Making Choices, Seeking Difference(s)

Toward the end of 1999, just as I was completing the requirements of my honours program for the Faculty of Education, my supervisor gave me an article that she thought would appeal to me. Caught up in mixed emotions from such a rite of passage as graduation, I was uninspired at the thought of having to read more research. The article was by Carolyn Ellis (1997) and was called ‘Evocative Autoethnography: Writing Emotionally about our Lives’.

‘It’s different,’ Heather said. ‘You’ll like it. It’s your style.’

I smiled. It was nice to know I had a style.

‘She uses I frequently, and writes personally about her research, about her life.’

Over the Christmas break, as the sun shone, the article was carefully slipped into the navy coloured hard back journal I’d bought tentatively thinking it might make a good research note book for the following year. I was about to formally begin doctoral studies and submit a research proposal and ethics form, move cities, and begin my first year of teaching. Mum and Dad were having a family barbeque later that month. The weather was warmer and the daylight ran long into the evening.

‘Definite barbeque weather,’ people would say at various points during these days. Somehow, knowing family members as well as we do, I knew that Mum and Dad were intending to give me, Ryan (my partner through university) and my younger brother some news. Only half a charcoaled sausage had made its way down my throat when Mum, and Dad, put forks and knives down, and looked out, first to each other, and us. Or so I imagined. I just kept staring at my plate.

Over what was supposed to be dinner, I learned that Mum’s chronic illness (that had been a debilitating mystery for more than ten years) had come to a point where doctors had decided they could do no more.

Pause.

She wouldn’t live more than a year, they said.

The barbeque ended. The evening was somber. Time passed.

I began doctoral research, put in a research proposal and applied for ethics approval, moved into a new home in a new city with Ryan, and began my first year of teaching at White School. Life was full of personal and professional highlights.

One quiet moment, I sat down and read Ellis’ article. My decision to use my personal experience as the site of investigation for my research on beginning teaching is based on several practical reasons, as stated in Chapter 1. This article moved me. It had many layers. It was professional and personal. It was academic. It made me think, and feel. Ellis (1997) wrote:

I wanted to understand and cope with the intense emotion I felt about the sudden loss of my brother, and the excruciating pain I experienced as Gene deteriorated. I wanted to tell my stories to others because it would be therapeutic for me and evocative for them (p.126).

Ellis acknowledged that this way of working can be of therapeutic assistance to the intended audience and also the researcher. She wrote about researching her days as she watched her partner Gene slowly die, as well as the sudden death of her brother in a plane crash. In the beginning, choosing autoethnography as the methodological approach had a personal dimension. As time passed the appropriateness of this methodology for researching beginning teaching became increasingly apparent.

Early on, I saw the writer’s own experience as worthy of inquiry (Mykhalovskiy, 1997) because it would not only allow me to portray this rich, personal and individual time in a teacher’s career, but it would also help me understand the often confusing and confronting experience of my beginning teaching days, which were heavily intertwined with significant personal challenges as well. This methodology was an important choice then because it could offer others, and me, a way forward through the daze of beginning teaching, exploring and valuing the emotional and heartfelt (Ellis, 1999) qualities of the experience.

Beginning teaching is understood as an intense and difficult experience. Teacher development theories recognise that the first year of teaching is necessarily complex and confusing for the beginning teacher (Berliner, 1988; Britzman, 1991; Kagan, 1992; Manuel, 2003). I sought a methodology that would enable me to embrace such complexity in methods of data collection, interpretation and representation of my research. Choosing autoethnography then was guided by the belief that it is an appropriate means of examining the lived experience of beginning teaching.

My personal preference for this way of working was clear from the start. Beginning teaching, for me, was complex and confusing because my personal life was constantly impacting on my teaching days. Family illness, important rites of passage, and dealing with my own pressures, to ‘be the best teacher I could’, all culminated in a time of intense emotions. My first year of teaching was a tremendous mix of both personal and professional incidents, feelings and events. I sought a methodology that enabled me to make sense of this enormity, inside and outside.

Another factor influencing my choice of methodology was the credence that autoethnography gives to the emotional aspect of lived experience. Beginning teaching is an emotional experience, and autoethnography offered me a way of working that would allow me to embrace feelings in many stages of this project including the personal teaching journal entries where I wrote about how I felt. Autoethnographic approaches require the researcher to write evocatively and to

stir up feelings in the reader. Hence this allowed me to produce a written text that could evoke the strong emotions that I lived in my beginning teaching days. I sought, as Ellis did (Ellis & Bochner, 1996), to ‘be a storyteller, someone who used narrative strategies to transport readers into experiences to make them feel as well as think’ (p.18). During this research I came to believe that this was what ‘heartfelt’ autoethnography (Ellis, 1999) was about – not just describing to the reader what happened, but encouraging them to feel the emotions that I felt. In choosing to present this issue differently I strove to encourage the reader to react to my experiences by using specific textual strategies to encourage her to be moved to consider her own feelings about this issue. Seeing ‘anew’ was not just about the visual, physical, or ‘outside’ qualities of the experience such as what I did and looked like while I was doing it. I strove to capture the internal, emotional aspects of beginning teaching as well. This is important because, as identified in the introduction, such representations have been missing from previous research into beginning teaching.

Researchers working in the field of autoethnography have used multi-method approaches to data collection and analysis and produced diverse texts on diverse topics. Final reports have been presented as stories, performance texts, and poetry that evoked the researcher’s woven exploration of their own lived experiences. Through various voices and textual styles these works examine the death of close relatives, chronic illness and bodily stigmas (Ellis, 1993, 1997, 1998), Crawford, 1996), the complexity of parent and child relationships (Ellis, 2001; Brettell, 1997) exotic dancing (Ronai, 1992, 2002), eating disorders (Kiesinger, 1998; Tillman-Healy, 1996), sexual abuse (Fox, 1996), and life as an academic (Richardson, 2002). The aim of this approach is expressed consistently within the works of these researchers - to see differently, to challenge old ways of knowing, to make sense of lived, personal, emotional experiences. Freese (2006) described this as the need to see with new eyes, to re-examine our teaching experiences in order to re-discover and re-learn. She emphasised her point by referring to a Proust quotation that she had on her office door: ‘the journey of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in seeing them with new eyes’ (cited in Freese, 2006, p.100).

Seeing ‘anew’ is also an attempt to resist prevailing and predominant views. In other words, it is about resisting stereotypes. In this research, the view that I looked at resisting was the narrow portrayal that positioned beginning teaching as either a period of mere survival or a stage of teacher development. I saw myself as defending notions of complexity and richness against contemporary deficit portrayals. I was fighting for hope. Autoethnography is a form of resistance to prior ways of making sense, in that it allows the researcher to identify and critique external portrayals of their experiences and themselves. Reed-Danahay (1997) referred to it as the ‘ability to transcend everyday conceptions of self hood and social life’ (p.4). Neumann (1996) noted that autoethnography ‘matters deeply in the lives of others who find themselves portrayed not of their own making’ (p.191). This desire to ‘resist’ and ‘reclaim’ appealed to me in light of the research context.

Starting my first year of teaching, I resented feeling like a cliché. I found myself resisting the extensive and limited portrayal that existed, instead striving to be different, better, and hopeful. Regardless of whether I still fell into familiar traps, I at least wanted to do it my way, and to conduct research that would allow me to portray it my way. This work is about letting me and others speak our silences, about finding our voices, and letting us speak in meaningful ways. I wanted to ask questions of answers previously given, rather than simply ask more questions. The investigation focused on what lies ‘between’, in the cracks and crevasses of previous portrayals.

With devastating news about my mother’s health being given before my first year of teaching even began (which was later followed that October with joyful news that her condition was not in fact terminal), I knew that my personal and professional lives would not be easily separated. As I read more about teacher development during the first year of teaching, I learned that professional learning in this initial step in the career is tremendously complex (Britzman, 1991; Eilam & Poyas, 2006; Flores & Day, 2006). Crawford (1996), on the sudden and violent death of his friend, explained his autoethnographic turn in his research, stating that ‘previous ways of making meaning became obsolete’ (p.158).

As a Drama teacher I also wanted to be creative in my research. As mentioned before, Gergen & Gergen (2002) explained that in autoethnographic research ‘one’s unique voicing – complete with colloquialisms, reverberations from multiple relationships and emotional expressiveness is honored’ (p.14). Autoethnography suited me – it was my style. For a long time, I thought that I knew what the first line of my thesis would be. Hand written in that navy, hardcover journal I had slipped Ellis’ article into, it was the short but confrontational sentence that I wanted to use to pull my reader in, to capture attention, and immediately let them know that this would be no ordinary or conventional doctoral dissertation.

When I began teaching, I thought my mum was going to die.

These words were what Ellis had argued for – they were emotional and evocative. In an instant the complex world of my first year of teaching was suggested through this serious and honest sentence. I thought this was a perfect way to begin my autoethnography on beginning teaching.

I had decided.

Until I tried it out on my Dad. His steady gaze and silence unsettled me, as I realised that ‘my’ personal was ‘his’ personal too. I realised that there is no such thing as just ‘my’ story. Autoethnography is not just about me. It is about us. I looked for a different place to begin the story.

The autoethnographer risks much because ‘the self-questioning autoethnography demands is extremely difficult. So is confronting things about yourself that are less than flattering’ (Ellis & Bochner, 2000, p.738). But making the decision to conduct an autoethnography had implications for others involved, such as my family, colleagues and students that were implicitly a part of my experience of beginning teaching. I learned that the autoethnographer has the right to take her own risks, but she must also consider the risks that others may be forced to take unknowingly by becoming characters in our research confessions. Before

commencing data collection in 2000, full ethics approval was granted by the University of Tasmania’s Ethics Committee.

The many choices made throughout this research project, in relation to both the form and content, were made with care and respect for all of those involved. My aim was always to help, to contribute, to improve, for my self and others. I conducted this inquiry with the belief that autoethnography ‘provides an avenue for doing something meaningful for yourself and the world’ (Ellis & Bochner, 2000, p.738). I hoped to increase understanding about beginning teaching.

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I’m worried. How do I treat those I write about with respect, but also strive for truth about how I feel about them at the moment? To really say my truth? I need to avoid creating ‘baddies’ and ‘goodies’, and of narrowly portraying others. This is what I felt had been done to my teaching life. The ethical considerations of autoethnography are much more complex than I first anticipated. It’s not just about me.

(Writing Journal, 2003)

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