Stories that won’t go away – How to tell the stories that keep teachers up at night
Presentation by: Peter Hill
Session E | 11:25 – 11:45 | Room 207
Abstract:
Stories that won’t go away – How to tell the stories that keep teachers up at night
All teachers have stories that won’t go away. These are the ones that keep us up at night. They aren’t always positive and are oftentimes ironically absurd. As educators, we rarely talk about these stories. If we tell a story at a conference or in a journal, it’s usually about how well we taught the metaphor or the digestive system. If we do talk about a problem that occurred in the classroom, the story almost always ends with a happy solution. I wonder if this is always healthy. If we wrote more about the strange, unsolvable stories that won’t go away perhaps we would focus less on who we should be, and more on who we really are.
I’ve been a high school teacher for thirty years and have worked with student teachers for twenty five years. I’ve taught Education courses at UBC for the past ten years and completed my doctoral studies two years ago. I have some sense of the life of a teacher both at the start and at the end of a teaching career. One amasses more of these stories the older one gets, but they begin in the first weeks of a student teacher’s practicum.
The presentation will begin by briefly discussing the narrative turn in qualitative research, mentioning the work of Ellis, C. & Bochner, A. (2010)., Richardson, L. (2000)., Clandinin, J., & Connelly, M. (2000) and Leggo, C.(2007). One intriguing aspect of this type of research is that, due to the varied experiences of teaching, each person’s story is different. The rich chemistry of each student, teacher, administrator, parent and culture can only lead to a completely individual story. However, as mentioned above, these stories aren’t always positive and are often ironic. They are the ones that lead the teacher to ask,“How did that happen, and why can’t I forget it?” These stories say something about who we are as teachers, but they also involve the weird confluence of chance, personality and culture. These stories occur to every teacher no matter what age, race, creed, class, or gender.
