Excavating Assumptions and Practices Through Writing an Autoethnography

Critically reflective leadership:

Excavating assumptions and practices through writing an autoethnography

CI 620: Pro-Sem Fall 2012

Adapted from the work of Linda Shadiow, Northern Arizona University

What Our Stories Teach Us: A Guide to Critical Reflection for College Faculty (2013). Sage.

What is an autoethnography?

Autoethnographyis a form of self-reflection and writing that describes, explains and analyzes the writer's personal experience and connects this autobiographical story to wider cultural, political, and social meanings and understandings.

“Ellis and Bochner (2000) advocate authoethnography, a form of writing that ‘make[s] the researcher's own experience a topic of investigation in its own right’ (p. 733) rather than seeming ‘as if they're written from nowhere by nobody’ (p. 734). Autoethnography is ‘an autobiographical genre of writing that displays multiple layers of consciousness, connecting the personal to the cultural’ (p. 739); autoethnographers ‘ask their readers to feel the truth of their stories and to become coparticipants, engaging the storyline morally, emotionally, aesthetically, and intellectually’ (p. 745).”

Porter, N. (2004). Computer-mediated anthropology: An Online Resource Center. http://anthropology.usf.edu/cma/CMAmethodology-ae.htm

Our stories matter.

Is there no context for our lives? No song, no literature, no poem full of vitamins, no history connected to experience that you can pass along to help us start strong? You are an adult. The old one, the wise one. Stop thinking about saving your face. Think of our lives and tell us your particularized world. Make up a story. Narrative is radical, creating us at the very moment it is being created. We will not blame you if your reach exceeds your grasp; if love so ignites your words they go down in flames and nothing is left but their scald. Or if, with the reticence of a surgeon's hands, your words suture only the places where blood might flow. We know you can never do it properly - once and for all. Passion is never enough; neither is skill. But try. For our sake and yours forget your name in the street; tell us what the world has been to you in the dark places and in the light. Don't tell us what to believe, what to fear. Show us belief’s wide skirt and the stitch that unravels fear's caul. You, old woman, blessed with blindness, can speak the language that tells us what only language can: how to see without pictures. Language alone protects us from the scariness of things with no names. Language alone is meditation.

Lecture, Toni Morrison, Nobel Prize for Literature, 1993

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Part 1: Finding our stories

Excavating: Mining the vein.

Who would have thought the stories would cling to him so? (Ibsen, Peer Gynt)

Drawn from materials at a half-day worksession for the POD Network (Professional and Organizational Development) annual conference 2010.

Directions: Draw a vertical line down the center of a page, then draw a horizontal line intersecting that so you have four boxes on the page.

In one box, recall two incidents involving you as a student. Something that shifted the ground you walk on regarding education.
Recall two instances where you were a leader and had something happen that shifted the ground you walk on as an educator.
Recall something from within your discipline (e.g., a book, a theory, an event, a speaker) that reshaped the professional ground you walk on.
Write your name (first and last) with your non-dominant hand.

Considering: Telling what is found.

Narrative is radical, creating us at the very moment it is being created (Morrison, Nobel Lecture).

Pick one story you have identified (from any quadrant) and talk with a colleague about it. Explain why that story is one of significance.

Why write your name with your non-dominant hand?

Next week:

Analyzing the stories further.

Bring this sheet with the quadrants back next week.