Learning about Teaching through Autoethnography
Kevin D. Cordi, Ph.D.
The Ohio State University

Learning about Teaching through Autoethnography
Kevin D. Cordi, Ph.D.
The Ohio State University

I serve in a dual role

Assistant Professor

Professional Storyteller

My research question: What is the role of situational interactive identity when using the pedagogy of process drama in the content (English, Drama, Reading) classroom?

Sub-Question: How can storytelling, story making, and process drama be used as a literacy and reading practice?

How does the discussion of narrative performance contribute to my understanding of process drama and storytelling in the classroom?

Background Context of my teaching

interactive narrative(s)
"Living narrative focuses on ordinary social exchanges in which interlocutors build account of life events, rather than on polished narratives." Ochs &Capps, 2001, p.2

The same conversations

Dimensions of Narrative

• Tellership
• Tellability
• Embeddeness
• Linearity
• Moral Stance

Process or educational drama:
"is role-taking or to experience imaginatively via identification in social situations."
Heathcote, 1984, p. 49.

Dramatic inquiry-"dramatizes inquires about life...are not pre-determined but are collaboratively created by participants and mediated by adults." Edmiston, 2010, p. 257.

"Drama is the act of crossing into the world of story."
Booth, 2005, p 13.

Storymaking-
"the process that leads us along our inner path, to find the places where stories live."
King, 1995, p. 16

Methodology

Reflexivity is a response triggered by dialectal engagement with the other...or even another part of one's self
Qualley, 1997, p. 11.

Interpretive Quality Design

Four Characteristics

• understanding meaning constructed by people and their experience.
• The research serves as the primary instrument for data collection and analysis.

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• Art investigates process.
• "thick descriptions" (Geertz, 1973) Through words and pictures, instead of numbers, qualitative researchers communicate what they learn about a particular phenomenon.
• Merriam, 2002, pp. 4-5.

Narrative and literacy practices

Writing to learn

What is auto ethnography?

Different intellectual traditions:
1. Cultural anthropology
--Hayano (1979/82)
--Pratt (1992)

2. Analytical autoethnography
--Anderson (2006, 2011); cf. Merton (1972)

3. Experimental autoethnograpy
--Denzin (1989), Ellis (2009)Sparkes (2007)

Experimental autoethnograpy
Aims to:
--"Make ethnographer's own life and experience the 'focus of the story, the one who tells and the one who experiences, the observer and the observed" (Ellis, 2009:13)

Focus on epiphanies, on the intersection of biography, history, culture and politics, turning point moments in people's lives
(Denzin, 2009: 335)

in favor of factors like personal meaning, empathetic connection and identification to tell stories about 'embodied struggles.'
Sparkes, 2007: 521

Data collection

Narrative writing/telling as data
"Writing is always partial, local, and situational and that our self is always present, no matter how much we try to suppress it."
Richardson, 2004, p. 480

"If we understand the world narratively, as we do, then it makes sense to study the world narratively."
Clandinin & Connelly, 2000, p.13

Participant Observer--this role invited me to an insider perspective studying the meaning making process of teaching using process drama.

Promises of the data

• Requires me to challenge my assumptions
• Allowed me to test, evaluate and frame my thinking
• Develop Narrative as Literacy Practice
• Voice my practice.
• arrive at information that I do not know already (Clandinin & Connelly, 2001).

Limits of the Data

• I can only see from my understanding.
• We (researchers) "inject a host of assumptions." (Crony, 1988, p. 17)
• "No truths, only different ways to tell a story." (Pagnucci, 2004, p.. 52.
• Avoid the "Hollywood Plot" (Clandinin, 2001, p. 181).

"autoethnography is a balancing act"

self is not fixed

"HOW SELVES ARE CONSTRUCTED, DISCLOSED, AND IMPLICATED IN THE TELLING OF PERSONAL NARRATIVES AS WELL AS HOW ThESE NARRATIVES MOVE IM AND CHANGE THE CONTEXTS OF THEIR TELLING."
(JONES, 2008, P. 211).

Enter Nepantla

worlds of teaching, telling and in-between

Holding back the story

"When I am writing an autobiography, I am coding. I am keeping a track record of the way I made my decisions."
Gonzalez, 2002, p. 166.

Findings
1. Identity is not fixed, it is contextual and situational

2. There is performance and value in storymaking and everyday conversations in the classroom.

The journal

With process drama and dramatic inquiry, storytelling and storymaking can be used to increase engagement and continual inquiry.

The titanic arrives

The same goals of the performing storyteller are not the same as the classroom teacher who tells stories.

Working with narrative dimensions can increase investment and continual opportunities for literacy and inquiry.

examine tellership and tellability

I don't want to play

Continual reflection as a storyteller, literacy teacher, and process drama teacher yields improvement of my teaching.

continuing the work

using narrative dimensions

Playing with stories: story crafting for

Adding Appalachian identity: You don't know Jack: An American Storyteller Goes to School
(in contract, University of Mississippi Press)

Exploring digital voice

digital lessons

Created an anti-bullying website

hybrid groups to

In the future

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• Continue to view my work through a narrative lens
• examine story making as a way to construct learning
• investigate using narrative dimensions in fiction and non-fiction
• study my role as storyteller, story teacher (Gillard, 1995. )

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• Develop the relationship between narrative and literacy practices
• explore the juxtaposition of digital literacy and narrative inquiry

For more information
contact
kcteller@sbcglobal.net