Teacher Narratives as Interruptive: Toward Critical Colleagueship

Recently, the fields of composition and rhetoric, English Studies, literacy studies, and education have witnessed not only a wider use of teacher narratives, but also an evolution in how they are used. Once perceived as merely “anecdotal,” teacher narratives have come to be viewed by many scholars as “critical instruments” (de Lauretis) which foster both self-reflection—allowing teachers to “connect professional learning and their practice as teachers with their ongoing development as people” (Ritchie and Wilson 21)—and social critique, by illuminating the ideologies and material conditions that shape education and by reclaiming teacher knowledge/agency from traditional, top-down educational hierarchies (see Stock, Knoblauch and Brannon, Ray).

Ritchie and Wilson credit the influence of poststructural language theory and cultural criticism for this development. Poststructuralist resistance to grand narratives and unified subjectivity, for instance, gives us tools to challenge the oft-relied upon tale of the heroic teacher waging a desperate but finally successful struggle against “the system.” Similarly, the poststructuralist notion that pedagogy involves the mediation of contending discourses, which renders any representation of it situated and partial, helps to displace the positivist notion that narratives are effective to the extent that they “capture” the “actual events” of a classroom (Luke and Gore, Gore, Knoblauch and Brannon).

Despite this appreciation of teacher narratives as negotiating contending discourses, however, we find little evidence of writers and readers treating teacher narratives themselves as contending discourses. That is, teacher narratives have rarely been placed in critical dialogue with one another. Instead, representations of teaching—much like teaching itself—tend to be treated as “private property,” the domain of a single teacher behind a closed door. Others may read teacher narratives for how they “resonate” with their own experiences, but rarely are those stories critically engaged. ¹ When teacher narratives are brought together at all, the prevailing principle of knowledge-making is accretion: each narrative simply adds to the knowledge created by others, rather than complicating or challenging it, as is typical in other forms of scholarship.

The three of us do not exempt ourselves from this critique. Although we have each taken considerable risks in representing our teaching—using nontraditional forms including the collage, the open-ended narrative, the fragment, and even a prolegomena—we have never written together about our teaching experiences. We have never put those experiences, and the words we assigned to them, in dialogue with one another. We hope to change that here. Drawing from the work of poststructuralist feminists to develop our notion of interruption, we aim both to argue for greater debate and dialogue between and among teacher narratives, and to demonstrate what this work might look like. In doing so, we hope to show how teacher narratives can be used to enact what Brian Lord calls “critical colleagueship”: ongoing, reciprocal relationships in which teachers serve as “commentators and critics” of each other’s work. According to Lord, critical colleagueship depends on “[c]reating and sustaining productive disequilibrium through self-reflection, collegial dialogue, and on-going critique” (192). Since the kind of “collective generativity” imagined here rests not upon uncritical celebration of “best practices,” but on mutual pedagogical engagement, we do not read representations of teaching for answers or closure. Instead, we read in critical dialogue, examining how the connections and tensions between narratives open new possibilities for revising our own pedagogical frameworks.

But first, we must start with a story. ²

Chris’s Narrative

It was the day after St. Patrick’s Day. I asked students in The Short Story—a sophomore-level general education course at a mid-sized university in the Northeast—to get into groups and develop a list of criteria that they might use as anthologists putting together a short story reader. I then asked them if I could record their conversations for the graduate school project I was working on. And they refused.

They refused.

I quickly retreated, laughed nervously, and told them to get to work. I picked up my notebook and pen, and began circulating, trying not to sulk. Teachers don’t...