The voice from within, teacher stories, epistemic responsibility, and first nations education

• Main Author: Burton, Wendy Ellen
• Format: Thesis
• Language: English
• Published: 1998
• Subjects: First Nations
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/1807/11902; http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk2/ftp02/NQ35395.pdf

grantor: University of Toronto This study addresses the role of autobiographical teacher stories in the ethical imperative to know well in teaching First Nations students. As an account of my own construction of my teacher knowledge, the thesis makes the claim that teachers' knowing, as expressed through personal narratives, can be a valid explanation of and justification for actions in the classroom. Within this context, the study offers itself in part as an enactment of what feminist philosopher Lorraine Code calls a "storied epistemology." The thesis begins with "The Trickster Brought Them," a story about my own classroom practice involving First Nations students, which acts as the backdrop for the study. This narrative is an articulation of my own teacher knowledge in response to the question, "How do I know what I ought to do?" in the literature classroom with First Nations adult learners. How I answer this question becomes the central problematic of the thesis. Chapter 1 introduces the nature of the problem, my method, and plan of the thesis. In Chapter 2, I describe the British Columbia postsecondary college system within which I teach and tell my teacher stories such as "The Trickster." I then elaborate the influence of biographical forms on knowledge claim, after which I present excerpts from my teaching autobiography, and consider the world in which I live and work from my perspective as a woman. Chapter 3 selectively surveys the literature on teacher knowledge: Argyris and Schön's work on "the reflective practitioner," researchers who use teachers' stories to make determinations about teaching and learning, critical and feminist pedagogies as they relate to stories about teaching, and educational theorists who use stories about teaching. Chapter 4 explicates Lorraine Code's theories of responsible knowing, epistemic community, and storied epistemologies, addressing how they support my use of stories as the justification for my classroom knowledge. Chapter 5 returns to "The Trickster," recapitulates the study, and sketches out unresolved problems in using stories to articulate knowledge claims when teaching postsecondary literature and composition to First Nations students. Ed.D.