Uptown Dialogues: The Reflexive Arc of Teachers College and Teachers College Record

In 1995, Maxine Greene stood behind the podium in the lecture room in Grace Dodge Hall, Teachers College, Columbia University. Acknowledging us (the students) as we unpacked notebooks in our tiered seating, she began her lecture. However, instead of introducing Chapter 1 of The Human Condition by Hannah Arendt (1958), she talked about her relationship with a homeless person who stood daily at the elaborately carved stone entry to Teachers College. She recounted their conversation from that day, which consisted primarily of what she had heard, the stories that the person had shared. When she left the man, she helped him with a little money. Now in class, she began her lecture on Arendt, asking herself (and us) questions: How had she learned from the moment? Had she done enough for him? How had she become a better person? How had she considered the ethics of self- and civic accountability?

Two years later, William H. Watkins (who was visiting) gave a lecture to faculty and students, myself included, in the conference room for the Department of Curriculum and Teaching. He reminded us of the progressive history of Teachers College: “George S. Counts and Harold Ruggs walked down these halls in the 1930s.” He then described progressive Black educators from that same time period, such as Carter Goodwin Woodson (who may not have walked down those halls). Calling for a new vision for education—rooted in the past and lived in the present—Watkins described the ethics of self- and civic accountability. On a different occasion, Nancy Lesko (visiting at a different time but then standing in the same conference room) took the time to talk to me individually about the book The Dialogic Imagination by Mikhail Bakhtin (1981). That conversation was my introduction to that text that later came to propel my (and others’) work with dialogic and reflexive methodologies.

As a doctoral student at TC in the 1990s, I was inspired and challenged by brilliant people exposing us to knowledge (often written by current and past TC faculty) about, for example, experience and education, pedagogy and oppression, narrative and subjectivity, social reconstruction and personal responsibility, community and voice, and school reform and equity. These were often overwhelming ideas, which continue to frame, and challenge, my work to this day.

I first heard about narrative research, for example, in TY 5501, Research Methods in Curriculum and Teaching, taught by Lyn Corno. In her class, I went from being a quantitative to a qualitative researcher. When she introduced narrative research as part of a “qualitative paradigm” (“paradigm, a worldview”), a new vision of inquiry began to emerge. Thirty years later, writing this reflection, I was at first frustrated about not being able to recall concrete details from her class. Then, I found my class notes. This verbatim quote (from my TY 5501 class notes, although I don’t clearly identify the speaker as Lyn) is from November 22, 1993:

Storytelling by its very nature is reflexive. It gives you a chance to take stock in yourself. Making sense of a story is a community, collective endeavor, involving the teller and the audience. It opens perspectives and supports reflexivity.

Thinking back on that class (as well as my conversation with Nancy), I wonder about how generative moments from past experiences, even those seemingly forgotten, continue to germinate within and frame our lives. For example, last week (on November 28, 2023), without having yet gone back to reread the above class notes, I wrote the following as part of a chapter I’m working on:

Inquirers engage in reflexivity then as an iterative (not linear) process involving . . . a cognitive/affective/emotional engagement in the inquiry process, a dislodging of routines and taken-for-granted ways of knowing, a dialogic creation of imaginative reconceptualizations, and a development of praxis.

Reading this juxtaposition, I experienced a “back to the future” moment.

Lyn also took the time in her class to begin to demystify the publication process by sharing the publication cycle of one of her manuscripts. She first showed how the manuscript started as an American Educational Research Association presentation paper. Then, based on the feedback from the discussant and audience members, she showed how she revised and then submitted the paper to a journal (what Lee Shulman once referred to as the “sacrificial draft”). She showed us the back-and-forth correspondence between her and the editor through the different stages of the publication process. Listening to her, I began to see the publication process as cyclical and developmental—and much less intimidating.

Up to this point, my TC experience had centered on existing theory and knowledge. But I soon was able to contribute to the construction of knowledge within the publication process. Karen Zumwalt accepted me (and Alison Rutter) as Spencer Mentor Fellows. We had the good fortune to work with her and Gary Natriello on their longitudinal New Jersey teacher certification study, which compared 10 years in the lives of alternate route teachers to college–based teachers) (Zumwalt et al., 2017). Gary, at that time the editor of the Teachers College Record, mentioned that he was going to teach a course about the publication process and engage students as initial internal manuscript reviewers. I signed up for one semester and then stayed for four years.

I remember going for the first time to the Teachers College Record office located in a back corner of Russell Hall, where Gary taught the class. The second I walked in, I strongly felt the presence of Maxine Greene, who had been a previous editor. I knew that her notes about the intellectual and existential imagination, about aesthetic and critical inquiry, and about subjectivity, choice, and becoming existed in the old metal filing cabinets lining the walls. It's hard to describe what it's like to be in a humble space containing brilliant writing. (What happened to those files? Are they in an experiential intellectual museum somewhere—with manuscripts also from Bakhtin—inviting engagement and inquiry into the dialogic imagination?) In the corner of the back office, Fran Simon, the much-loved lead editorial assistant, sat, watched, and kept manuscripts in neat folders marked by the peer review process. Often she would add her thoughts to our conversations.

On a table (actually, two tables joined together) in the center of one of the rooms, Gary sat with us, the students, as we engaged in a round-robin discussion of internal reviews (before the articles were sent out for a full, external review). My friends who sat at that table included Vanessa Smith Morest, Dan Ness, Judy Randy, Pamela Theroux, and Kimberly Yang. In this dialogic space, with its squeaky floors, our discussion arced from manuscript review, to personal reflection, to scholarship ethics. Each week, Gary offered feedback, guidance, encouragement, and validation. He helped us to see how our imperfect reviews were part of a larger, and no longer quite so mystified, cycle of scholarship. Many of our reviews fell short, but after our discussion, we improved them.

For me, that space resonated with Maxine Greene’s words about the existential process of becoming. As we discussed new manuscripts, making connections to our coursework, we created a collective experience—both in that office and, more importantly, in our own small ways, in the subsequently published articles of Teachers College Record. In that office, I began to see the articles in TCR as not only about research and scholarship, but also, more importantly, about the relationship of that scholarship to social justice (and injustice).

TCR is a generalist educational journal. Its thousands of writers and readers have their own unique stories about it. In my story, I thread together foundational knowledge structures with a personal responsibility to critically critique both them and our positionality to them. This responsibility calls for us to try to understand and work toward an improvement of the human (and posthuman) condition. The most recent issue of TCR reflects these concerns. Articles examine, for example, inequalities in becoming a scholar (Dinsmore & Roksa, 2023), Indigenous civic constructs in public school spaces (Talbert, 2023), and racial activism in STEM education (McGee et al., 2023). I would like to think that Maxine Greene would have approved of these articles.