Writing Truth as Fiction: Administrators Think About Their Work Through a Different Lens

This article argues that school administrators can learn about themselves through fictionalizing their real world experience. Examples of this writing form are offered in the text to illustrate the form and possible function of this type of work. The author presents this alternate writing form as a reflective tool that can assist professionals in learning about themselves and as a result resituate themselves in the world of leadership. Keywords: Autoethnography, Narrative Inquiry, Evocative Narrative, Alternative Narrative Research, and Fiction as Educational Research ********** A year ago something wonderful happened. I realized that by fictionalizing my real world experience as a school administrator I could translate my real world experience in new ways. Experimenting with this writing form has assisted me in understanding myself and allowed me to resituate myself in leadership. The use of fiction has become a focus of my research and I have used fiction coupled with real experience to explore myself and my experience. My work is autobiographical, that is based in real world experiences, yet fictionalizing some aspects of it to create the distance necessary to see, feel and analyze the work. By fictionalizing I mean describing reality as experienced by the writer/researcher with certain license taken. For example, nothing written is fabricated, but it may be a condensation of several lived experiences. I do not claim that fictionalizing real experience is the only or "best" way to represent educational research; I do claim that fictionalizing real world experience assists in cultivating certain kinds of reflective knowledge that can enhance understanding of self and in turn resituate a leader in her context. I entered academe five years ago after working as a public school administrator in rural northern California. Prior to becoming a public school teacher and administrator I spent nearly a decade working as a circus performer in Europe, walking high wires and working as a clown. If it were not for the birth of my son, his father's abandonment of me the night of my son's birth, and my need to do something purposeful while raising my son alone, I may never have found myself exploring real experience through fiction. When I came back to America I quit circus life, went back to school, and became a public elementary teacher. I continued my education and after four years of teaching I became an elementary school principal and also a small school district superintendent. While working as a school administrator I continued my graduate studies. My graduate studies focused on public administration and during that time my interest in alternate research writing forms grew as I became familiar with research work being done in fields outside education. It was at that time, in 1998, that I first read an article by Laurel Richardson (1998) in which she described exploring writing forms that helped her "relocate" herself within her university, "I am grateful that the writing has brought me to new places within myself ... I am in the process of relocating myself on a writing-map--indeed, of trying to figure out what is on the map" (p. 46). When I first read Richardson (1998) I realized that I needed to work to relocate myself in my work and to search for my own writing "map." Richardson's (1998) work moved me and made sense to me. I realized that I needed to find ways to express, explore, and examine who I am and how I situate myself in the world in order to reframe my work as a school leader. I realized that her inquiry could inform educational research and it influenced me as I explored narrative inquiry in my doctoral dissertation. When I left school administration to enter academe many of the same critical questions I posed to myself in the field emerged in academic life. Who and where am I in my work? How can I fully explore "self" in the context of "work?" Finding my place in the world of scholarship has been somewhat complicated. …