Annual Meeting of the Australian Association for Research on Education, Hobart, November, 1995 Writing about Teaching Max Angus Edith Cowan University Edith Cowan University Pearson St Churchlands Western Australia 6018 Ph 09-2738404 email m.angus@cowan.edu.au Introduction I used to think that the term `polemic' in the social sciences had a perjorative meaning. I thought it was a form of writing to be avoided if you wanted your work to be taken seriously by fellow academics. In a similar vein, I thought that researchers should avoid `rhetoric': if the research method were scrupulously followed and the data were logically displayed there was no need for artifice in writing. Also, I presumed that if you wanted to find out about teaching you would read what researchers had to say to the exclusion of anyone else. What else would you read? I have changed my position on these matters. I am writing a polemic about writing about teaching. The argument that follows is based on four propositions: ·Academic writing about teaching often fails to add to our understanding of teaching because when it is all boiled down it states what we already know; ·Narrative is a respectable form of writing about teaching even for academics although until recently they give it a wide berth; ·The boundary between fiction and non-fiction writing in the social sciences is indistinct if not arbitrary and there are fictional elements in all narrative writing; writing about teaching is no exception; and ·Fictional and non-fictional narratives about teaching provide a more accessible source of knowledge about teaching than scientific accounts although they are held in low repute in the academic community. I should make it clear at this point that I am not claiming to be an exemplary writer about teaching. The spur for this paper was a recognition of how uninteresting I found much of the current writing about teaching and much more engaging was contemporary writing in other discipline areas. Was my response a simple case of ennui? I don't think so although I realise that I was reading mainly for practical, extrinsic reasons - to keep up with my colleagues - and not for enjoyment. To be frank, I usually read without any expectation of any powerful new insight into teaching being revealed to me, something I did not already know about teaching qua teaching. A closed mind? Perhaps. Academic Writing about Teaching People write for a multiplicity of reasons. Professional writers earn their bread and butter from it. Academics' careers are tied to it. In the case of education, it is common for academic authors to have a further, evangelistic purpose: improvement of teaching and learning. The primary discipline base for the improvement of teaching has been psychology, especially educational psychology and cognitive psychology. Until recently, the dominant paradigm of inquiry has been positivist. The goal has been to find laws or statistical relationships between teacher behaviours and pupil learning. The idea was to build a knowledge base composed of such empirically tested findings about teaching. Gage's elegant book The Scientific Basis of the Art of Teaching 0represents the high water mark of this paradigm. Academics who conducted their research within it wrote mainly for other academic readers but sometimes composed textbooks for teachers and prospective teachers. Although consisting largely of decontextualised discussions of theories and practice, it was thought that teachers would be able to learn the principles validated by the research and recontextualise them in their own setting. In this tradition the primary interest is in the truth claims in the text rather than the act of teaching. Thus if the grounds for concluding that a particular behaviour were related to a student learning outcome were dubious then the study should not be published for fear that the publisher were wrongfully promulgating a fiction about teaching. Never mind whether the proposition made any sense in the everyday life of teachers. Nor worry too much about how teachers learn about their teaching - that problem is designated a problem of `dissemination'. Obviously academics working in this tradition would look disinterestedly upon the suggestion that teachers might learn constructively about teaching from a work of fiction - a film, a novel or a play. There are two primary criticisms that I wish to make about academic writing in the field of teaching. The first is that much of the writing is dull yet teaching is an intrinsically interesting subject. Although most of us, I expect, found our school days filled with tedium we also experienced moments of excitement and drama. There is plenty we could say about our teachers. Further, it does not follow that because we all went to school and at least in some respects had similar experiences, we must no longer be curious about teaching. Although teaching is a familiar subject so also is the material of many utterly absorbing pieces of writing. The problem is that most academic journal articles and books about teaching are neither intended nor expected to be engaging. They are usually technical accounts, written in the third person so as to reflect the objective attitude of science. Playfulness is unacceptable. Discursiveness is discouraged. The prose in academic writing is supposed to be spare and elegant and devoid of any passion or excitement. This attitude of detachment leads writers to exclude or camouflage the moral and political issues that infuse school life and the investigation of it yet they are the facets that sustain the day-to-day interest of teachers and outsiders. The second criticism is that much of the writing is purportedly about teaching when it is not. We academics know what academics know and tend to write about what we know. We write about what I would call `the academics of teaching', a subject that we have constructed for our purposes and about which we have become expert. Consider the index and table of contents of any book which purports to be about research on teaching. These rubrics describe the `academics of teaching'. This kind of writing situates teachers as subjects and describes in an academic discourse what teachers do. The accounts of what they do correspond with the researcher's constructions of teaching, not the teachers ' construction of what is perplexing and problematic. Of course, we would say, as researchers, that we don't expect teachers to read this material (except for those enrolled in our courses who are learning how to construct teaching the way we do and who, as a result, can therefore expect to be cut off from their previous experience and language of teaching). I would prefer not to appear too negative: after all, I have spent a large part of my life trying to become proficient at this kind of work. I still search for, indeed enjoy, some forms of writing about teaching. When I find them I am able to read them later in the night, read them closely rather than skim-read. What kind of writing? Fiction and non-fiction. Non-academic writing. `Other' Writing about Teaching Imagine, for the purpose of simplification, it were possible to dichotomise writing about teaching into fictional and non-fictional categories, and separately again into academic and non-academic writing. I will use this grid to structure my survey of the field. It is by no means an exhaustive survey and reveals my reading habits and those of my friends. Academic Non-fiction. The first cell in the 2 x 2 heuristic describes academic non-fiction. I have already made reference to this form of writing. To be more specific, by academic writing I mean scholarly writing produced by academics for publication and editorially controlled by academics for a readership principally of academics. The non-fiction qualifier is superfluous. Most academic writing, although not all, has been conducted according to the canons of scientific method and written according to the orthodox publishing conventions, dominated by the American Psychological Association. Even writers who adopt interpretive research frameworks commonly employ these conventions. This paper is meeting some of those conventions. I have been conditioned to write this way. I should make it clear that I am not dismissing all academic writing as arcane, dull, or without any value to teachers who are the subject of the writing. Sometimes the ideas that academics write about eventually shape the way teachers think and act when what they write is read by fellow academics who teach teachers. My point is that this writing has acquired a superior status that is undeserved. It is seldom read beyond the relatively small circle of academics who use it to cite in their own work. Teachers, who are supposed to be the beneficiaries, by and large do not read it. Non-fiction, non-academic writing. I generally find non-academic writing about teaching more engaging and more informative than the `serious', scientific accounts. I include in this category autobiographical accounts of classroom life, biographies and reflective essays about teaching. The classic autobiography in this category is Sylvia Ashton-Warner's Teacher.1 Although published in 1963, the account of her teaching struggles in New Zealand is able to span time and place. Some facets of teaching may have changed since she wrote the book, and there may be differences in context for readers who live outside New Zealand, but her reflections about her teaching seem so penetrating that it is the commonalities that the reader recognises that make her account so absorbing. I have not taught junior primary school but I think I know what it would be like from reading Ashton-Warner's book. It is common for autobiographies to refer to school life and most, as one would expect, are written from the perspective of students. After all, unless the author were a teacher it could hardly be otherwise. Famous novelists, statesmen, and pioneers, for example, usually have something to say about their school experiences. Some dwell on their school and university years regarding them as formative and their accounts are lucid and expressive. The first two volumes of Janet Frame's autobiography are also a rich source of acute observation and sensitive reflection although mostly from a student's perspective; she makes only a brief reference to her stint as teacher.2 An autobiographical essay I particularly like is Richard Ford's story about learning to read. `I learned to read - I mean learned to read carefully - in 1969 when I was 25 years old', he begins. This is a good example by an accomplished writer.3 Often in autobiographical work the references to schools and teaching amount only to snippets and turn up in unusual places, for example Levi- Strauss's account of his training to be an anthropologist in Tristes Tropiques,4 yet they can be quite revealing not only about the author but also about teaching and learning. Biographies of principals are more common than of teachers, partly because principals have more profile but also because without fine-grained documentation it is difficult to reconstruct the `immediacies' of classroom life, the powerful moments, the sense of `being there' in the classroom. John McPhee's biography of Frank L Boyden, headmaster of Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts for 66 years, captures the essence of the man - his wisdom, decency, grit and craftiness - but little about his teaching.5 In The Headmaster McPhee describes how Boyden, `a small grumpy Labrador of a man', gave the school its special character. One senses that Boyden had some of the same qualities as Sir James Darling who exerted such an influence on Geelong Grammar and whose obituary was recently published in The Australian6. A third genre of writing that falls into this category is the reflective essay, the writing that some academics are able to do when they shed their formal regalia. A recent illustration is Philip Jackson's Untaught Lessons,7 written `in a literary voice that transcends the academic', states the advertising on the back cover. More than 20 years earlier, Jackson, the author of the classic text on teaching Life in Classrooms, muses over what he has learned about teaching in four separate essays. The first, a reflection of his high school algebra teacher in his freshman year, the second a reflection about a paper which he wrote and presented at a conference and subsequently learned was the only paper omitted (without explanation) from the conference proceedings. The third, a reflection of what he observed in an `ordinary' first grade classroom and finally, his reassessment of his own teaching beginning with his (uncomplimentary) review of Willard Waller's 1932 classic, The Sociology of Teaching. Jackson had put together a cocktail perfectly suited to my taste. No doubt there would be some readers who would be impatient with his `literary voice' and prefer to see the whole book rendered to a few dot points under the heading Speculative Propositions about Teaching. There is a fourth genre to which I wish to refer: the polemic of which I suppose this paper is an example. A good illustration is the work of the progressive educators of the 60s and 70s such as Silberman, Neil, Kohl or Schoenheimer. Sizer and Goodlad are contemporary exponents.8 The purpose of this writing is overtly to persuade readers to share the writer's views about the need to reshape classroom life. The styles used may be quite different - journalistic (Silberman), literary (Kohl), scholarly (Sizer) or some combination of styles. The work cites empirical evidence, either from research or of a more anecdotal kind. Non- academic Fiction. For reasons that I do not understand, I have found it much more difficult than I expected to produce an anthology of accounts of teaching in novels and short stories. There seems to be infinitely more written about bedrooms than classrooms although most of us have spent significant portions of our lives in both. I have been able to locate a considerable amount of fiction centred on university life. Mostly it is satirical. Malcolm Bradbury, David Lodge, Kingsley Amis, for example, have written successful novels set in universities though there is more interest shown by the authors in sexual and departmental politics than pedagogy. David Williamson's recent play Dead White Males provides a theatrical example.9 The gloomy novels of C.P. Snow that form the Strangers and Brothers series also come to mind.10 They certainly convey a sense of Oxbridge life from an academic's perspective. There are of course a small number of novels about school teaching that are well known.11 The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, To Sir with Love and the sentimental Goodbye Mr Chips are three. There is also a large body of children's fiction, some of which is written by highly regarded writers such as Roald Dahl who can have a lot of fun at the expense of priggish headmasters or school bullies. As far as `serious' writers of fiction are concerned the school or classroom is a place where some drama in the life of a main character is being played out. D. H. Lawrence's The Rainbow , Henry Handel Richardson's The Getting of Wisdom, or David Malouf's Johnno provides examples.12 On the other hand there seem to be proportionally more films and television `sit coms' and dramas, most, though not all, produced in the US. Up the Down Staircase, Stand and Deliver and The Browning Version are films in which teaching is a central component, portrayed with a good measure of authenticity. Often the films have been based on books or scripts although the film is better remembered than the book.13 Television has also been a popular medium, dominated by US sit-coms: DiGrassi Junior High, Welcome Back Cotter, The Wonder Years are three popular series in which much of the action occurred in classrooms or revolved around them. Academic Fiction. The fourth category is in one sense oxymoronic - the conjunction of academic writing and fiction. The work of social scientists is rarely represented as fiction though Castaneda's ethnographic accounts of Yaqui Indian mystic, Don Juan, come close.14 Sometimes academics produce works of fiction in which they play around with theoretical ideas in a narrative form - Skinner's Walden Two is an example15 - although I am not aware of similar examples drawn from the study of teaching. One might also consider in this category the teaching of literature by academics. I was surprised to find two novels about teaching, Tom Brown's School Days and True Country on the textbook list for English literature courses at my own university.16 The latter is an account of a teacher's experience teaching in a remote Aboriginal community. The Blurring of the Boundaries My Cartesian categories, of course, are artificial and no longer map the field in which we work. The idea of an objective social science has been weakened (perhaps irrevocably) by attacks on the incomparability between the claims of an objective social reality and the properties of the language and discourse that social scientists must inevitably use. Following Derrida, deconstructionists argue that truly meaningful utterance is impossible and that the text that social scientists work with are open to unstable and contradictory interpretations. Worse, citing Foucault, they argue that the language social scientists apply is not neutral even though readers may have come to believe it so. The way scientists think is constrained by their language and discourse. The net effect of this postmodernist argument is to promote an epistemological relativism suggesting that the search for objective truths about the human condition is a futile pursuit. Even the most conservative social scientist must recognise that the distinctions between fiction and non-fiction, and between scientific and other forms of inquiry, have become increasingly blurred. They may deplore the erosion but it is happening. Gross and Levitt, for example, bemoan the end of the Enlightenment ideal of enduring universal knowledge and its replacement with the belief that the social sciences can at best produce stories. The blurring of the distinction between science and non-science can be attributed in part to the acceptance of more relativist epistemologies which deny the possibility of ever being sure of what is real (or true) and what is not.17 The burgeoning interest in narrative forms of knowing and writing has also contributed to the dissolution of a clear-cut dichotomy between fiction and non-fiction. Scholars in the discipline of history have been debating this issue for the last two decades recognising that historical accounts are fundamentally narratives and as such, to quote Hayden White, are `verbal fictions' of which `the contents are as much invented as found and the forms of which have more in common with their counterparts in literature than they have with those in the sciences.'18 The debate has moved on to other disciplines. Anthropologist, James Clifford accepts that ethnographies may be considered fictions insofar as they involve inventing things not actually real, although Clifford prefers the notion of `partial truths' rather than `falsehood as opposed to truth'. Ethnographic truths are inherently partial because ethnographic texts cannot avoid selection of content, the use of expressive allegories, that is, `constructed truths made possible by powerful ÒliesÓ of exclusion and rhetoric.'19 Or to put it slightly differently, as Atkinson points out, no text can be a completely literal and complete description of the world.20 One further example to illustrate how far the epidemic of narratology has spread (to put a fine word on it). Jerome Bruner, one of the most influential cognitive psychologists on the practice of eduction, has reformulated his view of the field, shifting from a more cognitivist view of psychology towards a construction he has labelled `cultural psychology' in which he claims the narrative provides a basis for understanding action.21 Bruner does not dismiss scientific (or paradigmatic) methods for understanding social phenomena. Rather, he advances the claims of narrative with its basis in literary criticism and literary theory. The weakening of the fact-fiction distinction in the social sciences has been accelerated by the understanding of how writers of fiction work. If ethnographies are partial truths so also are novels. Novelist Nadine Gordimer observes: It is beyond dispute that no character in fiction, even if conceived as an ape, a beetle, a fantasm, is without connections with real persons experienced by the writer within contact of sight, sound, and touch, or second-hand through experience recorded by others in one medium or another, and whether or not the writer is always aware of this.22 The character in fiction is imagined yet taken from life. Pat Conroy's novel The Water is Wide is about the challenges facing a young teacher during a year of teaching on a small island off the coast of South Carolina.23 It is `based on' the author's own experience according to the dust jacket. It has that gritty real life feeling about it, a story written by someone who knows about teaching. Is it fact or fiction? Does it matter? It is not my intention to try and argue the merits of postmodernist thinking vis-a-vis the orthodox view of social science. Maybe in 30 years' time poststructuralism will appear as a mere epiphenomenon, a side-show starring the French philosophers, temporarily distracting the Academy from its proper endeavour. For the moment, however, the blurring of boundaries between the social sciences and humanities, and the investigations of how the canons of literary theory might inform the traditional means of inquiry in the social sciences, have taken hold in the study of education and more particularly the study of teaching. Nor is it necessary to take a position in the debate whether the concept of validity of an account is an outdated, positivist notion and that verisimilitude or plausibility is all that can be applied to the reading of a text since one reading of a text is as good as another. I can sympathise with Hobsbawm's lament that if history were indistinguishable from fiction then historians would have been wasting their lives.24 My point is that writing which is plausible, that is, describes what could reasonably happen, which resonates with the reader's life experiences, either confirming or even contradicting these experiences, can constructively inform human action. For this to happen, such writing is likely to have literary qualities that enable the readers to comprehend possiblities that were hitherto beyond their imagination. Whether the events described ever happened is not the point; the issue is whether they could have happened. An Inclusive Anthology of Writing about Teaching There is a burgeoning interest in the construction of narratives about teaching. The move is partly a reaction against the arid behaviourism of the process-product approach that ignored teachers' intentions and motives. During the 80s, following the work of scholars such as Lee Shulman and Freema Elbaz investigations of teachers' knowledge reported anecdotal, narrative evidence.25 As well, feminist scholars demanded that the voice of teachers appear in the text. Connelly and Clandinin's work on teachers' stories, for example, helped promote the legitimacy of narrative in the study of teaching.26 Further, Ivor Goodson and others have promoted an interest in autobiographical accounts of teachers' lives.27 In addition, there has been a revival of interest in case studies of critical incidents in classroom life authored by teachers.28 Narrative writing now has a strong following in the American Educational Research Association. If one accepts that narrative is a fundamental way of knowing and therefore we learn about teaching by reading or viewing narratives of school and classroom life, on what basis should such narratives be constructed? More particularly, should it matter whether the narrative is written as far as possible in accordance with the canons of social science or by some other method, for example, journalism? And further, should it matter whether the accounts are as `factual' as the methods of social science allow, or might fictional accounts provide a way of learning about teaching? Yes it does, according to Zeller who, while extolling the strengths of narrative, warns writers `not to stray into the realm of imaginative writing'.29 Zeller advises writers to follow the dictates of sound research and avoid fictionalising events or people, a device which she associates with second-rate inquiry. I disagree. Why be so exclusive and disregard so much writing about teaching? Why exclude fiction and journalism? I am not arguing that it is of no consequence whether a text is represented as fact or fiction. Texts are read differently depending on how they are represented and on the purposes of the reader. Philip Jackson's essays intrigued me because they were autobiographical reflections and I had been impressed by his earlier work. Had I gained the impression that the essays were mostly invented I doubt if I would have finished reading them. Also, I was curious to find out what Jackson had learned (or chosen to write) about teaching since his classical work published a quarter of a century earlier. Levi-Strauss's account of his education as an anthropologist was absorbing because the young anthropologist was Levi-Strauss and not some minor figure in anthropology or a fictional character. In both cases I was interested in what the particular author had to say. The accounts were personal. Even so, I find that I can be engaged by fiction knowing that the characters are invented. My engagement depends to a large extent on the verisimilitude of the account and not the exactitude with which a particular method of inquiry has been followed. For example, the novels The Water is Wide and True Country , to which I have referred, evoke the sense of being there. But further, and more to the point of this paper, I believe that I am as likely to enhance my understanding about teaching by reading texts of this kind as any other. If I am engaged, what I do when I read is explore the significance of hypothetical actions in my imagination. It does not matter whether the characters appears in a novel or in an authenticated research narrative - I could even be reading a piece of science fiction by Isaac Asimov - they will be like or unlike some person I know or have known and I will be constantly assessing and reassessing whether I understand and approve of their actions. Whether the author is a respected scholar in research on teaching or a journalist does not matter; what does count is the quality of the characterisation. Ironically, because of the policies of university ethics committees, researchers tend to use pseudonyms and exclude uncomplimentary comment even if the commentary is not defamatory; they ignore the darker side of the subject matter. In doing so writers factionalise their texts so that in effect the characters and contexts are less `real' than those that appear in so-called fiction and the writing as a consequence is often bland and uninteresting. That is why I prefer to read writers such as Janet Malcolm even though I feel uncomfortable about the way she goes for the jugular. I am not suggesting in this paper that narrative is the only appropriate form of writing about teaching; nor, I repeat, am I suggesting that distinctions between fact and fiction can simply be ignored. For example, if I were assembling a carburettor, a manual be more helpful than a story about a mechanic. And it does matter in what order the parts are put together; it is not completely a matter of personal preference. On the other hand if I wanted to find out what it was like to be a mechanic, a story would be more helpful. A well-written fictional account might be more instructive than a `true story' badly written. Learning about teaching through fiction is not a new idea. During my search through the literature I came across an anthology of science fiction School and Society through Science Fiction published in 1974.30 The authors point out that the use of the fictional world as a tool for inquiry about existing worlds is a traditional technique and cite Plato's The Republic and Thomas More's Utopia as examples of this method. Each story in the anthology is prefaced with an introduction and a set of stimulus questions which situate the story in a contemporary education context. I can imagine designing a course on teaching for pre-service teachers in which the bulk of the reading was fiction and what might be described as `popular' writing about teaching. I expect the students and some of my colleagues would raise their eyebrows. Not only would students have to read more extensively than they are used to but they would discover very few certainties about teaching or procedural rules of the practical kind that they are accustomed to look for and value. Academic colleagues might tolerate the course but only as an elective that did not displace units which transmitted the orthodox contents of academic writing about teaching. I am proposing a form of deregulation of the writing about teaching industry. What would happen if some of the most accomplished fiction and non-fiction writers were persuaded to write about teaching? And what if the canons of scholarly writing about teaching were revamped to value more highly the literary qualities of the text? The Australian Research Council might get value for money if it were to commission Paul Kelly, Helen Garner or David Malouf to write a study of teaching without reference to the existing competitive research guidelines. Notes and References 0 N. Gage, The Scientific Basis of the Art of Teaching, Teachers College Press, 1978. 1 Sylvia Ashton-Warner, Teacher, Simon and Schuster, 1963. 2 Janet Frame, To the Is-land, autobiography 1, Flamingo, 1993 and Janet Frame, An Angel at my Table, autobiography 2, Flamingo, 1993. 3 Richard Ford, `Reading', in D. Halpern (Ed) Antaeus: Literature as Pleasure, Collins Harvill, 1990. 4 Claude Levi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, Picador, 1973. 5 John McPhee, The Headmaster, Farrer, Straus & Giroux, 1966. 6 M.C. Perrse, `Geelong's Master of Inspiration', The Australian, 3 November 1995, p.19. 7 Philip Jackson, Untaught Lessons, Teachers College Press, 1992. I used to wonder whether Jackson could have anything else to say about teaching after his classic account, Life in Classrooms, Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1968. I found his sharp criticism of Waller's The Sociology of Teaching, John Wiley & Sons, 1932, interesting given the reverential references to that text usually made by US academics. 8 This is a huge body of literature. The following are illustrative: C. Silberman, Crisis in the Classroom: The Remaking of American Education, Vintage, 1971; A.S. Neil, Summerhill, Penguin, 1968; H. Kohl, 36 Children, Penguin, 1972; Henry Schoenheimer, Good Australian Schools and their Communities, Wilke and Company, 1973; Theodore Sizer, Horace's School: Redesigning the American High School, Mifflin, 1992; and John Goodlad, Educational Renewal: Better Teachers, Better Schools, Jossey Bass, 1994. 9 David Williamson, Dead White Males, Currency Press, 1995. 10 See, for example, C.P. Snow, The Affair, Macmillan, 1960. 11 Muriel Spark, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Macmillan, 1961; E.R. Braithwaite, To Sir With Love, Bodley Head, 1977; J. Hilton, Good-bye Mr Chips, Hodder & Stoughton, 1934. 12 D.H. Lawrence, The Rainbow, Heinemann, 1968; Henry Handel Richardson, The Getting of Wisdom, Heinemann, 1977; and David Malouf, Johnno, University of Queensland Press, 1975. 13 Bel Kaufman, Up the Down Staircase, Prentice-Hall, 1964; T. Rattigan, The Browning Version. The Collected Plays of Terence Rattigan, Hamish Hamilton, 1953. 14 Carlos Castenada, The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge, University of California Press, 1968. 15 B.F Skinner, Walden Two, Macmillan, 1962. 16 T. Hughes, Tom Brown's Schooldays, Penguin, 1971; Kim Scott, True Country, Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1993. 17 P. Gross and H. Levitt, Higher Superstition, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995. 18 Hayden White, `The Historical Text as Literary Artefact', in R. Canary and H. Kozicki (Eds) The Writing of History: Literary Form and Historical Understanding, The University of Wisconsin Press, 1978. 19 James Clifford, `Introduction', in J. Clifford and G. Marcus (Eds), Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, University of California Press, 1986, p.6. 20 P. Atkinson, The Ethnographic Imagination: Textual Constructions of Reality, Routledge, 1990. 21 Jerome Bruner, Acts of Meaning, Harvard University Press, 1990. 22 Nadine Gordimer, `Adam's Rib', The New York Review of Books , October 5, 1995, p.29. 23 Pat Conroy, The Water is Wide, Houghton Mifflin, 1972. 24 E.J. Hobsbawm, Echoes of the Marseillaise: Two Centuries Look Back on the French Revolution, Rutgers University Press, 1990. 25 Lee Shulman, `Knowledge and Teaching: Foundations of the New Reform', Harvard Educational Review, Vol. 57, 1987, pp.1-22; Freema Elbaz, `Research on Teachers' Knowledge: The Evolution of a Discourse', Journal of Curriculum Studies, Vol. 23, 1991, pp.1-19. 26 Michael Connelly and Jean Clandinin, `Stories of Experience and Narrative Inquiry', Educational Researcher, Vol.19, 1990, pp.2-14. 27 Ivor Goodson, Teachers' Lives and Careers, Falmer Press, 1985. 28 Judith Shulman, Case Methods in Teacher Education, Teachers College Press, 1992. 29 Nancy Zeller, `Narrative Strategies for Case Reports', Qualitative Studies in Education, Vol.8, 1995, pp.75-88. 30 Joseph Olander, Martin Greenberg and Patricia Warwick, School and Society through Science Fiction, Rand McNally, 1974.