Abstract
This autoethnography describes the process of inquiry that led to the development of a series of ethnodramas that evoke teachers’ experience in the Chicago Public Schools (CPS). I discuss the methods I used to conduct a set of interviews with two groups of elementary school teachers in CPS: beginning teachers who had never worked a classroom as a full-time job and accomplished teachers who spent many years of their lives teaching students of color. I discuss the use of arts-based research methods to engage with these data, and I describe the interpretive journey I undertook as I wrote and produced ethnodramas about CPS teachers’ experience. A major dilemma for my analysis was communicating the structural inequalities that shaped the teachers’ narratives, particularly the Chicago system’s inability to create working conditions necessary to support the retention and professional development of teachers in the city’s high poverty schools. I describe how the conversation and inner dialogue generated by arts-based methods helped me recognize different patterns within the data, and inspired me to reframe my interpretation. In the conclusion, I discuss the limits of my approach as a researcher and an artist. Excerpts from two playscripts are woven throughout the article to convey the commitment that guided the teachers’ work and to evoke the social forces that shaped life in their classrooms.
Keywords
The Kingdom of God, the Pure Land, is not a place where there is no suffering.
Ethnodrama is more than a means of communicating people’s experience; theatrical performance may also be a method of interpreting data and of deepening inquiry into a particular realm of social life. Beyond offering perspectives on social issues, ethnodrama may be used to support collective analysis and build the audience’s capacity to advocate for change (Belliveau 2006; Norris 2009; Saldaña 2005). Conventional means of public research dissemination, such as the PowerPoint lecture, direct audience attention toward the investigator and filter the object of inquiry through that specific individual’s voice, words, and gestures. In contrast, ethnodrama brings the passion and conflict of life in the field into the performance space (Kazubowski-Houston 2010; Prendergast and Saxton 2013).
This autoethnography (Behar 1996; Denzin 2014; Steedman 1985) discusses my efforts to use the process of dramatizing data for performance to embark on a new direction in my research work. I describe the interpretive process I engaged to understand a set of narratives shared by twelve teachers who worked in the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) that I collected as part of my dissertation in the summer of 2004. Seven of these educators had spent at least seven years working in CPS classrooms and had received national recognition for their teaching through the National Board of Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS) assessment process (see National Research Council 2008). The other five CPS teachers were beginners who had never managed a classroom as a full-time job. The twelve teachers taught intermediate grades from third to eighth. All were asked to describe the students they taught, the lessons they were proud of, and their efforts to make a difference in their students’ lives.
My initial interpretive focus was the stories of the experienced teachers, and one major goal of my inquiry was to evoke the freedom and agency the veterans gained through their years of study and practice. I hoped to help others imagine what it might mean to devote one’s adult life to teaching students of color, and I wished to evoke the feeling of a good day in the classroom, as narrated by educators who made teaching their lifework.
In the ethnodramas I built from these data, I mostly failed to achieve this goal. As I will discuss, I was not able to communicate the exhilaration and energy of a good day teaching in CPS. The process of writing and, eventually, performing different scripts drew my attention instead to moments when teachers’ choices were limited and activities in their schools were channeled in ways they opposed. I found the teachers’ stories of performing within and against the social structures that shaped events in their workplaces to be the interviews’ most powerful dramatic content.
The stories I discuss in this article describe events that occurred within a few miles of one of Chicago’s major research universities. The broad patterns of events the teachers narrated have been investigated by researchers with deep ties to Chicago’s schools (see, e.g., Allensworth, Ponisciak, and Mazzeo 2009; Bryk et al. 2010). If it is possible to use research to pierce through the surface structures of common events and see the mass patterns that organize everyday life, there are few research sites more rife with possibility than CPS. There are also few places where the arguments are fiercer, and the meanings of events are more contested. The history of CPS is one of conflict from the system’s beginnings to the present day (cf. Herrick 1971; Lipman 2011; Payne 2005).
In the following pages, I join Conquergood (2002) and Madison and Hamera (2006) and follow three crisscrossing lines of analysis. I describe my work as the product of a systematic research process, the skilled application of artistic methods, and a commitment to social justice. I share stories of my life as a member of the academic community in order to discuss the practice of qualitative research and to communicate findings I gained through inquiry. I write about my experience to help people understand, in the words of Stewart (2008), “the sense of being in something—something grand, something degraded, something dumb—whatever” (p. 81).
Positioning
I am a Caucasian, Episcopalian man who grew up in an affluent suburb near Chicago. As I have written (Vanover and Saldaña 2005), I entered CPS as a substitute teacher to make money during the recession at the beginning of the 1990s, and was inspired to become a licensed teacher. I remained in CPS for eight years, until I left Chicago after I received a research fellowship from an out of state university.
I left the classroom only when the work pushed me to the limits of my physical and mental health. In my last years in CPS, I had episodes of bronchitis and sinusitis approximately four times a year. When winter came, I got sick. I could not walk in the rain or travel in a plane without becoming ill. I had friends who spent forty years in the city’s schools, but that was not going to be the story of my life.
Once I left CPS, I approached my academic work as a calling. My goal was to learn as much as I could from my studies and give something back to public education. In the early years of my program, much of what I learned was the narrow limits of what I understood as a teacher. There were choices I made during my time in the system I would not have made if I had better knowledge of teaching and students (Banks and Banks 2013; Lampert 2010). It was difficult to reconcile the visions of the world I had in CPS with the possibilities for better practice I learned in my PhD studies.
When I left Chicago to start my fellowship, my girlfriend gave me a book bag. When I took it to my classes that fall, I found a funeral procession card had found its way into a plastic folder that sat in one of the bag’s pockets. I can no longer remember when or why I put the card into the folder and the folder into the book bag. The card was from the final procession of a teacher who worked at the high school where I had spent most of my eight years in CPS. The teacher died of cancer. She had spent a portion of the last year of her life taking breaks in the library I co-managed with another CPS teacher. The two of us from the library drove out to the teacher’s memorial on what turned out to be the first day of school of my last year at CPS. After the remembrance, I put the printed card with the dead teacher’s last name on it on the dashboard of my friend’s car, and we followed the line of vehicles to the cemetery to stand by the graveside. The teacher’s family said their goodbyes. After we drove back from the cemetery, I picked the funeral card up and took it with me. I am not sure what happened to the card during that last year teaching at CPS, but I know I spent my first year of my university fellowship being surprised each time I unzipped different sections of my book bag, perhaps while looking for my keys, and noticed the card in the plastic folder.
I also spent the first year of my PhD studies learning it was not appropriate for me to be wandering campus with a funeral card in my backpack; I was not the person whose mission it was to carry that weight. The book bag and the funeral card were stolen at the end of my first year as a PhD student. It was difficult to tell my girlfriend the bag had been taken, but the loss was freeing.
Academic life was good for me. I did not need much money; I wrote all day and went to the gym and church on weekends. Sometimes I took the train back to Chicago and saw my girlfriend. Compared to my life at CPS, I was almost never sick. Once I latched on to the policy projects that supported my studies, I flew across the country to interview school leaders and district central office staff. Sometimes, after running all afternoon, I walked in the rain. I had mixed emotions about finding myself alive and healthy at a research university, but I felt that by focusing on the path in front of me I would journey to a place that might allow me to make a difference. I did not feel disconnected or, to use a term from a text by Berger, Berger, and Kellner (1974) I read extensively at that time, homeless. That would come later. When I was a PhD student I spent my days learning about teachers and schools; coding interviews and writing about school reform; going to the gym and getting stronger.
A Systematic Research Process
In the summer of 2004, I returned to Chicago to collect data for my dissertation, as discussed in the previous pages. Nine of the teachers I interviewed were White, three were African American, and all were female. I interviewed each teacher four times using semi-structured narrative interviewing techniques based on the work of Benner, Tanner, and Chelsea (1996) and Weiss (1995). All teachers were paid before each interview, and all understood their stories would be analyzed over an extended time period. Teaching in Chicago classrooms produced such strong, deeply felt memories almost all of the forty-eight interview sessions lasted for at least ninety minutes. The initial round of interviews began the day after CPS classes had ended in June. The first question in the interview guide was “Please tell a story about a student, or a group of students, for whom your teaching made a difference” (see Vanover 2014a, for the original interview guides and other materials).
By asking the experienced and novice teachers the same guiding questions at the same time of year, I hoped to collect stories that would help me see how the accomplished teachers’ years of practice shaped their stories of their work. As others have written (Brunner 1986; Fowler 2006; Van Maanen 1988), the stories teachers tell are maps of the worlds they and their students create. In a sense, I hoped to collate the accounts of the teachers I interviewed into a detailed atlas about life in the city’s schools.
Whatever I expected to happen during the interview sessions, I was not prepared for the first beginning teacher I interviewed, Halsted Hoyne (pseudonym), to say what she said. I had sent each teacher the interview guides and other study materials in advance, and I had asked each teacher to prepare for their initial interview by writing a story about a student for whom they had made a difference. When the session began, I asked each teacher to read this story aloud and to tell me more about this student and the other members of her class. Halsted began the interview by reading the story she wrote about an African American student named Arthur (pseudonym):
HALSTED reads from her notebook;
Arthur is a special child. Arthur is a very small adorable boy who was born addicted to crack. He was adopted by a wonderful man who then got very sick and died while Arthur was in my room. The first week of school, I broke up about 10 to 20 fights involving Arthur—with another little boy. And, in fact, they were the two smallest boys in my class. I, then, figured out that these two were mortal enemies and should never be in the same room together. The other boy was moved to another room, and I was left with Arthur.
1
In the first three months of school, Arthur threatened, hit, and bit Halsted. The child disrupted Halsted’s classroom, he argued with her other students, and, late that fall, Arthur invited the first year teacher to his father’s funeral.
As I listened to Halsted’s story, and then transcribed and coded the audio files from her narratives, I believe I failed to recognize a critical issue. I now believe Halsted’s relationship with Arthur is not best understood as a story. Teachers’ stories create meaning and coherence (Fowler 2006), and while Halsted’s relationship with Arthur had a beginning and an end, most of the events that happened in between occurred in breakdown. Classroom management problems have been discussed extensively in the literature of education research; I use the term breakdown throughout this article to connect the teachers’ experience to social theory that emphasizes the challenges of the performances of everyday life (e.g., Fabian 1990; Goffman 1959; Heritage 1984). Benner, Hooper-Kyriakidis, and Stannard (1999) describe breakdown as “[work] situations that unfold in undesirable ways as the result of team members’ performance, the unavailability of essential resources, and/or system problems” (p. 440). Breakdown can be managed by the heroic efforts of professionals and other actors, but in environments shaped by recurring system failures, daily heroic efforts are unsustainable.
A couple of lines Halsted voiced during her third interview communicate the confusion and fragmentation that ran through the hundreds of stories she told about Arthur and other students in her classroom:
And then it kind of gets blurry for me, but I just remember at one point—like I think I was telling you about Arthur and the other little kid that were fighting all day. I mean, at one point, just a big ol’ pile of kids—just a big fight, and I just remember standing there going, “What am I going to do?”
Such experience might be communicated through poetry (Denzin 2001; Prendergast, Leggo, and Sameshima 2009), but not through a plotted representation of experience. In Halsted’s stories, time passes, events follow one after another, sometimes things become more stable, and sometimes the moment breaks apart. Eleven years later, I believe what matters most from Halsted’s narratives is not what she said, but the question Halsted spent nine months asking over and over, “What am I going to do?”
When I looked across the interviews as I coded the material for my dissertation, I found each of the five beginning teachers had difficulty negotiating their vulnerability and the classroom’s “hostile space” (Biklen 1995; Kelchtermans 2005). Four of the five beginners were never able to fully get control over their classrooms, and, in their account, lessons moved roughly, with frequent arguments and acts of student resistance. I sensed the beginners felt humiliated by the conflict they described and were ashamed by the chaos that erupted in their classrooms.
My research design allowed me to describe, but, in a sense, avoid rich engagement with these narratives. Instead of deeply investigating the beginners’ work, I focused on the accomplished teachers’ stories. My goal was to take a positive stance. I had not found language that communicated the difficulty of teachers’ labor (Cole and Knowles 1993; Price, Mansfield, and McConney 2012) and was fair to children whose needs were not met.
Creating a Story and Using Ethnodrama to Communicate What I Learned
Along with coding and other forms of analysis, I used the practice of arts-based research (Brown, Carducci, and Kuby 2014; Chilton and Leavy 2014; Goldstein 2012) to reflect on my work as a researcher and to communicate life in Chicago classrooms. As with other forms of qualitative research (Cerwonka and Malkki 2008; Dutton 2003), this practice was deeply relational. My ethnodramas were shaped by teachers and friends as well as by people I sought out and people I met by chance.
My first ethnodrama began a class assignment for Ruth Behar’s ethnographic writing class. I wrote about my struggle to become a teacher in CPS and, in my writing, I worked to use words to capture the voices, sights, and smells I experienced during that journey. I read a narrative I wrote for Ruth’s class as part of a symposium a group of Ph.D. students and I created for the American Educational Research Association (AERA) (Spring et al. 2002). The session shaped my vision of how qualitative research might best communicate to an audience. Each essay built on the next, and when I read my narrative, words and memories came to life. The dialogue after the papers were read was energizing and people came up to talk with me after the session. One of the persons I talked to was Johnny Saldaña, and he asked my permission to develop the narrative I read into a one-person show. I told Johnny I would be happy to develop the show, as long as I might play myself.
Before I wrote that narrative and worked to put up the ethnodrama we eventually titled “Chalkboard Concerto,” I had experience, but I did not have a story. I had worked in CPS for eight years and had lived through thousands of critical incidents, but I did not understand how to communicate those events. I could tell stories that made people angry. I could tell stories that made people laugh. I could not tell stories that touched people’s hearts. “Chalkboard Concerto” mattered, in my opinion, because of the portrait of one of my mentor teachers that Johnny and I threaded into the center of the show. Mr. Johnson (pseudonym) had wandered into the school where I had met him in the same way I had wandered into that building—we both worked as substitutes to make extra money and CPS’s Substitute Center sent us to the school.
The show Johnny and I created was not the same experience as being twenty-seven years old and grabbing a cup of coffee at the start of a forty-five-minute break in a large, high-poverty elementary school located in an African American neighborhood in Chicago and walking outside, behind the cafeteria, to smoke a cigarette with Mr. Johnson and the other substitutes. It’s beyond my capacity to render the combination of laughter, relief, and exhaustion that shaped those moments in time, but when I performed the show it felt good to help others imagine that landscape. Mr. Johnson was black and gay and handsome. He had gone to Kindergarten or first grade in the building where we worked as substitutes. It was not possible for me to understand the kids in that school in the way Mr. Johnson understood them, and I could never matter to them in the way he came to matter. Our connection acted as a bridge, and it helped me imagine new possibilities for myself. To build on an idea of Connelly and Clandinin (1999), Mr. Johnson gave me a story I tried to live by. He gave me hope, and he helped me imagine what type of person I might become if I could work hard enough, plan carefully enough, and perform skillfully enough to manage the daily challenges of classroom teaching.
Mr. Johnson spent the rest of his life working at that school. He became certified as a teacher. The kids loved him, the teachers honored him, and Mr. Johnson gave them everything he had. This was not a wise decision. Mr. Johnson was HIV positive, and the virus, eventually, overwhelmed his resistance. He died a couple of months before the protease inhibitors and the other drugs transformed AIDS from a fatal illness to a chronic condition.
The character I evoked on stage was constructed from memories of Mr. Johnson I had held onto as I made my way through CPS. Mr. Johnson’s death was a source of trauma for me, and I had difficulty making sense of those memories. Some of the emotional energy that came from my efforts to come to terms with his loss animated the second show I wrote and produced. At about the same time Johnny and I began to develop “Chalkboard Concerto,” I interviewed Anise Arcova (pseudonym), a committed high school teacher, as part of the pilot interviews for my dissertation. During our second interview, Anise brought a pile of letters from her previous year’s class to the coffee shop where our talk was scheduled. She read each letter into the microphone and talked about each of her students. Once she stopped talking about the students who wrote the letters, Anise told me about an incident that had happened a few days before the interview session. A former student had gotten high and drunk with his friends, and then got into a car crash that killed four other boys who had attended Anise’s school. Her student was the only person who survived the crash. Anise said she was the only person who called the boy in prison, and one of the few adults who stood by his side: his parents had disowned him when he began dealing drugs and joined a gang.
“Teaching the Power of the Word” became a meditation on the emotional cost of classroom teaching. Anise was alone. She portrayed herself as almost completely disconnected from her school’s administration and most of its faculty. Teaching was Anise’s lifework, and the practice gave her so much emotional energy there were weeks she hardly slept. There was always more to do and more to think about.
I thought our production with its photographs and music did a good job of evoking Anise’s spirit. When I organized the script into an article, the piece was rejected at the first set of journals I submitted it to for a reason I did not expect. The reviewers felt uncomfortable with Anise’s anger and her solitude. One editor told me he was looking for plays that described how teachers worked together as a community. I believe it was only after people in education became more concerned about how students were criminalized (Alexander 2012; Giroux 2009) that there was enough interest to allow Anise’s story to come to light. The play was published almost nine years after our first productions along with a poem about Anise by one of my friends from Ruth’s class (see Vanover 2014b and Brown 2014).
In some ways, I failed to follow up what I learned from those performances. The coding I created to interpret the teachers’ narratives in my non-arts-based work allowed me to tell a clear story. The accomplished, veteran teachers described more generative environments than the beginners. I believe few people would wish their children to attend the classrooms the beginners described. The narratives of the veteran teachers, in contrast, communicated what I felt was a powerful vision of expertise, if a vision that was, in many ways, quite humble. As Benner, Hooper-Kyriakidis, and Stannard (1999) and Benner, Tanner, and Chelsea (1996) also found in their qualitative studies of excellent nurses in critical care units, the accomplished teachers I interviewed took their expertise for granted: complex instructional maneuvers and demanding classroom choreographies were narrated as ordinary events.
Coding was a useful way of highlighting the differences between the two groups’ stories. Coding also provided a way for me to avoid engaging with the breakdown that shattered across the beginners’ narratives.
After I finished the script for “Teaching the Power of the Word,” in 2005, I wrote versions of five different ethnodramas. It took almost four years to put up a new show, and two more years to create something I believe mattered. The first four shows were attempts to communicate ideas I worked out in my dissertation. All these ethnodramas pulled materials from multiple teachers’ interviews and attempted to help audience members see teaching in depth. The first two of these ethnodramas only existed as scripts in my computer; they were never staged. It was not easy to have proposals rejected and to walk away from the first script and then the second, but I had a lot going on. Panic had not yet set in. I felt that my efforts were a worthwhile way to investigate the interviews I collected and to experiment with the data (Feldman 1994, 2005).
In the summer of 2008, I won a fellowship to complete my dissertation. I used some of this time and money to put together a new ethnodrama. Much of the material I dramatized was excerpted as part of my thesis, and the script did not take a huge amount of time to build. The show evoked six different teachers’ experience: three beginners and three accomplished veterans. I was able to find a local director who recruited actors to read the different parts. The resulting ethnodrama was good, but not great. The performances were interesting, but not riveting. The stories the actors performed created a meaningful collage, but the individual stories did not draw to a climax, and the show did not generate the emotional energy I felt was integral to communicating the dynamics of life in classrooms.
What was powerful, however, was the dialogue the show created (Donmoyer and Donmoyer 1995; Madison and Hamera 2006). I had been away from performing for four years. In the conversations I had with the director, the actors, the audience, and, of course, myself, I felt a small homecoming. I found myself returning to the concerns I expressed in the original narrative I had written for Ruth Behar’s class: the importance of understanding teaching as a practice enmeshed in a crowded and sometimes hostile space. In these conversations, beginning teacher Halsted Hoyne’s stories stood out. The commitment with which Halsted discussed her teaching and the honesty with which she discussed her mistakes caught the audience’s attention.
My major reflection after putting up that show was to organize the revised script around Halsted’s experience and to use the other teachers’ voices to provide contrast for her narrative. When Halsted told a story about the beginning of the year, I paired her narrative with an accomplished teacher’s description of the first day of school. When Halsted told stories about her students, the other teachers on stage shared stories about the young people in their classrooms. I envisioned the show as a piece of music, and I layered stories from different interviews to create a sense of counterpoint. The show was never performed.
Breaking the Frame
I completed my PhD in the spring of 2009, and I started as an assistant professor in a new university in Florida, two thousand miles from the places I had called home. It was no longer possible for me to get on a train and see friends and family in Chicago. I carved out time in the mornings to write about the educators I interviewed in CPS, and during the afternoons I worked on two policy projects. At night, I taught teachers in my university’s educational leadership program.
I work up each morning. I put the kettle on. I made tea. I did what I thought I was supposed to do now I had finished my PhD. I tried to organize my dissertation material into non-arts-based research I would publish in peer-reviewed journals. Slowly, but surely, as I carefully and methodically wrote up these papers, disaster struck. I did not understand how to tell the teachers’ stories in short papers. I did not know where to focus or how to cut the material. I wrote and wrote and found myself unable to communicate. I began to panic. Panic took a lot of time. Panic did not seem to help me write any better.
After two years spent in this manner I was close to collapse. There were times I viewed my faith in the purpose of my work as what Bourdieu (1990) might describe as a form of enchantment: a comforting illusion that made it difficult for me to honestly assess my situation. Believing in the purpose of my work did not make me believe it was excellent.
In 2011, I went back to the script I had revised after that single performance in 2009, mostly because I did not know what else to do. I hoped the dialogue generated from putting up a new show might clean the rust off my writing and help me see the teachers’ interviews in a new light. My writing had become so hackneyed I decided I had to do something to change my approach, even if what I wrote might not be accepted for my tenure portfolio. I hated the sound of my voice.
The university I worked for was small and had no theatre department. I decided to go back to my former connections to find people to help me put up a show. It took a couple of false starts, but, eventually, I was able to find a director who had seen one of the later performances of “Chalkboard Concerto.” The director agreed to help me put up a workshop production of the script at the International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry (ICQI) in May of 2012. She taught near where the Congress was held, and her idea was to use her students to put up the initial performance, and then recruit graduate students to stage the show at other conferences.
I had spent two years working with the teachers in my university’s educational leadership program, and my discussions and relationships with my students reconnected me to the classroom. As I looked over Halsted’s transcripts for the new show, the first year teacher’s stories became more troubling than I remembered them to be. I continued to connect to the love and caring that animated Halsted’s schoolwork, but as I read her transcripts I began to feel the same shock I felt during her first interview. It became difficult to maintain the idea that breaking up ten to twenty fights during one’s first week on the job was part of a normal career development process and just another example, in the words of Le Maister and Pare (2010), of a beginning teacher’s struggle to survive. Halsted said she had been assigned a third-grade classroom with sixteen boys, five girls, and approximately one-third of these students had not passed their CPS high stakes exams the previous year. Halsted said she believed it was likely her administration had intentionally loaded her classroom to give the other third-grade teachers an easier year on the job. When I discussed Halsted’s case with a focus group of veteran teachers, they said such assignments were common in CPS.
Throughout Halsted’s first year teaching, children acted out and she struggled to create order. Children argued. They refused to do their schoolwork. Sometimes, boys hit each other. Time passed, and breakdown continued. Every day brought more challenges. Toward the end of her third interview, Halsted told me about how she walked into her principal’s office the first week of school, talked with her for a couple of minutes, and began to sob. The principal first gave Halsted a tissue to dry her eyes and then gave her a gift. Halsted described the gift with these words:
[The school was supposed to get] these clocks and timers, but we hadn’t gotten them yet, but she had suggested—she gave me hers. So big of her. [The principal] gave me hers, and she said, “I think you’re going to find if you start timing them doing things, you’re going to be able to keep them on task more.” And that was true. So, at the time, I thought it was ridiculous, but I did try it, and it did work. How would you time them? For things like lining up, I’d say, “Ok, I’m going to give you two minutes to line up and in two minutes when this clock goes off, we need to be done lining up,” or “I’m going to set the clock for ten minutes. You have ten minutes for the washroom,” and then I would bring it down to like eight and just kind of make it a challenge. And it has a thing so you could put it on the overhead so they could watch the time, too, and they loved—like if I let one of them hold it, it was like they loved looking at the timer.
In Halsted’s account, this gift helped create a small amount of order, but the story might also be read against the grain: the text vividly illustrates how much instructional time Halsted’s students lost because of the breakdown in their classroom. To me, the most troubling detail was that the principal who comforted Halsted in her office was probably the same person who had assigned the beginning teacher a classroom filled with some of that grade’s most challenging students: including Arthur, a boy whose father was dying.
As I read the transcripts, I began to view Halsted’s story from an organizational and policy frame (Darling-Hammond and Sykes 2003; Ingersoll 2001; Johnson, Kraft, and Papay 2012). Research is fairly definitive that one of the most important initiatives committed district leaders may undertake to improve achievement of poor and minority students is to create the incentives and positive working conditions necessary to draw skillful and talented teachers to the district’s high poverty schools (Darling-Hammond 2010; B. A. Jacob 2007). However, such reforms had not been enacted when Halsted began her teaching career, and Halsted and her students might be seen as collateral damage from CPS management’s inability to create a system that reliably supported the growth and development of professionals who serve vulnerable children and youth. Rather than understand Halsted’s actions through a frame that views her as a committed professional acting in response to a calling, one might instead view Halsted, to use language connected to the history and culture of Chicago, as a mark and a sucker.
Like my friend Mr. Johnson, Halsted was the type of sucker who taught in the CPS elementary schools most teachers left (Allensworth, Ponisciak, and Mazzeo 2009). Halsted was naïve enough to accept a job offer to teach in a large, African American school that had been put on probation by CPS management for low student achievement. It did not take a PhD from the University of Chicago to predict that she would leave that building, along with nine of the ten other beginning teachers who started with her in the fall of 2003. Halsted was unusual because, as she told me in 2008, during her member-check, she taught in that school for three years, while most of the other beginning teachers did not finish out their first semester in CPS. Halsted’s narrative thus might be best viewed as an example of the dysfunction and injustice perpetrated by her school system, rather than as a description of an individual’s efforts to make a difference. Halsted’s voice and the particular events she relayed were an epiphenomenon of this continually reproducing social structure; her agency mattered less than the structure’s central tendencies.
In 2011, I did not wish to communicate such a view. Reframing is a complex and emotionally challenging process (Locke, Golden-Biddle, and Feldman 2008). I deeply admired Halsted’s commitment and caring, but I did not know what to say about her. Doubt may be generative, but it also takes time and energy. I had so many ideas and questions, I drove the director crazy, and she had volunteered to work with me to develop the play for ICQI.
The director and I ended up scrapping the script we proposed. The group show we had envisioned, with roles for both teachers and students, was beyond our capacity. Instead, in the spring of 2012, we wrote a play about our failure to communicate.
The most unexpected part of the talkback after our performance at ICQI was how strongly the audience responded to our description of failure. In the New York City schools, a teacher in the audience told us, failure is not permitted. Students are retained if they do not reach the system’s targets. Teachers lose their jobs if their students’ test scores are too low. No one is allowed to imagine anything less than 100 percent success. Other people in the audience built on that theme. Teachers were asked to do more than change the world; they were required to shoulder the blame for its problems. There was so much pressure to meet system benchmarks, many educators no longer spoke honestly during grade level and staff development meetings.
The director went back to her life in theatre. After seeing friends and family in Chicago after the conference, I went home to Florida and tried to figure out what to do next.
The Skilled and Intentional Application of Artistic Methods
Before the show at ICQI, when I talked to people about Halsted, the story I told was plotted around her work taking care of Arthur and other students in her classroom. Certainly, Halsted’s story did not end with the events she described at the end of her fourth interview. It was not until that final interview session that Halsted said she informed the family members of sixteen of her twenty-one third-grade students their child had not passed his or her CPS high stakes exam, some for the second time or third time. These students would be required to repeat third grade, unless they passed the test after attending mandatory summer school (for details of this policy, see Anagnostopoulos 2006; R. T. Jacob, Stone, and Roderick 2004). I did not tell people, as I do now, that Halsted spent her first year in the classroom making time for failure. The reward for surviving in the classroom she was assigned to teach in September of 2003 was the task of flunking most of her students in June of 2004.
I found my way when I committed to evoking the incoherence and trauma I now read into her narrative. Halsted began her career in CPS as substitute. She subbed in the system during the day and worked as an actor at night. One winter, her commitment to teaching changed when she took a long term substitute position in a special education school located near a Buddhist temple. Halsted started going to the temple for yoga and meditation classes. In her interviews, she credited Buddhist practice for inspiring her to go back to school and become a teacher. She realized she did not need to be a movie star to lead a noble life. Halsted woke up before dawn to mediate every morning during her first year as a teacher in CPS.
I began to imagine Halsted’s experience as a parable. I started reading books on Buddhism and focused on Thich Nhat Hanh’s writings, especially his monograph, You are Here, to see if I might absorb and communicate the sacred quality of her story (Hanh 2012). I tried to read a couple of pages to keep my mind focused as I prepared my classes, graded papers, and engaged in other university work. Before I went to sleep, and when I woke in the middle of the night, I would go back to particular passages in Hanh’s books, sometimes many times. I read the text and imagined Halsted waking up, and saying a brief prayer as she prepared for school, “Breathing in, I know I am here.” I saw her walk through her school’s parking lot as dawn lit up the building’s walls and windows, “Breathing out, I know I am here.” I saw Halsted walking down the school’s hallways with her students, “Breathing in, I know I have arrived.” I saw Halsted walking towards her classroom door, “Breathing out, I know I have arrived.”
I also started reading and re-reading the classic Chinese poet, Du Fu. Something in his voice and his images appealed to me.
a very long journey all of it walking when we met people on the road we felt ashamed now and then birds sang in the ravines no one was headed in the opposite direction my silly little daughter bit me in her hunger afraid that her crying might attract tigers I held her mouth against my chest she wriggled free and cried louder my son acted as if he knew what it was all about but he kept trying to eat the bitter plums on the roadside trees. (Young 2008, 77)
The poems connected me to Halsted’s experience in a different way than her transcripts. Du Fu loved every moment of his life including those that brought him shame. I would read his poems over and over. His words helped me see the poetry in Halsted’s storytelling and connect to the awareness that animated the hundreds of stories Halsted shared about her work.
In the summer of 2012, I put the kettle on. I made tea. I sat in front of my computer. I made a new set of copies of Halsted’s transcripts and put them into a new electronic folder. Whatever collaborators I had from my time in Chicago had moved on to other things. I had to figure things out on my own or start another project. This time, when I read the data, I tried to let Halsted be herself.
I played with the transcripts for a couple of days. Eventually, I copied the most powerful stories and put those texts into a new Microsoft Word document. I then began to read through this material, and each time I read a passage, I deleted what was not fully alive. Once I found the stories with the most life, I cut the text word by word and line by line to compress the data for performance (Prendergast, Leggo, and Sameshima 2009; Saldaña 2002, 2011). Time was passing. I did not know where I was going, but I liked the jagged quality of the verbatim transcriptions and the way Halsted’s words transformed into rich, primary language when I read them aloud.
I began to envision the performance as a kind of data analysis session, and I organized it out of routines that had been used to support dialogue in a wide range of school reform settings (see MacDonald et al. 2007; National School Reform Faculty, n.d.). I decided to start the show by describing the research issues connected to Halsted’s experience. After this short talk, I would give the audience a few of the core texts I had cut from Halsted’s interviews, divide people into small groups, and ask them to read those stories and ask questions about that material. This activity solved, to some extent, one of the major challenges I had identified from the two previous ethnodramas. The audience did not enter the performance space with the background necessary to understand the teachers’ words in the way I had learned to understand their stories. Rather than using stagecraft to bridge those landscapes, I decided to ask the audience to enter Halsted’s world by reading samples of the verbatim narratives that made up the script. Once I had introduced Halsted’s story in this manner, an actor playing Halsted and an actor playing the interviewer performed the most powerful texts. The show did not end when the actors finished their lines. Dialogue would continue after the actors finished speaking. I hoped the audiences’ conversations would become a critical part of the performance event.
This organizational structure had an important benefit. It freed me to work independently. I did not need to find professional actors to memorize a script; all I needed to put up a show was two people who might read the compressed transcripts off the page. I could act as my own producer. I started writing a proposal and calling my friends and pulled together a symposium for the Ethnography in Education Research Forum at the University of Pennsylvania.
“What Does It Mean to Work in a System That Fails You and Your Kids?” (“System Failure”)
When the proposal was accepted, I staged a workshop performance in November of 2012 in the city where I received my PhD. One of my friends, Jennifer Jean Smith, volunteered to play Halsted. I was able to get the Canterbury House Episcopal mission to donate the use of their rehearsal and performance space.
The performance space at Canterbury House was used for the Sunday jazz services I had attended as a graduate student. In the musician’s section, there was a large gong which was rung during prayers (see Hamilton and Rush 2008). I decided to ring the gong and ask the audience to read a short prayer at the start and end of Jennifer’s performance to emphasize spiritual quality of Halsted’s narrative. Halsted had begun work at CPS in response to a calling. I rang the gong and read the prayers because I wished the audience to move beyond viewing the ethnodrama as a site for discussing critical social issues and understand Halsted’s narrative as an attempt to look deeply into suffering.
I cooked a meal for the audience to eat after the show was over to make more time for dialogue. As ten to fifteen people took their seats, I passed out the texts from the interviews and then shared my introduction. The audience got into a lively discussion about the texts and then something happened when I rang the gong and people, somewhat uncomfortably, read the opening prayer. Jennifer read the script. I sat in the audience. Halsted’s words came alive on stage. One story followed the next. Each incident built on the events narrated in the previous texts. The audience felt the beginning teacher’s commitment and her pain. After the performance ended, people ate and talked about the ethnodrama for almost an hour.
In December of 2012, when I went back to Halsted’s transcripts after that preview performance, I realized I could do more by doing less. I did not need to rearrange or alter Halsted’s stories. By refusing to make any changes beyond deleting her words, I unearthed a nonlinear, story structure. Over the course of her four interviews, Halsted might describe the same series of events three or four times. I found that by leaving those repetitions alone, and allowing the different versions of these events to remain in the script in the order they were voiced, the feelings the beginning teacher evoked grew stronger and more compelling. Each repetition might resonate with Halsted’s previous stories to create a deeper rendering of her life history.
Halsted was such a strong storyteller, I worried the audience might connect so deeply with her experience they might fail to recognize the ways her struggles impacted her students. I decided to ring the meditation gong I had bought to sound for the prayers during that began and concluded the performance at the start of the third and last major section of the ethnodrama: the gong would ring when the actor playing Halsted told the interviewer how she had broke down in tears in her principal’s office after her first week in CPS. I decided to continue to sound the gong through Halsted’s discussion of how her Buddhist practice influenced her decision to teach and throughout her story of how she ended the school year by flunking sixteen of her twenty-one students. The idea was to break the spell of Halsted’s narrative, and use Brechtian theatre techniques (cf. Claycomb 2007; Solga 2003) to push people to distance themselves from the beginning teacher’s stories in real time, beginning with the moment the actor who read the script told the story about the afternoon Halsted’s principal gave her a timer.
At the Penn Ethnography Forum performance, in February 2013, the questions audience members shared before the actors performed the interview were written on a chalkboard that sat behind the table where the actors read the script (see Figure 1). Everything moved as planned, and at the conclusion of the show the room was filled with a contradictory set of emotions. Many audience members were either teacher educators or teachers in the Philadelphia public schools, and for them I felt the breakdown in Halsted’s classroom had a visceral quality. The teachers said they had seen similar events to those Halsted described, but I don’t believe they had many opportunities to talk about those aspects of their job. Failure was not a focus of their school system’s job-embedded professional development.
Alexandra Miletta and Brandi Weekley performing “System Failure” at the 2013 Ethnography in Education Research Forum, University of Pennsylvania.
All the comments about the artistic quality of the show were positive. No one complained about my introduction or the gong or the prayers or the fact the actors read from script. The friends who helped me put up the performance felt good about it. All of them volunteered to help me put up another show the next year. They believed in the work.
The only negative comments I received came from audience members concerned Halsted’s stories were too powerful. These audience members worried new teachers might be overwhelmed by the pain evoked in the ethnodrama or, despite my efforts, people might understand Halsted’s stories uncritically, and ignore the suffering caused by the new teacher’s inability to manage her class. Other audience members spoke passionately about how difficult it was to listen to Halsted describe the chaos in her classroom and to imagine how the beginning teacher’s lack of experience negatively influenced her students’ development. Thus, the complaint was not that audience members were unable to connect with a show where the performers sat at a table and read from verbatim transcripts, but that I was unable to create enough distance, and had failed to push audience members to dig deeply into the storyline.
This was the fifth script I had written since writing “Teaching the Power of the Word” in 2005, and it was the first of those shows I liked. I know there are a variety of systems for evaluating arts-based research (e.g., Barone and Eisner 2011; Cole and Knowles 2011; Siegesmund 2014), but I don’t think there is any substitute for putting the work up and believing in it. The many characteristics described in those systems are important, but, for the type of work I do, those qualities do not matter if one does not believe enough in the project to risk putting it up a second and third time. Jennifer Jean Smith has worked with me to perform Halsted’s story five times (see Figure 2).
Jennifer Jean Smith as Halsted Hoyne at the Ford School of Public Policy, University of Michigan.
Working within the Form
In a moment of exuberance after I organized “System Failure’s” initial performance at Canterbury House, I pulled together a different group of colleagues to pull together a second show for ICQI that shared the story of one of the accomplished teachers from the original study I had conducted in Chicago. I chose an African American educator, Ohio Ontario (pseudonym) who taught a similar grade in CPS, and who also shared vivid stories of her work during her four interviews. I created a new electronic folder in my laptop’s hard drive, copied the teacher’s transcripts, and began to look for what mattered. There were puzzles and surprises as I compressed the text for performance, but the show emerged without much difficulty.
Similar to “System Failure,” I unearthed a nonlinear story structure. I realized that by following the prompts in the interview guide (see Vanover 2014a) and asking Ohio how she had made a difference with her students, Ohio’s interview began at what I now understood to be the end of the story. The year before our interview sessions, Ohio had transferred to a new school. When she discussed her work in this building, Ohio shared beautiful narratives of culturally responsive teaching practices (Gay 2000). The relationships Ohio developed with her students were beyond my ability to develop when I was a teacher and, in my view, beyond the grasp of most of the people I knew in CPS.
Ohio was able to act as an othermother (Collins 1999). She taught Black girls to read and write who had been flunked two or three times in CPS careers. She taught Black boys who threw tantrums how to control their anger. Ohio cared for students who had lost family members, and she worked to help young people gain social skills that would allow them become respected members of their communities. During the last month of school, in June of 2004, the students in Ohio’s classroom wrote poetry:
What did they do? They—they wanted to share. They wanted to conference—they wanted to conference with you, so you can hear their poetry. They wanted to conference with their friends. It was the end of the year, see what I’m saying, it was the end of the year, and my kids were engaged. “I can’t wait for writing, because we’re going to do our poetry.” Just seeing them so exciting, and doing what they were supposed to do, and doing it correctly, rather than the other thing. You sit there, and sit there, and they’re just rhyming—rhyming for their time. They’re rhyming so they can have a list of rhymes to put in their poetry. Their ending products were amazing.
In the ethnodrama I constructed from her transcripts, Ohio’s narration began at the start of her first interview, and the actor told stories about Ohio’s new school in the University neighborhood in Chicago (see Figure 3). In the play, as in her transcripts, Ohio’s storytelling moved back and forth in time until I chose to conclude the ethnodrama with a long chunk from the third interview, where Ohio discussed her experience in the place she described as her old school. This school was located in the Eastside, a poor, hypersegregated neighborhood in Chicago, and the conditions the school posed were challenging far beyond Ohio’s previous work in classrooms that served African American students. Ohio made deep connections with the students in her old building, and her teaching was strong enough that she was able to receive recognition for her work through the NBPTS process (National Research Council 2008). However, the stress of this workplace was so overwhelming, Ohio left her old school in June of 2003 to take a new position at a school in the University neighborhood of Chicago.
La’Kesha O’Neal as Ohio Ontario in “They Are Only Going to Steal Your Cars” at the Studio @ 620, Saint Petersburg, Florida.
The interviews I conducted with Ohio were intended to prompt stories of how teachers made a difference. The sessions were not designed to generate material that might be used to understand how mass patterns identified by social science research shaped people’s choices. I did not enter the field intending to study how conflicts between professionals and poor working conditions influenced teachers’ decision to continue to work at a particular school (e.g., Allensworth, Ponisciak, and Mazzeo 2009; Ingersoll and May 2011). As I built the script from Ohio’s transcripts, however, the breakdown caused by these social forces came to life:
Where was your old school? In the Eastside. Lake Specialty School: 4th through 8th grade. Very abusive environment. Huh, no, it’s a mentally abusive environment. I have lots of stories. It’s one of those schools where, if your heart is not in it, your kids are going to feel it. And, then, she gets awesome teachers, but our principal knows how to make them go away! Like I did. I stayed there for two years and, it was like—You have to believe in your kids. You have to believe. But, if you don’t believe, and if you tell your teachers, “Don’t worry about it, because they are only going to steal your cars.” Then.
Pause;
And, I remember, I remember everything.
Ohio did not stay; she left.
Ohio’s new school was located in a wealthier, integrated neighborhood in Chicago. The kids in her new classroom were poor, and almost all were African American, but they did not suffer from the same deep racism and other forms of social injustice that harmed families in Chicago’s poorest neighborhoods. Ohio believed she taught better lessons in her new school than in her old; her best work was not performed with the kids who needed her the most.
I have written and produced two subsequent plays in what I now describe as my inquiry theatre series (see Vanover, 2016). Each ethnodrama evokes events from one of the interviews with CPS teachers I conducted in the summer of 2004, and each piece follows the procedures I described in the proceeding sections. I may cut lines and sections from the teachers’ transcripts, and add music or other small pieces of stagecraft, but I leave the flow of the interviews intact. “Goodbye to All That!” evokes the interviews shared by an accomplished teacher who resigned from CPS two hours before the start of her last interview session. “Listening to the Silences” shares stories of a first year teacher who worked almost completely alone, without support from her principal or other teachers.
None of the issues raised by the plays are new. Teachers often fail to meet the needs of their students, even in the most privileged schools. Classroom management issues, school working conditions, and teacher retention efforts have drawn researchers’ attention from earliest days of education research. What makes contemporary, high-poverty schools unique is the intensity of the need and the stakes involved (Darling-Hammond 2010). In the absence of critical social supports, some professionals rise to the occasion, such as Mr. Johnson and Anise Arcova, the teachers in my early ethnodramas. Such professionals matter to young people in a way few people matter, they might serve generations of students and families in a particular school and neighborhood. However, it has been my experience, committed teachers pay a price.
Most teachers in high-poverty schools don’t stay to help generations of kids or to pay that price. Leaving students behind and traveling to a new school with fewer challenges might be, as educational economists write, a matter of taste, or, as the teacher wellness literature implies, a matter of self-preservation, but it is a mass pattern rarely evoked sympathetically in university settings.
Contribution to Social Justice
What I did not like, and what I still struggle to manage, was the sense of loneliness the performances engendered. My earlier productions, “Chalkboard Concerto” and “Teaching the Power of the Word,” created strong, communal feelings; the shows drew people to me and to each other. After the shows in the inquiry theatre series ended, I frequently found myself alone in a crowd. Usually, only a couple of people spoke to me after the performances had concluded; the rest of the audience tended to move away, and talk among themselves. People did not say it during the talk-backs, but I felt that the demoralized landscape (Santoro 2011) evoked by the teachers’ narratives left a bitter taste. The audience may have had the opportunity to ask really good questions, but the performances left them, as the scripts left the teachers, floating in space.
In the beginning teachers’ stories students flunked their exams. Children fought, argued, and wasted time that might have been spent reading, writing, or having fun. The seven accomplished, veteran teachers shared stories about classrooms I believed were better places for children, but breakdown was never far away. The problems of the city and their school system flowed through the experienced teachers’ storytelling. Children fell ill; they became homeless; their parents were incarcerated; families suffered in other ways. The accomplished teachers might create islands of stability and build classroom spaces with the potential to make a significant difference in their students’ lives, but this work does not stop the river.
Ohio now works as a principal. Halsted left the large, African American, high poverty school where she started at CPS, but she continues to work as a classroom teacher in the system. I left CPS, but continue to work with teachers. The space remains, filled with a changing array of teachers, administrators, policies, and programs. There is likely more instability and churn in those schools, now, than when I started in CPS twenty years ago.
Yes, questions matter more than answers and witnessing plays a critical role in the struggle for social justice, but late at night, when I think about the teachers and students I met during my time in Chicago, I wish I had more to offer.
Limitations and Future Work
This article discussed the labor required to put up a series of ethnodramas. I described how the activities I engaged in to build these shows reframed my understanding of the data I fitted for the performances. Because I saw (Eisner 1991) ethnodrama as a vehicle that communicated the poetry of everyday life, my eye was drawn toward data that evoked strong emotion, particularly teachers’ descriptions of breakdown. The teachers’ troubles came to interest me more than their successes. I found more dramatic possibilities in evoking limits of teachers’ agency than in communicating the flow of accomplished practice.
As this narrative implies, the interpretive process I engaged in using ethnodramatic methods created research products that communicated different meanings than the descriptive coding system I used to interpret the same data. The coding system brought to light the beneficent, but mundane, work of the accomplished teachers as they described their efforts to teach reading, writing, math, and science. By focusing on what I perceived was the most dramatic material, I constructed ethnodramas that communicated the limits of teachers’ ability to make a difference and the conflicts that structured their workplaces. Many of these conflicts had been identified in previous research on CPS, and I came to believe my methods evoked a common experience. As Steedman (1985) emphasized, life in classrooms is ordinary and extreme.
Nothing is definitive in the methods of inquiry I have described. The stories the teachers told me were not the only stories they might have voiced (Denzin 2001). A different interviewer using different questions might have surfaced alternate landscapes. The shows I dramatized from these data were not the only plays that could be built (Bagley 2008). Other people might respond to the more than 60 hours of interviews I collected from alternate perspectives and communicate different aspects of the teachers’ worlds.
In recent years, a number of theatre artists have worked to bring teachers’ experience in CPS to light (e.g., Holter 2014; Zarrow 2014). There is more to be communicated about life in the system than my plays evoke. Just because I could not figure out how to stage the warmth and joyous ordinariness of a good day in CPS does not mean such ethnodramas cannot be constructed nor that such productions do not have worth. Hope matters, but so does breakdown.
I have found great value in the sometimes quite humble labor of moving from one conference presentation to another and from one academic visit to the next occasion. With the help of a volunteer or two, I learned to put up a show almost anywhere. The teachers’ stories communicated so forcefully, words came to life with the simplest stagecraft. In a small way, voices and bodies broke through the “webs of talk” (Greenhouse, Mertz, and Warren 2002, 372) produced by the networks of people who study and control teachers’ labor. Asking people hear the data, and feel the stories the women performed, created richer meaning and dialogue than any words I might voice.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I would like to acknowledge the contributions of the four pseudonymous teachers whose work I discussed in this article: Mr. Johnson, Mrs. Arcova, Ms. Hoyne, and Ms. Ontario. Collectively, they have given more than sixty years to Chicago’s schools. I would also like to acknowledge the work of Alexandra Miletta and Jennifer Jean Smith for their work in performances of “System Failure,” and Rose Thomas, Cynthia Langtiw, and La’Kesha O’Neal for their work in performances of “They are Only Going to Steal Your Cars.” My mistakes are my own.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.