A university writing teacher's educational awakening: A narrative inquiry into authority and related issue

This dissertation examines the complex educational situation I confronted in my compulsory university scientific writing class. The inquiry employs a narrative methodology because it allows me to probe the situation as a whole, to enter into its complexity, to trace the origins of tensions in my practice and to renegotiate those tensions. Using personal, teaching and student journals, other written documents, photographs, interviews and the corroborating stories of others, I reconstructed six narratives. The first describes the context of the inquiry and my teaching during the research semester. The second, a narrative of my childhood, traces the historical development of values and tensions in my professional practice. The third, fourth and fifth narratives develop further themes arising from the childhood narrative in terms of three aspects of my professional practice: research, teaching and writing, respectively. The sixth, my student Drew Y.'s narrative, recounts the research semester and my teaching through the eyes of another. A major theme in the narratives is my problematic relationship to authority, its origins in the personal domain and my mediation of this issue in the public domains of research, teaching and writing. Reconstructing these stories provided a means for understanding the dynamics of authority relationships in my teaching practice and the opportunity to renegotiate those meanings. The process of mediating problematic issues is relevant to our understanding of how novice teachers mediate theory and practice. Authority, an issue every teacher must negotiate, is also relevant to our understanding of the role personal practical knowledge plays in the classroom. In addition, research into the experience of writing in the context of life story promises to provide a missing strand in our understanding of writing, namely its meanings to our students as writers and to us as teachers and writers.