Perceiving Professional Risk in Five Stories

Cliff

Cliff came into my room in tears. A gangly eighth grader, all paws and legs, holding the waist of his oversized pants with one hand, Cliff wiped his face with the back of the other. I looked up from my 25-min lunch and immediately knew something was wrong with my advisee. Cliff slumped into a chair in front of her and put his head in his hands.

“What is it?” I gave Cliff my full attention.

He wouldn’t say anything.

This wasn’t like him. Cliff lit up a classroom. He was well liked, admired by peers. He talked constantly and loved the attention of teachers and other students alike. Even when he misbehaved, teachers were hard pressed to hold it against him. He struggled to write, and most assignments came in with a kind of chicken-scratch that could be attributed to a combination of speed and disaffection with the work.

I had never seen Cliff in tears. Not when he failed a test. Not if he got kicked out of a class for talking too much, which seemed to be the only reason any of the other teachers booted him. He was trying on different identities the same way other kids tried on different outfits before they ran out of the house to catch the bus. One day, he worked on his swagger, over-emphasizing the lilt of his step on one side. The next day, he volunteered to take attendance or clean up the textbooks after math class. He could be annoying, but in an insecure puppy, I-want-you-to-love-me, kind of way. I don’t think the boy had a malicious bone in his body.

That day, no matter what I did, Cliff would not tell me what was wrong.

He also refused to leave my classroom. The bell rang and he just sat there. He didn’t read. He wouldn’t work, but he wouldn’t leave. He sat there and stared out the window. The tears stopped after a while, and he stayed quiet. I had asked him to stay silent, since other kids were coming in for Geography, and I couldn’t exactly keep my focus exclusively on Cliff. I thought it might convince him to go back to class, since sitting silently was not easy for him. But he complied. He sat there without a word and stared off into space.

It was a Friday, and at some point that afternoon, Cliff left the room. He thanked me for letting him be there and headed off. I didn’t think more of it.

On Sunday night, Cliff’s mother, Kirsten, called me at home. She seemed to be in a near panic. “Cliff is refusing to go to school. He says he’s never going back there.”

“He came to my room on Friday in tears but he wouldn’t say what happened.”

Then Kirsten relayed her son’s story.

Cliff was in the auditorium, showing off a one-hundred-dollar bill he’d received from his cousins for his 13th birthday. Sure he shouldn’t have been talking, and he knows that, but some teacher, I don’t remember his name, thought Cliff was selling drugs. So they pulled him out of there and sent him to the principal. The vice principal, Ms. Anderson, took the money from him and then asked him if he’d taken some key from the office. He didn’t know what she was talking about.

She’s like, “the key, the key to the safe here in the main office. It looks like this”: and she showed him a copy.

Cliff says that when he said no, she told him to take off his shirt, empty his pockets, and to remove his shoes and socks. She then patted him down, even felt through his hair to see if he had this key. Nobody else was there in the room. Just Cliff and Ms. Anderson.

Nobody called me on this. I didn’t get a single phone call. Not from Ms. Anderson. Not from the principal. This all happened—they make my kid take his shirt off, search his pockets, feel through his hair—and nobody calls me?

Cliff says he doesn’t know anything about the key they’re talking about. But I’m telling you, he doesn’t want to go to school. And you know, I can’t blame him. Why should I send him to a school where they’re going treat him like this? Can I go to jail for that? For keeping him out of school when he’s not sick? I don’t know what to do! We moved out here to get away from the gangs and the drugs in the city. I thought he’d do better out here. And now this? I don’t have time for this. I gotta work and he’s too young to stay by himself. I don’t know what to do. Please tell me what I should do.

Because I was so early in my career, I didn’t know what to do either. I offered to Kirsten that she wouldn’t be lying to say that her son wasn’t feeling well and to keep him at home on Monday. I also offered to talk with the social worker at school and possibly the principal to see what they knew.

The following day I did just that. I consulted with the social worker, a seasoned veteran and long-time student advocate in the school. He was highly respected by teachers. He told me to just be honest and try to find out what was going on. He said to “chalk it up to naivete” and ask what happened with Cliff and what they recommend I tell his mom.

The vice principal wasn’t available, so I knocked on the principal’s door. I shared the story: Cliff’s behavior the previous Friday in my classroom, the call from his mom, the accusation of a partial strip-search. I didn’t know what was what, I said, but I wasn’t sure how to best advise Cliff’s mom.

The principal brushed his graying hair from his forehead and tapped his pen slowly on his calendar desk. “Sounds to me like you might be in the wrong profession. We’re teachers here, not advocates. If you want to advocate for your students, maybe you ought to think about law school instead.” He stood up at his desk and without saying anything more, indicated that it was time for me to leave.

As I walked back to my classroom, the hallway walls narrowed and the cement floor seemed to tilt. I started to sweat and my vision blurred. Looking back on it now, I think I was having a panic attack. I braced myself at my classroom door and tried to catch my breath. I needed to be steady for the 35 seventh graders that would pour into the room in the next ten minutes. My hands shook as I straightened papers and pushed desks around the room. The bell rang and a dozen kids entered almost immediately. My principal was right on their heels. He strode into the classroom and took a seat in the back. He immediately started taking notes on his yellow pad and prepared to evaluate my teaching. Unannounced.

Mr. A

When I went to teach in the charter school in Chicago, I took all kinds of risks. After one month, I knew I wouldn’t stay past the year.

All the new teachers were told, “You’re going to teach a specific way.” They showed it to us: “I do. You do. We do.” You teach something for 15 min. You model it. Then you show the kids how to do it: guided practice. Then you have the students do it. Monkey see, Monkey do. I did it their way for maybe a week, and I realized it was not working. I mean, how do you teach social studies that way?

We were getting observed almost every other day. Deans, administrators, directors in the classroom, all the time. I taught one lesson where the director of instruction was there, sitting at the back of the room. Afterward, she invited me to debrief in her office. “Listen,” she said, “You’re not going to teach that to the next class. These are the questions you’re going to ask. This is how you’re going to ask it. This is how you’re going to do it. Any questions? Now repeat that back to me.”

I told her what she wanted to hear, without any intention of changing my teaching. Then I hear the heels of her shoes as they hit the floor behind me. Minutes later, she and another administrator were in the back of the room to observe the next class. At the end of the hour she told me, “We’re going to have to meet again.”

After that, it was common knowledge that I was doing my own thing. The only other African American guy in the building was an assistant dean, and since they included him in administrative meetings, he’d call me up when I was at home. “You’re on watch,” he’d tell me. “They say you’re being defiant. They’re going to come. They’re looking into you, man. What are you doing?”

I started questioning the merit/demerit system, how they disciplined the kids, which seemed to be the whole foundation of the school. At orientation, the administrators made a case for it, “Your kids have been here for three years. They know the whole demerit system.”

It was convincing. “Just use it,” they said. “It will work for you.” I had to memorize a list of 99 demerits. If a kid went into their backpack, you had to give them a 30. If they laughed at an inappropriate time: 22. If I paced when I was teaching and a kid wasn’t tracking me, then they got a 20. Disrespect to the teacher earned you a 99. Every misbehavior, every minor infraction had a number. And my teaching sounded like I was running an auction. 21! 42! 37! I had that thing down.

If a kid got four demerits, they were out of the classroom and headed to the dean’s office. But then they’d come right back down to class. I started realizing maybe it didn’t work. I was supposed to be there to teach, not to be a baseball umpire: “Strike one! Strike two! Oh that’s four! You’re out of here!” It didn’t work. With forty kids in a class, you were constantly shouting out numbers, in the middle of trying to teach. “Today we’re going to learn about the Aztecs kids . . . hey, that’s a 20. You: 30!”

They videotaped me teaching and I could see how the demerit system detracted from teaching. So I stopped using it and started doing what I wanted, what I believed. I was officially admonished. They told me, “You need to start doing this, or else.”

The director of curriculum and instruction acknowledged my successes. “Okay I see how you teach. It works for you. Kids like it. Just keep doing it.”

But other teachers resented me. They’d make comments like, “Well, you know, you’re undermining what we’re doing.” I could hear them from the hallways, shouting out violations, “25! 46! 62! Be quiet! I talk! You don’t talk!”

I hated it.

And then there was this girl. An eighth grader in my class. One day I see her from my window. She’s with her 10-year-old brother, outside, waiting to get picked up. I see these five boys who go to the high school next door, heading for her. Yelling things at her. I know instantly that there’s about to be a fight.

I look at the other adult in the room with me and I say, “Hey. We gotta run downstairs. There’s gonna be a situation.”

He’s like, “Oh no, man. Don’t get involved.”

I say, “High schoolers are coming after an eighth-grade girl. Five boys. We gotta get down there.”

I take my walkie-talkie and call the dean. I call the assistant dean. Nobody answers. So I just run down there by myself.

As soon as I get down there, the fight starts. The girl is getting punched and she’s punching back. Her little brother is on the ground. I just jumped in. I push, start shoving these guys. I grab hold of her. The police show up and take it from there.

My administrator tells me, “Never do that again. Never. Ever. Get involved in another fight. We can get sued.”

A week later, a girl comes running in from the classroom next door, “They’re fighting.” The teacher, a TFA member—clueless! He loved the system but kids were just out of control in his class. I come in and two boys are fighting. The teacher just stands at his desk, doing nothing to stop it. I get in the middle of them and break it up. I grab the aggressor and head upstairs to the dean’s office.

On my way, the assistant director comes at me, shouting, “What are you doing? Didn’t I tell you to stop? Do not touch them! Let me do that. You need training for that.”

I just kept walking. She’s yelling at me in front of this kid who just left another kid bleeding in that guy’s classroom. I didn’t even think about it.

You want to fire me? Go ahead.

Mark

Mark took a full-time position at newly built Monroe Middle School in the middle of nowhere. He tried to convince himself that this small Midwest town, overlooking vast acres of farmland in every direction, was growing, that this was an adventure for a first-year teacher. The building sparkled in the prairie sun, especially when a thick blanket of snow surrounded the place. The architect must have aimed for a 21st-century feel, with walls of windows and a gleaming passageway between the building that housed the cafeteria and gymnasium and the one where Mark located his new classroom. Everything shimmered. It felt oh-so modular . . . with a new classroom smell, if there was such a thing.

Mark stepped into the seventh-grade geography job, teaching with the team of teachers in Pod 3. The teaching team consisted of Language Arts, seventh-grade science, math, reading, special education, and him. Their classrooms clustered together, each just steps from the student bathrooms and surrounded by polished blue student lockers, lining the hallways between their doors. The layout intended to group teachers and students together, day-in, day-out, encouraging interaction and connection and relationship. Mark appreciated what this closeness might do for his students and their academic success. He hadn’t given any thought to how it might affect his work with his team.

Pod 3 teachers met weekly, discussing students, pouring over a student IEP, or negotiating calendars for major assignments at the request of their adolescent students’ parents. Other days, Mark spent his prep time working in his classroom, though he hardly ever made it through a complete prep hour without a visit from a teacher teammate, there to raise a question or offer unrequested advice.

At 7 a.m. one morning, Mark’s classroom telephone rang. “Come down to my office,” Mr. Perkins, the school principal, requested. Mark knew quickly that such phone calls were never good.

“Shut the door,” Mr. Perkins said without looking up from his desk. Mark sat across the desk from the silver-haired man. The snow had fallen early this fall, and the sun flickered across the flat, white land. “I want you to describe the dynamic up there between your pod, between the people working with you.”

Mark scratched his head.

Mr. Perkins explained, “There’s been teacher bullying in your pod in the past. I want to know how it’s going this year. Has the dynamic changed? What have you picked up on?”

Teacher Bullying.

Mark had never heard of such a thing. Of course, he’d witnessed bullying in his own educational upbringing, and bullying had come up as a topic in his teacher preparation courses. There, his instructors and supervisors considered bullying an imperative call for a teacher’s moral leadership.

Mark thought about how different his understanding of teacher-to-teacher interactions had been prior to setting foot in an actual teaching job. He assumed teachers were all on the same side: the students’. Not that he had some wide-eyed notion of “teacher Kumbaya,” with elbows linked, but it wasn’t six months earlier that he had marched on Madison in a sea of red, thousands of teachers and parents and students, filling State Street, screaming until they were hoarse, and then coming back the next day to do it all again. He had been moved by the die-hard union members and supporters: the parents and educators who had committed to camping out in the capital rotunda until the Governor re-instated collective bargaining for teachers. So moved, that he found ways to juggle his coursework and student teaching enough that he could drive home to Wisconsin for a day of canvassing for the teachers’ union, leafleting homes in Hudson or Pepin or Eau Claire, before heading back to the university on Sunday morning.

Here, teachers were different. Within the first week of school, one of his Pod 3 teammates had come into his classroom after Mark had released his students a minute before the passing bell rang. The next class had filled their seats and Mark stood organizing his thoughts to start the lesson. His colleague pointed at the hallway, her pinched voice silencing the students’ between-class chatter. “We never let students out, even a minute early.” Mark felt like this woman had lectured him. Lectured and humiliated. In front of his students, no less. He resented that she didn’t talk with him after school or during his prep hour, once his students had gone.

And not too long afterwards, the Pod 3 Language Arts teacher had blasted him at a team meeting. A parent, whose son was struggling at the end of the quarter, had contacted Mark. The boy’s grades had fallen and the parent pressed Mark for a solution. Mark had offered some options, including moving the boy from the Language Arts teacher’s advisory to his own, since the child seemed to have greater success in Geography than anywhere else. The parent jumped at the option, and Mark facilitated the boy’s schedule change. Two weeks later, the language arts teacher accused him of “backstabbing” during team meeting. Mark was dumbfounded.

Mark found his interaction and involvement with the teachers’ union less than satisfying. All Monroe teachers were assigned breakfast duty two mornings per year during contracted hours. Principal Perkins also asked for teacher supervision of the commons area, where students congregated for thirty minutes before being released to classrooms in the morning. The administration divvied up the supervision by Pod. Mark assumed this provided teachers with greater opportunity to connect with each other. He enjoyed those times to connect with students as well.

But the union’s loudest voices thought otherwise. Mark was struck by the confrontational attitude that set the tone of the initial meeting. Senior teachers took issue with nearly every administrative decision. The teachers warned him: “You give them a little, and they’ll take a lot.” While Mark appreciated all they’d experienced, all that they had seen in administrative and educational policy for the past 20 years, he felt their energy impacted communication and relationships between teachers and principal.

After that, participating in any union activity seemed risky to Mark, given the tenor of the conversation between the union and the district. The antagonistic relationship filtered down and festered at Monroe. The state legislature had eliminated the deadline for settling on a contract, and so negotiations had simply stalled. The district school board apparently saw no need to settle quickly, and Mark continued to hear frustration and cynicism from senior teachers. By October, teachers in the union had taken to wearing bright blue t-shirts with “We Will!” blazed across the front on a weekly basis. Monroe’s union representative had approached Mark in the hallway, warning him,

If you’ve got a meeting downstairs with Perkins, don’t wear it, since you’re not tenured. And if you’re coming to the union meeting, be sure to avoid that stairwell on your way up. The cameras see you. Perkins and his crew may be watching from the office.

Mark didn’t know what to do with such comments. Maybe it was just because he was new, but he seemed to get along with Principal Perkins just fine. The vice principal too. He didn’t anticipate them ever treating him with anything but respect. He had seen no signs of anything different. But he knew that teachers’ anger had to come from somewhere, even if he didn’t see it himself.

Mark focused on Principal Perkins, the ball-point pen poised in his hand and responded. “I haven’t seen any teacher bullying myself. Not in Pod 3.”

Mr. D

When I first started, I was teaching my high school poli-sci class, I was placed in the same classroom as Mrs. Swenson, a woman who has taught social studies for along the lines of 15 years. She’s been there a long time. She made it clear early on that her political beliefs fell on the opposite side of the spectrum from me. She’s just very conservative in both in teaching style and beliefs. And there we were, sharing a classroom.

I figured I could deal with it. It’s a small, suburban charter school. I think we’ve got about 350 students and not a lot of space, especially if you’re not a math or science teacher. Math and science are the heart of the program.

In class, I started talking about issues of race and white skin privilege. I actually gave the kids that Peggy McIntosh article. While I’m teaching that, she—the other social studies teacher—sat in the back of the room and watched. She . . . I don’t know. After class, I went back to her desk, because I felt uncomfortable. Maybe not uncomfortable. I just didn’t know how my pedagogical choices were being received. There were no minority kids in the classroom. Not a one. So here I am: minority teacher talking about, in this instance, white privilege with a classroom of white kids. It was awkward.

I went to her desk after the lesson and I asked her, “Was that too much?”

And Mrs. Swenson answers, “Yeah. Too much.”

For this lesson, I shared a lot of personal stuff with the kids. I was trying to lead and get things going. I was really open with everything and talked about a couple of experiences I’d had around race. Like having kids call me Jackie Chan during student teaching. Or being the only Asian American student in my classes for the majority of my life.

She says to me, “If they come and ask you about that, that’s one thing. But I don’t know if you should be divulging those kinds of stories about yourself. How are they supposed to feel?”

I get that, I suppose. But I doubt many of these kids will be pushed to have conversations around race or class or white skin privilege anywhere else in the school. It’s a STEM academy, after all! They’re all going into engineering and stuff . . . This is my last chance with some of them.

Pretty much the next day, we talked about gender as a class. Because she also teaches the American history classes, I told the students, “I’m sure you’ll get a lot of this (discussion on gender) in Mrs. Swenson’s class.” And . . . again, I went back and talked to her about it, as colleagues.

She tells me, “I don’t go into women’s rights stuff because I feel it’s overblown.”

Yeah.

The kicker for me was that I go to this board meeting, and there she is. My classroom/mate, Mrs. Swenson. She gets up and starts talking with another teacher about gender discrimination at the school. Apparently, there’s this history between her, another female teacher, and the director having something to do with sexist practices and sexist tendencies. She gets up there and begins to complain that male teachers at the school are afforded more opportunities than female teachers.

This was literally like SIX months after she told me, “The whole thing is overblown and we don’t have to worry about gender issues anymore.”

Whatever. She can just deal with the way I teach. I haven’t shied away from any of the curriculum controversy stuff. And I really haven’t gotten a lot of push back on it, besides from her, which I’m pretty happy about. But I don’t know if that is because word isn’t getting around about what I’m teaching or what.

Eliza

Eliza sat on my couch with her legs tucked up under her skirt. If she could have, she might have curled every part of herself up and under that skirt, covering every inch of her being. She rubbed one hand with the other when she spoke, waiting until all other members of the focus group had taken their turn to respond to a question.

Winter in Minnesota leaves everyone’s appearance a bit gray, but Eliza’s pallor seemed to come from within. She spoke softly, “Learning about the alternative school world has been really interesting.” She pinched at her lower lip with her forefinger and thumb. “Because I’m in a part of the city where the percentage of kids who graduate from traditional schools is very, very low. A lot of them end up in these alternative programs, like my school.”

Eliza hadn’t touched her food.

“It was a hard adjustment. What I have to do at my school as a teacher is not at all the way I was trained to teach. In part because my students can only physically be there maybe once a week. They have jobs going on. They have lives going on. They’re single parents, and a lot of them just like mentally aren’t in a place where they can go to school all the time.”

Eliza shifted positions, pulling her skirted knees up to her chest. “It’s been challenging to try to keep true to some of the values I have as a teacher.”

She leaned forward and looked at the others around the room. “I have to make portable work. I have to make . . . worksheets so that the kids can take them home. And I have to do the best I can to build relationships with the students that come. But some students, I just have really crappy relationships with. So when they come and they’re having a bad day, it’s really hard to do a whole lot.”

Eliza pushed her hair off her face and pressed the bridge of her classes upward.

“Sometimes they show up once a week. It’s forced me to teach in a more traditional way than I want to because the kids are not there. But worksheets seem to be the last thing they need.”

Eliza straightened her back, clearing her throat.

The part I have struggled with the most (is) stuff dealing with colleagues. Like if a colleague does something that I think is inappropriate, which has happened a few times, that’s where I find myself at a loss. Especially since I’m at a school without a union.

“And there have been a lot of unjust things happening to teachers,” she continued.

The lead teacher, and the teacher I work most closely with, had a disagreement with the administrative board. Within days, she was put on unpaid leave, indefinitely. And she had done nothing wrong. I was there.

The anger squeezed through as she spoke. “You have to understand. At our school, the administration is off-site. A ‘remote’ administration, they call it. It’s just us teachers and a few associate educators who double as security. We’re alone.”

Eliza crossed her arms, tight against her chest. “As someone who is in the first year of her career, I both like don’t enjoy those interactions and . . . I fear for my own longevity in the profession, which is not a way I’d like to feel.”

1. ¹

We have helped make the world in which we find ourselves . . . (W)e are complicit in the world we study. (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000, p. 61)

As a teacher, stories served as a cornerstone of my classroom. I sought to center my students’ stories in the learning, building the what and how we unpacked and discovered in history or economics or geography around their lives. My teenage students would second the assertion that “episodes of story sharing—honest or otherwise—remain hard to come by in the American public school” (Barone, 1992, p. 142). For that reason, my students needed to be convinced that their stories were valued and encouraged in my classroom, and that we needed their stories to learn from each other.

During my second year as a graduate student instructor, I taught three of the five core methods courses for teacher candidates in the initial licensure program in secondary social studies. That summer, we sat in a basement classroom, cavernous and seemingly sweating cinder block walls cocooned our conversations. I came to the work with the same intention with which I had entered the teaching profession: to polish my corner of the world and leverage the secondary social studies classroom as a place to combat racism, first and foremost, but other forms of oppression as well.

As Kumashiro (2002) writes, “Any assembly of voices tells an underlying story” (p. 58). Tapping the opening story from Cisneros (1984), House on Mango Street, the cohort of 24 teacher candidates began to weave their stories into and through the stories of others: How they got their names, why they chose to become social studies teachers, how schools and teachers had shaped and reshaped them. Our own stories connected us to a broader tapestry of stories through history and social science, threaded with narratives of teaching, learning, and school. Throughout the year, I sought to provide the teacher candidates with a multiplicity of voices, a series of partial stories (Kumashiro, 2002) in an attempt to open their eyes to seeing students and school, teaching and learning differently than their experience based on years of apprenticeship (Lortie, 1975) when they occupied schools as students themselves. Ultimately, I hoped that they would stride from our teacher preparation program, license in hand, carrying forward activist pedagogies and beliefs about school and social studies. They would enter schools ready to begin polishing their own corners of the world.

And yet my students and our conversations were plagued by a series of related questions, which they raised again and again with rising anxiety as they moved toward the completion of their programs: Will I lose my job if I teach that way? Will they fire me if I refuse to use the textbook? What if I question the rigid scope and sequence set forth by more traditionally minded, senior teachers? What will happen to me if I report a racist colleague’s comments? If I confront homophobia in the hallways? If I question discriminatory disciplinary practices in my future school?

As prospective teachers, they questioned the logic of challenging the cultural norms of their schools—even in the name of research-based, “best practice”—out of fear of losing their future jobs. They viewed their future teaching careers as tenuous and unstable.

In response, I told them my own teaching stories—stories of professional success and failure and stories of professional risk. Cliff’s is one such story.

I shared this teaching story with this cohort of teacher candidates as I have shared it with the cohort before it and the cohort that followed. The partial story I had heard from Cliff’s mother that Sunday night and the partial story I had constructed that Friday afternoon told the narrative of a 13-year-old African American boy in a predominately White, middle-class suburban school who had somehow and in some way been traumatized by his school.

Cliff’s story sent me wobbling as a second-year teacher in my school (Fecho, Graham, & Hudson-Ross, 2005). I had attended, survived, and succeeded as a student in a similar suburban school. I thought I understood the characters and plotlines that inhabited such places. As Lortie (1975) writes, teachers like myself are “socialized to a subordinate position within school systems” and “are dogged by painful uncertainties” (p. 168). Twenty years later, I look back on my physical response as rooted in my own fear for my job and for my career, but also crystallized in a moment of crisis of learning (Kumashiro, 2012), where everything I understood to be true and good about school, teaching, and learning turned inside out.

2

We know what we know because of how we are positioned. (Gertz as cited in Clandinin & Connelly, 2000, p. 17)

Over the course of that year, I came to know and trust that cohort of teacher candidates and they came to know and trust me. Our classroom became a true knowledge community, “a safe, story-telling place where people narrate the rawness of their experiences, negotiate meaning for such experiences, and authorize their own and others’ narrative interpretations of situations as legitimate tellings” (Olson & Craig, 2001, p. 670). When Rebecca told the story about the near fight in her class, we cried with her at her struggle to respond in the way she aspired to. When Karinna came out to us and shared a story where she chose not to disclose her sexual orientation to her suburban students, we heard her silence. And when Mark told us the story of how he applied for the program because he didn’t know what else to do, we supported his decision to leave because we all agreed that a combination of ambivalence and immaturity wasn’t motivation enough.

I remained in contact with this particular cohort after they completed their coursework. I met one or two for an occasional coffee and “friended” them on Facebook. I loaned out books and connected them with job opportunities. At a reunion brunch, I squeezed myself onto a cat-hair covered couch, ate overcooked scrambled eggs in a stuffy, humid apartment, and met various significant others who were willing to talk with me about anything but teaching. As the summer wore on, I heard through the grapevine which of them had jobs, where and to what degree.

In October, I received an unexpected phone call from Mr. A., one of the few teachers of color in the group. He had taken a job over the phone and began teaching middle school students in a charter school on the south side of Chicago. During his year in the program, he had carried himself with confidence and constraint. He kept his stories mostly to himself.

Over the phone, the emotion of his story was palpable. The only African American teacher in a racially isolated school, he was surrounded by Teach for America members, whose journey into teaching differed radically from his own (Foote, 2008). Young administrators controlled the curriculum, the instructional strategies, and the disciplinary structure of the school. Cooperative learning strategies were prohibited. Student-centered instruction was nonexistent. He had attempted to implement lessons and pedagogies he had learned in his university preparation program, strategies and lessons he had learned from me, and though his students had responded well, his peers and administrators viewed him as noncompliant and had turned up the pressure. He asked me, “What do I do?”

Kumashiro (2002) writes of the work involved in engaging in anti-oppressive pedagogy as occupying “a space between teacher and learner, the connection between knowledge and ignorance, and the crisis involved in learning and unlearning” (p. 53). That same semester, seated in my own doctoral courses, I shared a teaching story as evidence of the experiences faced by my students of color in the urban high school where I taught. My professor gave me a tight-lipped smile, walked to the whiteboard and directed me to read an academic text about urban education, the title of which she wrote on the chalkboard. The message she sent was clear: Teaching stories didn’t count for much in the academic world.

With any text, the reader approaches it and assesses it for cues as to how to frame it. An unspoken contract is established between the reader and the text. That contract is based on its shape and structure, format, and language. Academic writing requires qualified texts to meet certain specifications and follow specific rules. Hearkening to positivist epistemologies, scholarly writing structure and form signal to the reader that they are to read the text before them as fact and truth and science.

Fiction writers have played with form as a way to speak back to positivist, colonial, and Western ways of seeing the world that have dominated mainstream literature and social science texts. In his novel, In the Lake of the Woods, O’Brien (1994) combines factual testimony from the House Armed Services Committee hearing of Lt. William L. Calley, Jr. with fictional invention, disrupting the social science convention of footnote citations, a tool used by historians to prove the credibility and evidence of their words. Other novelists, such as Cortázar (1966) and Castillo (1986), challenge another conventional form of fiction, writing nonlinear novels that allowed readers to choose the direction and sequence in which chapters were to be read. Each reading offers the reader a different story, thereby communicating a different truth.

Groundbreaking scholars, such as Kumashiro and Tanaka, too have manipulated form to push epistemological boundaries of authority and truth in academia. Kumashiro (2002) re-stories the data from interviews with queer activist educators in narrative poetry, explaining the form “makes explicit, through its unconventionality, many ways in which the story is constructed” (p. 21).

Using a split page structure as a physical delineation between story and analysis (Tanaka, 1997), I hope to use form to trouble the notion of academic voice, and push the reader to question, unpack and rethink how an academic text conveys authority. Teachers’ stories occupy the left side of the page. The stories are dense, dialogic, and disparate, yet they capture “the complexity, specificity and interconnectedness of the phenomenon” of teaching, school, and learning (Carter, 1993, p. 6). The stories are intentionally partial, capturing snapshots of their first-year experiences through their own words.

Analysis and interpretation fill the right side of the page. My initial instinct spurred me to attempt to stitch the analysis with the stories in sequence along the columns and across the page, story to analysis and back. I thought this might provide the reader with an analytical crutch by which to unpack each independent story. As I wrote and revised, I filtered the stories through my own lens, shaping stories with the selection of a particular narrative point of view or specific verb tense. My analysis permeates both columns, not simply the right side. I further realized I could not predict how readers might interpret an individual story, how much interpretive “help” to offer, or whether or not an individual story could stand alone. Thus, the stories are intentionally staggered. Column alignment is not consistent. Readers may choose to alternate between story and analysis, or read the left column in its entirety before reading the right. The decision of how to approach the text is in the hands of the reader.

Pieced together, the stories offer a patchwork collection of perspectives on the first year of teaching across charter and public, rural, suburban, and urban settings. Furthermore, positioning story as the principal building block through both form and content, the form aims “to undercut the dominant mode of (academic) discourse on teaching” (Carter, 1993, p. 8).

Elbaz writes,

Story is the very stuff of teaching, the landscape within which we live as teachers and researchers, and with which the work of teachers can be seen as making sense. This is not merely a claim about the aesthetic or emotional sense of fit of the notion of story without intuitive understanding of teaching, but an epistemological claim that teachers’ knowledge, in its own terms, is ordered by story and can be best understood in this way. (Carter, 1993, p. 7)

I knew instantly from our phone call that Mr. A.’s teaching story needed to be heard. He needed to tell it, again and again, to make sense of the context he was in and the professional risks he faced. Furthermore, his story unleashed in me questions about my own initial years of teaching, about how other first-year teachers perceive and experience professional risks in their various school contexts, and whether or not they feel prepared to handle potentially risky situations.

3

That day, we sat in my living room. Nine first-year teachers and former cohort members, shoulder-to-shoulder, eating the meal I had home-cooked, reconnecting with each other. I had asked them into my home to tell their stories of professional risk-taking during this first year of teaching. The crows cawed outside, an unexpected vocal presence so early in our Minnesota spring. The wind moved through the open windows and pulled my screen door open and shut again with a squeak and a slam, each time prompting someone in the group to turn their attention to the door, as if someone uninvited might arrive, ready to listen.

As methodology and method, narrative inquiry involves narrative analysis and narrative construction. Because epistemologically, story is viewed the unit of knowledge, narrative analysis allows the researcher to collect, unpack, and make sense of stories told. Narrative construction empowers the researcher to re-story data in various forms, tapping conventions from literature, novel, poetry, and reportage, among others.

As the teachers shared their stories of perceived professional risk, the tape recorder lay microphone side up on the ottoman, between coasters and paper plates, in the center of my living room. As an insider, with an overlapping role in their teacher preparation history and job acquisition, I played an active role in the conversation. I leaned in, reacted honestly, with what came naturally, be it humor, dismay, or disgust (Holstein & Gubrium, 1995).

For hours afterwards, I replayed their stories, transcribing frantically, reacting repeatedly with a chuckle or a scoff with each playback. In the transcription, their words came out in narrative poetry. My creative writing background informed how I heard their intonations, silences, and stutters. Line breaks enabled me to see their discomfort and hesitation on the page. White space marked moments of deliberation and pause. A word standing alone in a line indicated emphasis and intonation.

Just as researchers must reflect on ways in which the voices of participants are both “an interpretation and in need of interpretation” (Kumashiro, 2002, pp. 19-20), the stories I collected from these novice teachers were constructed and reconstructed in and through multiple contexts. We share a story of teacher education together, and they share multiple stories with each other outside of my purview as their instructor. That day, they re-storied their experiences in a collective space, in the shadows of all of the previous classroom and interpersonal dynamics from their preparation year. Their relationships with each other and with me, as well as our collective history, may have provided us a professional trust that enabled them to share teaching stories more intimately and in contradiction to the isolation more common for teachers in schools (Barone, 1992). During their licensure program, we discussed some of the oppressive social and political forces that inhabit and shape schools through theory and through stories of teachers who had come before them. Given this web of relationships and experiences, the stories these nine young teachers told were “mediated and . . . influenced” by myself, by each other, and through our shared contexts (Kumashiro, 2002, pp. 19-20).

After transcribing their stories, I sent them the data via email, all 90 pages of it, in hopes of member-checking their work. I asked for feedback, edits, omissions, and requested that they each choose a pseudonym. Some of them replied to their own stories and added epilogues, revisions and updates to further inform their words. Invoking the idea of a second text that allows participants to speak back to the researcher’s analysis and interpretation (Segall, 2002), participating teachers’ comments were included in earlier versions of the re-storied text. They continue to receive subsequent iterations and have further opportunities to include their perspectives on what I have written, how I have framed the text, and the analysis I put forth.

4

Twenty-five percent of young teachers never make it through their first two years of teaching (Scherff, 2008). Nearly 50% leave the profession by year five (Scherff, 2008). Researchers, policy makers, and politicians regularly cite the statistics, brandish them like weapons in the ongoing attack on teacher education programs and the public school system alike. Teacher turnover is incredibly high, costly, and destructive (Ronfeldt, Loeb, & Wyckoff, 2013).

In teacher education, recent literature attempts to define the slippery notion of teacher dispositions and the development of these dispositions toward cultural competence, openness to multiple perspectives, and social justice (Hill-Jackson & Lewis, 2010). One text opens by describing two young elementary teachers, both working in schools where their progressive teacher beliefs contradict the prescriptive and regimented, test-driven curriculum that dominate their schools. One teacher holds true to her pedagogical beliefs and contemplates subverting the dominant curricular paradigm of her school; the other finds a way to repackage the mandated curriculum so that it complies but still allows for whispers of the progressive pedagogy from her preparation program to remain. The character of the second teacher, the one who finds a way to be compliant, is lauded, while the other new teacher held up as an example of “unprofessional” behavior and teacher preparation gone awry (Murrell, Diez, Feiman-Nemser, & Schussler, 2010).

In “Preparing Teachers for a Changing World,” the authors conceptualize the notion of adaptive expertise as a goal for teacher preparation (Bransford, Darling-Hammond, & LePage, 2005). Through this conceptual lens, teacher development is viewed on a matrix. The Y-axis represents Innovation, the X-axis Efficiency. A young teacher who is prepared only for innovation—the theory argues—may land in a school where prescriptive curriculum rules the day, where teachers are expected to follow rigid pacing schedules and uniformly assess their students in lock-step with their colleagues. The teacher who can only innovate ends up a “frustrated novice.” The inverse extreme is the young teacher who abandons innovation for development of routine procedures. This teacher becomes the “routine expert” but lacks the ability to flex and respond to changes in students, policies, or administrative expectations. According to the framework, the goal is the development of the teacher candidate/young teacher as an Adaptive Expert, someone who can flex and adjust to multiple environments, who finds ways to innovate within multiple settings, and yet still understands how to meet the routine demands of the work (Bransford, Derry, Berliner, & Hammerness, 2005). It furthers that if teacher education aims to develop young teachers into adaptive experts, they might be able to weather the arduous and draining first years in the classroom, and stay in the profession.

Research focused on early years of teaching suggests the story may be more complex. To what are we asking novice teachers to adapt? In what contexts? Under what conditions? And at what cost? To conceptualize the place inhabited by novice teachers, a catalogue of descriptors fills the page: vulnerable, uncertain, plagued by feelings of inadequacy, anxiety, doubt (Flores & Day, 2006); unsupported and lonely (Scherff, 2008) isolated, insecure, uncomfortable, and fearful. Citing Lacey (1977), Flores and Day (2006) describe how novice teachers adopt a “strategic compliance,” marching in step with the culture of school or the edicts of administration, while maintaining their own skepticism of the very policies and practices they (are required to) implement (p. 225). Picower (2011) describes the effect of neoliberal school contexts on the novice teachers in her study as follows: “Between the ideological imprisonment of mandated curriculum and standardized testing, and the traitors, spies, and landmines at their school sites, these new teachers recognized that they always had to watch their backs” (p. 1118). These authors further demonstrate the ways in which “negative school contexts and cultures” can destabilize the identities of new teachers (Flores & Day, 2006, p. 230) and push them toward an early exit from the profession.

The teachers who sat in my living room that afternoon recognized the need to adapt to their new settings and many of them wanted to do so. Yet, they also feared the possibility of a rupture (Britzman, 2003), caused by such an adaptation, and how that might prove fatal to their careers and identities. Ultimately, these young teachers believed they had few choices when confronted by a professional risk:

5

Telling our stories is not enough. (Olson, 1995, p. 125)

Cliff’s story has no resolution. After I was observed without warning, I called my parents who called a lawyer. She helped me craft a letter to the head of human resources in my district. In the letter, I positioned myself as legally vulnerable. I expressed fears of retribution and retaliation from an administration that didn’t appreciate my questions. I acknowledged that my position rendered me at risk for strategic obstructions to tenure and further employment. District human resources acknowledged receipt of the letter, and from there on my school administration had nothing to do with me. My principals avoided me, spoke to me only when absolutely necessary. But that had its consequences too. I was never observed from that day forward and, because of it, accumulated no formal evidence to support my tenure. The administration simply never set foot in my classroom again. After three years in the district, my file remained empty and I left the district, still untenured and probationary, without recommendation or evidence of competencies in my practice, and still vulnerable in a new district.

Cliff left the district before the year ended. After my unsuccessful attempt at finding answers for him and his mother, his absences increased. His work deteriorated. I seem to remember talk of a transfer to a Catholic school somewhere in the city. By the end of that year, he had simply disappeared.

His story hasn’t disappeared though. It threads through my story and has become part of how I view myself as teacher, teacher educator and, now, educational researcher. It weaves through the stories of the teachers who sat in my living room six weeks ago, and through our collective story together. Carter (1993) writes that the

stories we live by are not, of course, purely private inventions. We build them from the information provided by experience and from the inventory of stories. (p. 7)

Maybe through story, these young teachers who sat in my living room, just about to complete their first year of teaching will come to know that others have cut a path of resistance before them, and that others are cutting parallel paths by their sides.

Ladson-Billings (2006) writes that educational research must be about more than “data points and effect sizes” (p. 10). She argues that neutrality and objectivity should not obscure our responsibility to research that is conducted on behalf and for the benefit of real people and their real lives. My research intends to serve multiple purposes. I am invested in these novice teachers and want this work to benefit them in their immediate professional decisions as well as their long-term goals in the field of education. In addition, I hope their stories inform the larger understanding of the transition to teaching made by young teachers in a high-stakes, neoliberal, anti-teacher climate. Young teachers have contextually based and emotionally charged stories of perceived and actual professional risk in the early years of teaching. This knowledge is lived, understood, and re-storied through the narratives they share in safe, trusted, and reciprocated knowledge communities, and offers tremendous insight into varied school contexts, the static nature of instruction and pedagogy, and teacher attrition. Their stories can teach multiple audiences what it means to enter the pressure cooker environments of today’s schools as a young teacher.

An unexpected by-product of this work has been my reconnection with these teachers and, for some of them, their reconnection with each other. Since our conversation, I have received numerous emails and phone calls, and the webs between us have strengthened. Before their first year of teaching had finished, five of the participating teachers actively sought new teaching positions. I sent job postings their way, hoping that a new context might prove to be a better fit. Of the nine who sat down for the original focus group, all but one is in a new teaching position in a different school.

Mr. A. left his job in Chicago within four months and accepted a long-call position at my school. He and I met regularly to brainstorm ideas for engaging curriculum, and I assist in his classroom when possible. The long call has become a full-time position and already, he tosses around the possibilities of becoming a principal.

Mark left his school and accepted a position in different rural middle school, this time in Wisconsin, but within a short drive to a thriving urban center and closer to friends and family.

Mr. D. is in his second year at the suburban charter school and has been named department chair. He recently contacted me, hoping to recruit someone from our university licensure program to fill an opening in his school.

Eliza left her charter school and accepted a position in a suburban middle school. She and I had coffee not too long ago. She moved with ease and smiled often. Her complexion is clear. She left with a stack of borrowed books and it would not be an exaggeration to say she bounced as she walked to her car.

My hope is that the stories they shared and heard from each other have further layered how they understand their own school contexts and decisions around progressive pedagogies, equity-minded practices, and activism in their teaching roles. As researcher and reader, I choose to “enter into a conspiracy with (the storytellers), a politically based conversation about the relationship between the world-at-hand and the world-to-be-made” (Barone, 1995, p. 256).

I look forward to their second chapters.