LIBRARY Michigan State Unlverslty PLACE m RETURN edit to Mal; m}. Mont from your rocord. TO AVOID FINES mum on or him an. duo. DATE DUE DATE DUE DATE DUE D usu loAnAfflnnltlvo Action/Emu omrmylmmon Walla-9.1 STORY IN CONTEXT: A STUDY IN THE FORM AND FUNCTION OF TEACHERS' PERSONAL EXPERIENCE NARRATIVES By Stephen A. Swidler A DISSERTATION Submitted to Michigan State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOKDPHY Department of Teacher Education 1995 Edmtionai res oi teachers a'iC access and mo eddeational res comforting met account the fit study draws UF Through three i critical democr. studying these perspective see that, despite its concerned with reenacted, anc r95l3‘.='c‘ti‘»reiy, th minded educatr personal exper context, the pe Pelsuasion that ABSTRACT STORY IN CONTEXT: A STUDY IN THE FORM AND FUNCTION OF TEACHERS' PERSONAL EXPERIENCE NARRATIVES By Stephen A. Swidler Educational research is presently beset by a fascination with things narrative. The study of teachers and teaching seems to be a locus of narrative’s allure. In the effort to better access and more authentically represent the of teachers’ work and life experiences, educational researchers have found story a resonant object of study and storytelling a comforting method. Unfortunately much of this interest in story has failed to take into account the rich theoretical and empirical traditions of inquiry in folkloric studies. This study draws upon the intellectual tradition of folklore and story as performance. Through three detailed case studies of personal experience narratives told in a group of critical democratic educators, the author provides an ethnographic framework for studying these conversational personal narratives as performances. This performance perspective sees even the everyday conversational narrative as a form of verbal art that, despite its discrete and portable form, is inexorably bound to context. This study is concerned with the expressive narrative form, the culturally defined scene in which it is enacted, and the unique renderings of narrative in performance. Here, these are, respectively, the personal experience narrative, the context of the group life of like- minded educators centering on critical democracy and intimate conversation, and personal experience narration or storytelling. As a form of verbal art that occurs in context, the personal experience narrative performance functions as a form of persuasion that seeks dually to maintain the cohesion of the group and to stay the course otrneeting its 902 the interior exper that educational : experience or co; of meeting its goals. Thus personal experience narrative is not merely the expression of the interior experience of a teacher, but the artful effort at rhetoric. This study implies that educational researchers avoid viewing narrative as unproblematic mimesis of experience or cognition and see it as an artful and artificial device used to persuade. Copyright by STEPHEN A. SWIDL‘ER 1994 For my parents Compyeti: true and intelte-C'. remedy the ills c‘ are not the end C beginning to the children who are and lives lhiOlr‘g'F We have as "W narrates one's ex this goal withoUl I owe the Forum who allor their words. ask not only can tea maintain new w: educators show: would have ther her belief in thi: have happened. Protess unlikely dogma and encouragec ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Completion of this work is the culmination of my pursuit to be both personally true and intellectually rigorous. Education is a field that tempts researchers to try to remedy the ills of schooling through the arrogance of research. Research and its findings are not the end of inquiry. As we should know, educational research is but a partial beginning to the intellectual and pragmatic improvements of the lives of teachers and children who are thrown into a life of mutual dependence. Understanding teachers’ works and lives through the stories they tell is one way to contribute the this partial beginning. We have as much to learn from them as they do from us. Listening to how one artfully narrates one’s experience has been the goal of this study. I could not have accomplished this goal without the support of following people. I owe many debts of gratitude. I owe the greatest acknowledgment of gratitude to the members of the Teacher Forum who allowed me to join their group, participate in their conversations, record their words, ask them naive questions, and scrutinize their stories. They showed me that not only can teachers gather to talk about their work, but that they can create and maintain new worlds that help them answer the question “Who am I?” This gathering of educators showed me that teachers have the wherewithal to fend off a hostile world that would have them be something they’d rather not. I owe Clare special thanks since without her belief in this group, and that it was worthy of study, this dissertation would never have happened. Professor Christopher Clark, my dissertation chair, took a chance on an unlikely doctoral student and became my main source of intellectual support. He allowed and encouraged me to follow a vision of what I wanted this dissertation to be. He inspired vi courage and cor artiact. He den“: narrat; ve as pe“ what ttmeans to i l students could e i For this I am to Eliot Sirgl scholarly conce' theory are ewde' not only the tech study ol cultural r richest empirical these intellectual His availability tr leed'oack and so; I owe the close reading ot gendered nature he support ol H intellectual humi edllcaitors that tt developqn Jay‘ $0ciety We want I also WE Cherlitholrnes' r Provided an inv have otherwise courage and confidence in my efforts to see story as a cultural as well as individual artifact. He demonstrated the patience of a midwife as l muddled through ideas of personal narrative as performance, that ultimately became the core of this study. Chris embodied what it means to be good to one’s graduate students. I only hope that other doctoral students could experience such support in the pursuit of a personal and scholarly vision. For this I am forever in his debt. Eliot Singer is behind this study more than any other single individual. His scholarly concerns in cultural anthropology, folklore, sociolinguistics, and literary theory are evident throughout. He was first my fieldwork teacher. From him I learned not only the technique of ethnographic inquiry but the theoretical underpinnings of the study of cultural phenomena in general. He then directed me to the field of folklore as the richest empirical and theoretical source for research on narrative. His insistence that these intellectual traditions be accessed for the benefit of educational research paid off. His availability for long conversation, often over chili dogs, and reliability for accurate feedback and suggestions were invaluable to the completion of this study. I owe thanks to my dissertation committee. I am grateful to Doug Campbell for his close reading of this manuscript and Lynn Paine for the insightful attention to the gendered nature of teaching and of the Teacher Forum. I especially want to acknowledge the support of Helen Featherstone and Jay Featherstone. Their personal support and intellectual humility have been gifts I hope to emulate someday. I learned from these educators that the life of the mind is at the core of education and that our task is to help develop—in Jay’s Deweyan phrase—habits of mind that help us create the schools and the society we want to inhabit. I also want to thank members of my study group: David Labaree, Cleo Cherryholmes, Dirck Roosevelt, Mr. Bill Fiosenthal, and Steve Mattson. This group provided an invaluable alternative space for intellectual conversation that I would not have othenrvise experienced in my graduate education. They, therefore, indirectly vii supported this i. intellectual criti: lthank E she showed the teachers to unde otpassion and it My deece success in com; immeasurable a wanting and hatt- the period of this supported this work. The combination of this group’s playfulness and serious intellectual critique provides a guiding image for the life of an academic. I thank Sam Hollingsworth for her unflinching emotional support. As my teacher, she showed the transformative power of conversation and the moral necessity of faith in teachers to understand and take control of their lives. She also showed me the necessity of passion and romance in an academic life. My deepest debt of gratitude goes to my wife Ruth Heaton. She provided a model of success in completing her own dissertation of personal vision. She provided an immeasurable amount of support in her willingness to read and listen to my ideas, wanting and half-baked. If the amount of the care and concern Ruth provided me during the period of this study is in any sense a harbinger of the care and concern our child will receive I am assured that we will be all right in our life together. viii LIST OF FIGUF CHAPTER I INTRODUCTIO ART OF PERS NARRATIVE A The Per | What tc The Pe Ethnog RheIOl Ffame CHAPTER 2 THE CONTE SECTlON . TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF FIGURES ............................................................................. x I I i PART I FRAMING PERSONAL EXPERIENCE NARRATIVE CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION ART OF PERSUASION: PERSONAL EXPERIENCE NARRATIVE AS RHETORICAL PERFORMANCE IN GROUP LIFE .................. 1 The Personal Experience Narrative and Group Life .......................................... 3 Ends and Means ....................................................................................... 5 Storytelling ............................................................................................ 6 Narrative Inquiry .................................................................................. 6 What to Make of the Personal Narrative? ......................................................... 8 Ethnographic Concerns ........................................................................... 10 The Performance Perspective ............................................................................ 11 Ethnographic Framework Three-Fold Question ............................................................................... 13 Personal Narrative Form ....................................................................... 14 Context .................................................................................................... 16 Performance ........................................................................................... 19 Rhetoric and the Function of Personal Narrative .............................................. 21 Persuasion .............................................................................................. 22 Framework of the Dissertation .......................................................................... 26 CHAPTER 2 THE CONTEXT OF THE TEACHER FORUM ............................................... 28 SECTION 1: A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE TEACHER FORUM ................................................ 29 Getting Clare a' l Key EVI Teache' SECTlON 2: What is Group l Frames Primary Primary Primary The Pe SECTION 1: The PI Genre Getting Started .................................................................................................... 29 Clare and Critical Democracy ............................................................................ 31 Center for Education and Democracy ...................................................... 31 Key Events in the Teacher Forum History ......................................................... 35 The Doctoral Seminar ............................................................................. 35 Lana’s Ordeal .......................................................................................... 36 Teacher Forum Members ................................................................................... 37 SECTION 2: CONTEXT AS A FOLK FRAME OF REFERENCE ............................................... 40 What is Context? ................................................................................................ 40 Context vs. Surround .............................................................................. 40 Group Life as Context ......................................................................................... 42 Differential Identity ............................................................................... 42 Small Group Culture .............................................................................. 44 Frames of Reference and Primary Frameworks ................................................ 45 Primary Frameworks ............................................................................ 46 Primary Frames of the Teacher Forum ............................................................. 47 The Ideological Frame: Critical Democracy ........................................... 48 The lnteractional Frame: Required Intimacy or “Getting Personal”.... 6 1 Primary Frames as Guides or Rules .................................................................. 63 Primary Frames Together and in Relation to One Another ................................ 66 Contradictions and Tensions ................................................................... 67 Competence in Dealing With The Primary Frames ................................ 68 The Personal Narrative and the Primary Frames ............................................. 73 CHAPTER 3 WHAT PERSONAL NARRATIVE IS AND HOW I STUDIED IT ....................... 75 SECTION 1: PERSONAL EXPERIENCE NARRATIVE: ORAL LITERATURE? .......................... 75 The Problems of Genre and the Personal Experience Narrative ....................... 76 Genre Components of the Personal Experience Narrative ................................. 77 Dramatic Narrative Structure ............................................................... 78 “When I Went to High School” Text ....................................................... 81 “Kwame Touré” Text ............................................................................. 82 Implied Truthfulness ............................................................................. 87 Self-Same of Narrator and Character/Witness ..................................... 89 Story STUD-yin Data Slop, “No Story as Discursive Event .................................................................................. 90 Story Openings and Closings ................................................................... 93 Preface and Coda ..................................................................................... 95 SECTION22ANOUTUNEOFAIVETI-IODOLOGYFOR STUDYING THE EMERGENCE OF PERSONAL NARRATIVE ................................................. 107 Data Collection .................................................................................................... 107 Participant-Observation ....................................................................... 108 Tape Recordings and Their Transcriptions ............................................ 1 10 Interviews and Conversations ................................................................ 1 1 1 PART H: NARRATIVE PERFORMANCES CHAPTER 4 WHEN STORY MEETS CONTEXT: A TERRIBLE DISCUSSION ...................... 1 1 3 Breakthrough Into Performance ........................................................................ 114 “Terrible Discussion” Text ............................................................................... 116 Story As Joke ...................................................................................................... 120 Characters in the Joke ........................................................................... 121 Symbolic Inversion ................................................................................ 122 Story as a Tale of Critical Consciousness ........................................................... 124 Story Transformation ........................................................................................ 128 Dramatis Personae Transformation ....................................................... 130 Fitting Frames ........................................................................................ 132 CHAPTER 5 READ MY LIPS: REPORTED SPEECH IN THE POETIC RELATIONSHIPS OF PERSONAL EXPERIENCE NARRATIVE ....................... 1 3 4 Introducing Narrative Voices A Question of Framing ............................................................................ 135 Forms of Reported Speech .................................................................................. 138 Direct and Indirect Quotation ................................................................. 139 Quasi-Direct Quotation .......................................................................... 141 Alteration of Direct and Indirect Speech ................................................ 144 Story Background ............................................................................................... 145 “No End of Year Trip” Text ................................................................................ 146 xi CHAPTER 6 IIIBNALENT E PARADIGMATIC Story Ba: ‘Death T Narratiu Death 1 Ambive CONCLUDINc Reported Speech and the Genre of the Personal Narrative ................................ 152 Reported Speech and Dramatic Narrative Structure ............................. 152 Reported Speech and Implied Truthfulness ............................................ 159 Reported Speech and Narrator Self-Same ............................................. 162 Reported Speech and Audience Involvement Implications for Teacher Forum as Group Entity .................................. 162 Functions of Reported Speech ................................................................. 164 CHAPTER 6 AMBIVALENT EMERGENCE OF A PROSPECTIVE PARADIGMATIC NARRATIVE A TEACHER’S DEATH THREAT ..................... 1 6 8 Story Background ............................................................................................... 169 “Death Threat” Text .......................................................................................... 172 Dramatis Personae ............................................................................................. 175 Lana ........................................................................................................ 175 The Student ............................................................................................. 176 Administrators ....................................................................................... 178 Fellow Teachers ...................................................................................... 179 Narrative Devices .............................................................................................. 180 The Letter ............................................................................................... 180 The Grievance Process ........................................................................... 182 The Evaluation ........................................................................................ 183 Reported Speech and Dialogue ................................................................ 184 The Joke .................................................................................................. 185 Death Threat as Social Drama ............................................................................ 186 Ambivalence and a Prospective Paradigmatic Narrative ................................... 189 CONCLUDING REMARKS ON THE ARTFUL AND ARTIFICIAL NATURE OF STORYTELLING ................. 1 95 Story as Verbal Art ................................................................................ 195 The Mimetic Fallacy ............................................................................... 199 Cultural Embodiment ............................................................................. 200 Arguing From and For a Performance Perspective ............................... 202 EPILOGUE: TI-IE DOWNWARD SPIRAL OF A TEACHER GROUP ................... 2 0 3 xii APPENDIX A INDEX OF T: APPENDIX B TRANSCRIPT} UST OF REFE APPENDIX A INDEX OF TEACHER FORUM STORIES ................................................... 21 2 APPENDIX B TRANSCRIPTION DEVICES .................................................................. 21 5 LIST OF REFERENCES ....................................................................... 2 1 6 xiii Figure 2.1 Primary tran Figure 2.2 Dual primary Figure 3.1 Story as enr figure 3.2 Openings a Fliure 3.3 Preface an Flute it Humurous Flsure 4.2 Sydney's Figure 4.3 hmuma Figure 4.4 Figure 45 Figure 5.1 Flaming Ellie 5.2 Charac F'i’tre 5.3 ACTIQn LIST OF FIGURES Figure 2.1 Primary frames of the Teacher Forum ................................................................... 64 Figure 2.2 Dual primary frames of the Teacher Forum ........................................................... 65 Figure 3.1 Story as enclave in conversation ............................................................................ 92 Figure 3.2 Openings and closings in story ............................................................................... 94 Figure 3.3 Preface and coda around story ................................................................................ 96 Figure 4.1 Humurous inversion of child-adult relations ........................................................ 122 Figure 4.2 Sydney's pun and the double signification of grades ............................................... 123 Figure 4.3 Structural parallel of grades and homosexuality in the way it’s always been ....... 128 Figure 4.4 Story movement ...................................................................................................... 130 Figure 4.5 Transformation of dramatis personae ..................................................................... 131 Figure 5.1 Framing laminations of reported speech in story .................................................. 137 Figure 5.2 Characteristics of quoted speech ............................................................................. 141 Figure 5.3 Action sequence through reported speech ............................................................... 155 xiv PARTI: FRAMING PERSONAL EXPERIENCE NARRATIVE Educational res ol teachers anc access and mc Educational re: Comforting me account the r Study draws 1 Through three critical demc “tidying the PETSpeQ‘Ne that‘ 693p“ CW“erred is ElTacrted ‘espective minded 6r perSOna] mnien‘ . ABSTRACT STORY IN CONTEXT: A STUDY IN THE FORM AND FUNCTION OF TEACHERS' PERSONAL EXPERIENCE NARRATIVES BY Stephen A. Swidler Educational research is presently beset by a fascination with things narrative. The study of teachers and teaching seems to be a locus of narrative’s allure. In the effort to better access and more authentically represent the of teachers’ work and life experiences, educational researchers have found story a resonant object of study and storytelling a comforting method. Unfortunately much of this interest in story has failed to take into account the rich theoretical and empirical traditions of inquiry in folkloric studies. This study draws upon the intellectual tradition of folklore and story as performance. Through three detailed case studies of personal experience narratives told in a group of critical democratic educators, the author provides an ethnographic framework for studying these conversational personal narratives as performances. This performance perspective sees even the everyday conversational narrative as a form of verbal art that, despite its discrete and portable form, is inexorably bound to context. This study is concerned with the expressive narrative form, the culturally defined scene in which it is enacted, and the unique renderings of narrative in performance. Here, these are, respectively, the personal experience narrative, the context of the group life of like- minded educators centering on critical democracy and intimate conversation, and personal experience narration or storytelling. As a form of verbal art that occurs in context, the personal experience narrative performance functions as a form of persuasion that seeks dually to maintain the cohesion of the group and to stay the course of meeting its ;. the interior ex: that educatione experience or c Stephen A. Swilder of meeting its goals. Thus personal experience narrative is not merely the expression of the interior experience of a teacher, but the artful effort at rhetoric. This study implies that educational researchers avoid viewing narrative as unproblematic mimesis of experience or cognition and see it as an artful and artificial device used to persuade. No one c another's experts not the experienr artifice. Commur The artifice of pr- lecognize. unde: license. even wt Ourselves 0Ver “ Demo's “Dene presented anliic rhove others thrr P’EsentafiOn 01 ‘ “he's and self < presentation 0, y are able to com ar"Others life. With the itemergw in a 1 CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION ART OF PERSUASION: PERSONAL EXPERIENCE NARRATIVE AS RHETORICAL PERFORMANCE IN GROUP LIFE No one can experience another’s experience. All that we have to account for another’s experience is what she tells us. What a person tells us of a given experience is not the experience itself. Rather, it is a presentation of that experience, a text, an artifice. Communication of experience is always a creation and presentation of artifice. The artifice of presented experience occurs in many forms that we as cultural beings can recognize, understand, and employ. These are shared forms to which we give validity and license, even when we acknowledge their distortion for the sake of presentation. We give ourselves over to these items of presentation and we feel we can sense what another person’s experience is like. We are moved not by the experience itself, but by the presented artifice of experience, which we take to be the experience. It is the effort to move others through form, which is both artful and artificial, that is at the heart of the presentation of experience. Presentation is an aesthetic effort. It seeks to persuade others and self of the vitality and coherence of experience. It is in the vital and coherent presentation of experience, through the available cultural forms of expression, that we are able to connect with one another and feel we belong, even if momentarily, to another’s life. With these thoughts I began an inquiry into the personal experience narrative as it emerged in a small group of educators. I spent a year and a half attending the monthly meetings of a group I call the Teacher Forum. The fifteen or so members of the Teacher Forum meet l“: their work. TD- around ‘Cfttica' Forum. at time middle and sec listructors. and educators. This became a plea overcome the l of what school As a p call a folk frarr sensibilities ar hmamana depositions. ' htirnate, or “g between thee utterance. Tt h our secret-i lit the Teach contersaitior Which the De In it way I do_ I I 2 Forum meet to create and maintain an alternative conversation about the purposes of their work. This non-traditional, or at least traditionally radical, conversation centered around “critical democracy" and was enveloped in an ethos of intimate talk. The Teacher Forum, at time of data collection, had become a place where a diverse group of teachers— middle and secondary school English educators, elementary teachers, community college instructors, and teacher educators—could come to discuss their experiences and lives as educators. This discussion required them to do so in a critical way. The group’s meetings became a place to convince themselves of the validity of experience, struggle and pain to overcome the business-as-usual, functionalist, or otherwise “common” understanding of what school is for and what teaching the young is about. As a part-time identity affiliation for its members, the Teacher Forum is what I call a folk frame of reference. This type of folk group serves as a frame of and for sensibilities and dispositions. Teacher Forum members have created, or joined, and seek to maintain a community of vital ways of speaking around these sensibilities and dispositions. The primary ways of speaking include the critical/democratic and the intimate, or “getting personal.” The personal experience narrative works with and between these primary ways of speaking as a common cultural convention of expressive utterance. Though the personal experience narrative is common, known, and used widely in our society, it comes to life and only makes sense in context. The small group context of the Teacher Forum, with explicit goals and purposes and tacit, emergent rules for conversation and sociable behavior, form the cultural and communicative matrix in which the personal narrative arises. In this chapter I introduce my reasons for looking at the personal narrative the way I do. I present the theoretical backdrop against which I make sense of the stories I heard in the Teacher Forum. I attempt to present for the reader a view that casts the personal experience narrative as a variant of the art of persuasion in small group life. As rhetoric, the personal experience narrative must be performed since it dramatizes the lite and the the text's lorrr irriversal of ex: Teache uncommon phe the most part. g nganization car such as mather around thinking assessment an They may be u schools). They enhancement Am"? Teach leathers gath Teact ”the holistic htOre than 0T comhurries Seen‘ among Rachel t0 al 1EaChe’dlal educiitor, The that We are 3 the life and the ideals of the group. A study of rhetorical performances calls attention to the text’s form and its parole. This calls for an ethnographic and poetic view of this most universal of expressive utterances. i r 'v ’f Teachers getting together to talk about the nature of their work is not an uncommon phenomenon. Teachers join and form groups for various reasons, though, for the most part, groups are organized around teachers’ professional development. Such organization can range from enhancement of teacher’s learning around subject matter, such as mathematics (9.9., H. Featherstone, et. al., 1993) or writing. Others are formed around thinking about children and how teachers can learn from them in order to develop assessment and curriculum (e.g., Philadelphia Teachers’ Learning Cooperative, 1984). They may be university-initiated study groups (9.9., through professional development schools). They may be district sponsored inservices seeking the professional enhancement of its teachers. Sometimes they are part of teacher research networks (see Among Teachers newsletter). And sometimes, as in the case of the Teacher Forum, teachers gather away from their schools and districts and away from university agendas. Teacher groups are not only places for professional development and Ieaming. A more holistic view would encourage us to look at teachers’ membership in groups as more than opportunities for greater teaming and increased expertise in instruction. As communities that must be created (or joined) and maintained, teacher groups can be seen, among other things, as identity resources. In other words, group affiliation helps a teacher to answer the question “Who am I?” As all identities are social in origin, a teacher draws from social groupings to which she belongs to constitute her identity as an educator. The view of teacher groups as Identity resources is a variant of the larger notion that we are all members in multiple groups. No one in modern American society belongs toa single grc. apnmary groo: various groups identtyf notes envelope sever. eight talk grout sensibilities wh. the tamiiy, ethnr laesthetic prefer tahl pa complexity withi and secondary ! teachers do not defining dimens teachers is cho develogmem‘ i; been what mar are {1993, r little to poten them. we can “it Dart-time ; “Shimlonauy i This v QTOUp membe mmplex and be maintaine 4 to a single group that determines identity. Though we all may belong to and associate with a primary group (e.g., ethnic), we seem to draw differentially upon our membership in various groups to constitute our identities (Bauman, 1972a). “An individual’s sense of identity,” notes folklorist Sandra Stahl (1989) “grows out of a variety of sources and envelope several specific kinds of sensibilities within it” (p. 34). She has identified eight folk group categories “that both teach and allow the individual to express the sensibilities which collectively help form her or his identity” (p. 35). These include the family, ethnicity, religion, place or geographic locality, age, gender, social network (aesthetic preferences or taste), and occupation. Stahl paints with a broad brush and fails to account for the diversity or complexity within a given folk group category. Her division of primary (face to face) and secondary groupings, though, implies this is possible. I want to propose that teachers do not uniformly belong to the occupational category of “teacher" as a sufficient defining dimension of their identities. Rather, a teacher who chooses to join a group of teachers is choosing to expand and include a resource not only for her Ieaming and development, but also for her identity. If Joseph Featherstone is right and we take to heart what many biographies and autobiographies of educators tell us, then teaching is “a life” (1993, personal communication). We can extend the notion of the occupational group to potentially multiple groupings for those teachers who opt for membership in them. We can then conceive that a teacher’s identity can be significantly wrapped up in her part-time affiliation with such groups and that she can move beyond the institutionally inherited and stereotypical identity of “teacher.” This view of differential identity (Bauman, 1972a) points to the importance group membership can have for teachers. Groups take on a deeper hue as they are more complex and grounded in their social and symbolic organization than an independent variable in teacher Ieaming and development. Groups are complex resources that must be maintained if they are to act as significant resources to help answer the question ‘Who am I as 2 “identity resour: fey cohere? find; and clear, Whate. tasks. One. the sustain itself. Pi may evolve or c given time, the r PUI'POSE of their commonsensica and meeting the negotiate a grot means become t972b). Groups cuttmes that ar them (3 Fine. QTOup‘ that are risemble What 1986) GTOUDS and rules fOr tt goals a grOUpS maintenan Ce 5 "Who am I as an educator?” It forces us to ask What is the nature of groups that work as identity resources for teachers? How are such groups as communities created? How do they cohere? W Whatever the specific nature of a teacher group, it is faced with at least two basic tasks. One, the group must define its goals and purposes for existence adequately to sustain itself. Purposes and goals for gathering are often implicit and multiple, and they may evolve or change. Sometimes new goals emerge from the life of the group. At any given time, the majority of a group’s members will be able to minimally articulate the purpose of their group, even when those purposes seem self-evident, unreflective or commonsensical. Second, groups must develop means for fulfilling their stated purposes and meeting their goals, stated and unstated. Means must work to accommodate and negotiate a group’s goals, which maybe internally contradictory. Sometimes the very means become part of the goals of the group (e.g., sociable interaction, see Bauman, 1972b) Groups that consistently meet over time inevitably create local and part-time cultures that articulate their purposes and goals and give rise to the means of reaching them (G. Fine, 1979). Moreover, a group creates emergent features, unique to that group, that are beyond the personalities of any of the individual members. They resemble what folklorists call “folk groups” by virtue of shared lore, expressive traditions, and values embodied in their social and symbolic organization (Oring, 1986). Groups develop and employ cultural expressive practices, which entail norms and rules for their use. Cultural or folk practices linked to group life serve to reach the goals a groups sets for itself while at the same time serve group cohesion and maintenance. thnide'llftg Among out (e.g., Brunt intollr group lite parablel ember: folklore. stories ~ lormulation. the and maintaining maintenance of r Bascom. can be of culture’ tempt of narrative or st and its reason it To View educational res tom the quest experiences. | 935“ a GGEDer Elllded more c CODDENy and ”Wide a met EXpettence). . reCOnStrUC‘ilt‘h Characters in edu’lailonat r Stamelllnn Among such expressive practices is storytelling. As folklorists have long pointed out (e.g., Brunvand, 1968; Dorson, 1983), story or narrative plays an important role in folk group life. Various forms of folk narrative (e.g., folktale, legend, myth, proverb, parable) embody a group’s values and transmit traditional wisdom and knowledge. As folklore, stories serve the functions of folklore. In William Bascom’s (1965) classic formulation, the basic functions include entertainment, validating culture, education, and maintaining culture. Oring (1976) later persuasively integrated validation and maintenance of culture. As a whole, the functions of expressive folklore, according to Bascom, can be “grouped together under the single function of maintaining the stability of culture” (emphasis added, p. 297). In folkloric terms, then, the expressive practice of narrative or storytelling is implicated in the validation/maintenance of group culture and its reason for existence (purpose), while it seeks to entertain and educate. Witter To view storytelling in the service and maintenance of group life is new to educational research. The current wave of interest in narrative in education derives from the quest by researchers to understand and present particular educational experiences. More specifically, the use and study of narrative holds the potential to gain a deeper insight and meaning of teachers’ lives and teaching phenomena that has eluded more discrete and detached study (Witherell & Noddings, 1991 ). According to Connelly and Clandinin (1990), “narrative inquiry” into teaching seeks dually to provide a method (storytelling) and phenomena (the stories of teaching/Ieaming experience). The narrative study of teaching sees “education as construction and reconstruction of personal and social stories; teachers and Ieamers are storytellers and characters in their own and other lives” (Connelly and Clandinin, 1990, p. 2). For the educational researcher, storytelling is a comforting method, and story a resonant object olinquiry. as f the classroom Nana: broadening oi. expenence. Ls experience of . unnoticed by re nature of we teachers who s and contexts to Plotteration of s narrative plays ; seem to be toot be limited to the eduated with *9 consideration s l aware ol any ill social life c lunelion relatio The Str narrative toym Dew the DETSQ i\ The ra"9‘3 of n one way or at research the I“ ”ahative m St”Whit hart. 7 of inquiry, as they provide way for readers to connect with educators lives in and out of the classroom. Narrative inquiry in and about teaching and teachers has gone a long way to broadening our understanding of teachers’ experience and how they make sense of experience. Use of narrative has the advantage of making accessible and available the experience of underrepresented, dominated, or otherwise silenced groups that may go unnoticed by researchers (see Hollingsworth, 1994). Narrative points to the storied nature of experience generally (Bruner, 1991), and specifically to the experiences of teachers who spend their lives and careers organizing complex knowledges, materials, and contexts for instruction (e.g., Goodson, 1988).1 Despite the current interest in and proliferation of studies of narrative in education, no one has taken a close look at the role narrative plays in community creation and maintenance. The studies of teacher narrative seem to be focused on referential content—what stories are about—and function seems to be limited to the assumption that narrative is a vehicle for the teacher’s “voice,” often equated with “experience.” I am unaware of any studies that have taken into consideration specific form or genre properties of the stories that teachers tell. Nor am I aware of any studies in education that speak to the role or function that story plays in the social life of teachers. In short, no one seems to have paid attention to the tonn- function relationship of story and context or the poetic and situated character of story. The study of personal narrative presented here is an attempt to locate a specific narrative form as it arises naturally within a group of educators. It seeks to examine how the personal narrative, as a genre of oral literature, works within the Teacher 1The range of “narrative” In educational studies is vast. Nearly everything can be viewed in one way or another as a “story.” Autobiography, life history, research reports, teacher research, the list is endless. I am only pointing out here that within the explosion of interest in narrative in education, I have yet to see any research that has drawn upon the traditions of studying narrative and storytelling found In folklore and allied fields. It is not my intention, nor would it be useful to this study, to review the vast literature that can come under the rubric “narrative inquiry” in education or stories of experience, since this work has little or no theoretical connection to that which I use and explore as the poetic and functional dimensions of teachers’ stories. Fortrn. Furthe function and t. works poetica‘ tor allemative 1' How to exhloring perso ways. For one, written text. it is we can see tha literature (e.g., narrative is alsr arise in conver: “enclave' in co “5 Wall to and 1 minimum. story 5lepended (Cc mmmunicate Tl 3St0ry, Further Conversation a These t “resrigaior to r Of'nqul'Y- As te MNSCTlpthn. Tr OlWltat COURTS a A 8 Forum. Further, it explores how the personal narrative form relates to its social function and the ongoing maintenance of the Teacher Forum as an identity resource. In short, this study ethnographically explores how the personal experience narrative works poetically to keep the Teacher Forum coherent as its members maintain a place for alternative conversation about critical democracy in education. WWW How to make sense of the personal experience story? The difficulty with exploring personal narratives is that they can be conceived in two broad, but distinct, ways. For one, the personal narrative is a text produced by an author. While it is not a written text, it is an oral text. And, when collected, transcribed and examined in print, we can see that it is indeed a narrative with formal properties of a genre of oral literature (e.g., Labov, 1967; Stahl, 1989). Secondly, the personal experience narrative is also a discursive event. Naturally occurring personal narratives typically arise in conversation. In the koan of folklorist Katherine Young (1987), story is an “enclave” in conversation. As a discursive event, personal experience narrative makes its way to and from ongoing conversation between two or more persons. At bare minimum, story is an extended turn at talk, where the regular rules of turn taking are suspended (Coulthard, 1977). A narrator must frame her utterances as story and communicate that frame to the auditors where they allow the turn (i.e., the time) to tell a story. Furthermore, the narrator and audience are in a coordinated relationship. Conversation and story are embedded in a context defining such a relationship. These two views of the personal narrative may seem incompatible, requiring the investigator to pursue either a text-centered or sociolinguistic event-centered direction of inquiry. As text, oral stories can be regarded as items to be collected and inscribed in transcription. They can be analyzed for their narratological structure against a standard of what counts as narrative. Personal narratives do have a form which is recognizable tis new is ten But p6 nommunicatlv least two pen; tsel‘. oil from C” understanding when it is to be situation iGofin 1974') to one d narratives lWe We all utterar to the 50mm the narrative l aDOUL Clear! Story eVems l Simultanews MW 3 life aretreated a and ’FSlluat be""=<‘-V'I()r. Th VEfiGCilons C 193519. 2). “mama 0r 9 and can be studied for their literary-ness. According to the generic properties, they need not be examined with extensive consideration of the narrator or the context. Meaning in this view is textual and resides (and, therefore, can be found) in the structure of a text. But personal experience stories also occur in time and space as oral communication. Story is told and heard during conversation in a situation inhabited by at least two people with something in common. Personal experience narrative must mark itself off from conversation and the auditors and narrators must have mutual understanding of when a story begins and ends, when conversation is suspended, and when it is to be resumed. In this way, interlocutors must agree on the definition of the situation (Goffman, 1959). They must agree that the utterances are keyed (Goffman, 1974) to one discursive structure or another. In other words, personal experience narratives live a sociolinguistic life and this requires a discursive analysis of story. Like all utterances, stories as events are situated and their form and meaning are bound to the socio-cultural spaces in which they emerge. Meaning in this view is not found in the narrative text but in the shared understanding of what story is and what a story is about. Clearly each of these views has merit. Texts show story’s poetic dimensions; story events reveal socio-cultural and local significance. Focusing on their merits simultaneously reveals their drawbacks. The textual approach sees oral literature having a life of its own, disconnected from cultural spaces in which they arise. Stories are treated as discrete objects that can be detached from their socio-cultural contexts and re-situated. Out of context, stories are but partial records of situated human behavior. The sociolinguistic-event approach sees personal narratives as “expressions, reflections, or support mechanisms for cultures and social structures” (Bauman, 1986, p. 2). Stories in this view are merely “icons” of social and cultural events. The narrative, or poetic, construction of stories is subordinated to the socio-cultural referents and sociolinguistic contextually at Etinographica sustains some itscribe and at: stontelling mus reterence tor its narrative exist p 59056 as a com, Personal experre meaningful ways Persona! narrative is lypic party, In the Tea Wale them fOr tithe QIOUp‘ anc Teacher FOrum i ‘0 Their ”liquene Want to aCCOUnt ”am aCCOunt r0, given comex1 bu ate ' fryln9 10 ohm 10 referents and functions. The textual approach avoids the social and the vernacular; the sociolinguistic approach avoids the poetic (Bauman, 1986). Ethnggmnhisfiqmems As an ethnographer interested in the stories that teachers tell, I want to look contextually at storytelling as it naturally occurred in the Teacher Forum. Ethnographically, I assume that any organized grouping of individuals creates and sustains some patterning of their activities, and that members of any social grouping inscribe and attribute shared meaning to regularly occurring practices. Story and storytelling must then fit some regular redundancy in the Teacher Forum as a frame of reference for its members. Further, I assume that storytelling and the personal narrative exist precisely because they serve some function, that storytelling makes sense as a communicative and expressive device in Teacher Forum meetings. While the personal experience narrative is a ubiquitous form in our society, it works in locally meaningful ways. Personal narrative is also rather idiosyncratic. The personal experience narrative is typically a first person account of events, to which the audience was not a party. In the Teacher Forum specifically, the members bring their experiences and narrate them for the uninitiated. The stories told are almost always new to most others in the group, and always new to at least one person. Personal experience stories in the Teacher Forum are novel in their content, which lends a novel quality to the stories. Due to their uniqueness, I do not want to reduce the stories to a common or singular voice. I want to account for the differences in the stories and show their artistic rendering. I want account for both the regular patterning of a conventional expressive form in a given context but not to diminish the individuality of the stories created by authors who are trying to elicit a reaction from an audience. My 9? one hand, I in. function ot the want to Show ' communicative the Teacher F; as a medium t: other hand, I F; I want to exarr. personal narrat examine the pig present not only Following R099 9"mission in re In Short I want emiESS‘ron. In Order Mme as tex OI SIOry and the subSIanllVe ”8r onemed f0'Itlori: 11 My ethnographic concerns parallel those of the narrative text/event split. On the one hand, I want to account for the vernacular, the very local and meaningful use and function of the personal experience narrative as a naturally occurring expression. I want to show how the personal experience narrative is a useful convention in the communicative scheme of the Teacher Forum. I also want to portray how the people in the Teacher Forum understand the personal experience narrative and why they employ it as a medium for sharing experience to which they presumed others could connect. On the other hand, I hope to be able to see the unique renderings of story in the Teacher Forum. I want to examine not simply referential content, but the unique variations of the personal narrative form, as a definable and identifiable genre. I want to be able to examine the play upon the convention that the members of the Teacher Forum use to present not only new content, but to create a compelling representation of experience. Following Floger Abrahams (1972), I hope to see the relationship of individual expression in relation to the order of Teacher Forum: Underlying the activities of all groups is the constant potential of communicative ordering...[a] latent order. As latency, order permits a certain freedom of action, an experimentation that makes the final sense of order more complex and at the same time buried more deeply in the operating mind (p. 76). In short, I want to be able to examine the poetics of this most ubiquitous verbal expression. Wile In order to deal with the seemingly incommensurable foci of the personal narrative as text and event, and to follow my desire to consider the contextual grounding of story and the poetic qualities of everyday personal narrative, I draw upon a substantive trend found in folklore studies. Over the last thirty years anthropologically oriented folklorists have pursued an approach to folkloric items as performance (e.g., Briggs. 198E Abrahams It? Thepe The text is stilt an expressrve . In small group: social or cultur lora group ot emressive utt action called I Rents that are with an audie lite, not merel More literature, as ‘5 a Iorm of e Itself. BGWUSi bemuse 0f its I35 artifice In f, baIIads EVen ‘ 1 2 Briggs, 1988; Bauman, 1974; Abrahams, 1968; Georges, 1969). Broadly speaking, Abrahams (1972) calls performance a demonstration of culture, one of the products of men getting together with other men and working out expressive means of operating together. To do this, the group stylizes their interactions, often by introducing symbolic objects and movements into their encounters so they may economically coordinate their activities (p. 75). The performance-centered approach seeks a re-evaluation of the folkloric text. The text is still retained as an important record of communicative events. However, as an expressive item of communication, the text is “the product of artistic communication in small groups” (Ben-Amos, 1972). No longer the static signification of some set of social or cultural happenings, they are expressive items, symbolically ordered to work for a group of people. Texts are different than other modes of experience in that they are expressive utterances that “come to life only through the special organized and habitual action called performance” (Abrahams, 1968, p. 145). Texts are seen as expressive items that are “enacted” in culturally defined scenes (contexts) by a performer for and with an audience (Bauman, 1974). Texts in this way are emergent within group social life, not merely “out there” to be “discovered.” More specifically, Bauman (1986) defines performance implicated in oral literature, as a mode of communication, a way of speaking, the essence of which resides in the assumption of responsibility to an audience for a display of communicative skill, highlighting the way in which communication is carried out, above and beyond its referential content (p. 3). As a form of expressive communication, the item that is performed draws attention to itself. Because a text in performance is stylized, it draws attention to itself not simply because of its content (i.e., some reported experience); it draws attention to its form, its artifice. In folklore, these are items of various ilk (e.g., the tall tale, riddles, ballads, even gossip). A narrator or performer is in a coordinated relationship with an S‘ottered tor t intrinsic quatn understood as tBauman. toes A pert Wines 3 “or social action ' nsocrai lite‘ Womance examining te I): 2)( 3II F” this stui Bi 1 3 audience, which forms some sort of group existence. The performer of a text indicates with and to the audience that she has assumed responsibility for enacting a text. Performances are thus “framed” as stylized communication (Bauman, 1974; Goffman, 1971 ). Texts are enacted not only to deliver their referential content(s), but to display the effectiveness of the textual form and a narrator’s acumen. Therefore, a performance is “offered for the enhancement of experience, through the present appreciation of the intrinsic qualities of the act of expression itself;” Oral performance of a text “may be understood as the enactment of the poetic function, the essence of spoken artistry” (Bauman, 1986, p. 3). nr iFrmw 'hr-l A performance perspective views narrative texts as forms of verbal art, and provides a “concretely empirical framework for the comprehension of oral literature as social action by directing attention to the actual conduct of artistic verbal performance in social life” (Bauman, 1986, p. 3). Because of the situated nature of expressive acts, performance-centered inquiry provides a three-part ethnographic framework for examining texts as artistic communication. Attention is afforded to: 1) textual form 2) context in which a text is enacted involving an audience and a performer 3) performance itself, where the expressive utterance is understood and “framed” as performance (i.e., emergence of the text in an enacted communicative event). For this study, these dimensions are: A) personal narrative as a genre of oral literature 8) part-time small group as bounded context for communicative action, interpretation and evaluation When the sig' how“ questic' framework pr: f outline below i personal narra I orient the rea The pe as a genre ot r attention (0 Its ltree features Sellosame of tl Witness (Stan: communicate tern i as p irnegated Wit EXDEIIenCeS ( a 99mm] he ‘true‘ events, asSeton ma. Dre SEmed as “Snaiiy no, kr 14 C) storytelling or personal experience narration as performance as enactment of text. When the significant dimensions of form and context are established, then the “why” and “how” questions about emergence in performance can be addressed. This three part framework provides the questions that structure the inquiry of this dissertation. l outline below how these questions can be used as tools for exploring the emergence of personal narrative in a group of educators struggling with their non-traditionality, and l orient the reader to the analysis of the stories. WEE! The personal narrative as textual object is constrained by our ability to define it as a genre of oral literature. As artifice, the personal experience narrative calls attention to itself as a distinctive discursive form. As such, it has been defined as having three features: 1) implied truthfulness, 2) dramatic narrative structure, and 3) the self-same of the story’s narrator and the story’s main character and/or its chief witness (Stahl, 1989). Though the personal narrative is a ubiquitous form of communication, with a seemingly unplanned quality, it retains generic features that identify it as personal narrative. Indeed, personal narrative can be subsumed or integrated within a number of other forms of narrative (e.g., stories of supernatural experiences or UFO abduction). But the following underlying features mark the telling of a personal narrative. lmpfiedlmmtulness, First, the personal experience narrative must be about “true” events. The narrator must maintain truthfulness or credibility of the implied assertion that the events recounted in the story “really” did occur. The story is also presented as idiosyncratic, in that it has more or less novel content and the events are usually not known to the audience or to at least some members of the audience. Since auditors do n the narrator’s events as the which imply tr- naratve and 1 bread reflectioi Reflection on e Dewey, 1934a all reflection or beginning, mic mention. wi- IYPIQIIY Single as essential c stones are a 5 eVents. $9M narratives in 198%- TO lhi: the is at Ieas lmlhtulness ( ”‘9 SIOWIeIIe a person lnvr atmbutt? in th Iofiends), p9, narrative is 1, SignificanCe t 15 auditors do not have direct access to the events (unless they were there), and never to the narrator’s experience of events (i.e., they cannot have the same experience of the events as the narrator), the narrator must use those narrative or literary devices which imply truthfulness (e.g., reported speech). W Second, the personal experience narrative is a narrative and therefore must entail a minimal dramatic structure. Stories differ from broad reflections on experience in that the latter do not address action or event sequence. Reflection on experience is not necessarily the same as narration of an experience (see Dewey, 1934a). Though it can be argued that all story is a reflection on experience, not all reflection on experience is story. Story must have something resembling: a beginning, middle, and end; conflict or complicating action; inclusion of, or pointing to, a resolution. With regard to the conversational personal experience narrative, these are typically single episode anecdotes. Though there are competing definitions of what counts as essential components of a narrative (see Robinson, 1981 ), they at least agree that stories are a specific order of discourse that has complicating action of some concrete events. 5911;381:194 Third, the personal experience narrative is distinct from other narratives in that the narrator is usually the chief character in the story (Stahl, 1989). To this feature I add the qualifier that if the narrator is not the chief character, she is at least a credible witness to the events. In order to claim authority for truthfulness of the story and that the events in it unfolded in a minimally dramatic way, the storyteller offers herself as intimately involved (who better to know the events than a person involved?) The personal experience narrative would seem to hinge on this attribute in that truthfulness and drama can be applied to several narrative forms (e.g., legends). Personal involvement is what makes a personal narrative personal. A personal narrative is “keyed” (Goffman, 1974) to real events that bear storyworthy significance because of the narrator’s involvement. Qc'fefl. Nana experience 6;] Conn» ammaemer is probably a L to talk about It Madmesmi Story is a disc Ssue olcx>nte Story forms at they Emerge. defined scene m pent-Imam performance. M3: Context is no; nOtthe"SUrrc COnleXt Is no the surroLind environmEnta analytic task ‘ 16 92mm Narrative performance happens in observable and definable contexts. Personal experience narratives are no exception. Bauman (1986) reminds: Oral performance, like all human activity, is situated, its form, meaning, and functions rooted in culturally defined scenes or events—bounded segments of the flow of behavior and experience that constitute meaningful contexts for action, interpretation, and evaluation (p. 3). Context is vital not only for the performance perspective, but to further articulate the meaningfulness of the personal narrative. As noted, the personal narrative ls probably a universal communicative form in our society. Like conversation, it is easy to talk about the personal experience story with little or no reference to context. “I heard this story the other day...” often requires little explanation of when and where. A story is a discrete thing that pops up all over the place. Paradoxically, this make the issue of context essential to the study of personal narrative. Story performances and story forms are only coherent with a sufficient understanding of the context in which they emerge. They are situated events that take place, in Bauman’s words, in culturally defined scenes. Context determines when and whether a story can count as an native form of performance, and not a mere reflection of the analyst’s desire to see all narrative as performance. W In order to deal with context, I invoke a definition of what context is not. I follow the maxim of folklorist Katherine Young (1987) that context is not the “surround.” Context consists of that which is relevant to the object under study. Context is not only contiguous to an item or event, but relevant to it. Not everything in the surround is relevant, and not all that is context is in the surround. A mere listing of environmental features does not a context make. Establishment of context is as much an analytic task of the researcher seeking to explain a given phenomenon as it is part of the world in which the item emerges en parole. conceive ot th: WWMQ outside the me the same in tha lore as it relates experience nar Its educators t school admini “Bitty resou and schooling flame of refer Primary tram Primary tram anaW tram Infinite Numb. ltvoiye 9Xplic Sm II ‘is chi 0n here?' ' (It “LiteranceS! OIUIIEranCeS; I Chara MEWS. The 17 To account for a context that addresses relevant features of personal narrative emergence, l have chosen look to the level of the social and symbolic organization of the Teacher Forum. I call the Teacher Forum a “folk frame of reference.” It is difficult to conceive of the Teacher Forum as a full blown folk group due to the long intervals between the group’s meetings and the lack of sustained communication among members outside the meetings. But the Teacher Forum does manifest features of a folk group all the same in that it brings members together and allows them a minimal amount of shared lore as it relates to their values and shared communicative forms like the personal experience narrative. The Teacher Forum acts as an identity resource for its members. As educators have multiple perceived identities in our society (by parents, students, school administrators, politicians, etc.), the Teacher Forum becomes a meaningful identity resource for its members as it publicly pursues a alternative view of teaching and schooling. W In order to conceive the most relevant features of a frame of reference, I cast the Teacher Forum as composed of “primary frames.” Primary frames make up what Goffman (1974) calls a “primary framework.” Primary frames help us organize social phenomena we encounter and which we employ. Primary frames allow “the user to locate, perceive, identify, and label a seemingly infinite number of concrete occurrences” (Goffman, 1974, p. 21). Primary frames involve explicit and implicit rules. They are broad and make up a primary framework since it “is chiefly relevant and provides the first answer to the question ‘What is going on here?’ ” (ibid., p. 25). In terms of oral communication, primary frames are frames of utterances, and frames for utterances. In other words, frames-of serve interpretation of utterances; frames-for guide the practice of utterances. l characterize the Teacher Forum as having two primary frames that govern utterances. These frames are the context in and against which all talk occurs. first, the Teacher Forum is primarily framed by its ideological definition. That is, the group has a publicly deli“ ' renown" I5 I diswurse ab: democracy. C educational tr tone as itta‘xe- endeavor. sen. market econon the critical-den promoting a tv and lead. The si 9WD This in Teacher Foru Personal. In SI reveal their tai tIS a primary l anti to speak l Ftturn the per mail frame. Where One Illa: Talk in t mommy to tr Petsmayy The p EducaIIOnal Dial: ”Speak OI perso A 18 publicly defined set of goals and purposes that center around the promotion of critical democracy (see Goodman, 1992). The group is understood as a forum for fostering a discourse about educational practices and policies in a critical vein with an eye on democracy. Critical democracy has its roots in the philosophy of John Dewey and critical educational theorists (e.g., Paulo Freire, 1971). This discourse has a rather radical tone as it takes a critical stance to conventional views of schooling as a functionalist endeavor, serving the ends of a market economy. A critical stand sees society and the market economy as inherently unfair (i.e., racist, sexist, and classist). Schooling, in the critical-democratic view, is for raising consciousness about the social world and for promoting a healthy habit of critique of a society which students will eventually inhabit and lead. The second primary frame is more implicit or emergent within the life of the group. This frame carries the implicit rules governing sociable interaction during the Teacher Forum’s meetings. The talk in the Teacher Forum is often intimate and very personal. In such talk members speak personally about their lives as teachers and often reveal their failure and foibles. One member characterized this as “getting personal.” As a primary frame, the personal requires members to regard utterances as personal and to speak personally. This leaves the impression that when one speaks in the Teacher Forum, the personal might make her/him vulnerable and open to criticism. As a primary frame, this becomes enshrined as a rule for verbal participation in the group where one must speak personally and intimately. Talk in the Teacher Forum can, therefore, be characterized as necessarily conforming to the primary frames of both critical democracy and required intimacy (the personal). The purpose of the group is to provide a place to discuss critical democracy in educational practices. Through the frame of required intimacy, members are encouraged to speak of personal experience. Members cannot choose simply one or the other primary frames, but must respond to both. As members speak of their personal experience. some way. I: of educations, conform to c: Story narrative is p: personal, it aIr ‘getting perso Peno context. The I by definition 5 Patterned and Willdi they err text, th0ugh! is “fin/nuality of I985. p, 4). Ea Igenre) and ge cormerited wilt PEFIOrr coneEDI ot the . 00m"tunicairon how to interDret abom Dommunir 19 experience, as educators or otherwise, the talk must come around, and be connected in some way, to critical issues that are related to education. And when they speak critically of educational issues, their speech also be framed personally. Stories, therefore, must conform to both primary frames to be considered acceptable in the group. Story is a prime medium for discussing personal issues. The personal experience narrative is personal and the narrator is involved in narrated events in some way as character or witness. This situates the personal narrative within the context of the Teacher Forum as a potentially perform-able. In other words, by virtue and design as personal, it already conforms in a minimal way to the demands of the primary frame of “getting personal” and conveys the required intimacy demanded by this frame. Eedormama Performance happens when the expressive form is made compelling in a viable context. The performer assumes responsibility for the oral presentation of a text that is by definition stylized and therefore calls attention to itself. Textual performances are patterned and conventionalized as a part of the communication system of the group in which they emerge. They are, therefore, susceptible to ethnographic description. A given text, though, is not reducible to another, and “one wants to be able to appreciate the individuality of each as well as the generalized structures common to all” (Bauman, 1986, p. 4). Each text performed will have unique aspects as it is part of a known item (genre) and general patterned scene (context) in which it emerges. Here we are concerned with the personal experience storytelling as enactment of text. Performance is again a question of framing and the performance frame. The concept of the frame originates in Gregory Bateson’s (1951) profound insight that communications send not only their contents, they simultaneously send instructions on how to interpret the contents. He calls this “meta-communication,” or communication about communication (p. 209). When, for example, two or more people are in a conversatio' In order to a but also the tell a story. s . narrator and the story fra" story.’ Oral r, effort to shift conversation But is (1972b) has c not all narratic viewed by me attention to in Special mOde everyday qua to be perform Agair performance. 900d SIOry of named- COr 81on her tail: literature mu: Teacner FOri DErSOnal EXpI DEISOnai eXpr “Girls deep SI 2O conversation, they are in the midst of taking turns and alternatively assuming the floor. In order to accomplish this, interlocutors send not only the contents of their utterances, but also the message “this is a conversation.” When one of these interlocutors decides to tell a story, she must seek the floor for an extended turn at talk. For her to become the narrator and the other the audience, they both must move from the conversation frame to the story frame; they must communicate with each other and agree that “this is now a story.” Oral narrative works in this manner. The potential narrator must make an effort to shift frame and key the audience to story. The narrator closes down the conversation and opens a story. But is telling a personal experience narrative always a performance? Bauman (1972b) has clearly shown in his study of talk in a Nova Scotia speech community that not all narration is necessarily understood as performance. Some forms of story are viewed by members of a speech community as just talking, not stylizations that draw attention to themselves. More generally, the personal narrative hardly seems to be a special mode of communication which highlights the form or the storyteller. Their everyday quality would seem not to warrant featuring the personal narrative as an item to be performed. Again, we must consider the item being performed and the context of performance. Mastery over an expressive narrative form means little out of context. A good story on paper may have meant little to the people to which it was originally narrated. Conversely, “I guess you had to be there” is a common way to apologize for a story that fails to recreate the emotive experience of an original tale. Mastery of oral literature must be mastery in context in relation to an audience. In a group like the Teacher Forum where the personal is a primary frame oflfor expressive utterance, the personal experience narrative is a high form of this primary frame. That is, the personal experience narrative is a highlighted and amplified version of the personal. It holds deep symbolic value; it is at the core of the group’s nature. Moreover, stories in the Teacher critically in r other half of mastery ove' sufficiently ir Hymes (1972 personal an: common Iorrr Forum. The p to Questions c is a question I emerges_ It is V: In other WOrd Proverb, We don‘t blle off I anusOCIal bef DErsonal nan “989), Who l MSW Folk} a Vehicle for I 0f DefSonay e ”attain/e IS a 21 the Teacher Forum must not just be mere personal stories, they must be framed critically in response to the primary frame of critical democracy that comprises the other half of the context. Competent storytelling in the Teacher Forum means a minimal mastery over the personal experience narrative genre and being able to render the story sufficiently intimate and critical. In order to “breakthrough into full performance,” as Hymes (1970) puts it, the narrator must be able to make good stories sufficiently personal and sufficiently critical. Personal experience narration is the strategic use of a common form that must be crafted to work within a definable context called the Teacher Forum. The performance perspective outlined above is an ethnographic one which points to questions of not only what (item, context) and how (performance), but also why. This is a question of function that personal narrative plays within the social space in which it emerges. It is very difficult to point out just what the personal narrative, as genre, is for. In other words, it is difficult to point to its generic function in social life. Unlike, say, a proverb, which carries the function of social control through wise wittlcisms (e.g., don’t bite off more than you can chew), or riddles which are forms of controlled antisocial behavior (e.g., How many ethnics does it take to put in a light bulb?), the personal narrative seems to carry no such general social function. Sandra Stahl (1989), who has most comprehensively studied the personal narrative In her book Literary Folkloristics and the Personal Nanative, argues that the personal narrative is a vehicle for demonstration of an individual’s values, what she calls the “hidden agenda” of personal experience narration (p. 21). Furthermore, she notes that the personal narrative is a way to meet and understand the identity of the teller. While all values and identities are social in origin, Stahl does not use the personal narrative to explore the social throc; of story. He' narrative re" nanative 56' another? Close persuasion it expressive rte us that perforr through prese textual perfori seeks to mow entertaining g (1968). “is an PetSuasion re Temal Derfo function. beginnings in IIIEtary issues with the artist from Blithe, ir a"Ilstr'c Deng” WEWWFM 22 social through the personal. Rather, she focuses on the individual creation and reception of story. Her argument does seem valid, but incomplete; social function of the personal narrative remains unaddressed. Can we ask anything more of what the personal narrative serves other than a sociable function and a way for people to get to know one another? Eersuasion Closely tied to the concept of performance is that of rhetoric, the art of persuasion (Abrahams, 1968). Persuasion is a matter of aesthetics; we are moved by an expressive item or work of art. Viewing oral literature as a form of verbal art reminds us that performances of texts are aesthetic endeavors. Performances seek to move through presentation of a coherent and vital item of expression. Accomplishment of textual performance is to have the form cohere 9.9., to tell a good story. A performance seeks to move and this movement is a form of persuasion, just as it seems to be entertaining or informing. “Each item of expressive culture,” reminds Abrahams (1968), “is an implement of argument, a tool of persuasion,” and “the essence of persuasion resides in effective form and compelling performance” (p. 146-147). Textual performances are inherently rhetorical. In other words, they serve a rhetorical function. Strategies, The rhetorical view of expressive items—like stories—finds its beginnings in the work of Kenneth Burke (1950). In dealing with literature and literary issues, Burke outlined a framework that has proven useful to folklorists dealing with the artistic dimensions of their materials. Roger Abrahams (1968), borrowing from Burke, introduced and enshrined the notion of rhetoric implicit in all cultural and artistic performances in his now classic essay “Introductory Remarks on a Rhetorical Theory or Folklore.” Burke (1950/1989) viewed all literature, as well as ordinary expressions, as originating in some social sphere. In that sphere a speaker or writer must adoot notes. Burke was s artistic perfc stuations' i in he or she wa Butte calls tn Interpretation adopts a stra to present he Succeed In 9 an attitude, v message stir the message exPressrve a In Io, ‘0 address Ir ”mmmi aeSIhetic, Or the group as nalTative the Vehicle I0r Cr Stratfill in in that it not onl 23 must adopt a strategy in order to reach the listener or reader. Burke (1941/1989) notes, Critical and imaginative works are answers to questions posed by the situation in which they arose. They are not merely answers, they are strategic answers, stylized answers (emphasis in original, p. 77). Burke was speaking specifically about literary works, but his theory can be extended to artistic performances in general “as the adopting of strategies for the encompassing of situations” (ibid.). In communicative situations, a speaker has a concern, a message that he or she wants to get across. She wishes to impose an interpretation on a situation. Burke calls this the “name” the speaker would like to impose on the situation. This interpretation occurs in the face of possible opposition from others and the speaker adopts a strategy to anticipate this possibility. The speaker evaluates the setting in order to present her/his message in the most acceptable form, that is, the form most likely to succeed in getting a message across. How that speaker evaluates the setting will suggest an attitude, which in turn will suggest a “genre” that will least likely impede the message she wants to get across and which will be most acceptable to the receiver(s) of the message. Performed oral narratives, then, can be seen as strategically stylized, expressive answers, and the personal narrative a particular variation or genre. ln folkloric terms, the selection of genre involves the use of “traditional” forms to address traditional problems and situations. Similarly, in the Teacher Forum the use of the personal narrative can be viewed as a traditional and locally relevant strategy. The aesthetic, or stylization, of the personal narrative is used to express effectively within the group as it responds to the primary frames. The personal-ness of the personal narrative makes it commensurate with the primary frame of the personal. It becomes a vehicle for critically framing experiences and events. It is an expected and relevant strategy in the context of the Teacher Forum. The use of the personal narrative indicates that it not only imposes an interpretation on the situation in which it emerges (that the do the mere: rhetorical? Is I rhetoric itself expression is acceptance . Succeed,” hr elicitation is Burke's (19¢ sl’mbolic me Expressive I Visions or ve OOnneCi (or: I°U Say it.’ i "It” tor agar White is necessary (. Concemed WltI rtill-Cally aware members of pro 24 speaker evaluates the setting as amenable to telling a story), but also a strategy for presenting experience. An important purpose of oral literature, long a central focus of folklorists, is thus to argue and persuade, “and argue [the narrator] does, even when he seems to be entertaining” (Abrahams, 1968, p. 146). BMW But of what does the personal narrative persuade? Why do the members employ the personal narrative as an aesthetic form that is inherently rhetorical? Is the function of the personal narrative merely rhetorical? Or does rhetoric itself have a function? As Abrahams insightfully notes, the essence of artistic expression is to evoke sympathy, to move the audience who encounters it toward acceptance of the version of life or experience it presents. “For the strategy of a piece to succeed,” he states, “sympathy of the audience must be elicited” (p. 147). This elicitation is done through the selection and strategic use of relevant forms where, in Burke’s (1941 /1 989) terms, the audience can “identify" with (or against) various symbolic materials of the form (e.g., a story’s hero). According to Abrahams (1968), An utterance asks for some kind of sympathetic reaction on the part of the hearer—a reaction induced by manipulation of materials In combination with technique by which the speaker relates to his audience (p. 146). Expressive performances are aesthetic endeavors in that they seek to present coherent visions or versions of experience in appropriate forms. They need to hang together, connect (or seek to) with others, who can say “Ah, I am moved by what you say and how you say it.” The use of story seeks to elicit this sympathetic reaction for identification with (or against) what the story presents. While all verbal art can be seen as rhetorical, in the folkloric terms I use here it is necessary to see persuasion connected to group life. Folklorists have long been concerned with marginalized and dominated groups (Briggs, 1994). These groups are typically aware of and highly concerned with threats to their existence. Structurally, members of groups live with some amount of implied threat to their well being. Expressive problems If. group as In most fully se 1ij A groc face of extin forms to dea means that other that the way to deal if Mem forms that ar. seeks to pers and vital. Tel amptable lc have to say i: convince mer Narrative as f not IUSl persu the narrator. II ”Wmunicatior gelling PElSon; Members that e ”that can be a togethel. and till 25 Expressive folklore, in Burke’s terms, are strategies employed to deal with recurrent problems that threaten the life of the group. These threats are as much internal to the group as they are external to it. Social cohesion of a group becomes paramount and “is most fully sensed in terms of antagonism felt within the group” (Abrahams, 1968. p. 148). A group must fight internal friction and strife in order to maintain itself in the face of extinction from domination. Folk groups use “traditional” (folk) expressive forms to deal with recurrent problems that threaten the maintenance of the group. This means that members are involved in a rhetorical effort to convince themselves and each other that their effort and their cohesion is worthwhile, that staying together can be a way to deal with anxiety and perceived threats to their well being. Members of a group argue for solidarity. Argument is embodied in expressive forms that are aesthetically acceptable and appropriate. The employment of these forms seeks to persuade members of a group of a version and vision of experience that is viable and vital. Telling stories, and the personal narrative specifically, is an accessible and acceptable form of argument, where the narrator seeks to persuade others that “What I have to say is vital for us..” Story, in this way, is an artful device used to remind and convince members of a group that their existence and their purposes are worthwhile. Narrative as rhetoric in group life serves the function of group cohesion and stability, not just persuasion for persuasion’s sake, nor simply to realize the rhetorical intent of the narrator. In the Teacher Forum, the personal narrative is a strategy of communication. The rhetoric of the personal narrative, in the group, serves the role of getting personal and for framing experience in a critical light. It serves to persuade members that an ideologically critical perspective is vital to the group and that the critical can be achieved by remaining a member of the group and keeping the group together, and this can be achieved by getting personal. the theoreti narrative a is of the Teach Chapter 3 dr the Compon. enclave in c Genre and o 10 make ser Ethnograph, the Teacher Part narratives I ! stories that t analysis of e narrative ger By We lhplicaijOns 0 nature of the l FGIationship of hernCtIOn of 26 W This chapter has introduced the ideas that structure the organization of this inquiry. The dissertation takes a performance perspective on personal experience narratives as they relate to group life and their rhetorical dimensions. The ensuing chapters address these issues of item, context, performance, function and rhetoric. I have divided this study into two parts. Part I (Chapters 1 through 3) presents the theoretical backdrop against which I strive to consider the personal experience narrative a form of performance in group life. Chapter 2 focuses on the issue of context of the Teacher Forum. In this chapter, I also give a brief history of the Teacher Forum. Chapter 3 describes the personal narrative as a genre of oral literature. There I explore the components of the personal experience narrative and consider the idea of story as an enclave in conversation. After defining the personal experience narrative as literary genre and oral communicative events I present an outline of the methodology I employed to make sense out of this definition. As this study is ethnographic, l outline the ethnographic methodology I used to investigate the personal narrative in the group life of the Teacher Forum. Part II (Chapters 4 through 7) is an exploration of performances of personal narratives I gathered in the Teacher Forum. In order to address this I have chosen three stories that exemplify what it means to perform a personal experience narrative. The analysis of each of these stories is used to address an issue pertinent to personal narrative generally and specifically in the context of the Teacher Forum. By way of conclusion I present concluding remarks reflecting on the larger implications of this study. I reflect on the issue of artifice (the artful and artificial nature of the personal experience narrative), rhetoric, and the form-function relationship of the personal experience narrative in the Teacher Forum. I note further the function of storytelling in the Teacher Forum specifically, and reflect on overcoming text posit. nanation. F 27 “text positivism” (Rosaldo, 1986) and romantic readings of teacher narrative and narration. Further, I offer encouragement to resist what I call the “mimetic fallacy.” This i that makes ”I the TeaCher l of the QIOUp, Millie 0T trar CHAPTER 2 THE CONTEXT OF THE TEACHER FORUM In this place, however, we are not so much concentrating our attention to the text of the narratives, as on their sociological reference. The text, of course, is extremely important, but without the context it remains lifeless. As we have seen, the interest of the story is vastly enhanced and it is given its proper character by the manner in which it is told....the sociologist should take his cue from the natives. The performance, again, has to be placed in its proper time setting—the hour of the day, and the season, with the background of sprouting gardens awaiting future work, and slightly influenced by the magic of fairy tales. We must also bear in mind the sociological context of private ownership, the sociable function and the cultural role of amusing fiction. All these elements are equally relevant; all must be studied as well as text. The stories live in native life and not on paper, and when the scholar jots them down without being able to evoke the atmosphere in which they flourish he has given us but a mutilated bit of reality. Bronislaw Malinowski, Myth in Primitive Psychology This chapter sets out a theoretical framework for understanding small group life that makes up the context of the Teacher Forum. Section one provides a brief history of the Teacher Forum. This history informs the reader not only of the general background Of the group, but also the theoretical description of the Teacher Forum as a part time CUIture or frame of reference for its members in section two. 28 l Wr‘ old. in its 0. even montr campus of r faculty mem initialed proje seminar roor history of this emerge in lh overviews ar iiniend only conversatior not storyteiie description t Sedion MO . 29 SECTION 1: A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE TEACHER FORUM1 When I joined the group in the Fall of 1992. the Teacher Forum was five years old. in its current incarnation, the group meets the morning of the second Saturday of every month during the school year.2 They meet for approximately two hours on the campus of what I call Midwestern University, where Teacher Forum member Clare is a faculty member. Though they meet on campus. this group is not part of any university initiated project. Clare has the means to provide in-kind support in the form of a seminar room in the building where she teaches. in this section, I briefly describe the history of this group. I also give an introduction to the members whose utterances emerge in the data presented here. This oral history provides only the briefest of overviews and is not intended to describe in detail any or all Teacher Forum constituents. I intend only to provide a background for understanding this as a group of and for conversation and story. As the units of analysis in this study are story and storytelling, not storytellers, this oral history is about the group as a whole. The holistic theoretical description of the group as a super-organic context will be taken up in greater length in section two of this chapter. Wanted The origins of the Teacher Forum reach back to the fall semester of 1987 and the English department of Midwestern University. Two motivated graduate students, who were practicing teachers, and an university English educator formed the core of the first 1This section is essentially an oral history of the group. The data here has been primarily drawn from a long interview (5-9-93) and several unrecorded conversations with Clare. Numerous conversations and interviews with Fatimah, Lana (esp. 4-19—93), and Zoe were also valuable contributors to this oral history. 2I use the ethnographic present to describe the 1992-93 school year, the time that I collected data from for this study. iteration is l collected . course ca 5. new lacui-t, with exper ‘ personal. 20 necessarily t historically s democracy. Amc Compromis Outlines the education 5 had ior teat 1985). a ke advances l. Democrac} SUbsequen helped ther lecthal e! Endowed W problems it 30 iteration Teacher Forum. The teachers, Zoe and Cass (who was no longer a member when I collected my data), were masters degree students enrolled in an English Education course called Education, Excellence and Equity. Clare, the course instructor, arrived as a new faculty member of the English education program. She had come to the university with experience and interest in democratic education and critical theory, as well as a keen interest in teachers. Zoe and Cass were deeply affected by the course. For them, the course readings and conversations touched upon persistent concems they held as practitioners. The course helped them to frame explanations of their concerns as a social, not merely personal. Zoe notes that she came see better that schooling difficulties are not necessarily the fault of individual teachers, but can also be viewed as local expression of historically situated tensions among competing purposes of education in a liberal democracy. Among the course readings critiquing schooling were Sizer’s Horace's Compromise (1984), a research report, in assay form, on secondary education. It outlines the dilemmas of schooling in a democracy, which have left us with a public education system that satisfies no one and highlights the drastic consequences this has had for teaching practice. They also read and discussed works on tracking (e.g., Oakes, 1985), a key issue for democratic educators, since tracking is inherently unfair and advances unequal educational experiences among students. And they read Dewey’s Democracy and Education (1916). These readings seemed to set an early tone for the subsequent formation of the Teacher Forum group. Teacher Forum members note that it helped them to take a larger view of education and teaching as something more than just a technical endeavor for improving “Ieaming.” It helped them to see teaching as a vocation endowed with social purpose in a democracy and a set of ideas that help frame educational problems that seem to promote a social vision of equity in education. the issues conversaiic Moreover. fill in the gar continuing c conversant oi commor having boil desire to be In t Officially aft Center for E Organizatior had known ( With many of Literacy and . hm” Organi. CED is illeteSied in 'de 31 At the end of that semester, Zoe and Cass wanted to continue to meet and discuss the issues raised in the course. With Clare they agreed to meet one Saturday morning a month for critical conversation with anyone else who cared to attend. The first meetings in the winter and spring 1988 did not center around readings, but were an extended conversation about the issues raised in the course as they relate to teacher practices. Moreover, Zoe and Cass were to continue conversation as a way, in Clara’s words, “to fill in the gaps of teachers” isolation.” That is, not only were these meetings about continuing conversation of critical democratic issues, they were to establish conversations to deal with teachers’ isolation from one another and to encourage a sense of common purpose about their work. Thus, at the outset, the Teacher Forum centered on having both a critical conversation about educational school practices and an inherent desire to be personal and deal with isolation. Clareandmgalfleumracy In the second year of the Teacher Forum Clare proposed that the group become officially affiliated with the Center for Education and Democracy (a pseudonym). The Center for Education and Democracy, heretofore known as CED, is a small but national organization that has affiliates throughout the country, mainly in the middle west. Clare had known CED’s directors since her graduate school days and was in regular contact with many of its members. As Clare already had a relationship CED, she found the Literacy and Democracy group an opportunity to open a new branch “office” and a way to further organize and identify the group as a democratic teacher group. Warmest CED is an organization of regional offices, often affiliated with a university or college, with a faculty member as a sponsor. These offices act as resources for teachers interested in “democratic education” and the “democratic movement.” CED’s statement Th words are is for even (i.e., by rat of critical 0 lo a Freire,; PattiCipajor Irving and p; places for at “Complishe DOsition in St mmmunities‘ Understanding locus“ lemma Was to ’70? impt 32 of purpose provides perspective on its philosophy and demonstrates what the Teacher Forum is connected to: CED is a partnership of all participants in the educational process—teachers administrators, parents and students— who believe that democratic school change must come from the heart of education. CED promotes educational practices that provide students with experiences through which they can develop democratic attitudes and values. Only by living them can students develop the democratic ideals of equality, liberty and community. CED works to provide teachers committed to democratic education with a forum for sharing ideas, with support of people holding similar values, and with opportunities for professional development. These principles, while not directly attributed, are essentially Deweyan. The key words are equality, liberty, and community. Equality harbors the notion that education is for everybody and should not be the mechanism that distributes children unequally (i.e., by race and class) in school systems according to ability. Liberty implies the sort of critical consciousness advocated in taking a critical perspective and is often connected to a Freirean (e.g., 1971) liberatory pedagogy. And community is central to a vision of participatory democracy. To become part of community, one must be able to Ieam by living and participating in one. Taken together, these principles advocate that schools be places for achieving educational and social equality. A more just society can be accomplished though developing a sense of liberty in a critical consciousness about one’s position in society. This can be achieved through democratic participation in learning communities, like classrooms and schools. As Clare puts it, “to able to see that understanding and thinking about the kind of society that we're going to live in is a focus” (emphasis in original, interview, 5-5-93). Moreover, Clare saw that her role was to not impose an agenda, but to ask the teachers what they wanted to accomplish. She saw her rc that agen: in 1 Zoe. Olivia educators. made the i: entirely dii‘: Literaqi an not only Clar practice as s and maintain relinquish he and through: Slaying the c defining feat That Conference Small confer Edutalors‘ 5 making d8m and many in enmUSiasuc Qther 9mm “OffiCef Seer mammr memu 33 saw her role, in her capacity as an English education professor, to help them develop that agenda apropos the commitment to CED. In the third year of the Teacher Forum three of the Teacher Forum participants— Zoe, Olivia, and Lana—were students in Clara’s master’s level course for English educators. These three were still members when I joined the group. In this course Clare made the focus critical literacy (see Lankshear & McClaren, 1993). This course was entirely different from the technical rational approach that Tom put forward in the Literacy and Democracy group the year before. Zoe, Olivia, and Lana were therefore not only members of the Teacher Forum, but also Clara’s students. They were experiencing not only Clara’s theoretical approach and her teaching praxis in her class, but also her practice as sponsor of the Teacher Forum. At this time that Clare was able to advocate for and maintain the critical democratic focus of the group while simultaneously trying to relinquish her role as agenda-setter. As we shall see in the next section of this chapter and throughout the story analyses in Part II of this dissertation, this tension between staying the critical democratic course and maintaining a voluntary, lived agenda is a defining feature of the group. That summer of 1989, Lana, Zoe, Olivia, and Clare went to CED’s annual summer conference. CED attempts to practice its purpose every summer through a relatively small conference. It brings together mainly teachers, but also university teacher educators, administrators, and students, to exchange ideas and have conversations around making democratic education work. This is done through workshops and presentations, and many informal conversations. When Zoe, Olivia, and Lana returned, they were enthusiastic about being part of a national movement and about their ability to meet other educators struggling with similar ideas and practices. This trip, undertaken as an “office.” seemed to crystallize the Teacher Forum’s identification with democratic education and its relationship with the CED main office. Moreover, it solidified the overt purpose of the Teacher Forum as a forum for democratic educators. oould ‘oonr their proies tor convers adherence Participate Mitiriari QFOUps th. some of ti iv isolated t as Progre aims and teachers trOllblem lot in PM leave the OmSlderE Statemer Some of “tenatioy Commltm 6‘3' DUIS it 34 Members of the Teacher Forum consistently refer to the Teacher Forum as a place and an effort to overcome key problems in teaching: alienation and isolation. All the teacher members with whom I spoke noted that the Teacher Forum is a place where they could “connect” with other practitioners and engage in conversation that was absent in their professional workspaces. All members mentioned that they come to the meetings for conversation and camaraderie of communal membership and a minimal mutual adherence, in theory if not practice, to democratic education. In other words, they participate to overcome isolation. As Clare puts it, “The thing [the members] particularly keyed into was the fact that teachers seemed to work in isolation and in groups that continue to meet...outside of the school are groups that help close the gaps on some of that isolation that teachers feel” (interview, ibid.). Many of the Teacher Forum members have found that they are already somewhat isolated because of their political and pedagogical commitments, that they are perceived as progressive or non-technical educators. They tend to ask the larger questions of the aims and ends of education in a democratic society. This orientation alone makes these teachers seem as though they are different from their colleagues and that they might be troublemakers since they ask “Better teaching and Ieaming to what end?" They have a lot in common, at least in terms of interest, in democratic education (those who don’t leave the group). The Teacher Forum then provides a type of refuge for like-minded outsiders. As educators who often act upon the principles like those set out in CED’s statement of purpose, Teacher Forum has the paradoxical effect of further alienating some of its members in their schools. The Teacher Forum has become a support for the alienation some members have already felt by virtue of their own pedagogical commitments. Lana, who has poignantly felt the need for a support group (see Chapter 6), puts it this way: Th. addition to . support grc rteachers 5 Up getting th iogether‘ (Ci Ther further deiin. lnth iitiursation. i Oi her intelie s‘Utgish any Sam'day ml the Seminar was 3 out b Commumy ‘ persp‘éCtive. The feminisi Den“. 35 A lot of us, because of the way we teach and our political beliefs and our attitudes tend not to have a lot of support among our colleagues, and you feel isolated. So it's kind of good to come together with people that understand your struggle, understand the isolation, experience some of the frustrations. So it's a good support group and sounding board (Interview, 4-19-93). Thus, there is a shared understanding among Teacher Forum members that in addition to belonging to a group about supporting democratic education, it is also a support group for dealing with isolation and alienation in teachers’ work lives. ”Teachers supporting other teachers,” notes Clare, "who are trying to do things that end up getting them in trouble in schools was a big thing and a big reason for coming together" (Clare interview, ibid.). IEEI'IIIIE II'I There seem to be two keys events in the history of the Teacher Forum that further defined who they are. The first is reactive, the second more proactive. W In the winter of 1991, Clare was teaching a doctoral seminar in English education. This seminar incorporated the critical and democratic perspective that is part of her intellectual repertoire. That year, she had felt that the Teacher Forum had grown sluggish and had not found a focus or a purpose for their meetings. Clara’s seminar met Saturday mornings, before Teacher Forum Saturday meetings. She used the last hour of the seminar for her students to be part of the Teacher Forum meetings. Clare felt there was a gulf between the university and teachers, even between those from each community who share similar educational values like a critical or democratic perSpective. She was hoping to both bridge that gap and reinvigorate the Teacher Forum. The integration was a failure. It was organized around three conversation groups: feminist pedagogy, Foxfire curriculum methods (see Wigginton, 1985 and section two of this chap? networkirg common i. an imposit imposition The divisicr much more required to the Teacher readings ant that was dor university se The the following teachers‘ gr 0i Diacthion. Exclusion of F0rum be a Wamices 0i 36 this chapter), and teacher research. Clare hoped that these would be a places for networking among educators from both the university and the public schools who share common interests and pursuits. The Teacher Forum (members) resisted. They found it an imposition of agendas not of their making. Moreover, they seemed to see this imposition in terms of a hierarchy of university over schools, academics over teachers. The divisions were among doctoral students (some of whom have been teachers) who did much more work in the seminar (e.g., reading and writing assignments) and were almost required to participate in the meetings. This aggravated Teacher Forum members in that the Teacher Forum had not involved any required work, only mutually agreed upon readings and tasks. And it was a group formed of their own volition. Any reading and work that was done was from their own interest and commitment to the group, not to a university seminar. The group almost disbanded that year and the integration attempt did not continue the following fall. This event signaled for Clare and the other members that this was a teachers’ group, made up of members who set an agenda according to the goals and desires of practitioners who do the journey work of schooling. This did not result in the exclusion of university affiliated educators, but it spoke to the desire that the Teacher Forum be a group of practicing educators who have as their core concerns the lives and practices of teachers, not about or abstractions about "what works.” Lanaf§_QLdeal The second major event in the life of the Teacher Forum involved Lana and a struggle with her middle school and district in 1990. Lana joined the Teacher Forum the year following its inception. She also served as the group’s “facilitator" as part of her practicum for her English education master’s degree program. Her ordeal is taken up length at Chapter 6, so I will only outline this event. After having received a death threat from a student in her eighth grade class, Lana asked her school’s administration to remove it even acco school dist English dezl played a rr frustrated v. group). the members w about demo was experiei understandrr professional By th that following itfro attendec their teaching lare W30! of in. Meeting Spac TeaCher Fom wormed r and Cla’e’s st Unn- UndergradUatE 37 remove the student for her own safety. The school was unresponsive to her concern and even accused her of bringing the threat upon herself. She then filed a grievance with the school district. Though she eventually was successful and later promoted to head of her English department, this was a traumatic school year for Lana. The Teacher Forum played a major role in emotionally supporting her. Though some members grew frustrated with the therapeutic feel to the Teacher Forum meetings (some even left the group), the group seemed to more clearly declare itself as a place to support its members who are in crisis situations (in their professional lives) and not just to talk about democratic education. Since one of their own was under attack for her work, and was experiencing aggravating alienation from her colleagues, they felt a powerful, tacit understanding that the Teacher Forum is about personal support as much as it is about professional support. IeacbeLEQLumMembeLs By the time I joined the group in the fall of 1992, and formally collected data that following winter and spring, there were fifteen different members (including me) who attended the year’s meetings. I will briefly name them (pseudonyms) and describe their teaching background. film is an English professor, specializing in English education. She acts as sponsor of the Teacher Forum in that she provides in-kind support such as finding meeting space at her university. She also acts as the regional office coordinator of Teacher Forum as a member of the CED. Darlene is a high school English teacher in a predominately black high school in a middle-sized city. She is also a doctoral student in English education at the university and Clare’s student. Donna is a an humanities professor who teaches writing in an honors undergraduate program at Midwestern University. teaches E African A." Univershy is reading an [is being held 1 attend the i where CED E during the 1 when E Louise La! La mmmunriy Le School Em and Louise m 38 Eetjmen is a doctoral student in English education at Midwestern University. She teaches English teacher education undergraduates courses. A Muslim, she is the only African American in the group. She is also Clare’s student. flame): is a 4th grade teacher in a school district in the vicinity of Midwestern University. She is the sister in-law of Zoe. Hem is a curriculum developer in Darlene’s school district. He specializes in reading and language arts and does not teach. iris teaches at a youth detention center. She teaches adolescent males who are being held for criminal activity. She teaches social studies, writing, and literacy. We is a former co-director of the CED. She makes the monthly trip to attend the Teacher Forum meetings. Having worked at the university as an instructor where CED is located, she now teaches at a progressive public school in Illinois. Kathy had been an active member of the Teacher Forum, but attended sporadically during the time of my data collection. She teaches middle school in a suburban district in which the Midwestern University of located. Lane is a middle school English educator and teaches in the same district as Louise. Lana’s story of her death threat is examined at length in Chapter 6. Lame is a doctoral student in English education. She also teaches English at a community college and is involved with secondary English teacher education. Leuiee is also an long-term member of the Teacher Forum. She teaches middle school English and social studies in Lana’s school district. Qliyje is a high school English teacher. She teaches in the same district as Lana and Louise. Benin is a returning undergraduate student. She is completing her teacher education and hopes to teach English and psychology in secondary school. yelefie is a community college English instructor. She is also a doctoral student in English education under Clara’s tutelage. IN approxirr. (fang a C (‘3 of the orig N: meeting or, however, e examine at narrative e) 39 de teaches at a Catholic, grade K through eight school in a small town, approximately 30 miles from the university. She teaches eighth grade literacy (language arts) and social studies. One of Zoe’s stories analyzed in Chapter 5. She is one of the original members of the group. Not all of these Teacher Forum member participated in every Teacher Forum meeting over the year I attended and tape recorded. Some came only once. All of them do, however, emerge in my data (see Appendix A). Zoe, Lana and Clare have stories that I examine at length in the second part of the dissertation. Others appear the discourse and narrative examples I use. i-i: when suf‘. contextua‘ incumbent twofolded. storytelling. in which to context wh working tow my researci the Teacher context as ft of referenCe glove. It is t W underst. eXDerienCe TBacher F01 and Demon; 40 SECTION 2: CONTEXTASAFOU Figure 4.4 Story movement D 'E I I I' This move from the comic to the tragic is evidenced in the text in important ways. The “point” moves from we still get grades no matter what school age we are to how even the young have internalized the ways it’s always been. More specifically, the story's action and characterization shifts. The drama is no longer centered on Sydney’s punchline and play on language. It is focused on Sydney’s, not to mention her brother’s, unproblematic embrace of grades, since “that's the way it's always been mom.” The dramatis personae must therefore change and reorient themselves to the narrative action (see Figure 4.5). 131 Joke (comedy) Crltlcal Tale (traged Dramatis Persona Sydney (daughter) Hero victim, dupe agent of the power straightman, fool structure Miss Larson, principal social commentator, witness to an insightful consciousness raiser joke Clare victim, dupe, Sydney’s ally Dave (son) not present Figure 4.5 Transformation of dramatis personae Most conspicuous is the transformation of Sydney. In the joke, she is the dramatic comic here. She puts one over the principal, who is a comic fool. By the end of the story, and up until Clare’s last utterance in the narrative, Sydney has become another victim of society; she has been socialized into the commonsense attitude of the ways it’s always been. Clare’s daughter is now no longer the child trickster of the joke who reveals the irony of perpetuation of grades. At the very close of the story Clare re- makes her point and Sydney, who “just already in sixth grade” (51), has been suckered by the ideology of grades. She is no longer an individual comic narrative hero, but a social type, a sixth grader. At one level, Sydney’s transformation is a natural outgrowth of her own witty insight in the joke. Even a bright, witty sixth grader can be duped. However, Clare fails to make that point in the last line of her story. Sydney, whose narrative strength makes, and is made by, the joke, is in the end a victim and dupe. And the transformation changes the other characters. Sydney’s status is reinforced by her older brother. The principal who was comic fool is retroactively an agent of society and the school system who 1 3 2 perpetuates the ways it's always been for grades and assessment. And Clare becomes a protagonist in her story where she was at first merely witness to the action. She becomes social commentator and a consciousness raiser. One gets the impression that Clare is not so much speaking to her children (lines 33-34), as she is the audience of the Teacher Forum (just as she seemed to be bragging to them about her daughter in the joke). She speaks through herself as a character in her story, to speak to her audience, as if she might also be admonishing or lecturing them about critical consciousness. E'II' E This transformation in the story cannot be attributed merely to the constraint applied to Clare’s narrative utterance through her abstract (5-7) in which she says she will tell about a “terrible discussion.” More broadly and more pressing is the need to conform, like all utterances, to the primary frames of the Teacher Forum. The personal experience narrative, as a definable form, encounters the context in which it emerges. At one level, Terrible Discussion fits well the primary frame of getting personal. The story reveals a troubling conversation between Clare and her daughter and son. It is revealing in one important way that makes Clare look vulnerable. She presents herself in the story as someone who arrests a conversation with her son and daughter, clearly something she wished had not happened. More importantly is this story’s accommodation to the primary frame of the critical. The joke in the story itself does indeed fit this frame. It is a funny, critical story about grading. But its point may have been left too subtle for Clare’s satisfaction. Whatever her motivation, Clare is compelled to continue the story. She includes not only the dramatic, stylized report of her admonishment to her children about authentic learning, she includes the two utterances that are explicit evaluative commentary on what the narrative’s events mean—what the point of the story is. 1 33 Taken together, the primary frames of the Teacher Forum exert a powerful influence on Terrible Discussion. The story cannot rest as good joke, but is driven to become a tale of critical consciousness that is personal. The story's core is turned inside out and Sydney, the comic hero, becomes the tragic victim. In other words, the personal narrative form is at the same time independent of context and highly bound to it. Terrible Discussion as a joke gets subverted by the pressure of the primary frames, to be critical. Clare’s choice to make it explicitly so demonstrates not so much a fundamental incompatibility of story and the primary frames, but that context can disallow and subvert a decent story-joke that stands on its own. The context of the Teacher Forum is not only a primary resource of and for story and storytelling, it is also a constraint. CHAPTER 5 READ MY LIPS: REPORTED SPEECH IN THE POETIC RELATIONSHIPS OF PERSONAL EXPERIENCE NARRATIVE For others say thou dost deserve, and I Believe it better than reportingly. Beatrice, Act III, Scene 1, Much Ado About Nothing, Wm. Shakespeare Reported speech is an integral part of many forms of storytelling. As a variety of reflexive language, “Reported speech is speech within speech, message within message, at the same time speech about speech, message about message” (Volosinov, 1930, p. 149). In the personal experience narrative, of the conversational sort that is the focus of this study, a narrator frequently creates voices from experience and even hearsay (Tannen, 1986). Though based on actual characters and actual events, it is dubious that the words were actually spoken as reported by a narrator. This chapter is specifically concerned with the uses of quotation: the direct or indirect attribution of speech to another who is not the operative narrator. Though there are several forms of reported speech that are not quotation, their frequency and use in the personal experience narrative warrants a closer look at how it works in storytelling. Reported speech can be used to accomplish the personal experience narrative form as it becomes intimately implicated in the three generic features of implied truthfulness, dramatic movement, and the self-same of narrator and chief story character (see Chapter 3). As a form of realism, the personal experience narrative is necessarily consumed with not only telling a good story, but in asserting its truthfulness—that the events truly did occur. 134 135 The personal experience narrative seeks “maximum verisimilitude” (Jakobson, 1921L Reported speech is a poetic trope that serves multiple functions in the genre of the personal experience narrative and the personal narrative as an expressive utterance in group life. Through an exploration of Zoe’s No End of Year Trip, I assert that reported speech—specifically direct and indirect quotation—works through the genre dimensions of the personal experience narrative. Moreover, it functions in the maintenance of the Teacher Forum as a group. As a device that builds on and creates interpersonal involvement with an audience, quoted speech draws the listeners, or addressees, into the drama of a “true” story and thus works with and toward “getting personal.” III'I! I'VII' '90 l' [E' To attribute speech to story characters poses certain challenges to the personal experience narrator. She1 must bring the voices of her characters into the ongoing flow of narrated events. Since such speech is not that of the operating narrator, reported speech has a kind sovereignty. As Volosinov (1930) puts it: Reported speech has a capacity of entering on its own into speech, into its own syntactic makeup, as an integral unit of the construction. It has a kind of autonomy—speech belonging to someone else—outside of the storytelling context but still bound to the [narrative] event. (p. 149, emphasis added) Using reported speech requires that the speech represented have its own syntactic (and semantic) integrity. The narrator must make it work within, and distinct from, the storytelling event. The introduction of characters’ voices is, once again, a question of frames and framing. When in the course of telling a story an author or narrator wishes to create voices and use speech, she must signal to the audience that she 1I use the feminine form since this chapter analyzes a story by Zoe and most of the storytellers (members) in the Teacher Forum are women. 136 is speaking not as herself as narrator. She frames her utterances as speech of others, and even herself as a character. Reported speech is “keyed” (Goffman, 1974) through use of verbs of saying, which then opens a syntactic structure that maintains the frame of reported speech. Reported speech is embedded within the narrative utterance, which itself is embedded in conversation. When a narrator breaks through into story performance, she shifts from the conversation frame to the story frame. Once she has taken the floor, initiating the dramatic narration of events, and desires to use dialogue and quotation, she does this by framing her narrative utterances as reported speech. She keys her audience to her efforts of attributing speech to others. The reported speech frame is layered within the narrative frame, that is enclosed within the conversation frame. Goffman (1974) calls this “lamination” of frames (see figure 5.1). 137 reported speech and dialogue story conversation Figure 5.1 Framing laminations of reported speech in story Figure 5.1 indicates that to shift frames is to set up a type of linguistic boundary where the frame of reported speech marks itself off from the rest of the surrounding narrative. As metacommunication, a frame of/for reported speech “explicitly or implicitly gives the receiver instructions or aids in his attempt to understand the messages included within a frame” (Bateson, 1972, p. 185). In the transcribed Teacher Forum stories, I have set off direct quotation through the use of quotation marks and 1 38 indentation, as in fiction. Obviously, in spoken narrative the audience has no textual punctuation to see that what is being spoken is attributed to someone other than the narrator at the time of telling. To indicate the shift to quotation the narrator must use verbal literary devices to indicate such a shift has occurred. The common way to indicate this shift, or to introduce reported speech is, through the use of verbs of saying, verbum dicendi. Mostly common among these is say in its past tense said. For example, when a narrator says Billy said “My mom is used to driving at night” she is using said to shift her utterances to a frame of reported speech, where the utterance is that of Billy himself and the way he supposedly said it. The audience is keyed to the frame of reported speech through said. the frame sends the message “this is quoted speech.” Of course there are other ways of introducing reported speech to shift and maintain frames. The use of the verb of saying, or paralinguistic features such as a changed voice, or the shift of verb tense and pronouns are ways of keying the audience to the frames of quotation. In the story that follows, the narrator, Zoe, uses heavily the verb of saying to shift to the frame of reported speech. W Before looking at how reported speech works in a Teacher Forum story, Zoe’s No End of Year Trip, it is important at the outset to define two distinct types of reported speech. Specifically I focus on direct and indirect quotation. Though there are other forms of reflexive language in Teacher Forum stories (that is, language or speech acts that refer to other language and speech acts), I want to focus specifically on the most widely distributed forms of reported speech in Teacher Forum stories, explicit quotation in direct and indirect forms. 139 El Il!’ IQ Il' Direct quotation is a form of mimesis. Its orientation is the utterance itself as it supposedly happened in the story’s events. The direct form seeks to reproduce the utterance itself. Indirect quotation takes on the perspective of the narrative (storytelling) event. That is, it works from the view of the storytelling event and it involves the more or less explicit narrator interpretation. Direct and indirect quotation differ in both their form and function. Consider the difference in the following utterances: A Joe said “You are the first person who has ever come to me directly about this.” Joe said (that) l was the first person who had ever come to him directly about this. Both of these utterances ultimately have the same purpose in conveying the substance of Joe’s communication. And both of these use a verb of saying (said) to introduce and frame the quoted speech. A is a direct quotation. As such, it seeks it lmitate what Joe originally said. As such A is “footed” (Goffman, 1981) in the narrated events, or in the past when it occurred. As an indirect quotation, B is less a form of imitation as of analysis. That is, it analyzes the speech, and by extension its meaning, in the present storytelling occasion situation; it is footed in the perspective of the narrative event. It involves more directly the narrator’s interest than Joe’s. Indirect and direct quotation have structural linguistic differences. With direct quotation, the narrator is concerned with foregrounding the purportedly original form of the utterance. Though the narrated events necessarily occurred in the past, their presentation with direct quotation is as if they are transpiring at the moment of telling. Therefore, the speaker pays attention to and presents the quotation with appropriate pronouns and verb tense. In A, the speaker uses you as if Joe were speaking to her in .q—k u. _4-‘-_. 1 40 the present. This first person direct quotation indicates a use of the present tense verb bein “you are”. In contrast, the indirect quotation of B uses first personal pronoun l and the past (perfect) tense of be, “I was.” Indirect quotation often involves the syntactic subordinator that, which is optional. When that isn’t used, it can readily be inserted. In B I have done just that by adding it in parentheses. Narrator and audience are keyed to the quotation and the type of quotation it is through use of the verbs of saying, coordination of pronouns and verb tenses, and, sometimes, syntactic subordinators. The delineation of direct and indirect quotation is a little muddier with the personal experience narrative, where the narrator is also a chief character in (or a first hand witness to) the narrated events. Therefore, the use of the pronoun l is used both as l-the-current speaker and l-the-character. In the personal narratives In the Teacher Forum, nearly all the direct and indirect quotations are In the first-person: the l is both a character and the narrator. In the indirect form, though, the lis the current speaker, the narrator. In direct forms, I is a character speaking in the narrated past. In those utterances where we can distinguish direct from indirect form, we have a clearer picture of who is supposedly speaking and from whose point of view the utterance is made (though the entire narrative utterance is still the narrator’s). For example: indirect: I said (that) I wasn't comfortable with a ball game that started at seven. I said “I am not comfortable with a ball game that starts at sevenf direct: There is a subtle change in point of view that shifts with temporal difference in direct and indirect forms. In the direct form, lis speaking from the point of view as a narrator in the present, explaining her communication that she was uncomfortable. With the direct form, I is expressing the point of view of a story character. This returns to the major difference between indirect and direct quotation, a difference that holds even for the personal experience narrative: authority and 141 interpretation. Direct quotation foregrounds the original utterance form. Direct quotation bears no necessary formal (syntactic) relationship to the storytelling (or reporting) event. In it we see the idiosyncrasies and provisional nature of everyday language, including incomplete sentences, subjectless imperatives (e.g., “Get planning!” in Zoe's story below), use of dialects, etc. In that direct quotation claims to convey words as they were actually spoken, it is footed, or “indexically anchored” (Lucy, 1993), to the narrated events, and is therefore authoritative. The perspective of the current storytelling situation is less transparent with indirect quotation; it is anchored to the present storytelling event. Indirect quotation involves some more or less overt narrator interpretation or analysis of the reported speech. As such, the indirect quotation foregrounds the content of the quoted utterance, not its original form. Figure 5.2 indicates the basic structural and functional differences in direct and Indirect quotation. type of footed verb point quoted speech In tense of view foregrounds direct past present narrative mimesis of character’s original form indirect present past narrator's narrator analysis/interpretation Figure 5.2 Characteristics of quoted speech :3 '-D' I Q l I' There is one other form of quotation that briefly warrants attention, since it occurs twice Zoe’s story. What is called the quasi-direct, or free-indirect, quotation (Lucy, 1993) is used to report thought, or an internal state. It seems to blend the direct 142 and indirect forms. For example, consider the following: direct: Sally said “Hell! I am angry.” indirect: Sally said (that) she was angry. quasi-direct: Sally said: hell she was angry. In the direct and indirect forms, Sally is reported as uttering that she is angry. The quasi-direct is more of an attempt to represent her thought. The direct form represents the point of view of Sally herself; the indirect that of the narrator. The point of view is not so clear in the quasi-direct form. On the one hand, it seems to represent Sally’s report of her own point of view. On the other hand, there are other signs that this is indirect with the verb in past tense. This, according to Banfield (1978), is the form of the “free-indirect” quotation, or what I prefer to call the quasi-direct. It involves a blending of the direct and an indirect forms of quotation. Though it seems to sound like the direct form, with the presence of the interjection (hell) and the order of syntactic constituents (Lucy, p. 20), the pronoun and verb tense follow the indirect form. This gives the impression that we (reader/audience) have almost direct access to Sally’s thoughts. This definition of the quasi-direct form seems limited in a significant way. It is important to recall that Banfield is interested in literature and the development of tropes like quasi-direct speech in western fiction. The idea of quasi-direct speech seems applicable to oral literature in general, and to the personal experience narrative in particular, but with a slightly expanded definition. My re-definition may be a direct function of the genre properties of the personal experience narrative, but it is hard to account for it at this point2. Banfield argues that it is the past verb tense that is used in the quasi-direct. But is it not possible to use the present tense? If the chief aim of 2This would require a thorough survey of various forms of the personal experience narrative which is beyond the scope of this study. 143 quasi-direct is the representation of thought in speech, and this is achieved by blending features of direct and indirect, is that blending limited to the use the past tense verb form and the deletion of the (optional) syntactic subordinator that? Consider the following example, taken from Zoe’s’ story: I felt “Well, that's a real nice attitude” D E I said (that) that was a real nice attitude. F I felt: well that that's a real nice attitude. D and E are direct and indirect quotations respectively and clearly follow their respective patterns. F (the actual line from Zoe’s story) retains the interjection (well) and it follows the pattern of direct quotation (as if she is talking to someone). Yet F retains the syntactic subordinator of the indirect form. Zoe Is representing her thoughts, that ultimately have motivational consequences for her (as dramatis persona) subsequent action in the story. In this case, the syntactic subordinator is hardly optional but important to the representation of her thoughts. Even if we take into consideration that in F Zoe is restarting the word “that’s (that -that’s), we can still see that Zoe uses the past tense felt as the framing verb of saying, representing her feelings, or subjective experience. In other words, her thoughts. Her thoughts are painted as if she was speaking to herself. If she were only reporting the content of her thoughts, she would most like say something to the effect. “Then I thought/felt that was a poor attitude”, rather than the sarcastic “nice attitude,” as if she was trying to impress upon someone the inverted meaning of “nice”. It therefore seems that the quasi-direct need not be determined by the use of the past verb tense in order to represent thought.3 Whatever the proper definition of quasi-direct speech, there is a larger 3In the Teacher Forum stories I have gathered, there are six other instances of my extended definition of quasi-direct speech, in which the aim of such utterances Is to indicate thought without communication or expression to other characters in the story. 144 theoretical issue pertinent to the personal experience narrative as verbal art. Banfield (1978; 1993) holds that the consciousness or thought of the character has been directly represented, in a literary way, through the quasi-direct form. The important difference with the personal experience narrative is that the narrator is also a main character in her own story, that complicates the literary understanding of quasi-direct speech. If we consider Banfield’s points more carefully we can see that the quasi-direct has a dramatic literary function, even for the personal experience narrative. Banfield argues that directly quoted language combines expression and communication, that it directly presents the utterances of expression of a literary character. Indirectly quoted speech, she also argues, represents communication without expression, referring only to the content of the communicative utterance without its direct expressive form. Thought reported in the quasi-direct form is neither communicative nor expressive: Expression has no form of its own. The expression of thought as speech provides the narrator a way of presenting thought without communication. In D, the utterance is an expressive communication (e.g., Zoe saying something to another character). With E, Zoe reports communication (to whom is she expressing in her story?). The quasi-direct quotation of F allows for the narrator to present narratively her own thought as speech without reporting it as communication. The use of the quasi-direct in a story, as will become apparent in Zoe’s story, works to accomplish the dramatic movement of the plot and ultimately the poetic efforts of the personal narrative. The quasi-direct form used to report thoughts helps explain the personal experience narrative narrator/character motivation that may otherwise be unclear from the description of action alone, tedious or boring if explained, or left intolerably ambiguous. Ell I' [D' I II I' IS I As we shall see in the story analyzed below, the personal experience narrative 1 45 involves frequent alteration of the direct and indirect, and to a lesser extent, quasi- direct quotation. The alteration has practical and aesthetic functions. Specifically, the use and shift of direct and indirect forms help the narrator shift between points of view. She can represent herself in the storytelling occasion and in the story’s events. This aids her to work effectively between interpretation/analysis and narrative authority. By using the expressive character of language, she can use direct reports that appear more vivid and authoritative. With indirect reports, she can more or less explicitly convey her understanding, as narrator, of the original utterances. Moreover, with insertion of the quasi-direct form she can further give credence to her motivations and intentions as a character in her own story. The manipulation of the direct, indirect and quasi-direct forms lets the narrator blend authority, interpretation, and explanation to create a tale of her experiences the way she’d like them to be received. Stomaaolsgmund Zoe’s No End of Year Trip is about a conflict between Zoe and her principal. Zoe told this story in the eighth Teacher Forum meeting of that (school) year, in April. Present at this meeting were Olive, Fatimah, Clare, Hannah, Lana, and myself. Hannah did not arrive until almost the very end of the story. Zoe told this story at the very outset of the meeting. There was no preceding conversation, other than the more informal chatting between two or three individuals that typically occurs when members first gather. It was the first utterance that day to which Teacher Forum members paid collective attention. Zoe announced her story and then proceeded to breakthrough into story. Thus, Zoe’s story preface did not act as a suspension of conversation that usually characterizes personal experience narrative in the Teacher Forum. It was more like she took the floor and made others pay attention to her. 1 46 “No End of Year Trip” 1 Zoe: (I had out with my principal.) part 1 2 I kept my mouth shut 3 for about for six years. =And that's what I told them. 4 I said “I've been quiet for six years 5 and she's so incompetent. =There's no other word to describe her.” 6 Lana: Is she a Sister ((nun))? 7 Z: No. 8 Steve: What prompted you? 9 I mean what was ~ 1 0 2: What prompted me was that part 2 c 1 1 I planned the eighth grade trip last year. c 1 2 In the past we've done a shared time '~ 1 3 with the public school. I; 1 4 And last year we kind of went to a split. 0 1 5 Um : 1 6 We lost a lot of our kids but o. 1 7 we are almost self contained. =We -They still take band over E there. 0 1 8 Um ° 1 9 Last year it went I 2 0 rather from ‘7 21 the three hours and lunch and the whole thing in 2 2 we went to two hours '3 2 3 and our kids weren't included in a lot of their stuff a, 24 and our kids were really treated badly in public. -~ 2 5 It -lt's too bad because for years and years it's been a good system. a 2 6 And then all of a sudden 2 7 they decided 2 8 um 2 9 Clare: Hi. ((Clare enters)) 30 multiple: Hi. 3 1 Z: -All of a sudden they decided that the -that the public school was running out of money. 3 2 So if the Catholic school stays open 3 3 the public school 3 4 -that'll cause the public school to go under. 3 5 Well 3 6 you know 3 7 if they you know if they're running out of money they're running out of money. 3 8 That's all there is to it. 3 9 So anyway 4 0 um 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 147 last year I planned the trip because I had a little girl who was bald who wore a wig and they always go to an amusement park. And I heard this girl talking about an amusement park and she said her hair flies off. And um [Uh oh. [she said her doctor gave her special tape and her hair still flew off. Ooooh And I thought “We can't go to an amusement park. =l'll take these kids to Chicago.” 01. & you know they earned [How many kids are you talking about? Twenty-four. They earned three thousand ( ) tweny-seven dollars or whatever and we went to Chicago. And we did real cool things. And um I think we had twelve adults and twenty-four kids. This was last year? Last year. And but it -I undertook it. And when I asked the principal she said “NO NO NO.” And I said “You know I'm really concerned about Sarah.” She said “Sarah will have to Ieam that she can't do everything else everybody else does.” Which I felt well that that's a real nice attitude. And then when she asked the priest about it -actually I asked him about it. =l saw him in the hall and he said “Great! =Are you going to Toronto?” And I said “Chicago.” And he said “GREAT=I'd like to go.” Well it turned out he couldn't go. 148 7 6 But once she -he gave the okay then she said to me “G ET PLANNING. =GET PLANNING.” 7 7 Well at that point it was toox late to go to a couple places I wanted to 7 8 and um 79 but we still got it planned. I=But this year part 3 80 I sort of like ~ 81 got 2 82 I don't know 0 8 3 / :7. 8 4 unspokenly chosen as the class advisor or whatever. 8 8 5 So I was gone the first term and I had a couple of mothers start a : bake sale every Tuesday. a. 8 6 And the kids started earning money right at the beginning. '5; 87 And um o 88 But this class I 89 there’s fourteen of them and they're awful. N 9 0 And nobody breaks windows and nobody brings guns to school g 91 but they're just always 8 92 -there's always a comment. -~ 93 There’s always smarting off. 3, 9 4 They don't bring their books 95 they -there's always just a little bit of -enough of a 9 6 an attitude in the class 9 7 that we've talked about you know 9 8 -I've talked to them about three or four times that 99 “You know this isn't a right. 100 This is a privilege and you have to earn this privilege.” 1 01 And they just assumed they were going. 1 02 / 1 0 3 As early as this week part 4 f3 1 04 they said “What have you done on our trip?” .tn 1 05 And I told them what I’d done. I 1 06 And then I told them I really -they wanted to go to a ball game. 3 1 07 And I said I wasn't comfortable with a ball game that started at x seven. g 108 And um .- 1 09 I said “By the time we get done it's it's midnight B 1 1 0 we get home at four in the morning I 1 1 1 if we leave at six in the morning. =lt's too long.” “'3 1 1 2 And and rather than saying “Oh. Okay.” .g 1 1 3 You know I had eight kids bombarding me 8 1 1 4 “That's not -they won't get out at midnight they'll get out at ten.” .. ((in a childish, whining tone)) 3- 1 1 5 And I said “Well ten our time is -ten Chicago time is eleven our time. 1 1 6 By the time you get to your car it's not like walking from Midville High School school to your cars. 1 17 It's a big city.” 1 1 8 And uh 1 1 9 and then I had “My mom's used to driving at night.” 120 It was just -like it's just constant! 1 21 So on Tuesday I said to them “I'm not going to plan the trip. 149 1 2 2 If somebody else wants to 123 theLcan. =But I -I choose not to.” 124 And I told my principal. part 5 125 And she like wrote notes. 126 And I said “All the teachers feel the same way that the kids don't deserve it.” 1 2 7 And um 128 I said “You know it's your decision but I'm not going to ch -plan the trip.” 12 9 Well she came back to me the next day and said “The priest said we can't cancel the trip 130 um because the kids are expecting to go on it.” 131 And I said “That's his decision.” 132 And I said “But I'm not going to plan it.” 133 And she said “Yes you are going to plan it.” 134 .: Oooh 1 35 . : Oh no. 136 And I said “I'm not planning it. =l'm telling you I'M NOT PLANNING IT” 137 Read 138 my 1 39 lips ((he he)). 1 4 0 She went nuts on 141 -or I said “I guess if it ultimately -if the the trip is 1 42 an expectation 143 then I assume that it's your responsibility to plan it.” 1 44 And I set her off. 1 45 And she just like started saying “What you don't understand is this is a Catholic school and we do extra things at a Catholic schooL” 1 46 Yeah I have seven preps. =Don't tell me about extra things. =| do the student council. 1 47 Like I'm the one that stays there until five two nights a week with whatever's going on after school. 1 48 I didn't say that to her. =l just listened and she said 1 49 “I know you do some extra things and Joe ((teaching colleague» does some extra things but you don't understand I do so many extra things.” 150 When I came back in October ((from maternity leave)) part 6 1 51 um 1 5 2 the welcome back to school bulletin board was still up 1 5 3 and at Advent I took it down and put up Advent stuff. 1 5 4 I just said to her “They've been back to school for eighteen weeks now.” 1 5 5 You know. 1 5 6 And um part 7 1 5 7 l / 1 5 8 but 150 159 / / 160 she 161 pretty 162 -l -l sa 163 -she said “You have to. =Father said we can't cancel it.” 164 And I said “Take them. =Let Father take them. =l'm not taking them. 165 And I'm -and if somebody else plans it I'm not going.” 166 And um 167 she like wrote it down and stormed out of my room. :80 168 then 169 she came in and said “Fathers going to talk to the kids tomorrow.” 170 Andsowhenah part 8 g 171 / c 172 he came in m 173 / E 174 he asked (me) not to be there. :80 I left the room and I said to him ‘1’ “As a terribly disgruntled (employee) 3 175 / c 176 I want to talk to you.” ‘fb 177 And like ‘3 1 78 I wrote up this huge page of E 179 complaints 0 1 8 0 and uh '2 181 all -I kept it all professional a 182 I kept it all s 183 things that she doesn't do that should be her job. 3 184 And he said “You're the first person who's ever come to me q, directly about this.” L 1 85 Everybody knows. =The parents all talk about her. I 1 86 The kids don't respect her. at 1 8 7 And um m 188 / n 1 8 9 but 3 1 90 you know I said a 1 91 Is there a trip? o 1 92 He said -I said “I'm not gon” -I told him what went on. 1 93 And he said “I in no way insinuated that you would do it.” 1 94 And I said “Well that's what I assumed.” 1 95 And I said “I'm not going to do it.” 1 9 6 And um 1 97 he said I told them that the trip was in jeopardy. 1 9 8 And 1 9 9 / 2 O O my assumption was that 2 O 1 that -that doesn't necessarily mean a trip to Chicago. 2 O 2 And uh. 2 O 3 So part 9 2 O 4 anyway 205 I didn't say anything further to her 206 207 208 209 210 211 212 213 214 215 Fatimah: 216 L: 217 Z: 218 Olivia: 219 Z: 220 ?: 221 Hannah: 222 Z: 223 224 225 226 L: 227 Z: 151 and she didn't say anything further to me. But for an hour and twenty minutes I told him how incompetent this woman was how she doesn't speak to us. =She comes in and stands next to you and writes a note. And then hands it to you and while you read it. ((Lana laughing)) If you just -if you just answer her she says write it down. She wants you to write your answers. And ah I wonder where she got that notion from? Interesting approach. She can't remember anything. Oh that's why she writes everything down? She writes down everything. Hi. ((Hannah enters)) Sorry I'm late. If you say to her “I was just wondering if -if I could leave today at um right at homeroom?” =She'll get out a piece of paper and start writing a note. Like you can't even talk to the woman at all. NO BABIES I KNOW. That's the first thing I said. ((in reference to none of the new mothers brought their babies today)) We have teachers quit. Zoe's No End of Year Trip is a story in which reported speech and dialogue play an Important role. These are important to the generic features of the personal experience narrative genre: dramatic narrative structure, implied truthfulness, and the self-same of narrator and key character or chief witness. This section will look at the role of reported speech as it relates to each of the genre dimensions and the accomplishment of story. BIISIID I'III'SII I first described Zoe’s No End of Year Trip in my fieldnotes (4-24-93) as a “celebration of victory.” I have come to believe that part of getting personal in the group is to share in one’s triumphs, especially when these involve successfully dealing with troublesome administrators. Lana’s story Death Threat, in chapter 6, has a similar theme of victory. The story was the first utterance that I recorded in that session. In fact, I only started the tape recorder at line 2 (“I kept my mouth shut”). I believe I recorded accurately in my notes Zoe’s first words in line 1, but I keep these designated as doubtful hearings to be safe. Zoe’ story has 9 distinguishable parts, encompassing 4 distinct episodes. I have broken the story down into parts in order to show how in each part reported speech plays a role of moving the dramatic plot along.4 Episodes are empirically distinguished by utterances that indicate temporal shift between settings. I label the episodes complication 1 (lines 1-79), complication 2 (lines 79-102), climax/crisis (lines 103-169), and the resolution/dénouement (lines 170-227). The episodic shifts correspond with different story parts, as indicated in the text of the story’s 4i make no pretense that these “parts” are necessarily natural or inherent within narrative generally or in Zoe's story specifically. I am only doing this for analytic reasons for focusing on the text and the role of reported speech. 1 53 transcription. I refer to “parts” rather than episodes as I believe they are better suited to talk about reported speech in the story and its dramatic movement. Part 1 is Zoe’s introduction (lines 1 -5). This is a preface that comes in the form of an abstract (Labov, 1972). As I indicated in chapter 3, the preface is a petition to take the floor to tell a story. The abstract form of the preface is a summary of the story, but not part of the story proper. Nor is it offered in lieu of the story.5 The abstract/preface is a request for an extended turn at talk, where the regular rules of conversational turn-taking are suspended. The preface typically occasions a response (or at least a non-interruption) by the audience. In this case, Lana asks about the principal (if she is a nun), and I then ask her what had prompted her to “have it out” and to announce to “them” (3) her principal’s incompetence.My response is, In effect, permission for Zoe to tell the story (which she seems determined to do anyway) and she proceeds to open the story in part 2. It is important to note that from the very outset of Zoe’s narrative utterance, even in her abstract, Zoe is compelled to use reported speech. After her first clause (1), the rest of the abstract/preface is a melding of indirect and direct quotation. Lines 2 -3 could have simply been general commentary, an expression of her anger and valorizing the duty of keeping her “mouth shut for about six years.” She indicates that this is not just her thoughts, but what she said to an undetermined “them.” This indirect quotation pattern is inverse to the usual form in conversational storytelling where the verb of saying usually precedes the quoted utterance. In other words, the typical patterns would have made Zoe’s statement “I told them (that) I kept my mouth shut for about six years”. Instead she put the verb of saying (told) after the quoted utterance. This, combined with the next utterances in part 1, that are direct quotations, foreshadow the intense use of reported speech in the remainder of the story. It Is an ambiguous use of 5Like Susan Kalcik’s (1975) “kernel narrative”. See Chapter 6. 1 54 reported speech. When Zoe declares “I said “I’ve been quiet...” it is not clear whom she is addressing (i.e., who “them” is). As the story unfolds, we find out that “them” is really a single person. In this sense, direct quotation of lines 4-5 is, perhaps, what she Is transparently uttering as the narrator, not as a narrative character, to the audience. In effect, she says that her story will be one about a silent character who found herself morally bound to speak up and inform “them” of the incompetent principal in their midst. Part 2 is also the beginning of episode 1 and forms the story’s opening (Young, 1987). Since the abstract/preface is not part of the story’s events, it is hard to characterize it as an episode, rather a general orientation to the main events in the story, that have happened sometime between this Teacher Forum meeting and the one before (one month prior). The first episode ls marked by the shift in time to her planning the eighth grade trip “last year" (11). Episode 1lpart 2 amount to background complicating action. Zoe appears to feel it necessary to refer back to the year previous in order to render fully the meaning of the conflict with her principal. Here, Zoe is establishing her own role as the structural “hero” in her tale: she has already done heroic things in consideration of the one girl who was bald. Zoe implies that Sarah is bald because of illness since “she said her doctor gave her special tape and her hair still flew off" (46). This appeals to the members of the Teacher Forum, as Zoe’s action is highly child-centered and shows emotional concern for her student. In this part reported speech plays an important role in the establishment of the background for the ensuing drama in three ways. One, she indirectly reports the speech of the “bald girl” and why she cannot go to an amusement park (43, 46). Zoe gives the serious and humane reason for her heroic decision to go to Chicago. Second, using the quasi-direct form, Zoe reports her thinking and her decision to go to a city rather than an amusement park with a roller coaster. It is her idea that she represents as speech (48). This helps Zoe to express her thoughts as a key factor in her motivation to go to 1 55 Chicago, which, in turn, has repercussions in the next episode. Third, Zoe introduces two main characters with direct quotation, her principal and the priest. Through directly reporting the principal’s speech in a conversation with her, Zoe presents the woman as her antagonist. The principal refutes Zoe’s initial efforts and clamors “No! No! No!” (65). When Zoe gives her reasons for this trip—the concern for a child who cannot go to an amusement park—the principal gives a stern reply about Sarah’s need to Ieam the hard lessons of life (67). Not to be discouraged, Zoe again uses quasi-direct form to report her thoughts. This implicitly explains for the audience her motivation for going to the priest. Her disgust with the principal’s “attitude” (68) warrants her approach of the priest.6 The priest is then introduced in her constructed dialogue (72-74). His directly quoted speech shows a resounding confirmation of her decision, so much so that he said he would like to join the trip. The last direct quotation of part 2 is of the principal. After the priest’s approval, the principal quickly changes her tone and enthusiastically tells Zoe to “Get planning! Get planning!” (76). Zoe surrounds the priest’s words with the principal’s completely contrary commands in an action sequence: Principal approval Principal disapproval Pn'est approval ——> “Great! I’d like to go.” “Get planning!” “Nol Nol Nol” Figure 5.3 Action sequence through reported speech The juxtaposition of these commands in this action sequence shows a principal who is 6A3 a side point, but not clear in her story, in Catholic schools, which are typically connected to a church, a parish priest is the administrative head and most major decisions (e.g., money) typically go through him. *‘l mu l u—mm 156 irresolute, willing to surrender to the approval of her superior (the priest) and not to the merits of Zoe’s heroic efforts to include students in communal activities. The principal cares more about covering her backside than about a student who may miss out on a class activity. This rubs the democratic, student-centered values of many teachers, and of the Teacher Forum members specifically, the wrong way. For them, responding to the needs of children is as important as reacting to the sentiments of a superior. This characterization and action sequence is accomplished with directly quoted speech. Part 3 marks a episodic shift from the previous year to the current year in Zoe’s story. Reported speech plays a minor role in this part and episode. In this part she establishes how she, by virtue of her heroic efforts the previous year in organizing a school trip, she was “unspokenly chosen as the class adviser" (84).7 She moves the drama along and develops her role as a selfless hero for a class of students who are “awful (89), “smarting off” (93), and who have “an attitude” (96). Her students, or “class” (88, 96), are an aggregate to whom she speaks. In describing how she deals with her class apropos the trip, she conveys this through direct quotation (99-100): “You know this isn't a right. This is a privilege and you have to earn this privilege.” (99-100) This speech is not introduced. Though Zoe says in lines 97-98 that she and the class have “talked, ”she makes a generalized direct quotation. While there is no verb of saying that linguistically frames her speech (e.g., Isaid “You know this isn’t ...... ”), Zoe does change her voice as if she were addressing her students, speaking In a didactic, measured manner one might use with unruly children. The change in voice is one aspect of direct quotation, a marker to key the audience that she has shifted frame. It is further 7i find this a fascinating use of language. Zoe uses an invented adverb to describe her ascribed status in the school, that she was unwittingly or coercively selected to organize the class trip. It is as if she cannot avoid using reflexive language—“unspokenly”—to describe herself and her involvement in the narrated events. 1 57 evidenced as a direct quotation by the coordination of verb tense (present) and pronouns (first person, “you”). With this utterance of directly reported speech Zoe indicates not so much a movement of action as a description of attitude, her general mindset at the time of the narrated events and her students, that further complicates the story. Part 4 moves the story to the next episode in the near past (“As early as this I week,” 103). The drama of this entire part, and indeed the entire episode, is developed through use of reported speech and nearly every utterance is an instance of direct quotation. The students, on whose behalf Zoe has already heroically worked the previous year and on whose behalf she has again grudgingly decided to work, become antagonistic and fail to appreciate her efforts. She mimics her students’ speech. She does not indicate any specific child in her class. Rather, any one reported speech act represents a composite of her students’ voices. Zoe casts the conflict in linguistic terms, that she “had eight kids bombarding me” (113), a verbal barrage that is “just constant!” (120). This conflict, conveyed through reported speech, is but a warm up for the next round of conflict. In part 5, Zoe’s conflict with the principal, already introduced as insensitive and uncaring, comes to full crisis. As with the conflict with her students, Zoe’s conflict with the principal is almost entirely narrated in reported speech, and all in direct quotation. She tells her principal in no uncertain terms that she has no desire to plan a school trip. In her speech she directly quotes herself and connects her reasons, described in part 4, “All the teachers feel the same way that the kids don't deserve it” (126). The climax of the crisis itself is reached through an utterance of direct quotation: And I said “I'm not planning it. I'm telling you I'm not planning it!”(136) At the zenith of this crisis the audience responds. Two indistinguishable (134-135) members utter some shock, and Lana joyously echoes Zoe's reported declaration of not planning a class trip and pedantically says: “Read my lips” (137-139). 1 58 Part 6 seems rather out of place at first glance. It is an aside where Zoe narrates an example of the “extra things” she does at the school. She also uses this part to remind members of the Teacher Forum that she was on maternity leave earlier in the year. Though not evident in the text itself, members of the Teacher Forum are cognizant that Zoe had a baby and was out for the beginning of the school year. Not only does she do “extra things” (146), she indicates she did these after her return from a pregnancy. Moreover, these counter the principal’s claim that she herself does “so many extra things” (149). What Is notable about this aside is that Zoe cannot get through it without a use of direct quotation: I just said to her “They've [students] been back to school for eighteen weeks now” (154). Even this explication needs to be brought to life through reported speech. Part 7 picks up where part 5 was suspended for Zoe’s aside in part 6. Here the principal invokes the authority of the priest. Zoe represents this threat with a direct quotation (169). As Zoe shifts to the final episode with part 8 and Zoe speaks to the priest (“As a terribly disgruntled employee...l want to talk to you,” 174-176), it is not entirely clear when she actually talks to him. Zoe simply moves directly to her conversation with the priest. Through a directly quoted utterance, Zoe is vindicated. This is the dramatic resolution where Zoe triumphs over the principal. We find out that the principal is a liar, that she had communicated to the priest that he wanted Zoe to do it: “And he said ‘I in no way insinuated that you would do it.'” (193). Again, the crux of the resolution comes through the explicit use of reported speech that forms a constructed dialogue between Zoe and the priest. Lastly, the dénouement of No End of Year Trip involves Zoe commenting further on her frustration and disgust with the principal. This is done through indirect reporting of what she told him (208-213). She closes the story as she starts it, telling the priest how the principal is “incompetent” (5, 209). The narration gets a little 1 5 9 confusing when Zoe explains, through her indirect words to the priest, what the principal does that primarily annoys her, i.e., notetaklng. Olive asks a question. Hannah enters the room, Zoe gives a further example of the notetaking. Lana then screams that no one has brought their babies (Zoe and Hannah both have young infants). Finally, Zoe ends her narration, and closes the story with the coda “We have teachers quit” (227) because of the principal. W The forgoing brief analysis of the plot movement of Zoe's No End of Year Trip r- -_-—_—- a shows that she and her story respond to the demands of the personal experience narrative genre in order to develop a dramatic narrative structure. The poetic function, in Jakobson’s terms (1960/87), of language and narration require that the narrator tell a “good” story, that the narrative utterance stand alone as a story for its own sake. Zoe’s story has the basic narrative components of a beginning, middle and end (roughly following its episodes), complicating action, resolution, and it makes a point (the incompetence of her principal). This is accomplished through the explicit and substantive use of direct and, to a lesser extent, indirect quotation in constructed dialogue between Zoe’s and her students, Zoe and her principal, and Zoe and the priest. The story is introduced (prefaced/abstracted) with direct and indirect quotation; the climax and ultimate crisis of the story is a verbal conflict between Zoe and the despotic principal; the drama’s resolution is completed through a civil conversation between Zoe and the priest about the failings of the principal, in particular, and her oppression of the school’s teachers in general. In this sense, the dramatic construction of the No End of Year Trip conforms to the essential demands of the primary frame of celebrating critical (critiquing a administrative superior’s behavior and taking action to correct it) and getting personal, since it intimately involves Zoe as the story’s here. As a genre, the personal experience narrative must respond to the demands of its 1 60 other generic features. Like the Zuni origin and stories and fictive tales Tedlock (1983) describes, the poetics of the personal experience narrative require that it work at implied truthfulness, that it seek verisimilitude. Reported speech, in the form of direct and indirect (as well as quasi-direct) quotation, is a trope to persuade an audience that the narrated events truly happened. Herein lies an inherent tension of the genre of the personal narrative. The creation of voices is essentially a poetic act that has more in common with fiction than with audio tape recording. The literary representation of speech and dialogue in conversational personal experience narratives, not to mention the limit of human powers of recollection, lead us to suspect that the lines were probably not actually spoken as reported. As Tannen (1986) asserts, “It cannot be the case that the dialogue presented in oral storytelling is being reported exactly as it was spoken, unless the report is based on the deliberate memorization of a transcript which was based on a tape recording of the talk” (p. 313). For instance, when Zoe reports the speech of her students who are haranguing her to take them to Chicago and to attend a Cubs game (103-123), she speaks of kids verbally “bombarding” her (113). She presents the students as aggregates and does not name any individual student. They all, or at least eight of them (113), were saying the same things to her. Unless they were a chorus, they could not have all said the same thing. And even if she were quoting one student as a representative example of being bombarded, can we say that this is precisely what Zoe heard? Or, even when she reconstructs the dialogue between her and the principal, the powers of memory indicate that even though Zoe was in a position to hear and participate in it, the conversation did not take place precisely in this way. Strictly speaking, Zoe is not creating fiction. Her story is framed as a personal narrative that is supposedly true—expressly not fiction—and her direct and indirect quotations are said to have actually taken place. While she cannot, like most of us, remember verbatim, she does have a sense how speech sounds, how people talk to one another, and what a verbal conflict is like. Thus, in order to render the realism of 161 speech she cannot recall word for word, she needs to “model and trigger” the imagination of her audience (Tannen, 1986). She creates voices, depicting action and making drama that are based upon real people. She necessarily embellishes and adjusts these voices. This is the poesis of personal narrative, to create in the imagination of her auditors the voices of characters that make it seem as if the story were true. As verbal art, the realism of personal experience narrative cannot evade coloring. Referring to the great Russian realist Dostoevsky, Jakobson notes (1921/1978): Exaggeration in art is unavoidable, wrote Dostoevskij; in order to show an object, it is necessary to deform the shape it used to have; it must be tinted, just as slides to be viewed under a microscope are tinted. You color your object in an original way and think that it has become more palpable, clearer, more real. In a Cubist’s, picture, a single object is multiplied and shown from multiple points of view; thus is made more tangible. This is a device used in painting. But it is also possible to motivate and justify this device in the painting itself; an object is doubled when reflected in a mirror. The same is true of literature (p. 44, emphasis in the original). Given the latitude we give (and take) in the personal narrative, we need to assume that a story is true, especially when we know the narrator and feel she is someone we can trust. The literary device, or trope, of reported speech in Zoe's story works to help her achieve dramatic rendering of events. This rendering of events is necessarily exaggerated and deformed since a pure isomorphic mimicking of the original form is impossible. Besides, she needs to make the story sound real to achieve “maximum verisimilitude” (Jakobson, 1921/1978) of the realism of the personal experience narrative. This is where the art and the tension of the personal narrative genre reside. To make things seem real, they must be deformed. To make a speech seem like it truly did occur, it must be recreated from memory to sound like real speech and dialogue that, at the same time, has dramatic movement. 1 62 WIDE This leads to the consideration of the third feature of the personal experience narrative genre and the use of reported speech, the self-same of the narrator and the narrative’s protagonist and/or chief witness. This dimension is clearly implicated in the forgoing discussion of the other two genre features. Zoe is capable of telling the story as an accurate drama since she was not only there, she was in the action. Reported speech and her involvement in the constructed dialogues put her intimately in the dramatic action. The story cannot proceed without her and she develops it through reports of her own speech. As for meeting the demands of implied truthfulness, what better way to demonstrate a story's truthfulness than by replaying speech and dialogue? Not only was Zoe in a position to hear the words spoken by others, she is an interlocutor in dialogue with them. She heard them and she speaks back to them. It is her involvement in the drama that makes her a credible storyteller, that in turn makes the verlslmilitude acceptable. The genre of the personal experience narrative seems to hinge on this quality as it puts the narrator dramatically and realistically in the action. Listeners give themselves over to the narrator as the most credible one to make a story good and seem true. 3:001“ 0“ 1 1|. ; ,0‘1 : I ”an: ' no ' .: or 0 :21: or.“ :_ Qmucinlltv So far this analysis has been concerned with the use of reported speech in the form of direct and indirect quotation, apropos the realism of the personal experience narrative genre that is both artful in its dramatic rendering and at the same time real- sounding. Since members of the Teacher Forum have no way to really check on the accuracy of Zoe’s story, all they have to rely on is Zoe and her text. As Zoe is artfully and intimately inserted into her own story, her credibility and the story’s are nearly one in 1 6 3 the same; they vouch for each other and the auditors make the necessary leap of faith that the story is true and welcome the chance to be taken away by the drama. Is there more that we can say about the use of reported speech other than the inevitable adjustment, embellishment, exaggeration, deformation, and transformation made by the author and tolerated by the audience to achieve a good story that has veracity? Can this not be said about any conversational personal narrative in any context? Does the “culturally defined scene” (Bauman, 1986) of the Teacher Forum exact anything special or unique on the use of reported speech in personal experience narrative? In my view, I find it is essential to connect the use of reported speech to the context of the Teacher Forum specifically, the group life of the these teachers who have something in common and have coordinated their verbal utterances in alignment with the primary framework. A As defined and described in Chapter 2, the context of Teacher Forum is composed of two primary frames: the critical and the personal. I claim the personal experience narrative is a high form of the personal. If the personal narrative is implicated in “getting personal” in the Teacher Forum, then it would seem that reported speech plays a role in accomplishing this. As a trope and a poetic device used in storytelling, as we have seen, reported speech is a means to enact drama from experience. As an oral activity, storytelling is an event that works to involve the audience, not simply the presentation of text to be “read” or heard. In other words, it seeks the involvement of the auditors, as persons with whom the narrator is already in some form of coordinated relationship. Tannen holds that as spontaneous “poetic linguistic device[s]...used in ordinary conversation”, represented speech and constructed dialogue are ...means by which experience surpasses story to become drama. Moreover that creation of drama is made possible by and simultaneously creates interpersonal involvement among speaker or writer and audience (emphasis added p. 312). Though I believe Tannen fails to consider the need for verisimilitude in conversational 164 narratives (not to mention in realist fiction), her notion of interpersonal involvement would seem relevant to an examination of storytelling in a group that praises “getting personal.” WWI) Of relevance is linguist/literary critic Roman Jakobson's (1960/1987) theory of language. He identifies six constituents of speech present in any act of verbal communication: 1) addresser (speaker, encoder, emitter, poet, author, narrator) 2) addressee (decoder, hearer, listener; reader, interpreter, audience) 3) code (system, langue) 4) message (parole, the given discourse, the text) 5) context (referent) 6) contact (a physical channel and psychological connection between addresser and addressee) Each of these components is associated with a specific function of language: 1) emotive (expressive) 2) conative (appellative) 3) metalingual (glosslng) 4) poetic (aesthetic) 5) referential (cognitive, ideational) 6) phatic (keeping channel open) Though speech events, according to Jakobson, must involve all of these constituents and their functions, one may be emphasized in a given speech event. In the referential function, there is an emphasis on the context or idea of a verbal message. Jakobson was concerned with what makes not only poetry poetic, but ordinary language and prose. 165 Poetry is only the major example of the poetic, but all speech acts are, to some extent poetic. In a sense, this chapter has been an examination of the poetic function, that is a focus upon the message, as the “dominant” (Jakobson, 1935/1978) in personal experience narrative and the role of represented speech therein. As Jakobson (1935) seesit The poetic function is not the sole function of verbal art but only its dominant, determining function, whereas in all other verbal activities it acts as a subsidiary, accessory constituents (p. 69). Apropos the aesthetic expression of storytelling, this is the narrative utterance for its own sake—telling good stories. The genre demands of verisimilitude and dramatic narrative structure in the personal experience narratives are subsumed under this poetic function; to tell a good personal experience narrative it must be both dramatic (in its own, conversational way) and true (inter-subjectively understood as actually having occurred). As part of the poetic function, reported speech is “a focus within the verbal message on the verbal message itself” (Waugh. p. 144). In relation to this dominant, the deep symbolic quality of the personal experience narrative reflects a subsidiary function of the metalingual, part of the group’s code. Of specific concern to this analysis is Jakobson's conative function. This is where an emphasis of utterance is on the relationship between the addresser and the addressee. In storytelling, this is between the narrator and the audience. It would seem that in the conversational personal narrative a preponderance of reported speech acts reveals an emphasis on the conative as well as the poetic. In a group that is dedicated to “getting personal,” the emphasis on the conative makes the use of reported speech an artful device to work with and toward the personal. It seeks to draw the audience into the story and engage them in the story’s telling. There are at least two occasions where we can see that the audience is engaged in Zoe’s story. As noted, the preface/abstract No End of Year Trip (1-5) involves direct and indirect quotation. Zoe announces that she has a story and is seeking the floor. In the 166 preface-response sequence, Lana and I express curiosity and respond with questions. These indicate, at least on the surface, a form of engagement. Lana and l are responding to Zoe's reported speech. Lana seems to want to know if the principal is a nun and I did want to know what compelled her to say these words to someone. I was personally drawn into Zoe’s' preface: To whom was she talking? What led her to say these things about her principal’s incompetence? What happened when she “had it out” with her principal? Lana’s and my response provide one set of clues as to how we were brought into the story through in/direct quotation. More significantly, there is evidence that the audience is engaged at the story's climax: Zoe: I said “You know it's your decision but I'm not going to ch -plan the trip.” Well she came back to me the next day and said “The priest said we can't cancel the trip um because the kids are expecting to go on it.” And I said “T hat's his decision.” And I said “But I'm not going to plan it.” And she said “Yes you are going to plan it.” ?: Ood't ?: Ohno. 2: And I said “I'm not planning it. =l'm telling you I'M NOT PLANNING IT” Lana: Read my lips (hehe). (128-139) As Zoe reports the heated dialogue between herself and principal, there are responses by at least two (unidentifiable) members of the group during this telling in lines 134 and 135. They seem to sense the conflict and are compelled to utter the reactions “Oooh” and “Oh no”. More telling, however, is Lana’s response (lines 137 -39). When Zoe raises her voice to directly quote her own speech to the principal, Lana seems unable to contain herself and recites the phrase made famous by former President George Bush when he wanted to be understood in his hollow promise to not raise taxes: “Read my lips.” Lana is 167 moved to respond to Zoe’s reported verbal action toward the antagonist; she displays that she is not only listening to the story, but has been drawn into it, and responds specifically to Zoe’s use of direct quotation. Reading lips is a reflexive metaphor that refers to the imperative act of intently listening to one’s words. From this it can be inferred that reported speech within the personal experience narrative not only serves the function of the poetic, of telling a good, true story, it also serves the conative function of maintaining personal relationships and helping folks “get personal.” Reported speech is therefore also a device to maintain the group and its primary frame. This use of reported speech to bring an audience into a story, a function that focuses on the relation between addresser and addressee(s), points to an inherent tension in conversational storytelling. Unlike stories that are off retold, the conversational personal experience narrative in the Teacher Forum has the flavor of “news.” Stories typically are about events that have occurred since the last Teacher Forum meeting. In other words, the conversational personal narrative does not have the practiced or ritualized stylization of other story forms. There is a double edged risk: emphasis, or over-emphasis, on the poetic may seem too stylized for a personal experience narrative and may discourage active listening. Conversely, overemphasis on the conative function may bore one’s audience who may want to hear a good story that is worth listening to for its dramatic realism, its poetry. This forces the narrator to walk a narrative competence tightrope that stretches between alienating one's audience and boring them. CHAPTER 6 AMBIVALENT EMERGENCE OF A PROSPECTIVE PARADIGMATIC NARRATIVE: A TEACHER’S DEATH THREAT Teachers suffer in many ways what they experience as conditioning or manipulation by their superiors or by the “system” itself. To reflect upon the situation, even the bureaucratic situation, is to try to understand some of the forces that frustrate their quests for themselves and their efforts to create themselves as the teachers they want to be. ’1 iIAIO-in 2200‘... Maxine Greene, Teaching: The Question of Personal Reality Sometimes a personal narrative moves beyond the personal and starts to take on qualities of a shared or communal tale (Schely-Newman, 1994). Such stories can start to take on paradigmatic qualities for the group in which it is told; they become emblems of the group’s common meaning. This is an exploration of such a narrative told in the teacher Forum. The story is about a death threat one of the teachers, Lana, received from a middle school student. Personal experience narratives told in the Teacher Forum are typically single episodes of the kind that arise in conversations. Stories have the flavor of “news” where members narrate events that are usually no more than one month old. The Death Threat is a striking anomaly to this pattern. It is about events three years old. Longer and multi-episodic, with a more developed dramatic plot, the Death Threat resembles a “social drama” (Turner, 1957). Members tell an abbreviated version outside the Teacher Forum and often index it as the “bullshit” or Lana’s “ordeal.” As such, the Death Threat is en route to becoming a more shared story: in many ways it displays qualities which reveal the core values of the group—critical democracy and an ethos of personal support for its members. Though all members sympathize with Lana’s trauma, their attitude toward the narrated events and toward Lana herself vary widely 1 68 1 69 (from sympathetic to critical). There is a collective ambivalence about the meaning of the narrative’s events: even though it expresses core values, it also reveals certain conflicts while it emerges as paradigmatic. This chapter looks at how this social drama is put together and what this narrative means for the Teacher Forum. BEQKQLQLIDSI Lana told the Death Threat narrative in the sixth Teacher Forum meeting of the TWTT‘T‘H year. That day followed a Michigan February blizzard. The frigid temperature and the poor road conditions kept several members away. Only five members were able to make the meeting, Lana, Zoe, Hannah, Robin and myself. Since few came that day, the meeting had an air of informality; there seemed to be a feeling that this was not really a meeting. The combination of the bitter cold outside and the small number of attendees lent a greater sense of intimacy to the gathering than usually characterize Teacher Forum meetings. The Death Threat narrative emerged about thirty-five minutes into the conversation. The conversation leading up to the Death Threat centered around thinking about creating and teaching in democratic classrooms. It included commentary on the teacher’s leadership role in such classrooms and whether there is contradiction between teacher control and the democratic ideal of equality in participation and decision making Lana noted the difficulty in dealing with students who resist cooperative participation, and asked, “How democratic can you be when you have 'goof—offs’?” Further, she asked “How can we maintain a democratic classroom and at the same time deal with a student intent on totally disrupting the class?” This is, of course, a significant pedagogical question that resists any easy, formulaic answer. Mere classroom management techniques are too simple for democratic educators who are encouraged to query the purposes of their actions vis a vis democratic goals. Further, Lana asks how a particular student can be brought into a democratic classroom community without adversely 1 70 disrupting that community. This question goes to the heart of the classic democratic tension in the dialect of individual and community, between the rights of any one individual and those of the group. Robin then commented, “Along with the rights and privileges come responsibilities. For anybody.” I said that I thought the idea of accountability is often confused with a sense of responsibility. This led to Lana’s commentary and my response: Lana: Oh I know. This new CREEP1 business from the state. You know that dichotomy between the administration and the teachers all that crap that I went through with the death threat a couple of years ago. You know. And I finally got into the urn off the office. I said, “You have a luxury down here of being able to deal with a child on a one on one basis. And yes, I feel sorry for this child’s background. I realize he is a troubled teenager blah blah blah and I hope he you know but he does not have the right to come into that classroom and threaten the teacher’s life and disrupt the class and so on. When I am in that classroom my decisions are based on what’s best for the majority. As much as I care about that individual, the majority takes precedence.” Well we went round and round and round and round on that issue and the board of education finally decided that um you know that difference between...and again it’s that power structure hierarchical deal. Steve: So you got a death threat from a student? Can I ask about that? Her comments piqued my interest. It was hard to tell if Lana was speaking directly of personal experience, of a specific child, or a type of child who is bent on making classrooms uncomfortable. Prior to data collection, I had heard from at least two members that Lana had a traumatic experience in her school district a few years preceding and that the Teacher Forum was a major source of professional and emotional support at that time. They advised me to be careful in asking Lana about this experience as she found it painful to discuss. l was uncertain if this was the precise experience to which she was referring in this utterance. I had been a member for almost seven months and I had yet to hear the Death Threat narrative. The words “death threat,” combined with “all that crap I went through,” led me to think there was a good chance that this 1Acronym (pseudonym) for state mandated standardized testing. 1 71 was that experience. I couldn’t resist. My request for Lana to say more opened the door for the Death Threat and allowed Lana to breakthrough (Hymes, 1970) into the story: _._._. - a-s-scooosrcamtsoom-e more on re-no —L—L {D mN 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 é? a; 172 “Death Threat” Oh this -thls was (hehe) a topic of conversation several years ago. Um Yes there was a note ah left on my table and ah it was in a letter or some such thing and um this particular child was going to cut off my tits and shove one down my threat the other up my cunt and throw my body into the front yard of my house so that my husband and children could see what a bitch they lived with. And the office said “Well Lana I don’t know what you’re complaining about. You run a writing workshop. =You let kids choose their own topics so how can you say this isn’t the appropriate topic?” =And I -and they said it’s just a typical teenage expression of anger and they wouldn’t do anything and wouldn’t do anything. So I filed an assault complaint with the police department who the next day showed up and took the kid out of the building in handcuffs and he spent the weekend in detention. And my name was mud. =How dare I humiliate that child in front of his peers? And when he was brought back to school that following Monday he was made a teacher’s aide to make up for the humiliation that he suffered at my hands and I you know the -the lousy teacher syndrome came down all this kind of stuff and I said you know “Screw you.” I said “I have the RIGHT to walk into this building and feel safe and it is your responsibility to insure my sa” = “Oh we don't have any nobody is breaking the law here.” I said “This kid is into HEAD BUT TING. To me that’s physical assault. You can call it teenage fun but kids are hurt when he’s butting heads with them.” And I said “This is a foster child who has Fila tennis shoes and long sleeved Polo tee shirts on day after day that have never been worn before and you can’t me that he’s not financing those somewhere else.” The kid will come in Monday and just be “uuuhhh” ((groggy)) and by the end of Monday be extremely hostile. I said “He's on drugs.” Well of course because he's this foster child and there’s -there’d been a previous police record that all this is confidential. =They don’t tell the teacher anything. =Like the schools now don't have to tell you if a child in your classroom has AIDS because that’s a breech of confidentiality. And uh the police were absolutely horrified albums-av“! IL 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 173 they said because of the sexual content of that note in addition to the life threat it was jus ( ). And we went round and round and round. And finally I said “You know they want to put him right back in the class.” And uh so I started the grievance. Spent a year fighting it and complaining about a lack of discipline code in my building. During that time no one I worked with would associate with me. And the whole staff is constantly complaining about no discipline no consistent patterns for -you know -but nobody would associate with me. =And I said “Look I’m going through {,7 with this. 1‘ And you're welcome to ride along because you’re all complaining about 5 discipline. =Why don’t you (join) me?” Because it’s a class action grievance so something can =“Oh no we don’t touch you because if you lose we don’t want your shit on our shoes” kind of attitude. So finally I won it. =l won it at the board level. And -but I -I had like twenty three pages of single spaced documentation. =I was going home every night and writing up who said what. =And I mean it was just it was a horrible year in my life. And the upshot of the um / resolution was one that I would be evaluated for the first time in my career in North Hampton ((Lana's school district». =I've been there sixteen years now. This was at the end of the twelfth or thirteenth year and I’d never been evaluated. =And I'd asked for them because I want it on my record my current work but nobody would evaluate me and yet they were making evaluative comments about my teaching. =Now how can you do that? So the principal and the assistant principal came out looking like hall at the grievances ( ). And ah but the upshot was that there would be a consistent discipline policy developed for both middle schools. A policy was developed in my building. I’m the only teacher that has the policy applied. Everybody else is still bitching about the lack of discipline. And I -and I you know at this point “Screw you all. You know I’m fighting my own issues but I was willing to do something for everyone of you.” And uh with attitude -you know human personal attitudes like that / I don’t want anything to do with you. So but 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 174 / -and I’m the rabble rouser and / / / It’s just unbelievable. / / Local politics. / And then nobody you know -MOST people don’t want that a hassle like that in their life. They’ll complain about the fact that there’s no support for discipline. They’ll go home at the end of the day and be all ticked off because they didn’t get done what they wanted to do because of this obnoxious child who disrupts their class day after day. But in the summers they don’t have to think about it. / So anyway. / / / But I don’t have discipline problems in my classroom now. (hehe) And the word -and the word got around the next year when the kids were screwing around and one kid leaned over to the other kid and said “You better be good in here she calls the cops if you aren’t.” on if“ .(‘yMnl t". 175 Needless to say Lana’s story opening was a shock; I listened wide-eyed. At the time of this telling, it was three years after the events, which took place over the period of almost an entire school year. As the narrator, Lana needs to attend to creating an accessible text that further explains what the Death Threat meant in her previous allusion. A mere chronological listing of the events may fail to bring the meaning these hold for Lana, as well as other group members. She needs to make the causal connections between the events that lend a coherence and brings out the significant events that may otherwise be discreet and disconnected. To do this she develops a plot and reconstitutes dramatic characters and employs tropes. These draw upon the common experience of educators and the general orientation of the Teacher Forum. Dmmatisiersonae One defining feature of the personal experience narrative genre is the self-same of the narrator and the main character in, or chief witness to, the events as they unfold (Stahl, 1989). In this case, Lana is the story’s protagonist. Structurally speaking, she is the “hero” of the story. She creates, or reconstitutes, adverse conditions and trials worthy of a story’s here. These trials come in the form of victimization and stigmatization. Lana is clearly symbolically victimized by the student through a threatening letter. The letter is graphic and specific, not a comment uttered under the boy’s breath as he exits the room on his way to the next class. Lana is threatened by his ongoing presence in the school after he returns from a weekend in juvenile jail (line 17). Additionally, Lana is victimized by her school district, who places the cause of the threat on her own teaching (the writing workshop, line 13); they blame the victim. Lana experiences stigmatization after filing a grievance with the school district. She casts herself as someone held up to scrutiny and ostracized by her fellow teachers. 176 After offering her colleagues the opportunity to transform her grievance into a venue for larger concerns of school discipline, Lana is practically shunned, “because it is a class- action grievance;” if she fails then all teachers pay the price, they get her “shit on their shoes” (52). And Lana is stigmatized by the school administration (the “office”), as someone who “humiliates” a child by calling the police. This, In turn, causes the “the lousy teacher syndrome” (23). Lana’s victimization and the stigmatization makes her the story’s hero who encounters challenges and trials. It casts her as the innocent who either has the choice to fight the injustices or roll over when “my name was mud” (18). Lana decides to fight; “Screw you all,” she says (70). 39.310020! The student is the instigator of the drama. His threat to mutilate and kill Lana makes him an unpredictable and menacing creature. He is hostile by nature, “Into head- butting,” which Lana calls “physical assault” (26-27). The disturbingly graphic letter is a calculated message of hostility, not the momentary anger of a frustrated middle- schooler. The letter specifically describes mutilation of physical features which define women. He is a male violently threatening a female whom he calls a “bitch” (12). This is not lost on the Teacher Forum as the majority of the members are women, and four of the five present during this particular telling are women. The student is presented as a predatory threat, reiterating a recurring image in our society of violent males who direct their anger at women. (Would this student have threatened to cut off the penis of a male teacher?) His concrete description of mutilation encourages auditors to believe that he is capable of carrying out some physical violence, if not the mutilation itself. The student is also trouble because he is involved in the illicit world of drugs. She connects his actions to drug use, where he is “extremely hostile” (33). His expensive clothing and tennis shoes are marks of the modern adolescent drug dealer (30). Not only is he hostile by nature, a misogynist, and a drug user, the student is also 177 a drug dealer. This implies he is involved in the undemorld of the drug trade, a place that can only reinforce his violent and pathological nature. Additionally, Lana tells that he has a sealed police record (35), further implying that he might be even more of danger than the school is aware. The student is an enigma to be feared, so potentially dangerous that even the “police were absolutely horrified” (38) and took him away in handcuffs (16). To demonize a student like this, for the sake of literary coherence and plot :I *1!- was“ 1.; . anon initiation, is risky business for a democratic educator. On the one hand, Lana needs to convince the audience that this kid is a genuine threat, that he is indeed someone to be feared. On the other hand, is such demonization of a middle school student fair? One of the pillars of democratic education, most powerfully codified in nearly all of Dewey's writing on school, curriculum, and learning, is that it is child- or learner-centered. In the creation of democratic classrooms, and the socialization of children into democratic communities, the educator endeavors to work from a child's own interest and reality.2 This translates into a ethos of acceptance of the student; student bashing is out. Thus, Lana takes a harsh line on a student which runs counter to the child-centered ethos of democratic education. The demands of the narrative drama require that the student be genuinely dangerous, a real threat; he needs to be bad. To merely cast him as a troubled kid would require Lana to tell a story of how she came to terms as a pedagogue with a harsh, but otherwise educable child. An educational hero is one who overcomes the pedagogical obstacles in a difficult child. A dramatic hero, overcomes genuine and immediate danger like a mortally threatening student. 2The most cogent statement of Dewey’s on this matter is found In The child and the curriculum (1902). 1 78 AdministreloLs Like the threatening student, the administrators of the school are similarly demonized. While we do not meet any individual administrators, they are represented as an aggregate. The administration, presumably made up of more than one person, has a singular voice and is called the “office” (5) and operates as a coordinated and omnipotent “they.” For example, when characterizing the “office's” response to the students’ threat, Lana reports, -and they said it’s just a typical teenage expression of anger , . and they wouldn’t do anything...(emphasis added, 14-15). j What makes the “office” truly contemptible in this story is not only its unresponsiveness to Lana’s concern for her physical safety, but its implied assertion that Lane’s use of the “writing workshop” caused the threat. This response is a thinly veiled and cynical attack upon Lana as a teacher. The writing workshop to which Lana refers (13) is a methodology for teaching writing that is integrated with an English or language arts curriculum. Well known to the members of the Teacher Forum, the writing workshop is viewed as a progressive pedagogy in that it treats students as actual writers. As Lensmire (1994) describes it: Writing workshop approaches emphasize providing opportunities for students to engage in and practice the craft of writing. A central theme within such approaches is student ownership: Students have wide powers to determine the topics, audiences, purposes, and forms of their texts....children are supposed to gradually become more and more able to realize their intentions in text (p. 3). The writing workshop approach grew in response to the commonplace, conservative teacher-centered instruction, in which the teacher “initiates writing tasks, determines audience, purpose, and format for the writing, and acts as the sole audience, an evaluator...[where] the purpose of such school writing is often the display of academic mastery in evaluative contexts” (Lensmire, p. 3). This traditional form of 1 79 writing pedagogy functions “to silence students, deny student experiences and meanings, and alienate students from the teaching and Ieaming they encounter in school” (ibid.). Lana uses the writer’s workshop as a central component to her English instruction (interview, 4-29-93). When Lana reports the “office's” response to what “they” call her “complaint,” “they” are implicitly accusing Lana of bringing this death threat upon herself since Lana indicates “they” said, “You let kids choose their own topics” (13). Not only does the office dismisses her safety concerns as acceptable teenage anger, it criticizes Lana’s teaching as the actual cause for the death threat. It is criticizing Lana on two levels: her personal response to the letter and her professional, pedagogical conduct. In characterizing the office in this way, Lane is not only appealing to the common experience of teachers in dealing with the authority structures of schools, but to the democratic values present in the ideology of the Teacher Forum. Administrative hierarchical authority is one of the most pervasive, undemocratic dimensions of schooling. In the Teacher Forum there is a built in skepticism, even hostility, to administrative hierarchies. In her story, it is not what any one or more individuals of the administration really say to Lana. Rather, the “office” is the disembodied, yet ever present, specter that symbolizes the top of the authority structure that is inherently undemocratic. The office is managerial and has power to be unresponsive to a teacher’s concerns and to criticize Lana’s pedagogical aspirations. They, too, are bad. Eellcwleacllers Like the administrators at her school, Lana’s fellow teachers are also a collective and form a singular voice; they are the “whole staff” (35). Together they are one, large character who is yet another nemesis to Lana. When Lana tries to turn the incident and the grievance into a school-wide issue of discipline, she is shunned by the staff. Like the office, it is not so much what any particular individuals say to Lana, it is how they '- :3 1 80 represent as an “attitude” (53, 74) which embodies the entire staff’s reaction to her struggle. The sense of isolation and abandonment that Lana conveys in her story should not be underestimated. Teachers' work has historically been one of isolation, where they are removed from their colleagues and engaged in classroom work with students (see Cuban, 1984; Goodlad, 1984). In general, teachers rarely come together in any consistent manner outside of their classrooms to discuss issues, such as discipline. Though they work in the same building, hold similar goals, values, and dispositions, teachers remain in an ironic, lonely, “egg crate culture” (Lortie, 1975). Though independent, they paradoxically rely on other teachers for camaraderie. As Lortie (1975) describes it, “Relying on others to prevent loneliness intensifies the role of teaching in one’s life; cultural isolation follows personal isolation” (p. 98). Lane connects to the common experience of teachers being isolated and lonely which is only intensified by additional rejection by colleagues. II I' D . In addition to the characters and characterizations in the Death Threat, Lana employs literary devices in the story to further the drama. IbLLetter: The letter, or note, from the harassing student sets this drama in motion. Lana breaks through into story performance by dramatically re-reading the frightening letter, revealing a poetic brutality (9-12). This sets the tone for the story and frames the ensuing events as deadly serious. Lana indicates that the letter is not merely a message of “I hate you” or an adolescent’s exaggerated verbal venting “I’m gonna kill you.” Rather, her rhythmic mimicking of the letter calls attention to its barbarous contents and alerts the audience that this is a serious matter indeed: .1': ' “—751 181 this particular child was going to cut off my tits and shove one down my throat the other up my cunt and throw my body into the front yard of my house so that my husband and children could see what a bitch they lived with (9-12). In one sense, Lana is re-reading the letter as if she were dispassionately reading a grocery list. She is presenting it plain and factual, letting the note speak for itself. In another sense, it is not a re-reading of the note at all, but Lana’s report of what the student said he would do to her. That is, she did not say “the letter said these words.” Moreover, she refers to herself in the first person rather than the third person (using my vs. her). This juxtaposition of an objective mimicking of the letter (just the facts) and Lana’s use of the first person (e.g., my body) calls attention to the letter’s threatening contents and makes the point that this threat is directed toward her. It brings a morbid intimacy to the letter. The student is not the only one who wields the letter as a tool of hostility. The office uses the letter against Lana. The office cynically calls the letter an instance of student writing and sarcastically asks Lana if it is acceptable. As noted, this is an attack on her work as a teacher, not merely her frightful response to the letter. The letter, therefore, carries a double signification: not only is it used by the student to threaten Lana’s physical well-being, the administration uses the letter to attack her teaching and her pedagogical autonomy. The letter becomes pivotal; it calls Lana to action not once (seeking her administration's help and then the police’s), but a second time (the grievance process). The letter helps shift the story from the more individual issue of a teacher’s fear to the larger issue of pedagogical autonomy and control. The office’s use of the letter not only reveals basic administrative insensitivity but an underlying hostility toward teachers who attempt to be different and employ more “progressive” methodologies, like the writing workshop. The letter works to transform the story into a larger tale of teacher struggle for self-determination. fut—:3 182 The ereyange Ermess Lana refers to “the grievance” process (44). This is well known to public school teachers as a procedure for filing complaints within a school district. It is less a legal ordeal than one that involves labor-management like disputes over the conditions and problems of teachers’ work. The teachers’ union is typically involved in a form of mediation in order to resolve a particular problem a teacher has with a district or a school’s administration. In this case, Lana frames it as a problem of discipline, or a lack of a disciplinary code, and the school’s failure to act on behalf of her physical safety. Members of the Teacher Forum, like many public school teachers, see the grievance process as a drawn out adjudicative procedure set up within the confines of the given educational system. The perception of the process is that it tends to favor the system over the aggrieved party. Even when a teacher is successful in bringing forth a grievance, the time and public nature of the forum tends to focus attention on the aggrieved teacher, who is often cast by colleagues, parents, and especially school administration as a trouble maker. In this way the grievance process follows the classic struggle of labor against management and the continual perception of teachers as overpaid, underworked (summers off), baby-sitters who should be at least skilled in the art of student discipline. When Lana alludes to “the grievance process” this draws upon a shared understanding among the teacher-members of the Teacher Forum as a sluggish, unpleasant aggression upon teachers. In the story, Lana felt the grievance was important, but the fact that none of her fellow teachers, who are also union members, joined her made the alienation of the procedure all the more bitter. Even though a disciplinary code was established at her school, Lana points out that “Everybody else is still bitching about the lack of discipline” (69). It is as if her efforts and the outcome of the grievance procedure did not matter, making it “a horrible year in my life” (56). _I ”Abdul . . ._.____ ...— Trim—$174.. 1 83 Minimum The grievance procedure gives rise to the evaluation of Lana's work. She indicates that she asked for the evaluation and gives no detail as to what it entails. Though teachers are evaluated in many ways on regular and irregular bases, Lana is sure to point out that in her twelve or thirteen year career she had never been evaluated in her school district. This is, therefore, a special evaluation. The idea of evaluation is anxiety- provoking for teachers. Lana implies that the school administration can arbitrarily Him-71:92“ ‘l .. _ exercise evaluation to get a teacher to conform or get dismissed. For the members of the Teacher Forum “evaluation” is loaded, the capricious tool of an already hostile and structurally powerful administrative structure. It is one of the most powerful instruments of discipline a school has for controlling and, in Lana’s story, intimidating their teachers. To trump the administration, Lana asks for the evaluation herself (61). She indicates that there was already a hidden form of evaluation underway (“evaluative comments,” 63). Lana outmaneuvers her would be nemeses as she employs their tool of control and intimidation. She keeps her own records of her work at that time (55). Teachers are often very aware of the records that building administrators (i.e., principals) keep of teachers and school activities. The image of the notetaking principal I recurs in another story in the next Teacher Forum meeting (Zoe’s No End of Year Trip, see Chapter 5). This is a constant reminder that the principal has a “file” that can be used as evidence.3 When I asked Teacher Forum members if principal notetaking was in any way a form of intimidation or potential intimidation, all responded affirmatively and all had seen or heard of a principal’s “file.” 3During my first year teaching fourth grade, my principal would send notes around that had carbon copies. He continually kept notes of teachers' activities. His records became a basis for the dismissal of a teacher, whose true offense was his homosexuality. This allusion to the evaluative file was a piercing reminder for me. 1 84 WW Lana uses reported speech and reported dialogue extensively in her narrative. These are tropes that help lend verisimilitude to the story and a literary coherence to the action. Lana frames the character's words as speech that actually occurred through use of the verb of saying (Bauman, 1986). That is, in order to indicate to her audience that the office and her colleagues are speaking, she enters quotative frame with “said.” For example, she has the office talk: And the office said “Well Lana I don’t know what you’re complaining about. You run a writing workshop you let kids choose their own topics so how can you say this isn't the appropriate topic?” (13) And Lana speaks back to them as “you”: I said “I have the RIGHT to walk into this building and feel safe and It is your responsibility to insure my sa” = “Oh we don't have any nobody is breaking the law here.” I said “This kid is into HEAD BUT TING. To me that’s physical assault. You can call it teenage fun but kids are hurt when he's butting heads with them.” (25-29) Similarly, Lana’s fellow teacher speak as one. By the time her colleagues dialogue with Lana, the verb of saying is omitted, they just talk back (as “we”): -but nobody would associate with me. =And I said “Look I’m going through with this. And you’re welcome to ride along because you’re all complaining about discipline. =Why don’t you (join) me?” Because it’s a class action grievance so something can =“Oh no we don’t touch you because if you lose we don’t want your shit on our shoes” kind of attitude. (50-53) This use of reported speech and reported dialogue helps Lana establish three things. First, it helps maintain the implied truthfulness of the story, its verisimilitude, 185 especially for the story’s initiates (in this case Robin and myself). Reported speech helps her maintain her narrative authority (see Chapter 5). Second, reported speech he\ps economize what might othenrvise be an even more lengthy and convoluted narrative. instead of replaying what every administrator said over the period of a year’s time, she has them speak together in representative speech acts. It would be hard to say if any of her administrators spoke the words as Lana reports. And it is hard to say if the teachers at her school actually said, “'Oh no. We don’t touch you....’” (40). By having the office speak as a group and her colleagues as group, she can expeditiously characterize the response of people at her school. Thirdly, by use of reported speech, Lana codifies the image that her colleagues and the administration are singular characters, feeling and acting as collectives. In this way the collectives are individual characters, who are large by number and formidable antagonists in her story. Ibeslcke To bring poetic closure to the Death Threat, Lana tells a short story in the form of a joke (97-99). The Death Threat structurally comes to an end with her declaration of victory (“So I finally won it”, 54). This victory is symbolized by her own use of the evaluation procedure and the disgrace of the principal and assistant principal who “came out looking like hall” (64). Lana’s victory is further symbolized by the development of a “consistent discipline policy” (52) that she claims is hers since she “is the only teacher that has the policy applied” (68). Following this drawn out ending are several statements that are evaluative utterances which return to the points of the story and Lana’s point of view (Labov, 1972). These include Lana’s emotional anguish in her alienation and abandonment by her colleagues, whom she chides again (70-74; 90-91). This seems a diffuse and somewhat ambiguous ending to her narrative, which clearly has a dramatic beginning and middle. No one picks up the conversation after Lana calls herself the “rabble rouser" (80). 1 86 There are several pauses, and two very long ones (81 , 96). Lana and the audience seem uncertain that she is done. Lana needs to close the story and to signal that she is done. To do this she tells a joke. It is almost as if she caught herself floundering at the end of her story and needed something to end it after “So anyway” (96). She recalls how she heard a student say, “You better be good in here, she calls the cops if you aren't” (99). This punch line not only ends the Death Threat, returning talk to conversation, but also reiterates Lana’s heroic status in the tale. She comes out on top; not only does she have a discipline policy, she regains authority over, and the respect of, her students. W What makes the Death Threat such an important tale? Is it simply a longer more dramatic tale, with multiple episodes and a shocking Introduction? Does it’s age have anything to do with its importance? The Death Threat is three years old at the time of its telling and undoubtedly the events, if not the story itself, have been recounted on more than one occasion. It is not the first time that the veteran members, Hannah and Zoe, have heard about the death threat. As I became more curious about the Death Threatl began to ask members and my (member-)informants more directly about what Lana’s story holds for the Teacher Forum. As I found out, the Death Threat occupies a precarious symbolic position in the Teacher Forum. It clearly is a critical tale. And it clearly involves Lana dramatically and emotionally, and, therefore, conforms to the primary framework of the Teacher Forum. The Death Threat can also be viewed in terms of what Victor Turner calls a “social drama” (1957). It is a story not simply about a personal struggle, but a story that intimately involves the institutional and social structures that govern Lana’s work as a teacher. And, it involves dimensions of schooling that all teachers can recognize: a hostile administration, cold-shouldered colleagues, administrative adjudicative processes, and a potentially harmful student. These dimensions involve the moral and political economy of 1 87 the school and therefore makes the Death Threat a tale about life and conflict within a social structure with which teachers are familiar. It is more than a personal drama, it is a social drama. Turner (1981) calls social drama a universal cultural process, “and a fact of everyone’s experience in every human society” (p. 149). Social dramas occur with groups of persons who share values and interests and who have a real or alleged common history” (ibid.). Social dramas arise in conflict situations and have four processual phases: 1) breach, 2) crisis, 3) redress and 4) either reintegration or recognition of schism. These are clearly discernible in Lana’s Death Threat story. A breach is a violation of some regular, norm-govemed social relations. In Lana’s view, a vivid and graphic death threat from a student is such a breach; it is beyond the acceptable limit for expression of student anger. It is, for her, a serious breach of teacher-student relations. But the breach does not end with the student’s death threat. This is more of a precipitating event initiating the larger and more significant breach between Lane and the school’s administration. Lana frames the administrative inaction as a breach, arising from their failure to act upon a legitimate threat. As such, it is “the deliberate non-fulfillment of some crucial norm regulating the intercourse of the parties” (Turner, 1974, p. 38). In this case, the office failed to fulfill its obligation to act upon her concern and see to her physical safety by doing something about the threatening student. Moreover, the office attacks her pedagogical work. Lana sees herself acting on behalf of all teachers, not alone, though this alliance is tenuous and crumbles during the redressive phase when she offers to work for all teachers in her building (“I was willing to do something for every one of you,” 57). In the crisis phase, “[T]here is tendency for the breach to widen until it coincides with some dominate cleavage in the widest set of social relations” (Turner, 1981 , p. 150). Lana calls the police who arrest the student. The result is Lana’s name becomes “mud” (18). The antagonisms become overt, the administration brings upon 188 Lana “the lousy teacher syndrome” (23), and she and the administration “went round and round and round” (40). Now the problem is in the crisis phrase where “it takes up a menacing stance...and dares the representatives to grapple with it. It cannot be ignored or wished away” (Turner, 1974, p. 39). In the redressive action phase, according to Turner (1974), efforts are instituted to confine the expansion of crisis. These mechanisms “are swiftly brought into operation by leading or structurally representative members of the disturbed social system” (p. 39). In the Death Threat, the redressive mechanism is the grievance process that Lana herself initiated. This is a formal adjudicative process, short of legal action, for teachers (as union members) and the school district. In the story, it is not difficult to imagine why a school district would prefer to have a grievance procedure than to have further official police or legal action. The final phase of a social drama, according to Turner (1974), is “either reintegration of the disturbed group or of the social recognition and Iegltimatization of irreparable schism between the contesting parties” (p. 41). In the Death Threat, Lana conquers and successfully re-integrates in her school. It is not necessarily a happy or emotionally satisfying return, but a return where she has won her grievance. She indicates that she was able to get a discipline policy established in her building. Her joke at the and indicates that she feels she has reestablished her authority and her students respect her. She says she feels strong enough to say “Screw you all” to her colleagues (70). As is possible in the outcome of breaches and crises in the social drama, the social relations are rearranged, “most importantly the nature and intensity of the relations between the parts, and the structure of the total field, will have changed....[where hjigh status can become low status and vice versa” (p. 42). In the Death Threat, Lana achieves a higher status in her reintegration. Lana told me later (interview, 4-29-93) that soon after the grievance she was appointed head of her English department. There is a major difference in the way Turner conceives of the social drama and the way I am borrowing it here to talk about the Death Threat. The Death Threat is not a story about the Teacher Forum itself, its social relations, its members’ status, and its moral economy. In fact, the Teacher Forum does not even emerge in the story. The Death Threat is a social drama in a social field that is familiar to teachers generally, and to members of the Teacher Forum specifically. The political and moral economy of the institution of school In the tale rings true. The Death Threat occupies a liminal space between the moral order of schools and that of the Teacher Forum, and between the purely personal narrative and a shared communal tale. It became clear to me that the Death Threat is more than just another story to the Teacher Forum. As I began to ask members what they felt about the story I was not so surprised to find a continuity in their sentiments toward the story as I heard it that day. All agree that what happened to Lana was terrible and that what she went through was unnecessary. Members maintain that no one should have to feel a sense of physical threat and that a school’s administration should be responsive to the concerns of a threatened teacher. Moreover, members see the story as stating something important about being a critical democrat. That is, the story signifies an important issue as it relates to democratic education and critical democracy. The story is framed—as it is told and as it is heard—in the Teacher Forum as one of dealing with undemocratic hierarchies in schools. It is about an unresponsive school system that is indifferent to a teacher’s life in her classroom, a teacher who finds she cannot do her job with a menacing threat in her classroom. More importantly, members see it as an issue of confronting the powers that be in a school system. It is in this sense that I began to see the Death Threat as holding potentially paradigmatic dimensions. When I further queried my informants and other members of the group, they indeed said that the during the time of the events of the Death Threat the 1 90 Teacher Forum acted as a support group for Lana. Following the charter of the group to be personal as well as critical, Lana used the group to talk about and seek empathy for her experiences in the ongoing events. The group was a place to frame, and to help Lana frame, Lana’s dramatic encounters in a critical way such that she did not see her troubles as merely psychological or individual, but a function of her position in a particular educational system. When I asked Lana about her membership in the group at the time the events were unfolding, she told me that the group was the only thing that kept her sane (interview, 4-29-93). For the members of the Teacher Forum, the Death Threat is a prospective paradigmatic narrative of the enactment of critical democratic values as one faces challenges or threats in one’s occupational space. Lana retains storytelling rights for the Death Threat in the Teacher Forum meetings, and members are clear that it is “Lana’s story.” Members do, though, refer to the story and tell an abbreviated version of it, containing all the main elements and Lana’s victorious resolution. They often refer to it as “Lana’s story,” the “bullshit” she went through, or “her ordeal.” Indexing the story like this has the flavor of what Susan Kalcik (1976) calls a “kernel narrative.” Kernel narratives are utterances which contain the “kernel” of a story that is already known and shared among a group of individuals. It is in this sense that the Death Threat is en route to becoming a more shared or communal narrative (Scher-Newman, 1994), that is, more symbolic or metaphorical of the values of the Teacher Forum. As paradigmatic, it provides a tacit guide for understanding events in schools in a critical vein and a potential guide for action if one finds oneself in a similar position to Lana’s. It says “I can win,” but it also says “I may also pay a psychic price in the process.” This, in turn. carries the implicit message among the Teacher Forum members that if one pursues redressive action In the face of a crisis, it is good to have a supportive, personal, or intimate group for support. The Death Threat carries symbolic meaning not merely as a 1 91 story with mythic qualities as social drama, but also the implied understanding that teacher groups are worthwhile especially when one is critical and in crisis. The story of the story of the Death Threat does not end with its shared metaphorical meaning as a emergent paradigmatic narrative. Whenl further queried members of the Teacher Forum, especially those who were present at the Teacher Forum meetings the three years prior when the narrated events occurred, I found there to be far from uniform sentiment about the events and about the narrator. Peering below the artifice of solidarity in the metaphorical meaning of the Death Threat, I found wide variation in attitude toward the “actual” events and Lana as an actual person in the events as they happened. On one end of a sentiment continuum, there are several members who think that the wrath Lana incurred from her school administration was self-induced, that she brought it upon herself through overreaction to a hollow threat from a troubled student. They find it hard to believe that such a hardened menace could have made his way into a public middle school, especially in an overwhelmingly middle class district which makes provisions (has educational and social programs) for students who are threatening. They feel that if he had been a real, violent threat he would have been exposed and have been either in jail or in a special state facility. At the other end of this continuum there are members who find Lana completely justified in her complaint—her institution of a breach—in that no one, or no woman specifically, should have to endure such a threat. In addition to the variation in attitude toward Lana’s reaction to the threat, some Teacher Forum members feel that the school may have responded within the bounds of reason. After I heard the story I recorded in my fieldnotes that my own initial reaction was probably similar to that of the “office”. After getting over the initial jolt of the graphic brutality of the letter, I asked “What is the big deal? Another kid talking tough. These are kids who need our help the most” (fieldnotes, 2-20-93). As a former social worker who worked with “delinquent” boys, I was impressed that the student actually 1 92 took time to write a letter to make a threat; I felt that he didn’t have the nerve to be hostile to Lana’s face. I found myself not listening to the gravity the story held for Lana and remembered what I heard the progressive educator, Vivian Paley, once say: troubled children like the hostile student in Lana’s story define our responsibilities, not our contempt (fieldnotes, ibid.). It was not until I thought I understood that the larger point of the story is how schools systematically alienate and dehumanize teachers who have concerns (like physical safety), apropos the values inherent in the Teacher Forum, that l revised my own sentiments toward the story. Similarly, some of the Teacher Forum members feel that administrators, in their basic insensitivity and disconnection to teachers and classrooms, would naturally react in a manner of the “office.” They indicate that since its task is to keep children in school (by law), not necessarily to “empower" teachers, the school would logically react in this way. They feel that Lana would have had a stronger case had she made the student a focus for help, not for elimination. These members feel that the humiliating grievance and evaluation might have been entirely avoided. Conversely, other Teacher Forum members are convinced that Lana was completely justified in asking that the threat be removed and that the school administration work on her behalf. They feel that such a violent threat overrides any educative or legal concern the school might have for the student: such aggressively graphic threats against women made this student an unacceptable client. Moreover, some of these members think the district administration was out to crush Lana and they persuaded the Teacher Forum to send a letter to the school district in support of Lana. The group went on to contact a attorney for legal consultation. Complicating this range of sentiments toward the events are the opinions group members have about Lana herself. Several are indifferent to her. Some like her. And a number out and out dislike her. Those who dislike her, or came to dislike her, feel she was self-centered in having the events become a crisis for her. They became resentful that group meetings were used continually for Lana to talk about her struggles and self- 1 93 esteem. For these members, the group was pulled too far in the direction of the personal, away from the group’s purpose of sustaining critical conversation. At least one member left the group because of this. Others, on the contrary, feel that supporting Lana, emotionally, is one of the precise reasons for the group’s existence. They feel that if they could not support Lana in this effort, what good is a group in the first place? They are drawing on the primary frame of the personal, which requires they use the time to support a fellow member. Some even feel that they were required to like her, to be her friend. It is this sense of duty that won out, despite the personal feelings of individual members. They used the time to talk about the ongoing events and to support Lana; for them, acting as a support group was not only perfectly acceptable, it was required (interviews, Fatimah, 3-23-93; 5-5-93). This variation in attitude or sentiment to the narrated events, and to Lana (the person not the social drama narrator), leads to a collective ambivalence toward the Death Threat story. This happens at the same time the story emerges as a paradigmatic narrative where members embrace its symbolic qualities. To the members of the Teacher Forum, and to newer members who were not present during its events, like Robin and myself, the Death Threat embodies a democratic educational struggle: that teaching involves dealing in authoritative structures that are alienating. It is about framing the problem critically, about the power of administrative structures over teachers, who are forced to deal with what they feel is wrong. The narrative wins out, despite the lingering sentiments toward the events and the narrator. This tension between the accepted symbolic meaning of the story and its ambivalent emergence due to knowledge and sentiments about the events and the narrator shows a susceptibility to tropes (Workman, 1994). The experience of alienation among teachers who even marginally try to alter their practices, to be more progressive, more authentic to what they see as right pedagogy in the face of uncooperative and unsupportive administrations and colleagues is not uncommon. Some of the most 1 94 compelling published narratives of teaching and Ieaming are by those who fought against a rigid structure.4 Teachers may pay a price for trying to be different. In this case Lana paid the price to be a more progressive English teacher who took on a critical democratic view of the enterprise of education. Stories like the Death Threat are a form of mimesis where Lana can replay and relive her trauma and listeners can vicariously experience it (Abrahams, 1968). In her story, Lana can symbolically deal with the events in a heroic manner and triumph. Members of the Teacher Forum can join in her triumph, whether it ever really was a triumph or if it ever really meant anything to the school and the district. In the Teacher Forum, it means much. The Death Threat is about the real threat that some educators feel from an educational system that sees their work as subversive. In this way, the weak overcome the powerful time and time again. The Death Threat serves well the Teacher Forum as it reminds the members what they are about, despite their differences and personal feelings toward each other. It helps keep them together while naming and exercising magic over the hostile educational world, and helps them feel “we belong.” Stories like this help teachers live. 4See for example Kohl (1991) and Herndon (1968). CONCLUDING REMARKS: ON THE ARTFUL AND ARTIFICIAL NATURE OF STORYTELLING One does not make poetry with ideas but with words. Mallarmé I introduced this dissertation with the rather esoteric claim that we can never experience another person’s experience. We do not have access to the events that someone narrates for us. If for some reason we do have access to these events, through having participated in them, or access to detailed records, we can never have the experience of the events that another person has had. All we have Is what people tell us their experiences are like. These are inevitably distortions—presentations that are not themselves the experiences. These presentations are texts. As texts, they necessarily follow the cultural conventions we share for presenting our experiences. We agree that these conventions, or forms, are acceptable; we permit and employ them readily in our social lives. This dissertation has been about an instance of the use of one of those acceptable forms, the conversational personal experience narrative. By way of conclusion, I would like to revisit this rather grand assertion about experience in relation to the enactment of the three stories I analyzed. I make a final plea for educators and educational researchers to not limit their understandings of story to referential content alone, but to the poetic, rhetorical, symbolic, and contextualized practices of narrative. WWII The model of narrative l have employed in this study is that of performance, narrative as verbal art (Bauman, 1977). In the three stories I have analyzed, l have 195 1 96 tried to show their artistic or poetic dimensions. Following Abrahams (1972), I see verbal art of the personal narrative as an alternative model ...to those which see art as conveying knowledge (and therefore in need of interpretation by an initiate) or as expressing only beauty, or mirroring reality, or as an excrescence of an individual’s beautiful mind or soul (p. 81). To view personal experience narrative as verbal art is consequently to argue against viewing, or assuming, narrative (specifically teacher narrative) as a window to the soul or mind. Such a view builds from a positivist paradigm where narrative is a “reflection” of the mind or cognition. Similarly, in this view, narrative is sometimes conceived as a process (i.e., sense making), which is a variation on the narrative as cognition theme. In either case, the narrative text is taken to be cognition or an unproblematic signification of an individual’s thought processes. This view, incidentally, is also taken from the realm of art, a Romantic view of narrative as the “excrescence of an individual's beautiful mind or soul.” It valorizes the individual’s artistic struggle, and indeed pain, to present and represent herself authentically from the depths of her soul. And since the soul is a beautiful creation, the struggle and pain ls heroic. The Romantic view of teacher narrative is not inherently wrong; when a teacher tells a story, she is exposing her soul and making herself open to examination and criticism. There are a lot worse ways to think of the people who live with children in the classroom. Related to the view of narrative as window to the mind and soul is the view that narrative is a mirror to reality. This view is also taken from art. The mirror to reality view sees an artistic rendering of an item to be fundamentally truer or more real. That is, taken through the artist’s eye or ear, interpreted, and then put on canvass, in musical score, or into dance, the artist has gotten to the heart of the matter. She struggles to get to the essence of an object’s reality, and reveals a deeper, cryptic Truth. In this view, a teacher’s story, or a story of a teacher’s experience, can get to the 197 essence or truth of such phenomena as relationships with children, personal curriculum development, Ieaming to teach, and so on. In yet another similar vein is a view that art is knowledge, or a codification thereof. Knowledge is artistically encoded information about some item or some event. Apropos narrative, this view would assert that since narrative is a truer representation of that which it recounts, it is in fact a container of knowledge. In terms of teacher narrative, this notion has been particularly appealing to educational researchers who have become disillusioned with research methodologies that have failed to deliver the educational knowledge promised by research on teaching (e.g., Carter, 1993). Stories of teaching experience, whether by teachers or by others writing about them, builds upon the view of narrative as window to mind in that it reveals the knowledge and experience of teachers, in ways that have eluded researchers in the past. The multi-dimensional, and indeed artistic, dimensions of narrative make stories rich texts that are receptacles for untapped and unused teacher knowledge. Not withstanding the obvious problems of interpretation and translation of stories to codified text, the aforementioned views of narrative as art are problematic in that they take for granted, for example, that people tell the truth, that there is little or inconsequential distortion that takes place in storytelling, that the text is just a mirror of the mind, that certain narrative forms and cultural conventions are of little import, that context, other than the larger cultural surround, is ultimately irrelevant to the stories themselves since valid Knowledge and Truth are transcendent. These views, to varying degrees, rely on the reliability of the text, what Renato Rosaldo (1980) calls a form of “text positivism.” This is not to say that the aforementioned views are invalid. Rather, I see it necessary to bracket them and put them aside when we consider teacher narratives as performances. A performance perspective asks that we reconsider such views in light of cultural expressive forms and context. It begs consideration of storytelling as a 1 98 perforrnative act that is culturally bound and locally realized. Enactment of teachers’ stories (or teachers’ enactment of story) is an artistic act, where the narrative is the creation of artifice. At the heart of a performance view is the notion that performances are acts of persuasion. That is, they are rhetoric. Personal experience narrative in this view is not simply borne out of the rhetorical intent of the author. Rather, it runs deeper in the culturally and social matrix in which the expressive form is employed. This requires a notion of context and an identifiable and knowable form of expression that can be used appropriately. What the performance perspective points to, and what I have tried to show in my story analyses, is that story is both artful and artificial. The telling of personal experience stories is the enactment of a widely known and shared cultural form of expression. It is nearly universal and we cannot seem to get through the day without telling some story to someone about something that seems relevant at the time of its telling. l have tried to show that even in everyday conversational stories, there are poetic elements in them, like reported speech and characterization of dramatis personae. Though not the highly refined stories of the more ritualized or stylized sort (e.g., the urban legend), they contain the same poetic elements that make them artful, a sort of art of everyday life. The Teacher Forum is not everyday life, but a place to employ the everyday form of the personal experience narrative. Context provides purpose for stories and storytelling. By focusing on the poetic dimensions, and the poetic function (art for art's sake) we can see that stories are indeed very human constructions. They must conform to not only the demands of the context in which they are told, but to the expressive form. This form is by its very nature a cultural convention, a genre that must be followed lest we get a bad story. As form-play within a culturally defined scene, we see that personal narrative is poetic and necessarily a distortion of experience. A narrator must make 1 99 drama from experience for story to work. And this drama is not the experience itself, nor is it the original events themselves. As constructions, stories are not really reality, they are artificial. IhLMimaliLEallacx This view of the artful and the artificial leads to what I think is the underlying argument in this study: to undermine the “mimetic fallacy.”1 This is a play on Wimsatt “‘1 and Beardsley’s (in)famous essays in literary criticism called “The Intentional . Fallacy” and “The Affective Fallacy” (both 1954). Briefly put, the intentional fallacy I, asserts that it is wrong for the reader and the critic to engage in speculation about what an author originally intended in his or her work. We have no access to the author’s intention or experiences (though this is always possible through supplementary texts about the author’s life, time, and culture). All we have is a text and it is to that we should divert our critical attention. Otherwise, such wild speculation about what an author really meant is a waste of time and takes us away from the text as a work of art. The flip side of this literary deceit is the affective fallacy. lt eschews criticism that is focused on the reaction of the reader as the marker by which to gauge the effectiveness or goodness of a text (a precursive criticism of reader-response theory). What I call mimetic fallacy harbors a similar argument: since we do not have access to the original events in a story, nor to the narrator’s experience of the events, all we have is a text to read or hear. The idea that a text merely mimics events, experience, and cognition is, in a performance perspective, a false one. For the personal experience narrative, we should not be off checking to see if a story is true. We never really know this. However, we do have access to text and context. And we can query these with persistence. 1The mimetic fallacy was suggested to me by Eliot Singer (personal communication). For any dereliction in my use of the notion I alone am responsible. 200 This is what I have tried to do in this study. In the stories analyzed, l have tried to look at how these stories get put together, what makes them narrative. That is, What makes them seem true? How do they have dramatic structure? How is the narrator also a character in her own story? In No End of Year Trip, Zoe poetically creates voices; Clare reports and transforms a joke in A Terrible Discussion, Lana’s Death Threat engages a drama of almost paradigmatic proportions. These narrator’s have to make their utterances work as narrative in the group: all need to perform drama the primary framework. These stories are presentations, they are artifice, entextualization (Briggs, 1994) of experience for others to secure a purchase. As artifice, they are artful and artificial. Does this make story and storytelling any less meaningful when we recognize their artificiality? On the contrary, they point to the meaning saturated textual worlds created by the narrative artifice. With teachers’ personal narratives, the world of tales provides a window on the world of teaching. They give the readers or auditors, teachers and non-teachers alike, an entry into teaching worlds and a view of the deeper vicissitudes of teachers’ lives. In this way, the world of teacher stories connects to the traditions of teacher narrative. The more refined narratives of Vivian Paley, Herbert Kohl, George Dennison, and Sylvia Ashton-Wamer are textual worlds of teaching and teacher experience. They are as much artifice as the conversational, personal narratives l have studied here. This does not point up their superficiality, but that in their common artful creation of artifice there are continuities in narrative worlds. Quflutaljmngdimfim Moreover, in the performed personal experience narratives of the Teacher Forum, forces us to find the meaningfulness of artifice embedded in context. This interaction of text and context creates “real” worlds in the sense that good literature is artfully real. Meaning is not found in the content of stories alone, but in the way they are 2 0 1 put together in relation to the context. As an ethnographic study as well as a textual one, I have tried to look at the local meanings of the story and the personal narrative form and asked Why does story make sense here? To view narrative expressions as verbal artistic performances is to consider their aesthetic purpose of moving an audience. This is a matter of inducing the sympathy of one's audience, one’s group. As Abrahams (1972) reminds: This is done by resorting to shared orders and experiences and to techniques by which the insight and continuity of these experiences and orders are withheld by limitations on sight and by giving the appearance of discontinuity. The idea of art is to move the performer and his audience, the group, from a point of repose one in which larger and greater continuities may be demonstrated, recognized, recaptured. (p. In the stories that l have analyzed, I theorize that personal experience narration is such an effort at moving its members. Personal experience narrative is device, or strategy in Burke’s words. by which experience is revealed to other members of the Teacher Forum. These experiences seek to persuade, not only through the content they present, but to the general “order” of a group, its primary framework: to be personal and critical. Moreover, the personal experience narrative form itself holds metaphorical qualities. In the Teacher Forum, the personal experience narrative is a high form of the personal. It is a vehicle for the critical and a device for getting personal. In viewing personal experience narrative as art, then, I am compelled to put such an expressive utterance at the center of this group as it “both embodies the primary motives of the group and it epitomizes them through stylization and performance” (Abrahams, ibid., p. 78). Personal experience narrative is not the center, but it is at the center, along with conversation in which it is embedded. If it is at the center, what and does the personal experience narrative serve? Obviously, it helps maintain the group and keep it adaptive. As a rhetorical expression— the epitome and the embodiment of the group—it seeks to persuade members that critical tales that are personal are worth telling. And, they are worth telling in a group of like- 202 minded others who, by their very membership, are oppositional to mainstream educational practices. Members converse and tell stories. The personal narratives are then persuasions to convince each other that what they are about is worthwhile and that it is worth their while to stay together. The educational world is hostile and there is an inherent need to convince each other that one should seek out others like themselves and to stay together. W In this study I am arguing from the perspective of verbal art as performance. It is also, by definition, an argument for this perspective. Following this argument for, I feel that there are at least two domains of relevance to educational studies of teacher narrative. QLaLijmm, First, this study begs that we look at how teachers' stories are put together as oral literature. As the Russian formalist literary critics might ask (Erlich, 1955): What makes these stories literature? Or, What is the source of their Iiterary-ness? This urges an examination of story as a coherent and discrete object of art and its constituent parts. For example, my look at reported speech in Zoe’s No End of Year Trip, or the inevitable characterization of dramatis personae in all the stories. Moreover, I have a hunch that there are features of teacher’s stories that make them teacher narrative. In other words, there are themes, common experiences, arising out of teachers’ positioned status in schools, that might naturally give rise to the use and distribution of certain tropes in teacher narratives (e.g., malevolent or dimwitted administrators). In short, I think there may be a genre of teacher personal experience narrative. This can only be determined when we start to examine more broadly the tropic dimensions of these stories in numerous narrative settings, in the more formal published narratives, in those that are lurking in the data of educational researchers, and in the infinite number of stories yet to be narrated and collected. 203 contextuality, Second, this study urges examination of how stories are contextual. As Malinowski (1926/1948) warned almost seventy years ago, “The stories live in native life and not on paper, and when the scholar jots them down without being able to evoke the atmosphere in which they flourish he has given us but a mutilated bit of reality” (p. 104). Though he was speaking of the Melanesians, the same warning can apply to personal experience narratives out of most native contexts. At one level, it seems self-evident that personal narrative, like any cultural expression, is rooted in some context. But context needs to be conceptualized, not just asserted. l have attempted to conceive of context as primary frames and how these, as context, are resources for and constraints upon oral utterances generally and storytelling specifically in the Teacher Forum,. The context of the Teacher Forum is not only primary frames. I return to the maxim of Katherine Young (1987) in making the distinction between the context and surround. Context is that which is not necessarily environmentally contiguous, in the surround, it is that which is relevant to the object under examination. The list of relevant features of story and storytelling events is presumably large and a researcher needs to have a tool for winnowing out and bringing forward the relevant contexts of story and storytelling. I do not argue for primary frames as the way to think of context. Rather, I argue for a contextualized view that has a concept of context. It personal narratives “live in native life,” then we must ask what this “life” is. If stories are artificial and artful, then they must be treated as such. That is, they should not be considered truth since they are not Truth in and of themselves. They are not Reality, only a presented artifice of reality. This claim I make does not mean to denigrate narrative. If anything, I hope my study venerates narrative because of its artifice, because it is humanly artful. Mind, soul, knowledge, wisdom, and truth are indeed parts of storytelling. A narrator must obviously have a mind and some knowledge to tell stories. And that narrator and her/his audience must also believe that there is truth in story, especially for the personal experience narrative, and that it says 204 something wise or else it wouldn’t get told in the first place. As artifice, we are thus concerned with how our lives are textual. That we tell stories in organized spaces is a way to give our fragmented lives meaning. Teachers are no different. EPILOGUE: THE DOWNWARD SPIRAL OF A TEACHER GROUP Don’t moum—Organizel Joe Hill. The Teacher Forum has died a quiet death. Though officially the regional office of the CED still exists, the latest manifestation and membership of the Teacher Forum no longer does. I find it sad that I need to report this as I think a great resource for identity affiliation and formation has been lost. I believe Teacher Forum’s dissolution can be explained by the fundamental inability, or, better, the will of its members to work through and sufficiently reconcile the inherent contradictions of its primary framework. Let me briefly explain the last moments of the Teacher Forum and why I think its downward spiral was, if not expected, sensible and how I may have inadvertently played a role in the group’s downfall. By the summer of 1993 I found myself an invested member of the Teacher Forum. I was asked to attend the CED yearly conference and make a report to the CED office coordinators’ meeting on our groups activities and possible future direction. Neither Clare nor Fatimah could attend and other members did not plan to go. Since I knew more about that year's activities than anyone else (taking notes, talking with members, etc.), they proposed that I should go. Since I found this a rather uncomfortable position in that I still saw myself as an outsider studying the group (though I had paid my dues, participated in conversations, told my own stories, and generally considered myself a member), I agreed, grudgingly. 'As reported by Big Bill Haywood at Joe Hill’s funeral. 205 2 O 6 I had assumed an unexpected leadership position the group. Not that I would have minded, since many of my social and educational values are in harmony with those of the Teacher Forum, CED, and the general ideology of critical democracy. But I was still the researcher and carried an ethnographic belief (or delusion) in a form of required detachment. By the middle of the next school year in 1994 I was beyond detachment. I developed an active interest in the group’s survival and in the group’s following its purpose and commitment to democratic education and pedagogical action. In trying to be true to the group's purpose and ideology, I shared Clare and Fatimah’s sentiment that the group should be more than about conversation. Though we all agreed that the intimate conversation and sharing of stories is vital to the group, we all thought critical democracy was about action, taking our avowed beliefs into a public or communal forum. We talked often of trying to increase membership, generating brainstorming sessions to think what we might do, such as creating an advocacy resource for parents and teachers, or holding workshops where our members could share their efforts at democratic pedagogy. Each time Clare, Fatimah and I mentioned this in the Teacher Forum meetings, and to individual members privately, we were met with resistance. "Too much time” and “too much energy" were the typical responses we got. Clare summed up well our frustrations: “I’m done validating people’s reality. It’s time for actionl” We knew the difficulties ran deeper than that. As critical educators we assumed that resistance is rarely what it appears and is rarely driven by what the resistors say it is. Our operating assumption had become that people enjoyed the conversation too much. Conversation took little commitment. To ask for more was to ask for risk. Teachers know well the risks they run by trying to be publicly different, to work from and toward different pedagogical values. Lana’s Death Threat is an entextualized case in point. We also knew that some were invested in the group and that we could access and argue from the values of the group to call for action, not just thought. 207 Since our suggestions were met with resistance we thought it would be helpful to call a sort of quorum, where we could openly discuss the future of the group. We planned a winter retreat for February. We found rustic cabins at a nearby, bucolic state park. We sent out letters to our members and to the CED head office inviting any of our democratic comrades for a weekend of camping, cross-country skiing, and conversation about what sort of action an office like ours can take to fulfill our ostensible public commitment to democratic education. Our retreat was a bust. Clare, her daughter, Fatimah, her son, Laura, and myself were the only ones who showed from our office. It was a conspicuous contradiction that we were all teacher educators and or graduate students and none of us were full-time practicing teachers. Bruce, a full time educational activist and writer from Ontario Canada came. Though we had interesting conversation about democracy and education, for me it felt more like a wake than a planning session. We were all disappointed that none of our teachers showed, even for half a day. After that, we called a suspension of Teacher Forum Saturday meetings until a time that we could decide what we were going to become. Why did the group dissolve? Why couldn’t it stay together? Why couldn’t we convince ourselves, and the teacher members specifically, that it is worthwhile staying together as a group dedicated to critical democratic education? The answer, I believe, lies in the fundamental tension between the two primary frames of the Teacher Forum primary contextual framework. As I noted in Chapter 2, there is an inherent, irreducible contradiction between the ideological primary frame of critical democracy and the interpersonal primary frame of getting personal. This contradiction lies between the empathic, intimate acceptance of the Teacher Forum members and their need to be critical. The personal frame extends to verbal utterances, where conversation—not argument—is the primary communicative mode. Moreover, this frame demands of the auditors to accept the storyteller and treat her stories as intimate expressions worthy of 208 their embrace. The critical frame requires that member engage in critique of education, and indeed, social practices that rub against the democratic ideal of equality. Critique is indispensable in becoming aware of educational and social inequalities. This does not require accepting everything anyone says they do or believe, as some practices are oppressive. For example, suppose a Teacher Forum member who tells a personal, revealing story of pedagogical struggles with African American children. But this story happens to be about the failure to get these children to speak “standard English” 95% of the time? For critical educators, especially for someone like the African-American Muslim Fatimah, to respond to such a story is difficult. Would not such a story call for a critical gaze and an effort to persuade that storyteller that teaching standard English may in fact be oppressive? Might it also set that teacher up for judging and failing her students for a fundamental cultural linguistic difference that is irreducible and highly meaningful and functional for African-American children in their communities and homes? This contradiction between the two primary frames works at another layer in the emergent culture of the Teacher Forum group. The personal frame values and supports intimate conversation, where members can discuss their troubles and foibles in their lives (in and out of school) as educators. Conversation, with give and take and acceptance, not argumentative battle for the Truth, is valued in this frame. Of specific relevance to me is the use of the personal experience narrative as a ready made, accessible cultural expressive convention that members can access. A personal experience narrative is “personal” by definition since it in all likelihood involves the narrator intimately. The critical frame, as it works in the Teacher Forum means a subscription to the stated purposes of the group about critical democracy. Not only is the group about critical conversation, seeking a sort of consciousness about educational and social practices, it seeks action. As a pedagogical stance, it is about not just thought, but about 209 taking action to correct and work toward a more just and democratic society. This means engaging in conversation about what can be done to raise consciousness in teachers (and in turn their students) about the fundamental inequalities in a historically unfair society. For teachers, these involve the local things that they can do in their schools and classrooms to make this contribution to changing society. In short, it is about advocacy. It is this taking action that Clare, Fatimah, Laura and myself were concerned about. We somehow felt it was our duty to move beyond conversation, telling stories, and validating ourselves and our experiences in the world. We wanted to do something. The other members resisted. This was terribly frustrating and arresting for us: Who are we to dictate to those who do the hard work in schools and classrooms? It seemed that members came to the group not for critical conversation, but for plain conversation. That is, they came for the intimacy and validation that a group of individuals can bestow upon each other. It was more like “I’m OK, you’re OK.” The culture of the group had become entrenched in the personal. The personal frame seemed to provide something very basic, almost primal, for those that came: an intimate, accepting conversation about being teachers. They did not come primarily for the critical democracy, though several of the members do share the ideology and do engage in progressive practices that can be called democratic. To ask that members pay attention to and follow through—act upon—the values of critical democracy as a group somehow was (at best) time and energy consuming, or (at worst) threatening. Moreover, to do this would take away from the very reason many of them still attended, getting personal. As we started to speak of taking action and doing projects many members just stopped coming to the meetings. Many said that had families to tend to. Some were taking classes. Others just never showed and we never heard from them. The Saturday mornings became depressing without these teachers. We decided to have our retreat. No teachers came to that. The group went into a downward spiral from which it never recovered. We 210 were unable to bring our two frames into harmony, to rise above the inherent contradiction to be personal and to take critical action. What were we to do? We thought one solution was to just convene a conversation group, to have intimate conversation and tell each stories. But this would have removed the purpose for meeting the first place. Should we meet for the sake of conversation alone? What kind of group is this then? What would hold us together? Just conversation and story? As we know, conversation and story without purpose is hollow. Clare told me she thought that I may have precipitated this downward spiral, though she graciously fails to indict me. I am inclined to agree; my study probably contributed. By recording the meetings, displaying a keen interest in the culture of the group, and asking the members “What is this group about?” and “What is going on in there?” I may have inadvertently sparked a reflection in the members that they may not have wanted. My queries, and very presence, may have forced them to ask themselves “What are we about?” “Why are we here?” and “What is going on in there?” They may have been forced to confront the fact that they may not have been living up to the publicly stated purpose of the group, which did have a six year history. An inability to reconcile the contradictions a group sets up for itself is hardly a uncommon feature of human cultures, large, small, or part-time. As Clifford Geertz says (1973), the irreducible feature of culture is that we are forever caught in imperfect webs of meaning in which we are forced to concoct sense upon non-sense. Coordinated groups of peeple try to reconcile fundamental incoherence. One way to get out of a semiotic system that seems to not have an inherent coherence, or an intolerable coherence, is resignation. That is what many of the Teacher Forum members did. The formerly convincing expressions in critical democracy and getting personal of what is and what must be, and its symbols of what was and what might be, no longer worked in harmony. When I asked my questions and demonstrated a curiosity, and when we pulled together our retreat, we were asking our members to peer below the surface of the symbolic 21 1 structure and look at the forms that held the primary framework of the group together. As a part time culture that only partially defined their identities as educators, the members found it easier to withdraw than to stay. The truth of the group was no longer self-evident. Nothing is lost when nothing is ventured. l have come to believe that groups like this run their course. They exhaust, or can no longer fulfill, their stated purpose with the emergent cultural practices that once served them well. It is a shame since I believe that teachers are continually under attack in many subtle and crass ways. Withdrawal into personal isolation has not only professional effects, but personal ones. Perhaps the lesson of a group such as the Teacher Forum is that we need to know why we are together and we need to continually persuade ourselves that belonging with each other is worthwhile for survival. We may need to do more than just tell our stories. We need to tell our stories with a purpose. APPENDICES APPENDIX A INDEX OF PERSONAL NARRATIVES COLLECTED IN TEACHER FORUM MEETINGS §£§§IQ£L1 Story Narrator Title 1 :1 Harry Not Multi-Cultural 1 :2 Lana Changed Forever 1 :3 Darlene Angry About “Queenie” 1 :4 Olivia Kid with Deep Anger 1 :5 Lana Black Kids Pick Hatred 1 :6 Louise Ten Words 1 :7 Harry English T.V. 1 :8 Valerie Backwoods of Kentucky 1:9 Fatimah Missing Gitchie 1 :10 Iris Mike’s Teaching 1 :1 1 Valerie Spanish llliteracy 1 :12 Iris Slam a Black Kid Just as Fast 1 :13 Harry Consulting Firm 1:14 Lana Black Girls 1 :1 6 Fatimah Kwame Touré 1 :17 Fatimah Student’s Cheating Story Sessimz 2:1 Steve Larry Cuban 2 :2 Steve Deaf Student 2:3 Lana Mumbling Student 2:4 Steve lris’ Project 2:5 Lana Death Threat 2:6 Lana Publishing Decline 2:7 Lana Are You Reading With Them? 2: 8 Steve Sustained Silent Reading 212 2:9 2:10 2:11 2:12 2:13 2:14 2:15 3:1 3:2 3:3 3:4 3:5 3:6 3:7 3:8 3:9 3:10 3:11 3:12 3:13 3:14 3:15 Sassiqnfi 4:1 4:2 4:3 4:4 4:5 4:6 4:7 4:8 $555; Steve Zoe Clare Fatimah Fatimah Steve Fatimah Lana Clare Lana Clare Fatimah Zoe Zoe Lana Clare l r i s Iris Zoe Fatimah l r is l r is Laura Clare 21 3 D.E.A.R. Time All They Do Is Flead Listening Center Hamlet wlth Mel Gibson Special Ed. Reader White Pine Reading English Curriculum Dilemma No End of Year Trip Minorities and Medical Technology Gays in the Military African American Female Scholar Friend In Air Force One Guy Wrote in the Paper No Role Models Terrible Discussion Scary Meeting Fundamentalist Baptist Church Vivian Paley and Glue Fowler Linguistics Study “Derrick Seen Huck Finn” Carolina Library Aide Joel Taxel Pitching a Fit She’s Very Strong Olivia’s Daughter My Principal is Gone Minorities Looking for Empathy Tests Writing About the Muskie Kelly’s Homework Sixth Grade Writing Instance 4:9 4:10 4:11 4:12 4:13 4:14 4:15 4:16 Valerie Fatimah Fatimah Donna Fatimah Fatimah/Clare Clare Fatimah 214 Daughter's Science Paper Feminist Lecture and Watching Grass Grow “Will this answer the question?” He Argued Against Multiculturalism “What would you have done differently?” Perfect Dad New Meaning to Dysfunction Daughter’s Paper on Flap APPENDIX B TRANSCRIPTIONS DEVICES Note the following transcription conventions are used to format the personal narrative as text, in order to make an effort at representing the feel or sense of the personal narrative as spoken. Prosodic clauses which contain obligatory pauses are represented by line breaks or and lines. / ( ) (hehe) (( )) ALLCAPS one turn pause not obligatory at end of clause or sentence. indicates end of sentence, with down intonation restart or correction (e.g., but -but) no pause for a new clause, where an obligatory pause would be warranted inaudible or doubtful hearings indicates overlapping talk laughing editorial comments represents words said in an elevated volume notes up intonation at the end of a clause typically representing a question quotation marks denote quoted speech These devices above are adapted from Dennis Tedlock (1978) Finding the center: Narrative poetry of the Zuni Indian. and Katherine Young (1987) Taleworld and storyrealms: The phenomenology of narrative. 215 LIST OF REFERENCES LIST OF REFERENCES Abrahams, R. D. (1968). Introductory remarks to a rhetorical theory of folklore. Journal of American Folklore, 81, 143-158. (1972). Folklore as literature and performance. 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