Telling Stories in Book Clubs: Women Teachers and Professional Development PDF
Preview Telling Stories in Book Clubs: Women Teachers and Professional Development
Telling Stories in Book Clubs Mary Kooy Telling Stories in Book Clubs Women Teachers and Professional Development ^ Sprriin ger Author: Mary Kooy Ontario Institute for Studies in Education University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada. Cover Illustration: Wilhelmina Kennedy Cover Design: Meg Bortha Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A C.I.P. Catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN 10: 0-387-33926-4 ISBN 13: 9780387339269 Printed on acid-free paper e-ISBN 10: 0-387-33927-2 e-ISBN 13: 9780387339276 Library of Congress Control Number: 2006924686 © 2006 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC All rights reserved. This work may not be translated or copied in whole or in part without the written permission of the publisher (Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, 233 Spring Street, New York, NY 10013, USA), except for brief excerpts in connection with reviews or scholarly analysis. Use in connection with any form of information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now know or hereafter developed is forbidden. The use in this publication of trade names, trademarks, service marks and similar terms, even if the are not identified as such, is not to be taken as an expression of opinion as to whether or not they are subject to proprietary rights. Printed in the United States of America. 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 21 springer.com Dedication This book is dedicated to the women teachers of the book clubs who believed in the research and through their participation, demonstrated the powers of stories to teach and transform. Book Club 1: Bridget, Lesley, Louise, and Patricia Book Club 2: Evelyn, Helen, Kerri, Liz, Lucy, Melanie, Rosemary, Sandra, and Shelly Contents Foreword ix Acknowledgements xi Women Reading, Teaching and Learning 1 The Study: Re-plotting the Stories of Teacher Development 9 Analyzing and Re-presenting the Data 25 The Teachers in the Book Clubs 29 Book Clubs: Establishing Processes and Protocols 61 New Beginnings and Telling Stories 71 Lessons of Learning and Teaching 103 "Lead Kindly Light": Teachers Learning and Leading Together 133 "Crossing Borders": Stories of Teaching, Gender, and Identity 177 The Telling Stories of Teacher Book Clubs 209 viii Contents References 225 Index 241 Foreword Sometimes we don't know. Sometimes we don't know what will happen. That's part of the mystery and pleasure of teaching. But we live in an age in which all teaching must be assessment driven. This is an age in which professional development consists of "one-shot" workshops designed to familiarize teachers with the latest package. This is an age in which education is in danger of being lost. Even at my own small liberal arts college, the pressure is on for assessment-driven teaching. Lost is the passion for learning and the desire to pass it on. The creative and exciting lesson plan must be sacrificed on the altar of assessment. However, reading this book, hearing the voices of experienced and novice teachers, I am inclined to hope. This book makes me think of my own literacy autobiography and about what has been important in my life as a student and a teacher. I think of the feminist theory reading group I joined as a new assistant professor. Those readings and those meetings saved my life. I read to save my life. This is a persistent theme in the stories of the teachers who populate this book. Despite the bureaucracy of schools, they retain their attachment to reading. And these are sensual, familial, and communal attachments. It's that that they would like to pass on to their students. When we read books important to us we want desperately to pass those books on to others. The center of education is communication around books and ideas. Communication implies community. What we encounter in this book is the formation of communities of nurture and care with books as the mediators. Just as in the classroom, there is an object between us that sustains our work in coming together. What comes through in the voices of all of these X Foreword teachers is the impulse to care which is at the heart of women's impulse to teach. This book teaches us the importance of nurturing that impulse to care. There has, over the past couple of decades, been an interest in the use of narrative in educational research. Telling stories, hearing stories, we are inclined to look at our own teaching identities. That our work as teachers is central to our identities becomes clear when we hear the stories of the teachers in this book modulate from a discussion of the text into a discussion of their own teaching lives. The text, when read in the company of others, calls us to ourselves. For all of the teachers in this book, reading has been profound in making them the women we come to know. That they are women is no small part of their experience. They read as women and they teach as women. While they recognize that, it is a hard-won and sometimes destabilizing knowledge. A male student once said to me that he preferred to take courses with women because women are "easy." One of the novice teachers in this book worries about being perceived as the ''easy" teacher. Mary Kooy quite appropriately replies, "So what?" This is the kind of impertinent question that all of these teachers learn to ask of the texts and of their practice. Mary Kooy is a gifted writer and teacher. She takes the obvious truth that we read books with other people and turns it into a compelling work of professional development. We see the communities emerge and coalesce. We see the self-reflective questioning that is at the heart of all good teaching take shape through interaction and nurturing, "Books and Brunch." The brunch is not a trivial partner in this relationship. I don't know Mary Kooy, but I would like to. Jo Anne Pagano February 2006 Acknowledgements It is a pleasure to celebrate and acknowledge the people and the research agency that supported this long and often arduous journey to the completion of this book. I received generous support from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (2000-2004). Throughout this research, I enjoyed and benefited from the participation, cooperation, and contributions of the teachers who participated in the study. They became co-researchers who continually affirmed, inspired, and encouraged the work. They taught me and provided opportunities to discuss the ongoing research. I want to particularly thank my colleague and research book club member, Dr. Lesley Shore, Assistant Professor at OISE/University of Toronto, who gave generously of her time and expertise at every stage of the creation of this manuscript. Other colleagues and friends provided inspiration, encouragement, and extremely helpful readings. Michael Connelly, Professor emeritus, OISE/University of Toronto, whose generosity in sharing his research in narrative and supporting my grant proposal, helped me shape the dream and reality of this research. Kelleen Toohey, Professor of Second Language Education at Simon Eraser University, read drafts and responded with incisive and challenging questions to guide my evolving thinking and writing. David Booth, Professor emeritus of Language Education at OISE/University of Toronto, provided unwavering encouragement and inspirational support. Each contributed invaluable insights to the research and my changing perceptions of teacher development as social and critical practice.
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