Teaching the power of the word

Art/Research International

2016

Self Cite

Listening to the Silences is an ethnodrama -an example of verbatim theatre that evokes a teacher's first year in the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) based on the words voiced during a series of four interviews sessions conducted by the author. The protagonist, Indiana Ingelside, spent her first year in CPS in an African American school in one of Chicago's poorest neighborhoods. The show is intended to help the audience reflect on the beginning teacher's experiences of working in that setting. The script evokes the challenges of teaching within environments shaped by social policies that do not address, and frequently exacerbate, the poverty, racism, and other forms of injustice that shape the lives of children and families of color. The article begins with the complete playscript and then concludes with an afterword that describes what the author learned from developing and producing the show. Photos from the Philadelphia workshops are included. Mikhail Bakhtin (1981, p. 111) Notes on the Script and PerformanceThe playscript presented below was constructed from a verbatim transcription of an interview conducted by the author as part of a larger research study (see Vanover, 2016, in press). All names of people, schools, streets, and neighborhoods were changed to pseudonyms during the transcription process, and all pauses in the interview lasting longer than two seconds were timed and marked. Words have been cut from the transcript to dramatize these data (Saldaña, 2002), but no words have been added. Every word spoken in the script is presented in the ethnodrama in the original order it was voiced.Listening to the Silences is intended to support audience discussion about first year teachers' experiences in schools that serve low income and minority students; brief suggestions for guiding this dialogue may be found in the discussion which follows the script. Following the principles of inquiry theatre, future productions may cut words from the script and may make changes to the music and the staging, but no words may be added to such future works, nor may these performances change the order of the dialogue. THE FACILITATORS are the producers of the piece. At a university or school district performance, THE FACILITATORS might be faculty members with research interests in teacher induction and retention; at a performance put up by a community group, THE FACILITATORS might be neighborhood leaders with an interest in improving local schools. THE FACILITATORS hand out programs to audience members before the piece begins, and they guide the discussion that concludes the work 4 .THE MUSICIANS: Different arrangements of Arvo Pärt's Fratres are played throughout the show by local musicians. School of music students might play in a performance hosted by a university. High school students might play in a performance hosted by a school district. Performances without live musicians might use conductor Rudolf Werthen's Telarc recording of Pärt's Fratres.THE INTERVIEWER is a graduate student working on his/her disserta...

Section: Afterwordmentioning

confidence: 99%

Listening to the Silences: A Teacher’s First Year in Words and Music

Art/Research International

2016

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“…I believe it was only after people in education became more concerned about how students were criminalized (Alexander 2012; Giroux 2009) that there was enough interest to allow Anise’s story to come to light. The play was published almost nine years after our first productions along with a poem about Anise by one of my friends from Ruth’s class (see Vanover 2014b and Brown 2014).…”

Section: A Systematic Research Processmentioning

confidence: 99%

From Connection to Distance

Journal of Contemporary Ethnography

2016

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This autoethnography describes the process of inquiry that led to the development of a series of ethnodramas that evoke teachers' experience in the Chicago Public Schools (CPS). I discuss the methods I used to conduct a set of interviews with two groups of elementary school teachers in CPS: beginning teachers who had never worked a classroom as a full-time job and accomplished teachers who spent many years of their lives teaching students of color. I discuss the use of arts-based research methods to engage with these data, and I describe the interpretive journey I undertook as I wrote and produced ethnodramas about CPS teachers' experience. A major dilemma for my analysis was communicating the structural inequalities that shaped the teachers' narratives, particularly the Chicago system's inability to create working conditions necessary to support the retention and professional development of teachers in the city's high poverty schools. I describe how the conversation and inner dialogue generated by arts-based methods helped me recognize different patterns within the data, and inspired me to reframe my interpretation. In the conclusion, I discuss the limits of my approach as a researcher and an artist. Excerpts from two playscripts are woven

“…Throughout my analysis, I also used ethnodramatic methods to interpret data I collected and to generate dialogue (Feldman, 2005;Gillen & Bhattacharya, 2013;Saldaña, 2011). In these forums, I began to construct a counter narrative to this idea of meritorious progress through extended personal reflection and professional growth, but these ideas were not linked to a formal analysis (see Vanover, 2013a;Vanover & Saldaña, 2005). Some researchers emphasize teaching is an intense intellectually and emotionally demanding form of care work that makes practitioners vulnerable to the gaps between the needs of their students, the demands of their employers, and their own abilities; these gaps remain a part of the practice of classroom teaching at all skill levels (Biklen, 1995;Fleming, Mackrain, & LeBuffe, 2013;Kelchtermans, 2005).…”

Section: Points To Journalmentioning

confidence: 99%

Inquiry Theatre

2015

Qualitative Inquiry

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Inquiry theatre is a form of ethnodrama that investigates core issues raised by interview data and communicates research participants' experience with passion. Audience members work with the research team to read, discuss, and ask questions about verbatim interview texts that are also performed at the session in a reader's theatre format. Dialogue and inquiry deepen audience members' connection to the texts and help them enter imaginatively into research participants' worlds. Suggestions for successful performance and a vivid analysis of the strengths and weakness of the form are offered at the conclusion.