Storytelling into Understanding
THE STUDY
I chose teachers with very different profiles for the study because I wanted to see how FMC would play out in different classrooms and from different points of view. Lizabeth was a veteran of 20 years in the profession. Eve had taught for 10 years. Lizabeth taught English language and literature at La Tierra Encantada, while Eve taught double periods combining social studies and humanities. Lizabeth was endorsed in Teaching English as a Second Language (TESOL). Eve’s education included a liberal arts bachelor’s degree but little TESOL training. Eve, however, was knowledgeable about the L2 backgrounds of her students. Lizabeth, ironically, seemed reluctant to identify her students as anything but students. “I just look at them as children,” she said when asked if she had any LMs in her classes.
Study Group work began in late January with discussion of the characteristics and academic difficulties of L2 readers, followed by a look at the reading process and an introduction to the differences between spoken and written language. Late in the second session we began talking in more detail about the linguistic features of different text types, which led to the distinction between narration and exposition, then to an in-depth examination, during session three, of FMC. During session four, in early March, we read and discussed the simplified “training paragraphs” the teachers had been asked to write as possible teaching material for their classrooms and constructed Field Models of those texts. The remaining period of the study entailed classroom use of FMC. I assumed an essentially observational role with respect to the classroom activities, asking the teachers to describe their lesson plans to me in advance, offering suggestions only when asked, then sitting at the back of their classrooms and taking notes on their work with their students. The last two Study Group sessions were aimed at discussion of their experiences with teaching FMC.
During this differentiation phase of the study, as the teachers began taking FMC into their classrooms, discussing their work with me individually, and continuing their Study Group participation, clear differences began to emerge in how they were processing and using the new ideas they were being exposed to. The sharpest differences were to be seen in what Eve and Lizabeth were doing and saying. Eve either found or wrote beautifully-crafted teaching materials, launched FMC in her classroom before I had had a chance to talk with her about her lesson plans, asked probing questions during Study Group sessions, and elicited what I was later to call “dazzling” intellectual work from her students. Lizabeth did not begin using FMC with students until late in the study and often commented on her lack of understanding. She found it particularly difficult to write training paragraphs without considerable guidance. During the fifth Study Group session, she was almost entirely silent except to comment that she felt “out of the loop.”
As I began reviewing my transcriptions of Study Group sessions and interviews, I was struck immediately by the occurrence of storytelling behavior that seemed to be characteristic of the two teachers during Study Group meetings. Lizabeth favored accounts of specific events in her own classroom, whereas Eve tended to generalize on past experience or describe imagined events situated in a possible future. Because the choices they had made about storytelling genre implied choices about their different positioning as narrators, and because the underlying theme of all the stories was the narrator’s effort to learn a very new approach to teaching, I realized I was witnessing choices in narrator stance that invited use of the concept of “footing” developed by the sociologist Erving Goffman. I also began to see that the teachers’ stories underwent changes in narrator stance over the course of time that suggested the metaphor of movement and the usefulness of James Gee’s ideas on “Discourses.”
Discourses, according to Gee, are cultural constructs in which people are “coordinating and being coordinated by … other people, things, technologies, as well as material, symbolic, and institutional resources . . . so as to assume particular ‘recognizable’ identities” (1994, p. 36). Discourses are thus pre-eminently systems of shared culture. Especially germane to my purposes is Gee’s claim that learning can be viewed as “induction into Discourses” (p. 39) signaled, among other things, by language use which reveals one’s identity as a member of the Discourse.
Goffman was interested in the social roles, the “footings,” constructed by speakers (or writers) in communicative settings. The concept assists in refining Gee’s point that humans are very much occupied with signaling their Discourse membership and do so in important ways through language. As one speaks or writes, according to Goffman, one assumes the role of “principal,” someone in the text who is “active in some particular social identity or role, some special capacity as a member of a group, office, category, relationship, association, or whatever, some socially based source of self-identification” (1983, pp. 144-145).
In combination, the constructs of Discourse and footing are useful metaphors for framing what is learned and the learner’s relationship to what is learned. Stories which may emerge during the learning process are useful as depictions of Discourses and how the learner identifies with, or does not identify with, one Discourse or another. A series of stories told by the same author may demonstrate the move from one Discourse to another, from identification with an older Discourse to identification with a newer one. In such stories are to be found reflections of principalship which signal the nature of the learning process.
In my analysis of the data from my study, how Eve and Lizabeth moved from one Discourse to another—from a Discourse that did not include FMC to one incorporating it, to differing degrees in each case—became my central focus. Their stories, which embody testaments to their identity, illustrate that shift in position.
