Storytelling and Discourse Analysis; Stock, Rex & Schiller

This week’s reading included a chapter from Stock’s The Dialogic Curriculum (1995). The chapter, “Teacher Research as Storytelling” is an introduction to the premises that teachers’ research is presented through anecdotal storytelling and for that reason is primarily ignored or discounted formally in the profession but has been shared among teachers informally and can greatly influence and benefit teachers and learners.  Stock defends the value of storytelling and anecdotal based research within teaching by illustrating that these practices exist also in the fields of law and medicine.  Maybe because I am new to the field of Education there is nothing revealing or revolutionary here.  Storytelling as a means of discerning meaning and guiding actions is common and universal.  Aesop’s fables, the parables of Jesus, other religious scriptures, family oral history, any history, biographies, novels, and news media are all about recounting specific incidents, events, and personal behavior through some form of story.  An endless cycle of life imitating art, art imitating life surrounds us. How could educational research NOT have its basis in story? 

I appreciated the inclusion of the poem and the line that stories “aren’t just entertainment.” (Stock, 1995, p. 96) I think this is true. Every story reveals, teaches, inspires, or highlights something about us.  And I found it timely to read the quote from Loren Barritt, a professor of Education that says “Research is just the story someone tells.  What counts is who gets to tell the story.” (Stock, p. 96) Indeed!  I had the same day that I read this, listened to a podcast from Malcolm Gladwell called “The Foot Soldier of Birmingham” (Revisionist History, 2017).  The episode is about a statue in a park that commemorates the Civil Rights Movement and is based on a photo taken in Birmingham of a policeman with a dog attacking a young Black boy.  The statue tells a “true story” of our history, while distorting the details of the policeman, the dog, and the boy.  The person telling the story, the artist, has subjectivity that influences him to create this statue by consciously portraying the boy from the photo smaller, younger, and more African looking, portraying the policeman who was reportedly trying to pull the dog back, bigger and not at all concerned that the dog is attacking the boy, and portraying the dog more wolf like and threatening.   And it turns out the boy wasn’t even a “foot soldier” of the Civil Rights Movement, but a passing bystander.  But this is how we tell our stories.  Real events, behaviors, actions perceived differently by different viewers.  And then told and passed on through different mediums and lenses of subjectivity.  Is this a problem?  Is truth in the details or the interpretation? Is the answer different for history, politics, art, religion, or education?  And who gets to tell the story?

The second reading was from Rex & Schiller’s Using Discourse Analysis to Improve Classroom Interaction (2009).  This was a complementary pairing of readings in some respects.  Rex & Schiller discuss interpretation of dialogue as being influenced by context, assumptions, and background information including “your own beliefs, values, and dispositions that lead you to make assumptions about what is occurring.” (Rex & Schiller, p. 16) But the sections I found most interesting were about identity (pp.19-24); recognizing the identities of our students in ways that affirm their identities and positioning them through our constructive dialogue to assume identities that will aid them to participate more successfully in the learning environment.  I recall an adult GED prep-class student who strongly felt another teacher’s disdain for his abilities in Math.  Since we rotated the students for Math lessons among 3 GED classes, one of which I was teaching as a long-term substitute, I arranged for this student to be in my Math group which was a higher level.  He seemed to appreciate the confidence I had in him to handle the lessons and I think because of that he was more open to making the effort to do the work, rather than display combativeness with the teacher.  I believe that my positioning him as a capable student and my appreciation for the world he lived in with various challenges increased his self-image and motivation to apply himself in my class.  I had been warned about this “difficult student” before taking on the class but I found that we could form our own teacher-student relationship and identities that were free of other people’s interpretations and conclusions.  Rex & Schiller provided a valuable model to follow when they wrote “We choose ways to use language that recognize identities and selves in order to engage and affirm learners, particularly those who are most reluctant.”  (p. 20) I was happy that my reluctant student felt that I had recognized his capabilities.  He said that I “got him.” So, who gets to tell the story?  We do.  Teachers AND learners.