A Novel of Education: Stories of Secondary Teaching in North Carolina
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A NOVEL OF EDUCATION: STORIES OF SECONDARY TEACHING IN NORTH CAROLINA Michael Zan Crowder A dissertation submitted to the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Culture, Curriculum, and Change Program in the School of Education. Chapel Hill 2016 Approved by: Madeleine R. Grumet Fenwick English Kathleen Gallagher Eric Houck Lynda Stone © 2016 Michael Zan Crowder ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ii ABSTRACT MICHAEL ZAN CROWDER: A Novel of Education: Stories of Secondary Teaching in North Carolina (Under the direction of Madeleine R. Grumet) On two evenings during the winter of 2014/2015, a small group of North Carolina secondary teachers gathered in a festive environment to tell stories about their working conditions. Recorded by video cameras, the performance of these stories forms the basis of this dissertation which employs the writings of Russian theorist Mikhail M. Bakhtin to inform both methodological and theoretical frameworks. Bakhtin argued that the novel was the most suitable literary genre for approximating the complexity of life as lived by humans. This life was characterized by heteroglossia ; a term that Bakhtin used to describe the “situation” of multiple voices and discursive streams that saturate and constitute human existence. The novel, Bakhtin felt, provided the most faithful artistic representation of the myriad language genres that humans encountered in concrete, daily life. Significantly, he also argued that human beings, in selecting from, or responding to, these language genres, author themselves into the world. Thus, our being itself is imbued with an aesthetic quality that is intimately related to the ethical stances that we take as we respond to external conditions. The stories that the teachers performed reflect varying degrees of the institutional, research, and policy discourses in which their professional lives are immersed. The stories also iii include less formal discourses reflecting family, community, religion, and their relationships with the students that they teach. A fundamental proposition in the dissertation is that professional educational discourses are inseparable from geographic, demographic, economic, literary, political, and innumerable other categories of situations that are organized through narrative. The combination of these discourses blurs the lines between the teachers’ professional and private identities and indicates that their working conditions are contextualized by much more than the school setting in which they teach. Further, their stories also point to their perceived inability to communicate with the more authoritarian voices in education and this dissertation explores the dynamics of these multiple, hierarchical relationship. Because intersubjectivity is at the heart of Bakhtin’s thinking, this final consideration asks how teachers, located in a multi-vocal context, might maintain a dialogic relationship to the monologic, institutional discourses that govern their work. iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank the participants of my study whose stories allowed me to present the experience of secondary teaching in North Carolina with the complexity that such a phenomenon deserves. They are all terrific educators and wonderful, generous human beings and I am incredibly fortunate to have been associated with them in both a professional and a personal capacity. Each member of my dissertation committee was helpful in a different way. I would like to thank Lynda Stone for her unflagging support and enthusiasm; Fenwick English for providing me with a model for my scholarship and for offering me numerous opportunities for growth; Eric Houck for his always generous, incisive, and thoughtful comments; and Kathleen Gallagher for giving me a provocative place to start from and for providing abundant, illuminating critique. I am forever in debt to my dissertation director, Madeleine Grumet, whose friendship and guidance over the many years of our acquaintance have sustained me. I would like to thank all of the scholars whose work on Mikhail Bakhtin was indispensable to my own work. They were a constant source of enlightenment. I am grateful to my mother, Sue, for her wisdom and experience in the field of education and to my father, Jim, who introduced me to rhythm and blues music at an early age. Although I do not mention it in the dissertation, I think that the paradox of the blues; the coexistence of joy v and pain, flows through the stories of the educators and is hopefully embedded in my own narrative. Both of my parents played an important role in this. To my children, Harper and Finley, I cannot begin to express how much your laughter, companionship, and support buoyed me through this process. Every day you make me feel uncommonly lucky. Thank you for being so amazing. Finally, this work is for Karla, my collaborator and partner. Thank you. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS………………………………………………………………….xi OVERTURE……………………………………………………………………………………1 I. ACT I: BAKHTIN (THEORY AND METHOD)……………………………........................22 Thinking Without a Banister……………………………………………………………22 Discursus Interruptus I………………………………………………………….............26 Story as Method --- The Novel………………………………………………………….27 Discursus Interruptus II…………………………………………………………………28 Heteroglossia and the Novel…………………………………………………….............29 Translation………………………………………………………………………………32 Transmission………………………………………………………………………….....33 Dialogic Research…………………………………………………………………….....37 Bakhtinian Stories…………………………………………………………………….....44 Bildungsroman ………………………………………………………………………......54 Discursus Interruptus III………………………………………………………...............59 Intertextuality……………………………………………………………………………60 The Methodology of Creative Understanding ---Author, Hero, and Other……………..65 Architectonics of Research……………………………………………………...............72 II. ACT II: SETTING (HETEROGLOSSIA)…………………………………………………..81 The Research Stage, Part I……………………………………………………................81 Story……………………………………………………………………………………..83 The Dancer and the Dance……………………………………………………................84 vii The Research Stage, Part II……………………………………………………………..86 Procedures……………………………………………………………………................87 Research………………………………………………………………………………...92 Horizons and Creswell………………………………………………………………….93 Divisions………………………………………………………………………………...94 A School Day……………………………………………………………………………98 Another School Day…………………………………………………………..................98 Speech Genres…………………………………………………………………………..100 Fiction and Truth………………………………………………………………………..103 Descriptive Statistics……………………………………………………………………105 External Events………………………………………………………………................107 Classroom Management………………………………………………………...............107 Facilities………………………………………………………………………...............108 Collegiality……………………………………………………………………………...110 Teaching………………………………………………………………………………...112 Real Estate……………………………………………………………………...............113 Support………………………………………………………………………………….114 Structure and the Narrative Turn……………………………………………………….116 Change………………………………………………………………………………….120 Autobiography………………………………………………………………………….122 History…………………………………………………………………………………..124 Micropolitan………………………………………………………………….................126 Comparative Compensation………………………………………………….................127 Budget…………………………………………………………………………………..130 Longevity and Attrition………………………………………………………................131 A Form of Value………………………………………………………………………..133 The Province of Narrative……………………………………………………................135 viii Cause and Effect………………………………………………………………………..137 Communication………………………………………………………………................140 Epistemology…………………………………………………………………...............140 Ontology………………………………………………………………………………..143 Leadership………………………………………………………………………………146 Educational Research and Narrative……………………………………………………147 Influences, Part I………………………………………………………………………..152 Influences, Part II………………………………………………………………………156 Social Media……………………………………………………………………………157 Influences, Part III……………………………………………………………………...159 Polling…………………………………………………………………………………..162 Influences, Parts IV and V……………………………………………………...............163 III. ACT III: GHOSTS…………………………………………………………………………167 Introduction……………………………………………………………………………..167 The Frame: Working Conditions……………………………………………………….176 The Frame: Ritual………………………………………………………………………181 The Turn of the Screw………………………………………………………………….189 The Frame: Expectations……………………………………………………………….214 The Bildungsroman ……………………………………………………………………..221 IV. ACT IV: HARD TIMES…………………………………………………………………...222 Introduction……………………………………………………………………………..223 Dickens’ Fable………………………………………………………………………….224 Themes………………………………………………………………………………….227 Unions…………………………………………………………………………………..230 Debate and Heteroglossia………………………………………………………………239 Teacher Perspectives……………………………………………………………………259 ix V. ACT V: DEUS EX MACHINA: THE CORRECTIVE OF LAUGHTER………………...265 Acknowledgement……………………………………………………………………...265 Resolution………………………………………………………………………………273 Pursuance……………………………………………………………………………….280 Psalm……………………………………………………………………………………305 APPENDIX 1: TRANSCRIPT OF FIRST PERFORMANCE EVENT……………………….309 APPENDIX 2: TRANSCRIPT OF SECOND PERFORMANCE EVENT……………………376 REFERENCES (CONTRIBUTING AUTHORS)……………………………………………...428 x LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS Because of the complicated publishing history of Mikhail M. Bakhtin which is discussed in Act I, I have provided abbreviations here of M. M. Bakhtin, V.N. Volosinov, and P.N. Medvedev works that are cited along with the publication date of the translation