Shifting stories to live by: Interweaving the personal and professional in teachers' lives

Abstract

Attending to teachers' accounts of their experiences of learning to teach children of diversity helped us see again the interweaving of the personal and the professional in teachers' lives. Who they are becoming as people is intertwined with who they are becoming as teachers. In each of the four teachers' lives, we see this intertwining. For example, we see this as we hear Sally draw on her childhood experiences to make sense of who she is becoming as a teacher. Perhaps what was most interesting as the four teachers told of their lives of learning to teach children of diversity were the ways the teachers drew on who they were, their stories to live by, as they encountered diversity on their school landscapes. Sometimes they drew forward threads situated more closely with who they were off the school landscape, sometimes they drew forward threads shaped by experiences on school landscapes. Always the personal and the professional were entwined. As Bateson (1994) wrote: "life is not made up of separate pieces" (p.108). Several things stood out as we attended to the four teachers' accounts. A notion of identity scaffolding was helpful to think about how those shifts occurred in stories to live by. We noticed that change did not happen in an all-transforming kind of way but as each teacher encountered a situation, met a child, heard a story and began to use that moment as a trigger to restory who they were in shifting, evolving ways. For example, Sally used the experience of meeting children from different cultural heritages which she initially attended to because of their different sounding names to begin to shift who she saw herself as a teacher. At first she assumed she needed only to learn to pronounce their names and she could proceed to live out her story to live by. She then awakened, as she interacted with one child's parents, to knowing the child's family narrative was also a cultural narrative. She needed to learn more about the family story of school. As she awakened, she began to scaffold a new story to live by, one in which all children were not the same but were shaped by family and cultural narratives. She is in the midst of restorying who she is as a teacher of children of diversity, a restorying that occurs from the "overlapping of lives, the resonance between stories" (Bateson, 2000, p.243). Something similar happens as Jim too begins to wonder about who he is as a teacher around a previously unquestioned practice, the sharing of a classroom activity. At first he saw this as a community building, fun activity. It has now become a moment for him to question who he is as a teacher of children of diversity. The initial wonder about the activity has begun a process of restorying who he is as a teacher. This process of shifting is not smooth and quick but is slow, uneven and a gradual evolving of a shifted story to live by, a story that draws forward some things from the past even as new understandings are added. It is most often in moments of tension that the possibility of a shift in a story to live by is possible. We heard stories of tension that suggested that when something does not fit, does not slide seamlessly into who we are, we are most able to awaken to other possibilities. For example, as Jim notices that some children cannot have chicken soup, he feels the dis-ease, the tension that helps him see he needs to shift his practice. At first he gives crackers so the children of East Indian heritage do not feel excluded. Even then he feels uncertain, the tension not quite dissipated. He experiences an ongoing awareness that something is not quite right. The something is something that leads to a gradual shift. He awakens to some aspects and then realizes there is more that needs to shift in who he is as teacher. It is in the moments of tension that we can perhaps become most attentive to the contradictions in who we are. The teachers drew on their childhood and school experiences as they tried to make sense of who they were. As Greene (1995) wrote: "the narratives we shape out of the materials of our lived lives must somehow take account of our original landscapes if we are to be truly present to ourselves and to partake in an authentic relationship with the young" (p.75). Sally first looks to her childhood experiences with her mother's colleagues as to what it means to be of a different cultural heritage. Diversity initially meant saris and different food. Sometimes those familiar stories could be what holds a teacher locked into a certain story to live by. However, as we learned from these teachers, when the old story to live by becomes unstable and when tension results, such tension enables shifts in our stories to live by. However, sometimes it is only as we look back at our practices that we realize that who we are as a teacher has shifted. The scaffolding that enabled a shifted practice has occurred almost without our conscious attention to it. This sense of stories to live by as the interweaving of the personal and the professional and as evolving, fluid and multiple draws us again to teachers' lives in school and in teacher education. Where are the spaces, we wonder, for this kind of questioning that will enable each of us to imagine other stories we might live by as we learn to live in relation with children of diversity. We need to make spaces in schools for the kinds of conversations that Jim might lead us to. How can his experience with the children's experiences with Chicken Soup and Rice create a space for a conversation about diversity? In her work with South African teachers, Pillay (2003) wrote: "these teachers experience their lives in a state of homelessness, constantly shifting and changing in the stance they adopt in the new situations in which they find themselves" (p.217). As we reflected on the shifting stories these four teachers experienced as they shifted from their certain stories to live by forged in their early years, their schooling and their teacher education to stories to live by reshaped by encounters with children of diversity, we too wonder about the feelings of homelessness that they might feel. One response is to stay fixed in who they are as teachers, secure that their story to live by is the only one. These teachers, however, are in the midst of shifting, changing who they are becoming as they try to stay awake to their sense that it could always be otherwise. We wonder where the spaces are for making sense of the tensions we and they feel and for imagining alternative stories for ourselves and schools where the stories to live by of children of diversity are honored. It calls us to reconsider the kinds of learning spaces we need to create for teachers, children and ourselves in schools, spaces for imagining and beginning to live and tell our shifting changing stories to live by as we dance along in this parade. © 2005 Springer.