Study, Stance, and Stamina in the Research on Teachers' Lives: A Rejoinder to Robert V. Bullough, Jr.
2008; Volume: 35; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
0737-5328
Autores Tópico(s)Educational Practices and Policies
ResumoHaving to comment on Bob Bullough's article not an easy thing to do. The article represents a brilliant and very rich specimen of committed scholarly work on lives of teachers. So, on the hand I feel honored and grateful for being part of this discussion, on the other I feel puzzled and challenged. How to discuss the work of a man that has been very inspiring, encouraging, and eye-opening for my own work? I admit: I deeply admire Bullough's work, which has been a crucial and powerful source in my narrative-biographical research on teachers' lives (e.g., Kelchtermans, 1993, 1996, 2007a; Kelchtermans & Ballet, 2002a, 2002b). Furthermore, over the years I've been lucky enough to meet and talk with him on several occasions. Those conversations always happened during escape walks in the margins of the American Educational Research Association conferences. In my experience escaping this way from the conference venue often brings the most powerful opportunities to 'confer.' The conversations with Bob Bullough always had that wonderful mixture of the academic and the intellectual passion on the hand and the personal--our 'selves' as committed human beings--on the other. The stories of our work, work lives, and personal involvement were triggered and revealed themselves in their entanglement (in the same way as Bullough's article does). These genuine encounters of the personal and the professional are a rare thing in an academic world that so often driven by competition, and that has made them even more rewarding, meaningful, and most enjoyable. Therefore I also deeply admire and appreciate the person in Bob Bullough and feel blessed by our friendship. Yet, let me move beyond this level of praise and testimony--however appropriate I feel they are--and rather try to develop a rational set of comments, triggered by Bullough's article. In order of doing so and to structure my thoughts, I'd like to quote the title of of Paul Simon's albums. The album called You're the One. After this introduction it should come as no surprise that in my opinion Bob Bullough definitely is the one who deserves the second Michael Huberman Award. Stories of Stance and Belonging But why that so? The answer can also be found on the same album from Simon, and more in particular in the opening lyrics he sings: Somewhere In a burst of glory Sound becomes a song. I am bound To tell a story That's I belong With these lines Simon nicely captures some of the key issues in the study of teachers' lives, more in particular in the narrative approach of it. Firstly, it obvious throughout the entire article: Bob Bullough was bound to tell a story, more precisely to tell several stories as a means to make his point, to illustrate and explain why and how he has become the scholar he is, why the research he has done what it is. He shared several autobiographical accounts that illuminate his personal, professional, and academic interest in the lives of teachers. Through their narrative form, these accounts do more than just transferring information. Narrative texts perform both a referential and an evaluative function, as Labov and Waletzky (1973) argue. The referential function describes events and experiences from the past in a temporal order. The evaluative function links the events with the moment of narrating by revealing what the experiences meant for the people involved in the present, how they appreciated the experience. Because of this evaluative function narratives always allow the storyteller to position him- or herself. This positioning important in several respects. Firstly, it situates the narrator in the biographical context of his/her life: the position taken in the present incorporates and reflects both experiences from one's past and expectations of one's future. The awareness of the temporality of human existence, of one's inevitable situatedness in time, allows the narrator to make explicit where he belongs. …
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