Forged in the Crucibles of Difference: Building Discordant Communities

In this article, the authors present a narrative that illuminates alternative visions for connecting K12/college collaborations, exploring the potential for social justice work at the intersection of K12 teaching and academia. Told as a collective autoethnography in narrative form, they recount their decisions to teach in K12 spaces, while simultaneously pursuing their careers as professors. Their narrative serves as a reflexive analysis of the challenges faced as their K12 and college worlds collide. The authors find that teaching at the K12 level, alongside their college students, fosters powerful pedagogies. This autoethnography explores the possibilities and complexities at the intersections of personal, K12 teacher and academic identities. Lincoln & Rolling, 2006, p. 427) This article is presented as an autoethnographical account of our efforts to claim an academic identity that captures the work that we feel politically and ethically compelled to accomplish. Though marginalized as a methodology, we find that autoethnography gives us license to examine this academic culture within which we are steeped. As a form of ethnography, autoethnography is appropriate to the study of cultural norms and expectations (as well as deviations). Yet, in autoethnographical work, the one written about is also the author of the ethnographic tale. Duncan (2004), in her study of her own pedagogical practice as a professor, writes about the unique location of the autoethnographer: He or she, in fact, is the insider. The context is her or his own. Through autoethnography, those marginalized individuals who might typically have been the exotic subject of more traditional ethnographies have the chance to tell their own stories. (np) An autoethnographic account such as the one we undertake here also serves the purpose of revealing alternatives to dominant discourses around academic identities (Okawa, 2002). Alternatively, it may unveil areas of discontent, for academics such as ourselves, where political, financial, and/or emotional support might be necessary (Stanley, 2006). There are several forms that an autoethnography might take (Ellis, 2004). We create a personal narrative described by Ellis as follows: Where social scientists view themselves as the phenomenon and write evocative stories specifically focused on their academic as well as their personal lives. The primary purpose of personal narrative is to understand a self or some aspect of a life lived in a cultural context. Readers. take a more active role as they are invited into the author’s world, aroused to a feeling level about the events being described, and stimulated to use what they learn there to reflect on, understand, and cope with their own lives. (pp. 45-46) More specifically, we conduct a “collective autoethnography,” a term coined by Lapadat (2009). Lapadat, in her description of the collective autoethnographical work her graduate students conducted, writes that collective autoethnography allowed them, as a group of researchers, to analyze and interpret each other’s work, while creating a space for class members to respond to that work. Here, we similarly write individual narratives based on critical moments in a narrative form that allows for response to each other. We define a critical moment as one when, in the course of our work, we feel compelled to make a decision between a traditional academic response and a critical academic response. We use these critical moments as evocative spaces to explore what it means to be a transformative intellectual. Collective autoethnography is steeped in an Afrocentric feminist epistemology (Collins, 1991) – one that claims a research grounded in the concrete experience of those researched, engages others in sincere dialogue as a method of coming to understanding and acknowledges the moral, ethical, political and value-laden dimensions of research. This epistemological framework is consistent with our experience, guided by our political beliefs and is ethically in line with our conscience. Collective autoethnography is also closely aligned with the narrative and counterstorytelling traditions in critical race theory. Autoethnography, as a reflective and reflexive process of telling, performing, constructing, analyzing and representing, provides a space to own one’s stories and study them rigorously for what they have to offer others. An empowering methodology, autoethnography seeks to embrace experiences through a self-telling that does not use “voice-over” or ventriloquy (Fine, 1994). Indeed, it brings marginalized voices into spaces that have attempted to delegitimize them. Tierney (as cited by Holt, 2003) writes: Autoethnography confronts dominant forms of representation and power in an attempt to reclaim, through self-reflective response, representational spaces that have marginalized those of us at the borders. (Tierney, 1998, p. 66) Similarly, Lawrence (1995) holds that narratives bring marginalized stories to the center, making them honored and valued in academia, and provide support to others with similar untold stories. Narrative serves the critical purpose of sustaining the souls and spirits of the writers and readers. In this writing we incorporate a narrative counterstory into the collective autoethnography method by employing the narrative convention modeled by Solórzano and Yosso (2005) in which they use a fictional dialogue between a tenured Latino professor and his former student who is currently an untenured professor. They use this fictional dialogue to add the perspective of critical educators who like other marginalized groups may “be at the margins of higher education” (p. 72). The use of fictional counterstories has long been valued in critical race theory going back to Derrick Bell’s (1992) fictitious “Space Traders” story. Such story-telling is powerful because it is “honest and relentless” and, in its creation, enables the author to offer “the lie that tells the truth” (Dufresne, 2003, p. 14). In our case we’ve constructed a fictional scene in Eric’s family room not to present a hypothetical scenario to discuss a point. Rather our scene serves as an analysis of those critical moments in which we felt compelled to a transformative academic response. As Dufresne goes on to say, we care little that it happened exactly that way; rather we are interested in “telling the truth, not telling the facts” (ibid). In writing about the power of stories, Delgado (2000) asserts that stories can have both community building functions as well as destructive functions. “Stories build consensus, a common culture of shared understandings, and a deeper, more vital ethics,” writes Delgado (2000), “but stories. can (also) show. when it is time to reallocate power” (pp. 60-61). In these tentative first steps as professors, we communicated with each other regularly at these critical moments. Some stories were too painful to tell immediately and would be told nonchalantly weeks later as if unimPERSPECTIVES ON URBAN EDUCATION SUMMER 2010 | PAGE 42