COMING TO KNOW THE SELF THROUGH SCHOOL STORIES

Bryant Griffith, Texas A & M University at Corpus Christi
Kathryn Thomas, Texas A & M University at Corpus Christi

Traditionally the writing of history has been by the dominant culture, skewed and one-sided towards the tellers, often leaving out important voices. Robin George Collingwood claimed that the writing of History had become unconscious, a process where the preconceptions of a society did not connect. In Collingwoodian language the explicit meaning of actions has not been made implicit and this can only happen when we realize that History is about self knowledge. The process of making the explicit, implicit, making the outside the inside is philosophical. It is philosophical because it has to do with the nature of knowledge and it is also historical because it has to do with the way in which the past and present interact to provide meaning, a meaning that Collingwood says can only be about who we are. Any knowledge we can have of the past has to be based on present knowledge of ourselves, the nature of thought and the fact that we can construct analogies about the past to make meaning.

This compilation of narratives is Colligwoodian in nature. It comes straight from the source, people reflecting and narrating stories of their early schooling experiences. Through the telling and reading of the stories, early schooling experiences are shared and made meaningful both for the writer and the reader. This can also be seen as form of Habermas’ idea of emancipatory knowledge where the insight gained by self-awareness and reflection are used to gain understanding and control over the effects of early educational experiences.

The School Stories Project began in 1999 with the meeting between the artist Thomas Rose and Dr. Bryant Griffith in New York City at an art opening. In coming together and discussing their chosen careers, Professor of Art at the University of Minnesota and Professor of Philosophy and Education at Acadia University respectively, they began to realize that they had certain early schooling commonalties. They found this uncanny –that they were from two different countries and had two dissimilar career paths albeit; they were both working in the sphere of education. A litany of questions began flooding their minds. How did two men who were relatively unsuccessful in their K - 12 schooling experiences overcome insurmountable obstacles to become professionals in the field of education? Why did they interpret their K-12 experience as being unsuccessful? How many other men had had similar experiences? They began to wonder about the early schooling experiences of their male acquaintances, and if they shared any of the same similarities. As they delved further into these ideas the thought of collaborating on a project began.

Phase one began with the collection of the stories. The original School Stories Project was composed of twenty-two short essays describing the early schooling experiences of a group of men aged forty and above that the two project coordinators, Dr. Bryant Griffith and Thomas Rose, have associated with, known professionally, or known on a personal level. There were no parameters put on the stories other than they discuss their own K – 12 early schooling experiences. All submitted stories were used in their original form. The stories were assembled and visual representations were constructed to make the stories multi textual and more representative of thought as they understand it. Later video and audio were assembled to represent the analogies in another medium. Further expanding the scope of accessibility to a wider audience the stories were posted on the web. What seemingly was perceived as a random collection of autobiographical text has come to transcend the ordinary into the extraordinary. Strands or links connect countless readers of the stories to construct meaning of their own lived experiences.

Putting this phase of the project into a philosophical context it seems that the stories have made explicit what many people have known implicitly about their early schooling. Habermas like the Idealist Collingwood share the belief that ‘mind’ has a tendency towards freedom. If that is the case then it can be argued that narratives about the struggle of young mavericks inside an educational system which attempts to standardize thinking and behavior is an example of how we uncover the dialectic of self knowledge.

In other words the critical self reflection on past human actions creates an explicit understanding of what had been implicit unreflected actions. The historical disconnect in the lives of these men between these two aspects of thinking about thinking has often caused a confusion about the nature of self and the nature of thinking. We argue that these stories have explicitly bridged the philosophical gap between the implicit past and the present. This has been accomplished in two ways: first, the stories were created as reflections in which thinking is characterized as a process with no beginning or end. Second, the stories have been made meaningful by the narrators and also through the further reflections of those who have read them and commentated on them. This is truly reflection.

Furthermore what began as a free-associative project between the written word and the mediums of art has expanded into the academic realm with the inclusion of phase two, Hispanic School Stories and its implications for curriculum studies.

The extension into Hispanic School Stories came about in 2003 when Dr. Griffith accepted a position in South Texas at Texas A & M University Immersed in an area steeped in Hispanic culture he saw an opportunity for understanding cultural characteristics as an important aspect of educating students from different cultural groups. The impetus for this addition to the School Stories Project was to further understand the perception of education and how we as diverse groups interact with the concept of education. Questions formed about the early schooling of the Hispanic people of the South Texas Region. How did they perceive education? What were the influences that determined their success or lack of success in their k – 12 schooling experiences? Were there any similarities between the original stories and this cultural group? In contacting Professor Rose the two agreed to further the reach of the School Stories Project to include phase two, the Hispanic School Stories. The stories would be compiled, interpreted through art and then shared through the printed medium and on the web.

A general invitation was extended to several doctoral level classes at TAMUCC to submit autobiographical accounts of early schooling experiences for Hispanics. To collect stories from a broader spectrum of the Hispanic population, students were encouraged to seek out stories from family members, acquaintances, and possibly themselves. Accordingly these stories represent a diverse sampling amongst the Hispanic population. Three classes were asked to submit stories and fifteen stories were collected and will be used in their original form.

These autobiographical collections also have a central theme of early schooling experiences and perceptions. They give rise to the questioning relevancy of curriculum and perceived meaning of early schooling experiences to Hispanics. This collection’s purpose is to express and share the experiences of the Hispanic people. It is to begin the discourse of contemplation, to consider what is happening in our educational system with regards to our nation’s complex, multicultural composition and hopefully to set about change, thereby contemplating curricular options. “The point of the school curriculum is to goad us into caring for ourselves and our fellow human beings, to help us think and act with intelligence, sensitivity, and courage in both the public sphere – as citizens aspiring to establish a democratic society – and in the private sphere, as individuals committed to other individuals” (Pinar, 1996 p. 848).

Understanding cultural groups allows one to begin to ascertain what is and is not effective in education policy. The central focus of improved academic performance has anaesthetized educators into thinking that they are providing quality educational experiences when they are at best preparing only a small part of the population for college or university. What about the students that aren’t academically gifted? (Noddings, 1996) states that politicians often affirm that education is, or should be, the way out of poverty. Teachers are urged to have the same expectations for poor children as for rich children: all should meet the rigorous standards that are now being recommended. This advice may be well intentioned, but its logic is muddled. We know that, by and large, children from stable, economically secure homes do fairly well with standard schooling (I am not arguing that they are, therefore, well educated - just that they do well on standard measures). In contrast, children from poor homes often have a difficult time with the usual pattern of schooling.

In the same vein, politicians call for “the same expectations” for all cultural groups. As educators we must realize that just a socioeconomic status makes a difference so does culture. They both need to be studied, understood, and contemplated in order to enact the change needed to equalize the educational equation - to take education beyond its present boundaries, to reflect and contemplate its application to today’s changing multicultural populations. William Pinar states that, “Any comprehensive theory of curriculum must include race and its concepts-such as multiculturalism, identity, marginality, and difference as fundamental” (Pinar, 1996, p.319). Student populations need to be respected by a curriculum that is not embedded with cultural bias. High drop-out rates, high teenage pregnancy rates, and the constant threat of violence in and out of schools all indicate the need for contemplation, discourse and action leading to change in society and in our public schooling system.

Differences between the two phases of the project

In the original School Stories, printed memories or representations of a group of successful men were collected. The men in the group were seemingly different from each other, but as their stories came together a common thread united them, their difficulties in their early schooling experiences. It was as if there were missing signals or misunderstood signals from the establishment that were not understood by these men until much later in life. The creativity or gifts were overlooked as youth and they were seen as problems instead of being recognized as creative, divergent thinkers. They went through the process of schooling backwards, but ended up being successful despite their early difficulties.

In contrast, the collection of Hispanic School Stories was composed of males and females from Hispanic backgrounds. Secondly, the diversity of the age of contributors along with the variety of careers is more varied among the second group. In many cases the parents of the contributors had very little formal education. Notably, this group had a more positive outlook on their early educational experiences despite many challenges and setbacks. They attribute their success to their parents’ determination that their children have greater opportunities than they had.

Methodology

The question is, ‘What is more?’ Within educational research there is a vibrant hermeneutical strand. The writing and research by Jo Anne Pagano, Deborah Britzman, Nel Noddings and Madeleine Grumet are informative for our purpose. Grumet’s work has been central to a field that might be called autobiographical text. In the past twenty years Grummet has attempted to rescue autobiography from its association with the self, the alias that has given subjectivity a bad name (Grumet, 1996). She has clarified the role of story telling in autobiography by citing Alfred Schutz, the social phenomenologist by saying, “Meaning does not lie in experience. Rather, those experiences are meaningful which are grasped reflectively. The meaning is the way in which the Ego regards its experience. The meaning lies in the attitude of the Ego toward that part of its stream of consciousness which has already flowed by.” (Schutz, 1996, pp. 69-71)

Grumet’s methodology has been to encourage her participants to write multiple accounts of one educational experience thereby getting a triangulation on the narratives. In some ways The School Stories project, through Rose’s visual metaphors, seem to be doing something similar yet quite different at the same time. By representing autobiographical text in a visual context, Rose and Griffith appear to have added a new dimension to what feminist phenomenologist call the reclamation of the self. Rose and Griffith are asking about the relationship between two distinct but not separate, forms of autobiographical text in reclaiming the self that was constructed in formal schooling. They are asking how the various forms of thought: verbal, visual, and written combine to form identity and shape memory. Peter Ackroyd raises much the same idea but on a more general level in Albion:The Origins of the English Imagination, (Doubleday,2003) when he argues at all forms of human expression must be taken into account in constructing cultural sensibility. The School Stories also seem to have uncovered another theme. The autobiographical texts appear to make explicit what has been implicit and in the process question what have been called historical presuppositions about what we believe is the basis for the way we view the world. One example might be the school stories question the ability of the public school system to fully prepare children for life in a vibrant democracy. These autobiographical texts are not simply bourgeois individualism. Like Connelley and Clandinin, these stories represent personal, practical knowledge of how to get by without succeeding in school. They tell of how a group of creative men succeed despite the myths of how to behave and learn in our society. One might say that they could be a broader exploration of Robert Fulghum’s, All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten.

A second example might be questioning how we know in schooling that we know. In an era of no child left behind our rush to accountability based on quantitative standards just may not be acceptable in a diverse and complex world. If autobiographical text is important in informing the nature of the School Stories project to this point, it may also help point the way to an educational context of community, diversity, complexity, and short term planning as Fullan (Change Forces: The Sequel, 2001) has argued. By rendering explicit what has been implicit The School Stories Project may be a vehicle to help coalesce much of the work cited above.

References
• Ackroyd, P. (2002). Albion:The Origins of the English Imagiantion. New York: Random House.
• Collingwood, R.G. (1946). The Idea of History. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Connelley, M.& Clandinin, J. (1988).Teachers as curriculum planners: Narratives of experience. New York: Teachers College Press.
• Fulghum, R. (1998). All I needed to know about Schooling I learned in Kindergarten. New York: Ballantine Books.
• Fullan M. (2001) Change Forces: The Sequel. London: Falmer Press.
• Grumet, M. (1996). Existential and phenomenological foundations of autobiographical method. In W. Pinar & W. Reynolds, Understanding curriculum as phenomenological and deconstructed text .New York: Teachers College Press.
• Habermas, J. (1970). Knowledge and Human interests. Boston, MA: Beacon.
• Noddings, N. (1996). In W. Pinar & W. Reynolds, Understanding curriculum as phenomenological and deconstructed text .New York: Teachers College Press.
• Pinar,W. & Reynolds.(2002). Understanding curriculum as phenomenological and deconstructed text .New York: Teachers College Press.
• Schutz, D. (1996). In W. Pinar & W. Reynolds, Understanding curriculum as phenomenological and deconstructed text .New York: Teachers College Press