STORIES FOR HUMANS: TEACHING NARRATIVES FROM A COMMUNITY COLLEGE IN THE COUNTRY By Lucia Margaret Elden A DISSERTATION Submitted to Michigan State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Curriculum, Instruction, and Teacher Education—Doctor of Philosophy 2014 ABSTRACT STORIES FOR HUMANS: TEACHING NARRATIVES FROM A COMMUNITY COLLEGE IN THE COUNTRY By Lucia Margaret Elden Much educational research categorizes community college students as underprepared and in terms of retention and completion. This study uses narrative inquiry to offer a critical alternative to “human capital” analyses of community college students. Within a context of economic struggle and globalization, students cross borders of many kinds, and there are pressures for the US to become the “first in the world” to produce the most college graduates. However, subjectification can be included as a function of education (Biesta, 2010). The humanities play a critical role. Stories serve to humanize the lives of ten persons in community college classrooms. The dissertation concludes with the researcher becoming the learner through storytelling and teaching through stories. Copyright by LUCIA MARGARET ELDEN 2014 TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter 1 A Girl Discovers Stories as Research…………………………………………….1 Chapter 2 Remembering Story: Turning from Teaching to Research…………………...12 1. The First Turn: Relationships Matter……………………………………………..17 2. The Second Turn: Words Are Not Insignificant…………………………………20 3. The Third Turn: The Unique in the Matter………………………………………23 4. The Fourth Turn: I Know in More Ways than One……………………………...33 5. How I Engage in Narrative Inquiry……………………………………………….37 Chapter 3 There and Back Again: Border Crossing in Time and Place………………....43 1. Tech Readings: No “Blank Slate” on the Border………………………………..47 2. “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough:” Challenges in Literacy Construction on the Border……………………………………………………………………………….79 3. Writing Transitions: College Prep beyond the Border………………………..109 4. Taking Every Opportunity on the Border: How to Get Off the Farm in the Country………………………………………………………………………………...132 5. There and Back Again: Hacking the Border When Coming Home……….....153 Chapter 4 First in the World: More than Economic Competitiveness………………....171 1. First: When You are On Your Own……………………………………………..174 2. First to Break the Barriers………………………………………………………...192 3. Reaching Out to be First……………………………………………………….….201 4. Going Early and Working Hard to be First……………………………………..211 5. First in the World When You Are On the Move and Not First……………….224 Chapter 5 Researching towards Writing--Storytelling towards Curriculum……….....241 1. Researching: What I Learned about My Research Process…………………...243 2. Storytelling: What I Learned about Writing Stories using Narrative Inquiry…………………………………………………………………………………255 3. Teaching: What I Learned about My Teaching and Curriculum…………….270 Epilogue………………………………………………………………………………………..296 BIBLIOGRAPHY……………………………………………………………………………...297 iv Chapter 1 A Girl Discovers Stories as Research It seems very late in a life and in a doctoral program to remember my inclination for story collecting and retelling. I tell stories every day and have been listening to them--my parents have told me in an oft-repeated tale--since I dragged myself as an infant to the kitchen to hear them. I can still hear my mother and her sister shriek with delight after quietly sharing a story at my Babcia’s house in the city, in a language I mostly could not understand. I also listened to the Holy Family Parish Guild swap stories. My sister reminds me that I would go out to the picnic table on our farm—my long blond hair streaming behind me—to present the chocolate cake and iced tea with strawberries I made for the ladies, and linger as long as they let me. As I was about to move to the country as a young girl, I wrote detailed directions to our mailman so that he could deliver my “weekly readers.” I loved stories about heroes and girls, including pioneer women, and I still remember letters used as history from my brand new social science textbook and so considered studying political science, history, social work, and then journalism, before I landed upon the teaching of reading. For many, finding one’s own way in the world sometimes takes time and experience. Since then I have told stories in classes, in presentations, and in articles. In spite of this affinity, the milieu of social methodology moved me from my recognition of the importance of stories for humans. 1 I suppose it is not a surprise that I became an English teacher though I came to it because of my interest in language learning and reading acquisition. I owe it to Marilyn Wilson, who was a professor and pregnant: she gave me the opportunity to explore my experience--dialects and discourse--which also helped me appreciate the literature of the students as I began teaching in the urban South. I was able to connect my past to my future. When it came time for me to consider ways to research, like many English teachers, I was “unaware that narrative inquiry is a recognized form of research.” 1 I did not know it was a research possibility or how to use it from the perspectives of the humanities, that is, how stories could be used as a kind of research thinking, not as a way to represent others but as a way of creating stories to present to others. They were circling around me: in Vivian Paley’s The Girl With the Brown Crayon: How Children Use Stories to Shape their Lives, in Mary Catherine Bateson’s Composing a Life, in Schneider and Laihua’s Giving Care, Writing Self: A “New Ethnography.” We read stories, but no one I knew was doing storied research. I thought that composing these stories was something that already famous researchers did, not a wobbly novice who has been 1 David Schaafsma et al, “Composing Storied Ground: Four Generations of Narrative Inquiry,” English Education 39 no. 4 (Jul 2007): 282. 2 teaching for a long time and who uses stories for herself to connect, to understand, and to remember. I have had a re-cognition 2. It wasn’t until my mentor, Lynn Fendler, helped me to cut my long research journey short, telling back all of the ways I had used stories and pressing upon me that my own voice could be used to express them, even though I was more interested in seeking how to engender student voices through my teaching. I remember fondly how my mother and aunt would press flowers in giant dictionaries and now wonder whether Lynn did this growing up. She could not comprehend how in the world I had let my literary life become overgrown by the nettles of enumeration, and she continued to pull me out. Although I had felt for a long time that the thinking from modernity was creating a kind of education that I did not abide in, I thought analysis, anger, and advocacy would pull me out. As I sought to help students develop their voices in their educational experience, I found my own but also listened to theirs in new ways. Story is, as it is for the Buddhist nun Jiko in the novel A Tale for the Time Being, my 2 Word play sustains this long journey of mine. My first college literature classes were taught by Evan Watkins. He teased me about the joy I found in my language play and about the way this country girl sighed as she looked out the window at the snow falling. I have felt this same sweet exasperation from Steve Weiland who treated me like a grownup in my first doctoral encounter but later teased me about my open enthusiasm. Watkins told me he wished he had the amount of facial expression I had as he assigned me to the role of the “Fool” in a classroom Shakespeare scene in a comedy. My memory is long. They were very patient with me. I am sure that he would be shocked to know that I teach college freshmen. I name them here along with other teachers from Michigan State University to honor their good work. 3 “superpower.” Her great-granddaughter Nao says of her, “She can pull a story out of anybody.” 3 Too much pressing and pulling for you? Probably yes. I remember stories. In conversation—in reading or in other relations—I remember small stories that mean so much or even so little. As a middle school reading teacher, I needed to collect as many stories as I could to pass on in an instant. Now as a community college and high school composition teacher, I use stories as examples and to show how a story can be used to understand experience. As a literature and humanities teacher, I share stories to provide other perspectives from human experience. And I draw out their stories as well by sharing mine. Small stories 4 appear in thousands of individual conferences and at the other end of an email communication. Human beings like to tell their stories; I certainly like to hear them. I also practice the telling of stories—getting just the right detail or image to evoke a response, much like moja matka i ciotka. In all, stories in the classroom provide me a way to be relational with students; they humanize us. They flip the classroom. Their stories are as important as my stories are and as important as the stories in the texts we share. My challenge was how to 3 Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for a Time Being ( New York: Penguin Group, 2013), 244 . 4 Hayden Lorimer, “Telling Small Stories: Spaces of Knowledge and he Practice of Geography,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers , 28, no. 2 (2003): 197. He differentiates story and narrative by suggesting that story includes an assortment of various memories which might create narratives.