Abstract
This article examines the collaborative inquiry practices of the Cincinnati Critical Friends, a cross-disciplinary group of teacher educators committed to improving their teaching through action research. Situated within the field of teacher education, the study explores how faculty members use structured dialogue to examine persistent dilemmas of practice and deepen their understanding of what it means to teach well. Drawing on perspectives from special education, literacy studies, English language arts education, and action research, the authors reflect on their ongoing conversations and shared inquiry. Over time, the group has come to recognize relational capacities—such as deep listening, empathy, and kindness—as essential practices that sustain their collaboration and enable honest reflection. The article illustrates how these relational practices function as professional resources that support meaningful learning, strengthen collegial inquiry, and inform efforts to improve teaching practice.
Who We Are, What We Do, and Why It Matters to Us
The online meeting opens and Susan, the host, is admitting us into virtual space. We are here to discuss Mark’s teaching dilemma. We will follow our usual protocol to support the process, and we will deviate from the protocol at times when it doesn’t serve that purpose. In one form or another, we’ve been having these deep dive conversations for years. We set time limits for ourselves and then ignore them. We seek clarifications about the dilemma; we ask the presenter to step back and listen while the rest of us respond to the scenario they’ve shared and then we invite them back into the dialogue. The steps are simple, but the process isn’t easy. Presenting a dilemma always feels risky because the act involves exposing some aspects of our teaching that we are questioning, testing, or experiencing some confusion about. Despite the risk, we persevere. Essentially, when we share our dilemmas, we tell stories. When Mark tells his story in this “critical friends” process, it allows us to walk in his shoes, try them on, and respond to his reality from our unique perspectives. Sometimes the storyteller describes what they initially think is a real shit show, but as we hear our friends draw insight and flesh out crucial details, wider implications of a dilemma emerge. We end up thinking, “Wow, I would have never thought of that on my own!” We have stuck with this process and found that it inevitably reveals new ways of seeing new ways of being.
As teachers, many of us experience a certain sense of isolation in our daily work. We rarely have time or opportunities to share with others the things we are struggling with in our daily tasks. As a result, we solve problems alone, with mixed results and without the wisdom of practice and support of those around us. The culture of schooling in the K-12 world as well as that of higher education has, in our experience, generally been one of isolation. It is a counter-cultural move to come together, open the doors of our classrooms, and invite each other in. As members of the Cincinnati Critical Friends group that has been meeting for the last 6 years, we engage in practices that have changed both how we teach and who we are as teachers. Within our group, we’ve adopted a culture of inquiry in which we question, wonder about, listen deeply to, and reflect on our teaching with the goal of improving our practice in culturally responsive and sustaining pedagogies. Our willingness to critically examine our own practices, we believe, encourages important changes we have seen and implemented.
This article describes our collaborative process for exploring some of the most difficult dilemmas we face in our practice, to address what it means to teach well and how action research principles and practices help us improve as teachers. While our community of practice collectively locates itself in the broad field of educational studies, with particular focus on teacher preparation, each of us brings a different disciplinary tradition and set of experiences to the group. Whether our expertise is rooted in special education (Steve and Annie), literacy studies (Susan and Connie), English language arts education (Mark), or action research (Miriam), our shared interest in studying our practices as teachers grounds our work. Over the years, we have come to see the fabric of our interactions, the skills we bring to the conversations, and the different ways we experience reality, as forms of “superpowers.” The skill of deep listening, for example, is a superpower. Empathy is a superpower. Kindness is a superpower. People might understand these skills as ordinary in the sense of being available to everyone. But how, when, and where are these superpowers invited, centered, and affirmed in our daily professorial lives? These superpower acts or stances are practices we engage in and capacities we build. They hold our group together and support our efforts to make meaningful changes in our teaching.
All this effort is grounded in a core component of action research: to reflect on and then change our practice, and then do that repeatedly in the context of a community of practice. We are mindful of the unique challenges in writing about action research. While the work itself is oriented toward change, it can be difficult to write about the work in change-oriented ways; that is, in ways that invite the reader into the experience and support the reader in cultivating their own unique experiences of change. Our goal is to capture, as clearly as we can, a set of conditions and processes that regularly inform our process of change as university teachers. In this article, we have adopted two of the guidelines on writing action research suggested by Friedman and colleagues (2018): “showing, not just telling,” and “challenging the standard academic paper format” (p. 3). Throughout, we invite you, our readers, to place yourselves in our group and reimagine the work in your contexts. Who would be there with you? What kinds of dilemmas do you face? Would you be willing to take a risk if you knew you were with not just friends, but critical friends—those willing to walk with you, ask questions, and reimagine the scene in a new light? Would you be willing to develop your superpowers?
Structured Storytelling: How Do Teaching and Learning Become Action Research?
As we explore questions about what it means to teach well and how action research principles and practices can help us improve as teachers in higher education, we ground ourselves in the act of structured storytelling. Our structured storytelling has some parallels to Campbell’s (1973) The hero with a thousand faces, where our storytelling is intended to move us forward across difficult thresholds in our practice, not to tie us down. Our stories are structured (Bal, 1985) in that they contain elements of events, actors, and time, as well as how the elements are presented. The text of the stories we present includes the narrator, who tells the story, and the listeners, who add to the narrative as they make connections to the story. As we have written previously (“Self-Studies of Teacher Educators,” 2022), we engage in a form of collaborative self-study of our teaching (Vanassche & Kelchtermans, 2016). We also resonate with Mats Hordvik et al. (2021), who describe the collaborative self-study of teacher education practices as “a space and structure to share and debate teacher educators’ practices, which promotes dialogue, reflection, interrogation, and interpretation of experiences” (Section 2.1, para. 3).
The critical friends process we have used is a structure for telling our stories of teaching dilemmas that has helped create the collective intellectual, emotional, and inquisitive space that we share together (Costa & Kallick, 1993). Storytelling is a foundational dimension of our group. Like Doyle (1997), we conceptualize a classroom as “not a kind of cloud chamber in which stimuli cause achievement” but a site of action and participation where “story is a quite appropriate, if not the only, way of knowing teaching” (p. 95). Storytelling—composing, telling, listening, responding—steers us away from finding a solution and instead allows us to deepen the interplay of theory and practice (i.e., praxis) in our teaching. In this sense, stories provide the textures, nuances, and multiplicities of meaning that set the conditions for praxis. Storytelling is a resource for connection and a method for making sense of experience.
Throughout the 2019–2020 school year, we wrote stories of our practice in the form of self-studies (“Self-Studies of Teacher Educators,” 2022), including our “origin stories” or stories that described what brought us to the group to study culturally relevant and sustaining pedagogies (Ladson-Billings, 1995; Paris & Alim, 2017). These stories are now part of the fabric of our group: images, metaphors, and turns of phrase are all threads that hold us together. We see these stories of teaching, the sharing of these stories and the structured responses, as a form of action research.
Storytelling has a rich history in many forms of action research, including in self-studies and inquiry groups (Ellis & Bochner, 2000; Marshall, 2016). Structured storytelling, especially in “second person” action research where collective learning for change is the focus, is intended to “democratize the storytelling process and to open up communicative spaces in which one can go beyond superficial exchanges of opinion” (Mead, 2014, p. 730). As we invite multiple perspectives and alternative interpretations of our stories, we open ourselves up to being changed by the stories we tell and hear. Our goal is to share our stories so that we can change our practice for the better. We also know that by hearing others’ stories, we change too. “Telling stories in postmodern times, and perhaps in all times, attempts to change one’s own life by affecting the lives of others” (Mead, 2014, p. 731).
What Is the “Structure” in Our Structured Storytelling?
One main structure we have long embraced for examining our practices has been the critical friends protocol (Costa & Kallick, 1993). While the word “protocol” suggests a fixed sequence of steps that requires fidelity, we have adopted this structure more as a process that we have altered and played with. For example, we set time limits for each step and frequently ignore them. We’ve also created a “flipped” critical friends’ protocol (see Sulzer et al., 2024) when the usual protocol didn’t meet our needs. In Figure 1, we outline the protocol that we used for this project. Each box represents a step in the protocol. Our “flipped” critical friends’ protocol
The other main structure employed in this project was the use of comics and zines—understood as both method and product—as tools for fostering collaboration, reflection, and new ways of seeing. Comics, as Weaver-Hightower et al. (2017) explained, can unify word and image, blend modes and senses, and invite readers into a narrative collage without a single “right” path. Their description captures how our comics functioned as layered, bricolage-like renderings of our dialogues. Zine-making is not simply about aesthetics but also about cultivating dialogue, participation, and collective memory (Baker et al., 2024). Situating zines within narrative inquiry, Zhuo (2024) highlighted their capacity to hold stories, fragments, and reflections in ways that honor participants’ perspectives. Taken together, these approaches mirror our own intent: to create a multimodal space where participants could juxtapose words and images to hold their realities at the center of the process. Put plainly, our use of comics and zines provided our group with a means of archiving dialogue, inviting reflexivity, and preserving the immediacy of lived experience while opening new forms of collective meaning-making.
We share a comic/zine created by Steve (Figure 2) that begins with a dilemma he experienced alone, in his office, and then follows that dilemma through a series of conversations and realizations. It provides an example of one critical friend session, outlines conversation guidelines, and presents a suggested structure to help navigate the storytelling space in the presentation of a teaching dilemma. The final page of the comic illustrates the structure of a critical friend conversation (Costa & Kallick, 1993) but is only meant as a malleable set of guidelines. A critical friend’s dilemma experienced by Steve Kroeger
A Collection of Stories
We now offer a series of stories about our teaching to invite the reader into our process. We offer one from each group member which captures a moment in time, suggests a mood, implies a question, and calls forth a tension. In our group, we write these stories to set the conditions for response, questions, clarifications, dialogue, sensemaking through our own theoretical lenses, and movement into plausible next steps in our teaching. While this is an open and full invitation, we acknowledge the tricky nature of this invitation in the context of an article where this style of storytelling is perhaps out of its element and where the stories run the risk of being dead on the page. To counter this risk, we would like to offer three understandings about our structured storytelling, which we hope contributes to a helpful approach for reading them in the context of an article.
First, we understand stories to be inherently relational. Stories represent a social situation, and storytellers are never telling one story but a story in relation to another story, as an extension of the multiple stories from a particular storyteller, as the one that comes to mind in that particular week, day, hour, minute, or second. Stories freeze the storyteller at a specific time, telling a story to a specific audience, and thus represent something about who the storyteller was but not who they always will be (Wilson, 2005). We, therefore, see the meaning of a story in the context of an article as situated with the person reading and responding to it just as much as with the original context of the storytelling.
Second, we understand that writing is itself inquiry (Richardson & St Pierre, 2005). Through the act of writing and using a critical friend process to engage in dialogue, we are using storytelling as a method of becoming. Becoming requires the storyteller, reader, and listener to adopt a mindset based in principles that, above, we call superpowers. Therefore, we see stories as a constant resource. In the right mindset, stories are pathways to the superpowers of epiphanies, connectedness, ambiguities, mindfulness, persistence, and vulnerability. Structured storytelling helps us cultivate these superpowers. Thus, stories have many purposes. We want to pursue meaning, but just as importantly, we want to cultivate a mindset that allows the stories to gain a second life, third life, fourth life, and so on, in our own teaching practices.
Third, we understand that sharing teaching dilemmas through personal story is a courageous act and that holding these stories in community requires mutually agreed upon standards of ethical responsibility. In our group, we have explicitly agreed to hold in confidence the stories we hear.
To show our process in the context of an article, we offer one example of a group member’s response below each story. These responses are meant to be examples that, rather than shutting down the conversation or solving an issue, represent the type of engagement that leads to more engagement. Our goal is not to solve a dilemma. The case is never closed. Instead, we want to find plausible actions leading to the next actions leading to the next and the next and so on.
At the end of this collection of stories, we offer a set of questions related to epiphanies, ambiguities, mindfulness, persistence, and vulnerability. These questions are meant to center the mindset we try to cultivate within ourselves. We offer them as invitations to the reader. We hope these stories illuminate our community of practice and, most importantly, engage our readers in considering their own existing or future communities of practice. Where are you in these stories?
Connie’s Story
I started reading about and practicing mindfulness during the first few months of the pandemic, both to take care of my own sense of well-being but also because I was contemplating creating a writing class to help graduate students jumpstart their summer writing projects—students who I imagined might be feeling just as isolated from their friend, family, and professional communities as I was. As a writing teacher and writer myself, I know how the stress of the writing cycle—getting started, stuck, back on track, only to get stuck again—is something too many students and faculty alike endure alone. It’s a familiar story, isn’t it? Writers writing in isolation instead of writing in community? I wanted to find a way to change that story for myself and the students I teach. In short, I wanted this class to be a safe space for discussing topics—or dilemmas, really—that confront all writers, like how to set writing goals, manage writing anxiety, prevent procrastination, build writing stamina, and maybe most importantly, how to practice self-care while writing. Looking back, I’m struck by how my vision for this class resonates with my experiences in the Cincinnati Critical Friends group and our efforts to create a safe space where we can discuss topics—or dilemmas, really—that confront all teachers, like the ones we’re describing here.
Jonathan Kabat-Zinn (1994) describes mindfulness as “paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgmentally” (p. 4). Alexandra Peary (2018), who studies mindfulness and writing, reminds us there is value in learning to “more fully occup[y] a present moment,” to “welcome,” as she puts it, “the fragmentary and the elliptical” (p. 167). If sustained observation of the present moment—on purpose and without judgment—changes how we experience writing by reminding us to let go of future- or past-oriented thinking (Peary, p. 24), then can we also change how we experience our teaching through the sort of sustained observation of the present moment Kabat-Zinn and Peary suggest? Ultimately, isn’t that what we do when we bring a dilemma to the group: intentionally attend to our teaching so we can become more mindful practitioners?
Miriam’s Response to Connie
Connie, I’m thinking about the idea of safe space and your desire to create “a safe space for discussing topics–or dilemmas, really–that confront all writers…” and the connection to mindfulness. To really be present to one’s own writing and a writing community strikes me as a deeply vulnerable act. It means confronting one’s foibles and failures while perhaps being able to celebrate someone else’s triumph. You are teaching your students to ground themselves with themselves and in the company of others. This is not for the faint of heart. And really, when I think about it, the capacity to do both is a superpower.
Steve’s Story
A recent moment of emergence: I am sitting at my desk at home on a Saturday afternoon during a fall semester. I am reading Paulo Freire’s (1970, Chapter 2) discussion on banking education for a critical pedagogy course that I teach every other year, when I see a contradiction between what I read and what I do. I am preparing a short 8-panel zine. A zine is a small-circulation self-published work of writings and drawings traditionally reproduced via a copy machine by a single person or a very small group. My zine is about Freire’s notion of narrative sickness. As I prepare the lesson, it is my intention to explain Freire’s thoughts on narrative sickness for the students.
Freire described a two-stage process of the educator, either in or outside of class. Freire wrote that during the first stage, an instructor might take and interpret an academic text. To do so, the educator cognizes (perceives or thinks about) a cognizable object while preparing a lesson. During the second stage, the educator expounds to his students about that object. Then, I thought, Oh, shit! I am doing this exact thing!
Freire explained that during this “banking education” process, the students are not called on to know, but to memorize the context narrated by the teacher. Nor do the students practice any cognition, and this defeats the achievement of meaningful knowledge, while generating narrative sickness.
I realize I can’t do this. Instead, I decided I will share with the critical friends group, this moment sitting at my desk preparing this lesson. This is a small act of surrendering my ownership and power over the process of cognizing an object. This moment produces a dilemma where I unwittingly reproduce the contradictions of a banking model in my instructional practice. This is exactly the kind of dilemma I can bring to my critical friends.
Annie’s Response to Steve
We all have many years of experience as students. For many of us, our education was “here’s what you need to know, learn it, and then spew it back.” Steve’s sharing with his students, I’m sure, made some of the students squirm. As products of the “no child left behind testing emphasis” our students want to know what’s going to be on the test. My reply, “Everything.”
Annie’s Story
I begin class with a TED talk by Aimee Mullins that challenges the words my students, who plan to become teachers, have been using to describe people with disabilities. They agree with the critique, but their comments resound the challenges Ms Mullins makes: “She is so strong,” “an inspiration,” the students say, “a role model.” In a subsequent TED talk, Ms Mullins asserts, “I am not your inspiration.” The students are silent.
I begin another class with a TED talk by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie who describes the dangers of a single story. In her children’s literature in Nairobi, the heroes never looked like her. Oral histories told her differently, but in school it was clear that the heroes, stars, and princesses were white. An active discussion about group members takes place, but then a comment I dread is made: But what about the white kids?
This is a dilemma I can bring to my critical friends. I tell my first-year students that all cultures must be respected. Then, along comes one blonde-haired, blue-eyed student who says, “What about us?” I reflected on the challenge to provide opportunities for all cultures when one culture is dominant. In a subsequent assignment, the students are prompted to describe whether their school is culturally responsive. It seems that in their view, de facto segregated areas are full of culturally responsive schools. But almost all the students attending those schools are white, and cultural responsibility is typically described as Black History Month, Heritage Month, and Native American month.
A tutoring experience in an inner urban school provides prospective teachers with a context for change. There, there really are students who take extra breakfast items in their pockets because they will have nothing to eat the rest of the day. There, there really are students plopped into second grade who do not know a word of English. This is a reality the critical friends understand: They understand my struggle to be culturally relevant. The readings are challenging for me, but after several re-readings, I glean information that gives me a way to support my practice.
Connie’s Response to Annie
What I like best about this story, Annie, is the way it focuses my attention on the vulnerabilities of teaching, both the risks we take as teachers and the risks our students take as learners, whenever we set about the project of education. To me, your choice to share a dilemma with our critical friends group models the kind of risk-taking we value in our own learning process and, in turn, want our students to engage. Creating a classroom atmosphere that fosters tolerance and invites difference is critical work. And as your story so aptly shows, seeking to understand our differences sets the conditions for our growth, as students and teachers alike.
Miriam’s Story
In the year when we conducted our self-studies about trying new culturally responsive/sustaining pedagogies in our classrooms, the teaching dilemmas for me kept rolling, like waves in the ocean. Just as I managed the high surf of one wave, another one with a different force was upon me. In a moment of great terror for me as a teacher, when a class rupture around issues of race tore through my doctoral seminar, it was my critical friends in this group who I turned to, to help me sort through the sea of emotion that I was experiencing, and to help me return to the class with a sense of competency to facilitate the next steps. I remember sitting with Steve and Susan in my office, feeling paralyzed by the events of the class. And there was comfort in knowing that Steve and Susan knew me as a learning partner. I could trust them to ask hard questions that would not tear me down, but with the intention of building me up. I could be at my most vulnerable, “I don’t know what to do.” “I’ve unleashed a conflict in my classroom that I can’t handle.”
When all I wanted to do was hide under my desk, Steve and Susan asked me challenging questions and encouraged me to be real with the class, to say how I felt as a teacher in that moment, to hold the tension for the class. They suggested that I share what I learned from that moment and offer a couple of moves that I might have done differently. This meeting was outside of our regular critical friends group meeting, outside of the critical friends process. But our critical friends practice of beginning by listening to the person experiencing the dilemma, then having that person sit back and listen to critical friends make meaning of what was shared, and then thinking together about possible actions, offered us a structure for this emergency meeting. Having experienced this practice together multiple times created a sense of trust and relationship for sharing tender and vulnerable stories.
Susan’s Response to Miriam
The phrase “moment of terror for me as a teacher,” reflects an ability to allow terror in, recognize it as such, give it a seat at the table, and invite a few critical friends to sit with it too, along with you. I think about how the ability to even allow terror into the room, as a teacher, changes what it means to teach.
Susan’s Story
“As a Black woman standing in front of 24 young, White faces I have often felt discomfort in these moments—these split seconds when I have been silent; these split seconds when opportunities came, and went—a door swung wide, or opened just a crack, was closed. What are the moments that strike us mute? Render us paralyzed? And how can I, along with my students, walk forward when the traumas of our racialized world show up in the classroom?” (Watts-Taffe, 2022, p. 41).
When I read Claudia Rankin’s Citizen: An American Lyric, a mixed-media contemplation of race and racism in the U.S., I found a connection to the disconnection I often feel as a Black woman at a predominantly white institution, which the quote I shared above speaks to. Rankin writes: “Certain moments send adrenaline to the heart, dry out the tongue, and clog the lungs. Like thunder they drown you in sound, no, like lightning they strike you across the larynx” (p. 7).
Rankin’s quote sent me digging into a contemplation of my own. Through poetry, journaling, and sharing with my critical friends I explored the vulnerable places of my own racing heart and muted voice. I wrote about moments in my teaching where I felt lost, “such as in the split second after a student makes a blanket generalization based on a racial stereotype or the split second when a student says, ‘Just because I’m white, doesn’t mean I’m privileged’” (Watts-Taffe, 2022, p. 41).
I shared my writing with my friends, because it seemed essential for me to explore this question: How can my classroom be a safe, productive place to speak up about and sit with uncomfortable, challenging ideas, so that passages into and through them are possible? What stands out most is that our critical friends space, with its values and practices, is what gives birth to the new ways space shows up in my classroom. It allows me to practice ways of being in the company of others that I want to enact with my students. It allows me to practice vulnerability, trust, and care in ways I want to practice with my students.
Mark’s Response to Susan
I’m sitting with “these split seconds when I have been silent; these split seconds when opportunities came, and went—a door swung wide, or opened just a crack, was closed.” This passage, to me, speaks to where ambiguities come from: a split second, a moment, an opportunity that came and went. In the context of a racialized society and such difference in lived experience and knowledge, these moments seem heavy with a how-best-to-get-into-it challenge. How do we walk toward challenges instead of being controlled by them?
Mark’s Story
No one can teach you how to teach. If this axiom were an animal, it’d be a puffer fish—swelling to twice its size, exuding confidence. You can’t take it at face value. I gather up my notebook, my bag, and this idea that keeps swimming in my head. Why is this puffer fish with me today? I’m about to go teach our student-teachers after a challenging class session. Maybe that’s why.
I’m typically invigorated by this cohort of student-teachers. I’ve worked with them in multiple classes over the years. In our critical literacies class, they studied the relationship between pedagogy and culture enthusiastically and crafted personal narratives grounded in equity and inclusion. In our young adult literature class, they produced youth-affirming teaching philosophies. Their philosophies rejected stereotypical constructions of youth by positioning high school students as creators of culture, not passive recipients of knowledge. Or so I thought. Now we’re in their Intermediate Methods course, which is meant to support their instructional thinking through their student-teaching experience.
What happened in our last session kept me up at night. Someone presented their “lesson from the field,” a practice-based learning experience where we simulate classroom activities. In our lessons from the field, student-teachers sign up for a date, and throughout the semester, they take turns showcasing what they’re trying in their field placements. Our purpose is to make our instructional thinking visible and deepen our pedagogical content knowledge. We want to design pathways for high school students to bring their life experiences into the classroom, exercise their intellect, and get up and move with various room arrangements, discussion formats, and writing practices. We want our engagement strategies to be lively and compelling. We want to improve our teaching by leaning on each other as a community of teachers. That happens more often than not. BUT. Last night session’s lesson fell short of that goal. The student-teacher leading the lesson taught us about short stories. It was a PowerPoint. Lots of terms. Slides upon slides. Long, tedious definitions. We dutifully took on the role of the high school students for the lesson, taking guided notes to simulate what they would be going through. Scribbling. Silence. Scribbling some more. After it ended rather abruptly, with no clear reason as to why we had just copied definitions from a PowerPoint, I expected a conversation about redesigning this activity to liven it up.
The opposite happened. This group of predominantly white student-teachers, who had just taken on the role of their students by taking these writer’s-cramp-inducing notes, who had made personal commitments to tailor instruction to the diverse student population we serve rather than to “teach into the vacuum,” who had up to this point demonstrated the capacity to integrate the richness of students’ lives into their instructional designs, wanted a copy of the PowerPoint. (!!!) Their students, they claimed, needed to be spoon-fed this information. (!!!) I couldn’t believe it. This way of thinking was antithetical to their previous coursework, discussions, and examples. Not all the student-teachers were thinking this way, but with this group, it was enough to give me pause. An image came to mind: Our critical thinking we had previously used to interrogate unjust and inequitable schooling practices evaporated from the top of our skulls, like steam into the air.
Me, trying to find a way in: “How did this go with your students?” Student-Teacher: “Oh, they hated it. Some of them outright didn’t take notes at all and just put their heads down. [a pause] But I think it was good because otherwise, they won’t get it.” Oh no, no, no. This line of thinking was maddening. The discussion went on. I tried to redirect us into different instructional possibilities. The reaction was mixed. I felt like a failure, deeply, as if I had just dropped this huge boulder I was supposed to be carrying on behalf of everyone.
No one can teach you how to teach. The puffer fish inflates when it senses a threat. I wonder if it’s trying to protect me or if it’s trying to get me to rethink this whole situation. The next class session is coming, and I need to do something to correct course. What do you see, critical friends?
Steve’s Response to Mark
Mark, I am in awe of your mindfulness about what you thought your students learned and why that learning was not obvious. I wonder how we transform such moments into critical dialogue. How would you enter that dialogic space with your students? I was also moved by how the student-teachers interpreted their students’ reaction to the content (“Oh they hated it”). The direct feedback was right there, but the student-teacher’s interpretation was driven by prior knowledge and beliefs. In this way, the interpretation process needs a critical friend—a relationship where we can ask each other to think through our experiences and reinterpret through a different and critical lens.
An invitation for the reader
We offer the following prompts as an invitation for further engagement with our stories. Don’t feel that you need to answer each prompt or, really, any of them. The prompts are simply a way to channel creativity. The idea is to find a compelling pathway and see where you can go. • What words or phrases from this series of stories are you sitting with? • What memories come to mind from your own teaching experience? • In the story or in your own experience, where do you feel… …a sense of epiphany (an ah-ha moment)? …ambiguities (questions, contradictions, tensions without clear resolutions)? …a sense of mindfulness (being in the here-and-now with the imagery and ideas)? …persistence (motivation to keep thinking and doing)? …vulnerability (the sensation of putting yourself out there, being exposed to risk)?
Consider re-reading the stories from Connie, Steve, Annie, Miriam, Susan, and Mark in the light of these questions. Jot some answers down on the margins of the page and see where it leads you.
Coda: A Letter and a Comic
Dear Readers,
In this article, we’ve attempted to describe and illustrate an approach to collaborative inquiry that has helped us explore some of the most difficult dilemmas we face in our practice—dilemmas that have been hard to articulate but that have found a safe space in our critical friends group. We opened the article with a glimpse into the start of a typical critical friends meeting and went on to describe how sharing our dilemmas are acts of storytelling and, further, how this storytelling is a form of action research. Stories are a method for finding next steps, which generate new stories, which generate the new iteration of next steps. In this way, our structured storytelling evokes the cyclical nature of action research, which invites a “look, think, act” process in multiple cycles (Stringer & Ortiz Aragón, 2021). What we learn in the first cycle informs the next. One is rarely “finished” with an action research project in one cycle.
Hoping to show you what this action research looks like in practice, we first shared a zine to illustrate elements of our collective experience, then shared individual stories. Each of these stories offers a unique view of our work together and its impact on our individual teaching practices. And since two central features of our work together are the de-isolation of stories and the request for additional perspectives, we have also shared a response to each story from one member of our group and then invited you to engage directly with each story. From an action research standpoint, our critical friends group was the locus of participation for this article. While each of our individual stories has a set of specific actions and insights resulting from our engagement with the critical friends process, this article remained focused on the inquiry process. Using a series of prompts, we have asked you to consider whether and how these stories resonate with you. If you have done this, you have started—or perhaps continued—your own process of critical inquiry and you may be wondering how to start your own critical friends group to continue this process in community with others.
In our critical friends group, we use stories as a method for critical reflection. Stories allow us to enter each other’s teaching worlds and live with the themes we encounter there. In Connie’s story, for example, we encounter themes of mindfulness and solidarity in efforts to get unstuck in the writing process. In Steve and Mark’s stories, we encounter the theme of disconnection when our intentions to teach critical awareness fall short in practice. In Annie’s story, we encounter the theme of dominant culture as it becomes revealed through white students’ uncritical questions about diversity. In Miriam and Susan’s stories, we encounter the theme of interpersonal rupture as our racialized world pierces into the classroom. But on their own, stories are not a method of action research. Yes, each group member’s story produced a next cycle of actions. But no, those actions didn’t magically appear, nor did they follow a linear problem-solution progression. Actions emerged from collaboration, often in unpredictable, nonlinear, and creative ways. In this writing, we have left those actions unstated to invite readers into the collaborative process with us. We wanted to underscore the importance of the collaborative process because stories have no life on their own but become alive through the audience. In being an audience to each other, our group found a need to cultivate dispositions toward the storytelling itself. These dispositions we call superpowers. These superpowers are simultaneously practices we engage in and capacities we are building. For example, the curiosity and openness that allows for epiphanies helps us to remain curious and open, which makes way for more epiphanies. Our other superpowers also expand through our shared practice. As we practice holding ambiguity, being mindful, being vulnerable, and persisting, we find that our capacities in each of these areas grow. We call them superpowers not because they are other-worldly—we all have these capacities within us—but because we have found it necessary to make space for these practices, which hold our group together and support our efforts to make meaningful change in our teaching. Your group may have some of these superpowers in common with ours, or it may have a different set altogether.
We are often asked by our colleagues about how we got started and how they might start their own group. We know there’s no recipe. Starting a critical friends group is like playing a game with no start space. You come in where you are. In Figure 3, we offer a rendition of our process that we hope might inform yours. How we started our critical friends group process in community
Although there is no prescribing how to create and sustain a critical friends group, the following questions will likely uncover next steps toward accomplishing this goal.
Questions to Consider • Who are your most trusted colleagues? • What would it take for you to trust a colleague in a way that you would share a dilemma? • What do you think it would take for a colleague to trust you in a way that they would share a dilemma? • What kinds of values could your group create that would establish and sustain trust? • How could your group work together to create these values? • What tools, techniques, and dispositions might support your work together?
Trust develops over time, and so too does lasting change of any kind. As Mark has shared within our group, “You can’t microwave this stuff.” So, as you consider the questions above, please also consider this one: How can you make time for regular critical friends encounters in your already cramped schedule? This, of course, is a practice question. None of us can or will do things that we haven’t made the time to do. But consider this also a bigger question: Where do you seek change in your teaching life? How badly do you want it?
If you’re anything like us, you’ll need to sit with these questions for a bit. They aren’t questions we typically ask ourselves, as faculty members, and they aren’t necessarily easy to answer. But we are not sitting still in our uncertainty. Each moment of collective reflection moves us forward and changes us in ways we could not anticipate.
Footnotes
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Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.