Book review: What our stories teach us: a guide to critical reflection for college faculty

Abstract

In this book, Shadiow focusses on the importance of stories as a key source of information in the lives of academics. The author believes our stories, as university teachers, can help develop a better understanding of events which include students within a university context. She likewise maintains that a close re-examination of our stories from our student days, and while teaching at university, can furnish us with multiple perspectives on how things could be done, or could have been done, in a more efficient and productive manner. Overall, Shadiow has accentuated the centrality of the concept of narrativisation of an academic's experiences and has offered a systematic approach to studying our experiences as told in our stories. The book is divided into eight chapters: the first four chapters focus on establishing the theoretical significance of stories in addition to specifying the most likely places in our biographies where we may be able to discover interesting and informative stories. Chapters 5-8 concentrate on developing an appropriate methodology to seek and analyse patterns in our stories in order to understand and develop meanings around events, based on a set of theoretical principles which will be briefly explored in this review.According to Shadiow, we are able to adjust or perhaps change our focus in teaching, if we begin to seek out and reflect on stories of noteworthy events or interactions with our students -stories that are more often than not forgotten or overlooked. She further states that we can also look for enlightening stories in our lives as students, and in our academic life -i.e. in our CVs, in the syllabi and memories of courses we have developed or taught, and in our professional writing: the journal articles we have written and the reviews we have received. The author also maintains that each one of these information sources may include some critical incidents or "breached norms" as Bruner (1996) refers to them, which we can analyse in order to discover the major themes that can inform and improve our approach to understanding our students and our own teaching practice. For example, she writes about her own experience of losing her work-study job during her undergraduate years at university, and subsequently of one occasion when she started teaching at university, when her students suggested a different plan from what she had originally suggested on the syllabus. The main proposition of the book is that our histories as students and academics, in particular the practice of teaching and learning at university itself, create a context rich with stories involving both educators and students. Accordingly, telling these stories can furnish us with valuable insights into, and multiple perspectives on, critical events in the stories. Drawing on Bruner's (1990) work, Shadiow also highlights the importance of our interdependent selves when narrating stories, i.e., self at the time the incident happened, self now, the telling self and the envisaged self, or possible selves in the future base...