Teaching daze: Stories of self and others

Abstract

Teaching Daze: Stories of Self and Others is a doctoral dissertation about beginning teaching by a beginning teacher. Set in Tasmania, in 2000, it is an investigation into one Drama teacher’s first year in the profession. This is my story. I was the teacher, and I was the researcher. The research method was autoethnography (Bochner & Ellis, 2002; Ellis, 1997; Ellis & Bochner, 2000; Gergen & Gergen, 2002; Reed-Danahay, 1997). I conducted this study at a time when beginning teaching was characterised in the literature as a time of survival, or development, or transformation, but policymakers predominantly viewed beginning teaching as a problem needing a solution. I found that an in-depth portrayal of the individual’s personal experience of beginning teaching was missing from much of the research literature in this aspect of educational inquiry, especially in the area of secondary Drama teaching. This dissertation is about ‘seeing anew’, as I offer a different way of knowing about this issue. I write in layers, quilting my multiple voices (teacher, researcher, woman, daughter, and mother) with the voices of others (research literature, critical readers and other beginning teachers). I argue that beginning teaching is complex; hence representations of it should be too. Teaching Daze is about unions – the writer and reader, the professional and personal, and the teacher and researcher. It is a story about embracing tensions, as opposed to solving them, and of finding connections between self and others. I allay fears. I confirm suspicions. Telling my story opened my eyes. I was guilty of holding a ‘limiting’ definition of ‘beginning teaching’. I stereotyped others. I stereotyped myself. I did not see anew; I wanted to fit in and to survive. By subconsciously embracing the notion that beginning teaching is about survival, I limited my ability to learn from my first year. Until I chose to revisit the experience, I had forgotten it. (Re)writing my story offered me, and others, hope. Teaching Daze is about the need for us to look beyond what others tell us the first year of teaching should be, in order to find what it can be – an individual, personal, and fundamental part of our days as teach