Reflections on Using Stories

A couple years ago Joy Ritchie--a colleague--and I drove for two-and-a-half hours on a two-lane road to a small town near the South Dakota border where one of the students in a study we were conducting--Margie--was a first-year teacher. We'd arranged to spend a few hours in her classroom, have lunch with her, and do a final series of interviews with her. Margie had graduated from our program, idealistic, committed, and sure of the holistic, student-centered, process-oriented philosophy of teaching and language learning she had been constructing. Margie had then moved back near her hometown to teach. As the new unmarried, attractive teacher in the school, she had to contend with the sexism, jealousy, community politics and power plays of her colleagues, administrators, students and parents. She had to deal with the tests of stamina her students put every outsider through, including attempts to weave her life into their own social and sexual struggles, and she had to deal with the realities of small-town life, where her every move was under scrutiny. She was women's track coach and directed the speech and drama club, and as a result went home exhausted every night and had little time for reading, writing, reflection, or class preparation. During her first semester of teaching, Margie called several times seeking someone to talk with about the dissonance she was experiencing in this small high school. In her first call, she talked about how one of the older teachers had discounted the importance of the journals Margie was asking her students to write and had urged Margie to "structure" her students' learning using the grammar book in order to prepare them for this other teacher's class the following year. Margie said the principal had "yelled" at her because the librarian had complained to him that Margie was sending too many students to the library to select their own books for reading rather than giving them assignments from the anthology. One of the older male teachers who taught in the same wing of the building called her "sweetie" and "cutie" when they monitored the hall between class periods. Such experiences heightened Margie's sense of isolation, exhausted her, and began to destabilize her sense of confidence, competence, and the authority which had grown in large measure from her well articulated beliefs. In another call from Margie, she told how the department chair had condemned her and reported her to the principal for asking students actually to perform the plays they were studying in her drama class and to give speeches in her speech class. This chair insisted that the curriculum required only the writing of speeches and the reading of plays. Margie said, "We're just supposed to read the plays, study the history of the theater, and not perform them??? What sense does this make? That's like studying about writing rather than doing writing." At times during the first semester Margie considered quitting because of the pressure she felt to conform. After a long-distance conference in January in which we talked about how to cope with the pressure she felt to conform and compromise her beliefs about language learning and teaching, I didn't hear from Margie for several weeks. And so Joy and I decided to visit Margie near the end of the spring semester. When we arrived, making our way into her classroom, a converted outdated science lab located in the oldest part of the building, Margie seemed as energetic as the student we'd worked with off and on for the prior three years, with all the enthusiasm we'd seen in our interviews on campus. But after talking with her for an hour or two and observing three of her classes, we realized that in some ways she was not the same person who had left the university the previous summer. Margie had been through a powerful initiation into the culture of schools, an initiation that had begun to subvert the beliefs she had developed in her preservice program. …