways of doing things.� This is a space in which we could argue
about what is truth, question values and develop practice. Along the way we
could also challenge some of Lyotard�s �grand narratives� such as self or
knowledge and, by giving weight to difference over sameness, could encourage
and respect plurality. If we could
then take that story back into our classrooms, I would argue, we would not only
enhance practice surrounding inclusion but better
prepare our students to function in a properly democratic society.
To
be fair, I am not the only one arguing for a place in which teachers reflect
upon and research their experience in order to develop knowledge and enhance
practice. The Government, for
example, is just one among many proposing something similar with its Masters in
Teaching and Learning programme.
The difference is that everyone else wants to act as a gatekeeper for
this knowledge and it was interesting to note how quickly organisations like
QAA and UCET were queuing up to provide methods for �validating� such a
programme. The real problem with
getting a teacher�s voice heard, then, is that whilst no-one
wants to admit to controlling what teachers are permitted to say everyone wants
to control how they are permitted to say it. Even Snow denies the anecdote as a legitimate voice.
Stokesy
would immediately have rebelled against the bullshit at work here. The fact is there are no �proper�,
�valid�, �objective� or �truthful� research methods. They are all �made up� social constructions and there are no
techniques for totally accurately and truthfully capturing and relating aspects
of life. All attempts, whether
they come in words or numbers or visual images, can only be re-presentations
and, hence, interpretations. As Patricia Clough (1992) has stated, �All factual
representations of reality, even statistical representations, are narratively
constructed�. The question, therefore, is not whether narratives should be
allowed but which one to choose.
Attempts to impose one research or narrative method will merely control
the story the researcher is able to tell, the identity they are able to form
and the knowledge they are able to create. This is no way to �Elevate personal knowledge� or tap in to
�A rich resource� and what counts as educational theory should never be allowed
to be separated from �in the field� educational practice. Instead, we need to get back in the
garage with The Clash�s punk sensibility and �make it up for ourselves�. Yes, it will be anarchic, yes, there will be anecdotes equivalent to a punk kid in a
bedroom trying to master three chords.
But there will also be recognition that we all have a song to sing and
encouragement to sing it. Then we
might be able to spot the gifts and talents in ourselves and use these to
encourage the gifts and talents in our students. Some of those three chord bedroom songs did, after all,
change my life. Perhaps some of
our stories can change my practice.
Towards
a Re-solution
In
this module I have attempted to use a story from my past that embodies an
aspect of my knowledge about education to develop a polemic arguing for the
need for teachers to construct personal narratives. I have claimed that these will develop positioned identities which can be shared and discussed in order to create new
knowledge and enhanced practice.
I have suggested that the type of story told influences our knowledge,
that all stories are subjective and that the best way to bring about
transformative change is to argue about the stories being told. I have also suggested that, whilst many
organisations purport to want the same things, in reality they act as gatekeepers by controlling the form a �legitimate� story is
able to take.
In
the field of research, many of those legitimate stories are constructed in what
Jerome Bruner (1986) calls the �paradigmatic mode� of thought and I am
conscious that you, dear reader, are even now cross referencing what you read
against marking criteria that call for tightly reasoned analysis, logical proof
and reference to authoritative voices.
In the end, though, my embodied knowledge positions me in opposition to
this mode of thought and, whilst I have attempted to engage with the systems
Snow wants to create, I have structured my text to embody my meaning. In producing this narrative I have come
to new understandings and become more aware of values that, in making my story
public, I am showing that I am prepared to stand by. The specific values I have
expressed are justice, tolerance and respect and not truth or objectivity so
these cannot be used to validate my story. Instead it must be judged against my own �Living� values and
validated against my own explanatory principles. When we get right down to it, the only justification I need
for my principles or the validity of my method is that, in applying them, I
have learned something and come to new understandings of myself
and my world. In short, I
am the living proof. This does not
mean that I am arguing that anything goes or that all stories are good. It
does, however, mean that my story deserves to be judged on my own terms. Given that my own terms exclude truth
or objectivity from the evaluative criteria I recognise that this presents
something of a problem but I suggest that the task is not impossible.
For
me, an important characteristic of most good stories is the extent to which the
way in which they are written allows the storyteller to make imaginative
contact with the reader/hearer. To
a considerable degree this relationship depends upon the extent to which writer
and reader share beliefs and values but it can also be aided by skilful
writing. With reference to
fiction, Virginia Woolf (1992) suggests that:
The writer must get in touch with his (sic) reader
by putting before him something which he recognises, which, therefore,
stimulates his imagination and makes him willing to co-operate in the far more
difficult business of intimacy.
And it is of the highest importance that this common meeting place
should be reached easily, almost instinctively.
Marion
Dadds (2007) seems to be hinting at a similar common meeting place when she
argues for the concept of empathetic validity as �The potential of practitioner
research in its processes and outcomes to transform the emotional dispositions
of people towards each other, such that greater empathy and regard are
created�.
In
making my narrative public I have attempted to engage you in that intimate
meeting place so that greater regard can be given to the personal narratives of
teachers. Through my story I have
tried to demonstrate that, whilst I empathise with students like Stokesy, in
the end I am not him and do not believe we should smash anyone else�s light or
head for the top of the nearest solitary tree. Instead we need to engage with each other�s stories
tolerantly and respectfully in a quest to find new meanings. I hope my story
has aesthetic merit in as much as it has stimulated your senses by inviting
interpretative responses and eliciting reactions (as contrasted with
anaesthetic qualities which dull our senses). I would also hope that my reflection on narrative has made a
substantive contribution to the construction of knowledge and meaning
making. If I have done all this I
would say that I have constructed a good story. You, of course, are more than welcome to disagree with
me. That is the whole point. My truth is no more valid than yours
and, when all is said and done, I�ve simply told you my story in an attempt to
get you to join the discussion and tell me yours. That is how we will meet Snow�s challenge and improve what
we are doing.
Everything
else is bullshit.
References:
Barone,
T. (2009) Comments
on Coulter and Smith: Narrative
Researchers as Witnesses of Injustice and Agents of Social Change?
Educational
Researcher 2009 38: 591-597.
Barthes, R. (1977) Image-Music-Text. New York: Noonday
Bleakley,
A. (2000) Writing With Invisible Ink: narrative, confessionalism and reflective
practice. Reflective Practice 1:1 pp 11-24
Bruner, J. (1986) Actual Minds, Possible Worlds. London: Harvard
University Press
Clandinin,
J D & Connelly, F (2000) Narrative Inquiry: experience and story in
qualitative research. San
Francisco: Jossey-Bass
Clandinin,
J. D. &
Murphy, M. S. (2009) Comments on Coulter and Smith: Relational Ontological Commitments in
Narrative Research, Educational Researcher 2009 38: 598-602.
Clough,
P. (1992) The Ends of Ethnography.
London: Sage
Dadds,
M (2007) Empathetic Validity in Practitioner Research: Educational Action
Research, 16 : 2, 279-290
Dewey, J. (1938/1997) Education and Experience. London; MacMillan
Derrida,
J (1990) Writing and Difference.
London: Routledge
Eakin,
P J. (1999) How Our Lives Become Stories.
New York: Teachers� College Press
Lubeck,
S. (1998) Is Developmentally Appropriate Practice for Everyone? Childhood
Education, Vol. 74
Lyotard,
J-F. (1984) The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Manchester
University Press
Plummer,
K. (1983) Documents of life an introduction to the problems and literature of a
humanistic method. London; Allen and Unwin.
Postman, N & Weingartner, C (1969) Teaching As A Subversive
Activity. Middlesex: Penguin
Shah, I. (1968) The Exploits of the Incomparable Mulla Nasruddin. Octagon Press
Snow, C. E. (2001) Knowing
What We Know: Children, Teachers, Researchers.
Presidential Address to AERA, 2001, in Seattle, in Educational Researcher, Vol. 30, No.7, pp. 3-9.
Woolf,
V (1992) Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown in �Selected Essays�. Oxford: Oxford
University Press
Appendix
1.
The hardest bit, they�d
said, was the first bit and, at first, it seemed like they were right. Standing at the top and leaning back
into nothing while I waited for the ropes to take my weight, I felt the air
trap inside me and my legs turn to jellies. Gradually, though, I felt the reassuring pull of the rope
and gathered the confidence to lean further back over the cliff edge. Slowly I shuffled my feet and, 150 feet
above the ground, staring at the sky with the rain falling directly into my eyes, I knew why I was there. I felt a rush of adrenaline, a soaring of confidence and an exhilaration about my own capabilities. I didn�t put two and two together but
the look on my face must have been why John Oram gave up his time to run the
local youth club and take ungrateful oiks like me to the Beacons for a
weekend�s abseiling.
A few feet to my right,
Stokesy was, literally, in full swing.
He�d been the butt of more than one joke that weekend because he�d
thought that abseiling was something you did on a lake in a boat called an
ab. Nevertheless, he was in his
element now, bouncing about on the cliff face and telling everyone that he was
going to do it like the blokes in The Guns Of Navarone. No shuffling of feet for him, Stokesy
practically ran off the top of the cliff and proceeded to explore what he
termed �the jump technique� by hurling himself away from the cliff face and
seeing how far he could slide down the rope before colliding once more with the
wall of rock. As I cautiously made
my way down I could feel Stokesy below me developing his technique into wide,
swinging arcs as he explored as much of the rock face as possible, all the
while providing a running commentary on what he was doing and ignoring the
increasingly desperate pleas from John Oram to slow down and go in a straight
line.
And then it happened. Everything ground to a halt. Stokesy�s manic swinging and bouncing
had turned the ropes controlling our descent into a tangled mass of spaghetti
and they had locked, preventing our movement towards the safety of the
ground. Worse still, Stokesy was
far below me and while they might have been able to pull me up the fifty of so
feet I had descended, it quickly became clear from the nervous talk at the top
of the cliff that they couldn�t pull Stokesy through my ropes and up. There was nothing for it. We were safe enough but we would have
to wait there while a rescue team made their way down with new ropes.
Or that�s what they
thought. Stokesy had other
ideas. �Tell them not to worry�,
he shouted up to me, �I think I can make it�. What!? Was he mad? It
was only the climbing harness that prevented the world from falling out of my
bottom as I clung frozen to the ropes and the cliff but Stokesy had decided
that the best policy was to climb back up. Voices from the top told him not to be so stupid, that the
slack couldn�t be taken up on the ropes and that he would effectively be free
climbing but, as always, Stokesy took absolutely no notice of the words of
authoritative wisdom and merrily set off.
For what seemed like ages I could hear him below me, clambering up the
rock face and hauling the ropes behind him, until at last he appeared next to
me. �You nutter,� I screamed at
him. �We�re tangled together! If you fall off you�ll drag me with
you�.
�I won�t fall off,� said
Stokesy, �I�ve climbed harder than this before. Besides, there�s only about fifty feet to go and if you
climb too they can start to pull the ropes in�.
I couldn�t believe
it. The nutcase was seriously
suggesting that I climbed to the top with him! �I can�t�, I protested, but Stokesy was having none of it. �It�s easy,� he said, �I�ll find the holds
and you just follow me up. All
you�ve got to do is keep three bits in contact with the rock�.
And then Stokesy gave me a
climbing lesson, teaching me how to secure three limbs to holds and move just
one in order to find another hold and move up. He did, indeed, make it look easy and I realised that this
kid had been climbing all his life.
He�d spent half his primary school years up a tree and now I knew why he
always had the biggest supply of conkers.
He was a bloody expert! I
also knew that I would lose a bucket load of adolescent street credibility if I
didn�t follow him. That�s why, more scared than I have ever been in my life, I
set off.
Amazingly, Stokesy was a
great teacher over those fifty feet, talking all the while about what he was doing,
finding a route he thought I could manage and constantly encouraging me with
words of support. When I crawled
over the top I felt like Superman and I had the most profound respect for
Stokesy. The lad who was generally
thought to be good for nothing had an amazing talent and, so I thought, had
saved my life. He was brilliant.
Sadly, my
thoughts were not shared by everyone. John Oram was white as a sheet, declaring our adventure to
be �Foolhardy in the extreme� and cancelling the rest of the session but we
didn�t care. By the time we got
back to our tents we had climbed 18,000 feet and we were heroes. It was the best evening in our young
lives.
Appendix
2
Comments on Coulter and Smith:
Relational Ontological Commitments in Narrative Research
D. Jean Clandinin
M. Shaun Murphy
D. JEAN CLANDININ is a professor and
director of the Centre for Research for Teacher Education and Development,
University of Alberta, Education Building South, Room 633, Edmonton, AB, Canada
T6G 2G5; [email protected]. Her research focuses on
curriculum studies, teacher knowledge, teacher education, and narrative
inquiry.
M. SHAUN MURPHY is
an assistant professor in the Department of Curriculum Studies, University of
Saskatchewan, 28 Campus Drive, Saskatoon, SK, Canada S7N 0X1; [email protected].
His research program focuses on teacher education, curriculum studies,
narrative inquiry, and the interwoven lives of teachers, children, and
families.
In this comment article on Coulter and Smith (2009), the authors
raise
concerns that focusing exclusively on issues of representation
may
lead readers to misunderstandings about narrative research.
The
authors argue that narrative ways of thinking about the
phenomena
under study are interwoven with narrative research
methodologies.
Drawing on Dewey�s theory of experience, they discuss three
features of an ontology of experience. They
highlight
distinctions between narrative research and other
forms
of qualitative inquiry, attend closely to the transition
from
field texts to research texts, and address the interconnections
between
ontological and ethical commitments. In their view,
research
texts need to speak to the everyday experiences of
researchers
and participants to arrive at an understanding of
those
experiences as "storied" phenomena within social, cultural,
institutional,
and linguistic narratives.
Key Words: narrative research � relational ethics � relational ontological
commitment � storied experience
Educational Researcher, Vol. 38, No. 8, 598-602
(2009)
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Educational Researcher, Vol. 38, No. 8, 598-602
(2009) Discourse
on Narrative Research Cathy A. Coulter and Mary Lee Smith The Construction Zone: Literary Elements in Narrative Research Educational Researcher 2009 38: 577-590. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]
[Request Permission] Tom Barone Comments on Coulter and Smith: Narrative Researchers
as Witnesses of Injustice and Agents of Social Change? Educational Researcher 2009 38: 591-597. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]
[Request Permission] D. Jean Clandinin and M. Shaun Murphy Comments on Coulter and Smith: Relational Ontological
Commitments in Narrative Research Educational Researcher 2009 38: 598-602. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]
[Request Permission] Michael W. Smith Comments on Coulter and Smith: The Issue of Authorial
Surplus in Narrative Research Educational Researcher 2009 38: 603-607. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]
[Request Permission] Cathy A. Coulter Response to Comments: Finding the Narrative in Narrative Research Educational Researcher 2009 38: 608-611. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]
[Request Permission] Ariel M. Aloe and Betsy Jane Becker Teacher Verbal Ability and School Outcomes: Where Is the Evidence? Educational
Researcher 2009 38: 612-624. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]
[Request Permission |