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Stories: A Common Currency a
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Graham Parr , Brenton Doecke & Scott Bulfin a
Faculty of Education, Monash University, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia b
Faculty of Arts and Education, Deakin University, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia Published online: 15 May 2015.
Click for updates To cite this article: Graham Parr, Brenton Doecke & Scott Bulfin (2015) Stories: A Common Currency, Changing English: Studies in Culture and Education, 22:2, 135-141, DOI: 10.1080/1358684X.2015.1026187 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1358684X.2015.1026187
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Changing English, 2015 Vol. 22, No. 2, 135–141, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1358684X.2015.1026187
Stories: A Common Currency Graham Parra*, Brenton Doeckeb and Scott Bulfina Faculty of Education, Monash University, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia; bFaculty of Arts and Education, Deakin University, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
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This article offers an account of a series of writing workshops involving English teachers in Victoria, Australia, known as the stella2.0 project. It argues that storytelling can potentially provide a valuable counterpoint to the ‘knowledge’ underpinning standards-based reforms. The argument serves to introduce two other essays published in this issue of Changing English: ‘Storytelling and Professional Learning’, in which Brenton Doecke articulates a standpoint about storytelling that helped to shape the workshops, and ‘Professional Learning and the Unfinalizable: English Educators Writing and Telling Stories Together…’, by Graham Parr and Scott Bulfin, in which they inquire into the conceptual foundations of the stella2.0 project and discuss some of the writing generated by teachers in the workshops. Keywords: storytelling; professional learning; narrative; standards-based reforms
Stories break the surface of our discourse not as great edifices but as spontaneously constructed coherences – cheap as dirt, common currency, a popular possession. (Rosen 1985, 25)
Recently in Australia, a book was published that purported to show the gains in literacy and numeracy that had been achieved at a secondary school in the northern suburbs of Melbourne, Victoria, through ‘powerful professional learning’ targeted at whole-school improvement. This professional learning included instruction for teachers on how to apply measures like ‘high reliability literacy teaching procedures’ and a ‘developmental management approach to classroom behaviour’ (Hopkins, Munro, and Craig 2011, ix–x). With a prefatory note by a former Labor Minister of Education who had made a mantra of implementing a ‘performance and development culture’ across the state school system, the book was touted as providing a model for all schools in their efforts to improve the learning outcomes of their students, especially those from low socio-economic backgrounds. (We know of some state schools where the book has become mandatory reading for all staff.) Open the book up and you find that it is chockablock with dot point summaries of strategies for improving learning outcomes, as well as tables and graphs showing the school’s ‘performance story’. It is a story of success that leaves no space for readers to doubt its claims – how could you gainsay the ‘objective’, scientific evidence of the whiskered box plots and tables mapping performance growth against the State mean? Yet it remains significant that at no point in the book do we hear the voices of the pupils who were the object of this whole-school reform, showing *Corresponding author. Email:
[email protected] © 2015 The editors of Changing English
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how they experienced the routines and strategies described. At no point do we learn anything about their life stories. The only sense we get of individual students in the school is at the very beginning and end of the book, where readers are presented with black and white photographs of the school. In one photograph, three girls are shown with their arms draped over each other’s shoulders, laughing into the camera. Another shows a group of girls and boys in a more formal pose, but again evincing the kind of ebullience that is typical of kids when they come together in the social space provided by schooling. It is indeed marvellous how kids rub along together, and how they can still joke and have fun with one another, whatever the designs adults have on them. We are not doubting that the authors of the book, each of whom took a hands-on role in implementing change at a school level, managed to significantly improve the literacy and numeracy outcomes of the pupils, at least as these were measured in whiskered box plots and tables of statistics. There is plenty of similar ‘evidence’ elsewhere, suggesting such an improvement in outcomes has happened in other schools and systems where a co-ordinated effort has been made to lift students’ basic skill levels as measured by standardized tests. But the fact that this book does not contain any stories by the pupils or the teachers about how they experienced these changes remains telling. The school caters for an ethnically diverse community, including young people from Lebanon, Turkey, Iraq, the Pacific Islands and other places (many recently arrived in Australia), prompting us to ask a number of questions as we worked our way through its pages. We wondered: What kinds of schooling did these young people experience in their mother countries? What has it been like for them to sit through lessons in Australia so firmly targeted on improvement? How have they experienced the interface between their mother tongues and standard Australian English, the language privileged at school? What has it been like learning to sit for standardized literacy and numeracy tests? Do they like school? What are their favourite subjects? Why? How do they see their futures? Where do they imagine their lives will take them once they leave school? Needless to say, the book remains silent on such questions, even though we feel that they are key to any attempt to implement sustainable educational reform that enriches the lives of young people and their communities. Perhaps nothing shows the bankruptcy of current educational discourse more starkly than when it is unwilling to listen to the stories that people tell about their experiences and to acknowledge the truths that such stories can reveal. The word ‘story’ still figures in the vocabularies of politicians, bureaucrats, school leaders and those researchers who have been willing to produce the ‘evidence’ that underpins reform directed at continuing improvement of students’ literacy and numeracy levels – the book that we have just been discussing is, after all, billed as a ‘performance story’. But what kind of appeal are the authors making to readers by calling their text a ‘story’? You would be ill-advised to approach this ‘story’ with any expectation of subtle ironies or unexpected turns of fortune, as the characters’ aspirations come into conflict with the reality that emerges in the course of the narrative. No, it is not that kind of ‘story’ at all. Rather, the word ‘story’ is primarily used here in an attempt to give cohesion to what would otherwise be no more than a list of strategies that have been deemed to ‘work’, typically couched in language that befits an instructional or ‘how to’ text. Yet the possibility that they have simply delivered a list of instructions for whole-school improvement seems to haunt the authors of this book. At the very end
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of the book, two of them offer what might be characterized as a piece of meta-fictional commentary, explicitly refuting the accusation that they have simply offered a prescriptive account of what schools and teachers should do to bring about improvement in students’ outcomes. They claim that their ‘performance story’ has an underlying cohesion because its directives to schools and teachers have been ‘infused by moral purpose’ (Hopkins, Munro, and Craig 2011, 171). ‘Without moral purposes’, they opine, ‘sustainability is purely instrumental and technical – there would not be the passion to proceed or the encouragement for others to follow’ (17). But again this is hardly congruent with the experience of reading a good story (meta-fiction or otherwise), when readers might feel encouraged to view sceptically any character who is so determined to remind readers of his or her ‘moral purpose’. We do not wish to give this ‘performance story’ more attention than it deserves, merely to point to it as symptomatic of our current policy environment. We feel confident that the situation we have evoked will resonate with people in other policy settings around the world, where governments have been implementing so-called standards-based reforms. This is a world where policy makers are only interested in ‘objective’, ‘scientific’ evidence that demonstrates continuing and measurable improvement. They are rarely interested in those who critically scrutinize such ‘evidence’ (Lather 2004; MacLure 2003, 2005).1 The stories that teachers tell when they share their insights into language and learning, bound up as they are with their interactions with individual students in particular classroom settings, hardly amount to anything vis-à-vis the machinery of standardized testing and the calculations relating to ‘value add’ or ‘effect size’ in which systems and schools now traffic. ‘Professional learning’, as another influential document in the Victorian policy context puts it, should be ‘evidence based and data driven (not anecdotal) to guide improvement and measure impact’ (DE&T 2005, 15). The same document, anticipating later ‘research’ in a range of international contexts (e.g., Earl and Timperley 2009), envisages professional conversations in schools that are carefully managed and heavily regulated, focused on reviewing standardized test scores and developing strategies to achieve mandated outcomes. No recognition is given of the way that teachers’ talk can generate sparks of critical awareness through unexpected turns in the conversation (Clark 2001; Parr 2010), let alone the possibility that teachers might usefully question the way standardized testing constructs narrow and damaging notions of literacy and whether this really matches what they know about language and learning (Doecke, Kostogriz, and Illesca 2011; Kostogriz and Doecke 2013). Against this backdrop, we have recently sought to revisit the question of storytelling through a series of writing workshops that have involved English teachers from a variety of schools in Melbourne, Australia. These workshops build on a lively tradition of English teachers’ professional writing in Victoria and across Australia. Some of this writing has been published in the international journal, English in Australia, and in state-based professional journals, and some has featured in collections we have edited (e.g., Bulfin and Parr 2013; Doecke and Parr 2005; Doecke, Howie, and Sawyer 2006; Doecke, McLean Davies, and Mead 2011; Doecke, Parr, and Sawyer 2011, 2014). In organizing these workshops, we felt it worthwhile to remind participants of other moments in our professional history when Australian English teachers were prompted to write stories about their professional practice, most notably the STELLA project of the early 2000s (Doecke 2006; Doecke and Gill 2000). Indeed, it was with a view to reminding the current generation of English teachers of the writing produced for the original STELLA project that we gave
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the title ‘stella2.0’ to the recent series of workshops. The use of the lower case signals both strong links to the previous project and our commitment to facilitating writing that spoke to a new policy setting that was radically different from the professional world of English teachers at the turn of the century. The essays that follow this one in this issue of Changing English are linked to these workshops: in ‘Storytelling and Professional Learning’, Brenton attempts to articulate a standpoint about storytelling that helped to shape the workshops, and in ‘Professional Learning and the Unfinalizable: English Educators Writing and Telling Stories Together…’, Graham Parr and Scott Bulfin inquire into the conceptual foundations of the project and discuss some of the writing generated by teachers in the workshops. We shall not rehearse here the arguments presented in these two essays. Both seek to return to the question of storytelling as it might serve the purposes of English teachers in their efforts to explore the complexities of language and learning in classroom settings, arguing the validity of the ‘truth’ claims made by storytelling vis-à-vis the ‘objectivity’ of research that underpins standards-based reforms. In this respect, the efforts by English teachers in Victoria to write stories about their professional lives obviously intersects with the claims made by advocates of so-called ‘narrative inquiry’ to offer an alternative approach to teaching and learning that refocuses on the ‘experience’ of pupils and their teachers. We share their determination to challenge the fetish of number and other features of research increasingly privileged by governments (see Clandinin and Connelly 2000; Pinnegar and Daynes 2007). The thinking presented in the two essays that follow emerges out of an ongoing dialogue with advocates of ‘narrative inquiry’ – our work could not exist without theirs – and yet we maintain a critical scepticism with respect to some of the more problematical claims they have made (see Doecke and Parr 2009; Parr et al. 2012). To introduce these essays, we want to emphasize first and foremost the ordinariness of storytelling, rather than elevating storytelling to the status of a new research methodology to be placed alongside other methodologies on offer. Part of the problem with ‘narrative inquiry’, as we see it, is the very way it has been appropriated by the academy, becoming the focus of a handbook no less (see Clandinin 2007) as well as other guides designed to enable researchers to ‘think narratively’ (Clandinin and Connelly 2000). To our mind, this co-option by the academy runs the risk of blunting the potential of storytelling to enable educators to gain insight into the institutional settings in which they work. We are here strategically using the word ‘storytelling’, in preference to the more technical term, ‘narrative’, to reaffirm the way that stories form the fabric of our everyday lives, becoming the vehicles for everyone (and not just researchers) to give meaning to their experiences, putting those experiences into perspective for socially critical purposes. We think that this is the potential that Harold Rosen recognised when, in Stories and Meanings, he characterized stories as ‘cheap as dirt, common currency, a popular possession’ (Rosen 1985, 25). It is the very particularity of any story that defies a classificatory mentality that seeks to assign everything to its place. It is in the richness of detail that stories can challenge the ‘great edifices’ (25) erected by researchers when they make any claim to ‘knowledge’. The fact that everyone can tell a story reinforces the democratic impulse behind an inquiry into teaching and learning that recognises the heuristic value of storytelling. Yet this is not, finally, only a matter of the ‘truth’ claims that might be made on behalf of stories as opposed to the ‘knowledge’ of science (cf. Fenstermacher 1994).
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Amongst the other characteristic features of the book about the Melbourne secondary school that we began by considering is the way it discusses teachers and pupils in the third person – it is all about what ‘they’ need to do in order to improve their educational performance, as prescribed by educational experts who are evaluating their work. This construction of pupils and their teachers reflects how the teaching and learning that take place in schools have been reduced to the status of an object of positivist science, subject to calculations and predictions that are blind to the social negotiations that constitute any institutional setting (cf. Arendt [1958] 1988). Stories, of course, also famously utilize the third person (think of Henry James’s claims about the virtues of the ‘third person intimate’!), but the characters and scenes in a novel are always a function of its ‘narrative situation’ (Chambers 1984; Reid 1992), of a relationship between a storyteller and a listener. Stories, in other words, do not simply relate a sequence of events with a beginning, a middle and an end, as though they simply reflect a world out ‘there’. They are always, as Chambers puts it, ‘someone telling someone else that something happened’ (Chambers 1984, 3–4; cf. Ricoeur 1984, 71). Every word in a story – to borrow Bakhtin’s (1981) language – ‘sparkles’ with the dialogical situation out of which it emerges. The reflexive ways in which some stories (whether written or oral) build in an awareness of their own ‘narrative situation’ might, indeed, be said to provide a suitable corrective to reductive notions of ‘science’ and its pretensions to represent an ‘objective’ world that exists apart from the subjectivity of observers, as well as the subjectivities of those participating in the situation that is the focus of the inquiry. Any representation of a classroom setting is provisional, a function of a ‘knowing’ subject, and the values and beliefs that he or she brings to her account of what is occurring there. The appropriate stance of such a subject vis-à-vis the other ‘knowing’ subjects who participate in that setting is – again to borrow from Bahktin – a dialogical one that allows the voices of others to resonate beyond the purposes of the inquiry, gesturing towards the complexities of a situation that always elude being captured by a single point of view or account of what is happening. This is more than a point about ‘knowledge’ or epistemology. Telling or writing a story is also about reaching out to others, about recognizing the mystery of the presence of other people in our lives. Rather than positing the world as an object of inquiry that exists apart from ‘myself’ as a human being, stories are shaped by a relationship between ‘I’ and ‘you’ (to echo a distinction made famous by Martin Buber [1958] 2000). Stories arise out of social relationships and return to them in the process of their telling and retelling. They are always embedded in a relationship between ‘I’ and ‘you’, bearing an obligation to attend to what your interlocutor is saying to you, and to try to understand the world on your interlocutor’s terms. We argue that this is, in short, an ethical stance to storytelling and to educational practice, one that is quite distinct from taking the high moral ground in an effort to improve those who are less fortunate than yourself. It is a stance that obliges the storyteller, the educator and the researcher to step back from any glib assumption that they can fully ‘know’ another person, comprehending not just their past and present, but also what is good for them in their future. It encourages storytellers to see the range of practices associated with story and storytelling as a space and a prompt for ongoing reflexive dialogue, and for building relationships and new understandings.
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Disclosure statement No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Note 1. See also the special edition of Teachers College Record – Volume 107, Issue Number 1, in 2005 – which laid bare this phenomenon in a major US report, Scientific Research in Education. This report was published by the National Research Council (see Committee on Scientific Principles for Education Research, Shavelson, and Towne 2002).
Notes on contributors
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Graham Parr is a senior lecturer in the Faculty of Education at Monash University and leads its Secondary English programme with Scott Bulfin. His research interests include English teaching, teacher professional learning and identity, and pre-service teacher education. Brenton Doecke is an adjunct professor at Deakin University, Melbourne. He has produced a range of essays on English curriculum and pedagogy. Scott Bulfin is a senior lecturer in the Faculty of Education at Monash University and helps lead its Secondary English programme. His research and teaching focus on English teaching, young people and digital media.
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