When Teachers Speak of Teaching, What Do They Say? a Portrait of Teaching From the Voices of the StoryCorps National Teachers Initiative The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters Citation Liefshitz, Irene Anastasia. 2015. When Teachers Speak of Teaching, What Do They Say? a Portrait of Teaching From the Voices of the StoryCorps National Teachers Initiative. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard Graduate School of Education. Citable link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:16461032 Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#LAA When Teachers Speak of Teaching, What Do They Say? A Portrait of Teaching from the Voices of the StoryCorps National Teachers Initiative Irene Anastasia Liefshitz Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot Joseph Blatt Michael D. Jackson Thesis Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Education of Harvard University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Education May 2015 © 2015 Irene Anastasia Liefshitz All Rights Reserved i DEDICATION To teachers, ancestors and living, in and out of the classroom, who help us learn, who use their power, who give their love, whose purpose is to not let schooling get in the way of education. Aché. ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I acknowledge first and foremost the teachers who participated in the StoryCorps National Teachers Initiative: their voices are everything. I am thankful to StoryCorps for the genuine interest and generous access that made this research possible. This work was guided by my committee: Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot, Joseph Blatt, and Michael D. Jackson. Their critical, discerning support was instrumental to my listening, reading, thinking, and writing. They are true teachers. They helped me learn in the classroom and in this dissertation. For this, they have my sincere gratitude and appreciation. I am grateful to Darren Chase, Rosanna Salcedo, Dena Simmons, Carla Shalaby, and Thomas Nikundiwe for reading portions of my portrait. Their thinking made this work stronger and more true. Finally, I acknowledge the teachers in my own life, especially at St. Simon Stock School in the Bronx and PS/IS 187 in Washington Heights. They showed me what teaching is. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS I Introduction: When Teachers Speak of Teaching 1 II Literature Review: Researching Teacher Talk 10 III Theoretical Framework: Conceptualizing Teacher Voice 19 IV Research Design: Interpreting Voice 31 V Research Context: Background to the Conversations 47 VI Portrait: What Do They Say 60 Introduction: Finding Meaning Love Learning Power Purpose Conclusion: “Yes, But…” VII Implications: Listening to Teachers 255 VIII Appendices 266 IX Bibliography 320 X Vita 335 iv ABSTRACT There is a significant lack of educational research in which teachers’ talk about teaching is not mediated by researchers. In the public sphere, teachers’ voices rarely reach us unfiltered by the media, union and school district representatives, education reformers, and policymakers. What if we could listen to teachers talk about teaching unconstrained by any topic or agenda, in a conversation initiated by them? The StoryCorps National Teachers Initiative (SCNTI) provides an unparalleled opportunity to answer this question. In 2011- 2012, hundreds of teachers talked about teaching with someone significant to them. Listening to these conversations enables understanding of teaching from the perspective of those doing the work, in their own voice. This study addresses the meanings and conceptualizations of teaching articulated by teachers. Three basic assumptions guide this research. First, because teaching is an uncertain craft (McDonald, 1992), I suggest poetics of teaching (Hansen, 2004) as a listening lens. Second, because the experiences of teaching are expressed in conversation, I suggest a prosaic approach to language (Morson & Emerson, 1990) which considers form and function. Third, I conceptualize teacher voice as a source of knowledge about teaching and the phenomenon by which we can comprehend its humanity, uncertainty, and unfinalizability (Bakhtin, 1981). Building on this conceptual framework, I propose a unique empirical approach to studying teacher voice: a synthesis of hermeneutics, metaphor analysis, and portraiture. The answer to the question When teachers speak of teaching, what do they say? is in the form of a portrait, a portrait of teaching composed of teachers’ voices. I find that teachers talk about four essential human phenomena: love, learning, power, and purpose. Within these constructs, I provide a critical interpretation of teacher talk about teaching that illuminates the complex and varied nature of teaching work. v This study privileges teacher voice—literally and epistemologically—and presents research as an act of listening. It transmits and amplifies teacher voice to constitute a refreshed and reexamined cultural record (Lamothe & Horowitz, 2006) of teaching. And as critical interpretation of human experience, this research invites participation: a response to teacher voice. 1 I INTRODUCTION: WHEN TEACHERS SPEAK OF TEACHING Teachers have always had to confront the fact that others in society are often eager to characterize or define their work for them. There always exist multiple ways of accounting for the work that are fashioned by those who do not do the work themselves. This political and often public condition generates tensions, ambiguities and confusion. It triggers debates that all too often devolve into either cheerleading for the profession or throwing mud in its face. However, the practice of teaching has resources and integrity enough to withstand such praise and blame. Consequently, while the politicized talk proceeds, so can the conversation among educators about the purposes and meanings in teaching. (Hansen, 2004) Teaching is studied, measured, rated, simultaneously vilified and exalted. The prevailing spirit is that of reduction, expressed in the quest to delineate the exact characteristics of effective teaching and in the totalizing representation of teachers as the single most important means for attaining student achievement. Heroes and saviors, unprofessional and resistant to change, the solution and the problem—teachers and their work are the topic of much talk. Amid this talk is an equally pervasive ethos of silence—a scarcity of public discourse by teachers talking about the work of teaching. Their talk rarely reaches the public unfiltered by critics or advocates in the media, union leaders, education reformers and policy makers. Public and policy conversations about teaching are indeed driven by “those who do not do the work themselves.” Outside the policy and public realms, in educational research, teachers’ talk about their work is almost exclusively elicited and collected by researchers who ask teachers about their experiences, beliefs, thoughts, and meanings. Though teachers are ostensibly the integral subject—the source of knowledge and experience of teaching—their talk is material for the research inquiry. No matter how unstructured the interview or focus group, how unobtrusive the observation, how inclusive and self-reflective the researcher, or how active the teachers in co-designing the research—teachers’ talk of teaching is mediated by the researcher’s presence, teachers are almost always positioned as respondents and objects of observation, teachers’ words are data to answer the researcher’s pursuit. 2 This relative lack of agency in talk, as well as the silence, is also experienced in the microcosm of teachers’ personal lives. I remember the experience of “talking about teaching” with acquaintances and friends, or at social gatherings, or when meeting people for the first time. I deliberately use quotation marks because it wasn’t really talking about teaching, not in the way that talking is the give-and-take of listening, speaking, and recounting of experience. It was responding to their statements, questions and observations: So what do you do? Wow, I could never do that. God bless you. So what do you think about testing? What would you do to fix schools? I can totally see you as a teacher. Don’t the kids drive you crazy? You must be so patient. What is your take on charter schools? The union? So do you want to be a principal some day? I remember feeling a kind of falsity, a sense of being spoken to or spoken about, but not really talked with, a deep-seated conviction that how I responded and what I said didn’t really matter, as if the set of topics and issues about teaching was already there and the conversation was an inconsequential variation on the theme. Even with close friends or family, conversations about teaching are filled with too many assumptions and misunderstandings, and I feel I have to explain so much and at the same time feel very little desire to do so. I end up feeling like a representative of the profession, reduced to giving sound bites. I remember becoming quiet, staying polite; inside me grew the feeling of being misunderstood and unheard. At other times, I started fighting the words and ideas which I did not want applied to my work. When teachers “confront the fact that others in society are often eager to characterize or define their work for them,” we respond or we stay quiet. But those are not the only options.