of magic doors there is this

Of Magic Doors There Is This....Author(s): Diane StephensSource: Research in the Teaching of English, Vol. 35, No. 3 (Feb., 2001), pp. 292-301Published by: National Council of Teachers of EnglishStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40171490 .

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Of Magic Doors There Is This. . . .

Diane Stephens University of South Carolina

Diane Stephens prepared the following talk for the 2000 NCTE Conference in Milwaukee

upon receiving the Alan C. Purves Award, presented to the RTE article from the previous year's volume judged most likely to have an impact on the practice of others. In her talk

Stephens considers the doubts she has had about the design of the award winning study,

focusing especially on a researchers obligation to help the teachers with whom the researcher is working, even at the risk of jeopardizing a study s design. Stephens traces the way that her

engagement with that question has led to her current professional commitments. P.S. M.W.S.

My office at home can best be described as a decorator's nightmare. My desk, bookcase, table, and walls are covered not with things that look "attractive" but with things that please me - things to which I am affectively connected. Aesthetically, I think the effect might be considered by some as

appalling; by others, as unappealing. In case you are wondering, this is true

throughout our entire house. In part, my husband humors me; in part, I think he rather likes how it looks. We live surrounded by pictures of our children, by things they have made for us; and by pictures of our friends and parents and

grandparents and great-grandparents and things they have given or made or left for us. On my desk, for example, I have 8 small pictures, most of them of

our grandson Ben. On the wall behind

my desk, I have a 12" by 15" frame with

pictures of our three quite grown up children, Jennifer, Kris and Ken; and three 18" by 22" frames - one for each of them. Each of these frames has 20

openings. When I bought them three

years ago, I spent hours going through photo albums - choosing pictures, color

copying, enlarging, cropping. In the first opening of each frame, I put pictures of my children when they were first born. In the largest opening, I put recent pictures. In the other 18 openings, I have pictures from each of their first 18 years. There are many stories that can be told about the lives of my children. Using photographs, I told the ones I want to remember. Every day, as I sit at my computer, my eye is caught

292 Research in the Teaching of English • Volume 35 • February 2001



by one or another of these pictures, and I smile. I am pleased to work surrounded

by the stories I have constructed. In the midst of this affective ca-

cophony of pictures, there is a small

print, in a tarnished, chipped, and

obviously cheap silver frame. The print shows some trees in fog. I've had this

print above my desk, among my pictures, for more than 20 years. Despite my strong dislike for prints that have

sayings written on them, I keep this

print close by because of what it says. And what it says is this,"Of magic doors there is this: You do not see them even as you are passing through."

"Of magic doors there is this: You do

not see them even as you are passing

through. "

I found that print when I was 30 and my life was undergoing a radical

change. I had been and always expected to be a full-time housewife. I was in the

process of becoming a single, working parent, with foil custody of three children. Five years later, much to my surprise, I was a full time graduate student at Indiana University. More than 20 years later, I am standing here

today giving an acceptance speech for an article that appeared in the very well

respected and prestigious journal, Re- search in the Teaching of English.

"Cf magic doors there is this: You do


through. "

I heard recently that some reading researchers were frustrated with research in reading and language arts. Their criticism was that "All that hap- pens at conferences is that people tell stories." I smile when I look at the

pictures of my children and think about the stories they tell. I smiled when I heard the criticism about research. For those of you who don't know this yet: Getting old is great. One's perspective shifts. Hindsight no longer allows us to see the past. Rather, hindsight allows us to see that each of us has many pasts. The present, we come to understand, exists only as the stories we choose to tell about a past we construct for that moment. I see this not as a cause of frustration but as a cause for celebra- tion. Finally, it seems we have come of

age. We know that all that we do - the classes we teach, the research we conduct, the lives we lead - exist only as

story. They are narratives we piece together based on things we believe to be true. Objectivity really is, as I once heard it described, "If you stood as I stood and watched as I watched, you would see what I saw."

Looking back, the story I like best about my past is that my life has been one of surprise. Of magic doors. Of truths that are illusions and illusions that are truths because we truly have no

way of knowing one from the other. As I write this speech, it is October

and I am at home, deciding what I will

say in the future about the past. The article for which I am receiving this award was hard to write. I think the

study was important. I feel a responsibility to share what we had learned. But two months into that two-year-long study, I knew I'd never again do one like it. And I wouldn't do one like it because it violated my sense of right and wrong. I felt it was unethical. I wished I had known that before we began.

Of Magic Doors There Is This 293



I am accustomed to revising my speeches not only on the way to the

podium but on the podium. But this

speech is different. It will be printed in the February issue of RTE and so I must

get it to the editors, Michael Smith and Peter Smagorinsky, in October. This means that they will send it to the

printer, that it will be in print, before I have said it. This fact is slowing me down, causing me doubt. When the time comes, will I really stand on the

podium and tell you that I thought the

study was unethical? I cannot be sure. How can I decide today what will feel

right in November? I wonder what Peter and Michael will do if the speech I write now is not the one I give. Will

they have a footnote that says, "This is the speech Diane said she would give in November"? And, yet even as I write this, I can see they will not be able to do that. There will not be time. What I write here will be printed as the speech I give two months from now, whether I do so or not.

But enough digression. I am avoid-

ing telling the story of my discomfort with the study. Here is how it starts:

The study on which this award is based was conducted when I worked at the Center for the Study of Reading. If

you have seen the article, you might remember that there are many co- authors. That is because many people contributed to the story I tell in it. Judy Sheltonjanelle Weinzierl, and Candace Clark spent three years collecting and

analyzing data and helping with early drafts of this report. Judy Shelton re-

sponded to many of the subsequent drafts. Jan Gafrhey was Director of

Reading Recovery in Illinois at the time of the study, participated in research meetings, and responded to earlier drafts of the article and to reviewers' comments on some of the later ver- sions. Gail Boldt worked on the final

version, helping to reconceptualize the review of the literature as well as the voice and shape of the manuscript. Jennifer Story also worked on the final

version, helping to abridge the case studies. I did not personally observe and interview teachers but was involved in other phases of the study. And I was the

person who took pen in hand to tell the

story. Because many people worked on

the study, I felt it only right that they be co-authors of the article. That meant that the story I chose to tell in the article had to be a story we experienced in common.That was not hard. We had a common history. We had conducted the study collaboratively, met regularly in research team meetings, and worked

together on data analysis. I knew we would all agree on how and why we conducted the study and what we found. What was hard was that I had to leave out the part that belonged only to me. I had to leave out how I felt about the study.

If my feelings about the research as unethical had stayed in time, in the past, this would have been less hard. But the

feeling has stayed with me. Perhaps more significantly, because of how I felt about the study, I took actions I might not have taken otherwise. And those actions enabled me to pass through a

magic door, to journey down an unex-

pected path, a path that significantly




shaped what I have done since and, indeed, continues to shape the work I do now.

So the story was hard to write because, since it was a co-authored

publication, I needed to take out the

parts that meant only to me. In the end I wrote an article from my perspective about which we would all agree, but I did not tell the whole story. I've decided to do that now.

Judy, Janelle, Jan, Candace, and I conducted the study in order to understand how teachers made changes in their beliefs and practices when no one was encouraging them, via mandate or staff development, to do so. What we wanted was data that would allow us to

begin to build a theory of teachers as learners.We thought that such a theory would inform our practice as teacher educators. We thought that such a

theory might prove useful to other teacher educators. In-house, we referred to the study as the "Second

Study." The term comes from Peircean semiotics. Peirce (1877, reprinted in Buchler, 1955) argues that change oc- curs when individuals experience doubt. Doubt, he claims, is an uneasy state from which individuals would wish to move. In his phenomenology he refers to doubt as a "Second." He argues that doubt/tension was resolved by "fixat-

ing belief." Early on, when we were

designing this study, we talked about what we might learn and wondered if

changes teachers made would be driven

by their heed to resolve doubt. And so we began to talk about this as the "Second Study."

Eight teachers participated in this

study. They were paired off with graduate students, who visited their classrooms and talked with them regularly for two years. Initially, I was pleased with the design. We held interviews

prior to the beginning of the first year in which we sought to understand each teacher's beliefs and practices. We then observed frequently in the first few weeks of the year. We talked with the teachers after those visits and in so

doing began to understand how each teacher thought about and taught read-

ing. We continued visiting about once

every six weeks that first year, inter- viewed the teacher at the end of that

year and the beginning of the next, and continued to visit and converse throughout a second year. We took field notes

during every visit, recorded and tran- scribed all interviews and conversations, and used qualitative data analysis techniques along the way and at the end of the study.

Not a bad design, maybe even a

good one, but also one that became

ethically problematic when in October of the first year, one of the teachers we were studying, Betsy, became the first of the eight to ask what all eight eventu-

ally asked, "Could you please give me some advice about teaching reading?"

What the graduate students said in

response, and this was true, was that

they were not experts in reading. But I was. And I sat in my office and read the field notes and analyzed patterns in the data but did nothing to help the teachers. And I continued to withhold help for the entire two years of the study.

Toward the end of the two years, I decided to teach a graduate level read-

Of Magic Doors There Is This. ... 295



ing course geared toward what the teachers in the study had wanted to know. I would teach it in the summer, so attendance would be easier for those who lived too far away to come to a class during the year. I asked the graduate students to let the teachers in the Second Study know about the course and to invite them to come. I needed to

give back; I needed to help. I needed some way to at least begin to offset the

help I had not given during the study. "Of magic doors there is this: You do


through. "

At the end of that course, the teachers who took it asked, "What's next?" and so we began to meet monthly during the next year and then for a second year and then for a third. At the end of that year, I left Illinois to take a

job at the University of Hawaii. One of the first things I did there was begin three-year-long teacher study groups. A few years later NCTE announced the NCTE Reading Initiative, a three-

year-long staff development effort. As

part of this initiative, consultants would work with groups of 8-10 teachers and their principal on-site at their school. These groups would meet once a month for three years. I offered to pilot a site.There were 28 pilot sites that year spread all across the country. I spent the next year working with teachers at Waiau Elementary School on Oahu and then, having found out that I was

going to be a grandmother, left Hawaii to take a job near our grandchild. The

job I chose was at the University of South Carolina, four hours away from our daughter Kris, her husband Scott,

and our grandson Ben, who is now 14 months old.

One of my first conversations in South Carolina was with Suzette Lee, from the State Department of Educa- tion. The Governor, Jim Hodges, had decided that he wanted a Governor's Institute of Reading. It was Suzette 's

job to figure out what that should look like. She was thinking she said, of three-

year-long teacher study groups. She wanted to know what I knew about such groups.



through. "

The 28 pilot sites of NCTE's

Reading Initiative were indeed spread out all across the country. There was, however, one state that had five sites. That state was South Carolina and the five consultants associated with those sites all had connections to the Univer-

sity of South Carolina. It is no coinci-

dence, then, that of out the many conversations that many people had with Suzette, there evolved the South Carolina Reading Initiative, SCRI, a

partnership between the State of South Carolina and NCTE. As in NCTE's

Reading Initiative, in SCRI groups of 8-10 teachers and their principal agree to study together for three years. Unlike NCTE's Initiative, The SCRI requires that the facilitator of these study ses-

sions, the Literacy Coach, spend four

days a week in the classrooms of

teachers, providing them with support as they work to be the best possible teachers of readers they can be. Each coach works with four such study groups. Teachers have the option of




earning graduate credit for their participation in these groups.

Regional Coaches are hired by the state to provide support to these coaches.

They also serve as Literacy Coaches themselves, working with one study group, though, not four. As Regional Coaches they visit the other coaches in their region regularly and hold regional meetings once a month. Each of these

regions has a liaison from the State

Department of Education, a member of the state-level Reading and Language Arts Team, who serves as mentor, at-

tending meetings and providing support throughout the month and across the years.

All together, then, there are 128 coaches, and they not only facilitate

study groups for others but participate in one themselves. Because there are 128 of them, there are six such study groups, called cohorts. Each consists of 2-3 Regional Coaches, the Literacy Coaches they support, their State De-

partment Liaison, and a university fac-

ulty member, referred to as a member of the Teaching Team. Predictably, the members of the Teaching Team are individuals who piloted NCTE s Read-

ing Initiative - Amy Donnelly, Janet Files, SusiLong, Ginger Manning, Heidi

Mills, and me. Diane DeFord joined the

Teaching Team this year as co-teacher of a cohort. These study groups meet for three weeks in the summer and once a month all year. They are the

equivalent of graduate level courses and over the three years, the 128 coaches will earn 27 hours of graduate credit, most of it in reading.

Across the state, in groups of 8- 10

teachers, these coaches are working with 3200 teachers. These teachers in turn impact the lives of the children in their classrooms - nearly 64,000 of them a year. We envision this as 128 coaches, eight members of the State Depart- ment Reading and Language Arts Team, and seven members of the Teaching Team, holding hands encircling 3200 teachers who hold hands encircling 64,000 children.

It is an incredible undertaking. It is the most rewarding work I have ever done. It is most rewarding work any of us has ever done. In an email message to me a few days ago, Janet Files captures what all of us feel: "SCRI is the most

rewarding, passionate, and visionary work I have ever experienced as a learner and as a teacher. ... It is also propelling me into an Olympic work mode."

I have a long history with NCTE s

Reading Initiative. When I was in Illinois conducting a three-year-long study group as a way of giving back to the teachers who participated in the Second Study, I participated in early conversations about the Initiative. Over the years I have continued to participate in those conversations. I think that it is because of this history that several

people recently have come up to me and commented on what /have done in South Carolina. But / have not "done"

anything in South Carolina. Wonderful

people in South Carolina built a door, a

magic door. Governor Jim Hodges and State Superintendent Inez Tennebaum wanted a staff development program. They asked Suzette Lee to design the

program and she put together a mag- nificent team to help her do so: Pam




Wills, Christy Clonts, Cathy Jones, Jennifer Reed, and, more recently, Pam

Huxford, Linda Ott, and Terrell Tracy. Suzette invited more than 700 people in the state to participate in a conversation about the Governor's idea. Five of those people - Amy Donnelly, Janet Files, Susi Long, Ginger Manning, and Heidi Mills - were people who were involved with NCTE Reading Initia- tive sites in South Carolina. They joined with Suzette 's team, and many many others across the state, to create the South Carolina Reading Initiative. I moved to South Carolina so that I could be a part of Ben's life; because of actions I took based on a study I

thought was "wrong," I was on a

professional path that led through the door to the South Carolina Reading Initiative.


not see them even as you are passing through.

>}

And that is the part of the story I haven't told before. The path that got left out of a jointly-authored but singu- larly-written article. I was uncomfort- able with the design of the Second

Study, and that led to study groups in Illinois and in Hawaii and then with NCTE and now in South Carolina in a

partnership between NCTE and South Carolina. Of course, it did not happen that way going forward in time. It is

only in retrospect that I construct a

pattern I believe to be true. The story told in the article is a

different story. It details the design I mentioned briefly here, includes data- driven narratives about the four teachers who stayed in their classrooms for

both years of the study, and identifies

patterns in the data. In brief, what we came to understand is that the teachers whose beliefs and practices changed considerably over the two years were teachers who (a) "fixated belief through inquiry" and (b) focused their attention on the skills and strategies of particular children.

As I mentioned earlier, the expres- sion "fixating belief through inquiry" comes from Peircean semiotics. In 1 887, Peirce (reprinted in Buchler, 1955) argues that individuals fixate belief in one of four ways:

1. By believing what one wants to believe (tenacity).

2 By believing what someone else has said is true (authority).

3. By believing what one always has and which seems reasonable (a priori).

4. By believing what one has tested out through investigation (scientific method).

It is only through the fourth way, scientific method, Peirce argues, that any new understanding or knowledge can be constructed. The other three ways cannot be generative. As I explain in the

article, Peirce's definition for scientific method is not consistent with the mean-

ing the phrase carries now. His term instead parallels what is currently referred to as inquiry, that is, as reasoned

exploration of an issue/concern. By believing what one has tested out, new

knowledge/new beliefs are constructed. What we found in the Second

Study and reported in the article is that




three of the four teachers upon whom we focused our attention did actively inquire into their beliefs and practices over the two years of the study. They thought about what they were doing, tried out new things, introduced into the classroom ideas and practices they were learning about in another context, and considered the impact of these new ideas and practices. What we learned, however, was that inquiry seemed to be a necessary but not sufficient compo- nent of change. The teachers who

changed their beliefs and practices over the two years not only took an inquiry stance but also focused on how these new ideas and practices played out in the lives of particular children. They saw and talked about, not what just what was happening with groups of children, but with what I have started to refer to as the "childs" with whom they worked. I use the word "childs" because, too often, our responsibility to the individual child gets lost in the curricular conversation about children. When we use the word children, the individual child becomes part of a

group and is no longer visible in his or her uniqueness.The word childs, for me, captures our responsibility to each and

every individual in our classrooms, a

responsibility evidenced by two of the four teachers in the Second Study. In their classroom the "childs" were in the

foreground and did not get lost in the

whole, as part of a group called "children."

These findings changed my practice as a teacher educator and became and continue to be a point of tension in

my work, work which most recently

has focused on the South Carolina

Reading Initiative. SCRI is inquiry- based but, to date we have not built in a

way for the coaches or the teachers to work with particular children, with the "childs." We are helping the coaches learn how to support teachers as learners while they are working with teachers. Because this is happening simulta-

neously, it is, of course, difficult for the coaches, for the teachers, for the State

Department and Teaching Teams. I

anticipate, however, based on the find-

ings from the Second Study, that we will tell success stories about this part of the initiative because the work with teachers is an inquiry and the focus is on particular teachers.

This past summer we taught the coaches about readers and reading and teachers and teaching. Our plan was to ask them to work one-on-one with teachers and with a child this year. We wanted their work with both to be an

inquiry and for them to be able to focus on particular teachers and particular childs. The demands of their new jobs are, however, often overwhelming. They struggle with principals who do not do their homework, with district-wide mandates that run counter to what they know to be true, with teachers who are more used to being judged for what

they do rather than helped with what

they do. Our first decision was to

postpone their work with the childs until spring. Last week, we made the decision to postpone it until summer. I am worried about this delay. What the teachers need to know most is how to

help particular childs as readers. The coaches do not know this first hand and




until they do, I worry that most of what

they encountered this summer will drift away as theoretical possibilities instead of being actualized as new

practices and as new ways of knowing and seeing and helping. And so the

story turns on itself - I was not helpful to the teachers in the Second Study -

and I worry now about the coaches not

being able to be helpful enough to the SCRI teachers.

From the Second Study, then, came

major understandings for me and for the research team: understandings about teachers as learners and about the

importance of inquiry and of paying attention to how theory plays out in the lives of particular childs. I learned other lessons as well. I learned about myself -

about my need to be helpful, about how I feel when I ignore that responsibility. I learned that every teaching act, every research study, every act of inquiry, every story we tell, is a political act.

Every decision we make silences some voices while allowing others to be heard. The past, as we tell it, defines the

present and shapes the future. So much gained from one study -

a study that I have thought about then and since as unethical. I find it incred-

ibly paradoxical that I learned so much from and am getting an award for that

study. I wish I could say that this current

work - our participation in and study of SCRI has somehow resolved all ethical dilemmas. But it has not. Is it better? Yes. At least I prefer to think so. We are sharing with teachers what we know and we have asked them to

engage in self-study and to share with

us and with others what they learn.We are not studying "them"; we are teach-

ing and learning with them. But, still, in some districts, in spite of our "design" that participation be voluntary, it is not

voluntary but mandated by administra- tors. And our request that teachers

study themselves is not really a request but a condition of participation, as is

reflection, a "requirement" we have built into all that we ask them to do. But this work is better than the earlier work, better than the Second Study, better than other alternatives, and we are

trying to be partners, to be co-teachers and co-learners and they know this of us.This time, in this study, being helpful is built into what we do.

I believe it is my responsibility as a

researcher, as a teacher, to be helpful, and I happen to believe that it is yours also. Our job as teachers, as teacher- educators, as individuals who conduct research and engage in inquiry, our job is to be helpful. I will always remember the Second Study as a time when in my quest to do "good research," I let go of what matters most to me and what I think matters most to all of us - I let go of my responsibility to be helpful to the teachers with whom I worked.

In my office at home, I work surrounded by those things to which I am affectively connected. Likewise I am affectively connected to my work. And passion, whether for one's family or one's work, is tied both to politics and to ethics. It is simply not right to care deeply about things or people without wanting them to be the best

they can possibly be and without giving everything that you have to make that




happen. In the Second Study, I held back. I did not give all that I could. I cannot document my success in lives made better.

And yet, as part of the overarching paradox, I am honored to receive the Alan C. Purves award for this study. It is an award that suggests that my work, while it was not immediately helpful to the eight teachers who allowed us to learn from them, may be helpful to others. And because of that I can not

imagine an award that could mean more to me.



through."

I have been very fortunate. The doors through which I have passed have

provided me with the opportunity to be of use. Thank you to all who build doors: to the teachers; to the research team; to the writing team; to Peter

Smagorinsky and Michael Smith, editors of RTE, for infinite patience and

great advice; to the teachers and childs in all the places I have ever worked; and

especially to the SCRI community -

the State Department and Teaching Teams, the coaches, the teachers, and the childs in South Carolina with whom I am now most passionately and

politically and ethically connected.Your doors have made a difference in my life. I will be forever grateful.

References

Buchler, J. (Ed.). (1955). Philosophical writings qfPeirce. New York: Dover.

Peirce, C. S. (1877/1955). The fixation of belief. In J. Buchler (Ed.), Philosophical writings qfPeirce (pp. 5-23). New York: Dover.

Stephens, D, Boldt, G., Clark, C, Gaffney, J., Shelton, J., Story, J., & Weinzierl, J. (1999).

Learning (about learning) from four teachers. Research in the Teaching of English, 34, 532-565.

Of Magic Doors There Is This. ... 301



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