Killam professor collects teachers' stories

Students meeting with Dr. Jean Clandinin are asked to sit in a particular way. With the student seated in a comfortable padded chair, Clandinin pulls up another chair, sitting with her back to her office's open door. This way, she says, she can focus on the student.

"Somebody has to really want my attention if they want to get hold of me when I'm with a student," she says.

Awarded a Killam professorship this year, one of the U of A's highest distinctions, Clandinin is a professional listener. She is a specialist in teacher knowledge, a subfield of educational research developing ways of understanding what teachers know and how they express that knowledge in their teaching practices.

For about the first decade of her career, Clandinin worked as a teacher, counsellor and psychologist in elementary schools. In 1978, she entered graduate school, and it was in her first course at the University of Toronto with Dr. Michael Connelly, who became her mentor and later one of her closest colleagues, that Clandinin discovered the research literature surrounding what teachers knew and taught. Teachers were represented, in researchers' eyes, "as though their practices were just applied theory," Clandinin said.

The system guaranteed, intentionally or not, that teachers would always be scapegoats for problems in the educational process. If a new curriculum was developed, or if someone came out with a new theory of how educators should teach reading, any theoretical flaws could easily be blamed on the teachers, and the administrators or academics could free themselves of responsibility.

Clandinin realized, as many researchers did in the late seventies, that the current academic view of teachers' practice didn't jive with the reality of the classroom. This was driven home in the field work Clandinin did for her doctoral studies. Having grown up in Alberta, which is relatively culturally homogenous, Clandinin was fascinated when she started working in Toronto's multicultural schools, where students came from very different backgrounds of race and class.

"When I did my first research in inner-city Toronto, I found it so interesting. How do you have white, middle-class teachers teaching new immigrants? I was fascinated by the questions there .Both the teachers and the students had such interesting stories to tell," she says.

The full set of stories that surrounds a teaching environment - from each student's upbringing to the teacher's own experiences as a student to the school's administrative structure - is what Clandinin refers to as the "professional knowledge landscape," the complete context of stories in which teaching takes place.

To arrive at this different, more complicated picture of what teachers know and how they teach, rather than simply handing a formulaic set of multiple-choice or short-answer questions to the grade-school teachers with whom she works, Clandinin lets them tell their own stories.

But this approach to discovering teacher knowledge, which falls under the rubric of "narrative inquiry," takes a lot of commitment and time, both on the part of Clandinin and the teachers she works with. "You can't just go in and say, 'Tell me your story,' Clandinin says. "If you do, (the teachers will) tell you the stories they think you want to hear or the stories that are safe, because they're often not going to tell you right away about the things they struggle with most."

Building up trust with the people whose stories she listens to is key to Clandinin's work, which has been funded since her graduate studies by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the federal funding organization for research in the humanities. "(My graduate students and I) go and live in a school for a long time, and as you live alongside somebody in the classroom, they start to tell their stories."

In some cases, Clandinin and her graduate students will spend a year or more on a single project, incorporating themselves into a classroom until they are as familiar as any other member of the class.

But the irony of the education system is that even as more and more academics are, like Clandinin, realizing the need to admit the complexities of the classroom, school administrators and government education programs, especially in Alberta, often seem bent on ignoring the real differences inherent in each teacher's and student's story.

"From 1978 to 2004, I've seen a shift in Alberta to the intense focus on test scores and achievement tests from a focus on child development and self-esteem that were more prevalent when I started to do my work," Clandinin says.

This is obviously an issue that frustrates her immensely: "If the focus is all about getting the highest test scores possible, . this is going to have a serious effect on what the teacher knows and how she approaches teaching." Rather than focus on the students' specific needs, Clandinin is saying, policy makers tend to view children as statistics, not as individual people.

Rather than succumbing to this trend, Clandinin develops ways to circumvent it in her own teaching, by incorporating ideas from her research into the instruction of her students.

Also, rather than simply teaching theory to her students, Clandinin tries to encourage students to bring their own stories into the classroom. "I try not to just respond to theoretical articles, but to talk in small groups about our own experiences in relation to research and theories."

On Tuesday afternoons, Clandinin meets with graduate students on the sixth floor of the Education South building in the Centre for Research for Teacher Education and Development, of which she is the director and sole professor. There, in a well-lit, spacious room, they gather around a large table to discuss the successes and difficulties they had in their previous week in the classrooms and in their research projects. Sometimes Clandinin will chime in with her own concerns, but often she will just sit and listen.

Seeing these young students struggle with some of the same problems she has faced in her career is an awesome experience for Clandinin, she says, revealing just how much work there is to do in this new field which she and others have carved out.

"Even with the kind of work we're doing, we can't get anywhere close to realizing how many things shape the knowledge teachers carry into the classroom," she says. "It's immense."