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Editors' introduction: Storying our research

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 STANFORD UNIVERSITY-GRADUATE SCHOOL OF EDUCATION
Faculty Position in early literacy, with emphasis on
elementary English language arts (Open Rank)

The Stanford Graduate School of Education is seeking nominations and applications for
a faculty member specializing in early literacy.

Successful candidates must demonstrate substantial evidence of a creative and

productive program of research, impact on his or her field of study (or if junior, the
potential for such impact), and a commitment to excellence in teaching and advising
students at both graduate and undergraduate levels. The applicant should have prior
experience teaching and/or working with teachers at the elementary level in classrooms
with ethnically, linguistically, or socioeconomically diverse student populations.

As a faculty member, responsibilities will include teaching graduate level and possibly
undergraduate level courses for both prospective researchers and elementary teacher
candidates. The faculty member will support doctoral students and doctoral research
in related fields.

Senior candidates should have an excellent record of research and teaching. Junior
candidates should have completed a doctorate before the date of appointment and
show evidence of excellent research and teaching potential.

Applicants should provide a cover letter which describes research and teaching
experience, a curriculum vitae, two examples of published, in press, or not yet
published research, and a list of three references (complete with addresses and phone
numbers). We will request letters of recommendation to be sent directly to Stanford for
a small number of finalists. Applications will be reviewed beginning on September 15,
2015 and the position will remain open until it is filled.

All application materials must be submitted online. Please submit your application on
Academic Jobs Online:

https://academicjobsonline.org/ajo/jobs/5632

Questions pertaining to this position may be directed to Tanya Chamberlain, Faculty

Affairs Officer, tanyas@stanford.edu.

Stanford University is an equal opportunity employer and is committed to increasing the diversity
of its faculty. It welcomes nominations of, and applications from, women, members of minority
groups, protected veterans and individuals with disabilities, as well as others who would bring
additional dimensions to the university’s research and teaching missions.
 Journals from NCTE

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 Responsibility, Creativity, and the Arts of Language
2015 NCTE Annual Convention
November 19–22
Minneapolis, MN
Workshops: November 19, 22–24

Teaching is an imperfectible art.

I come to Convention to learn
with others who have embraced this
endlessly perplexing work. I
leave—every time!—inspired.
—Carol Jago, associate director,
California Reading and Literature Project,
UCLA, NCTE Past President

The influence of
NCTE’s Annual
Convention on my
growth as a teacher is
immeasurable. It is where
I go to learn and to
recharge. I wouldn’t
think of missing it.
—Kelly Gallagher,
Anaheim Union
High School District, California

I come to NCTE to connect with new ideas

and people interested in the pedagogy and
policies of literacy. That’s why I come, and I make
those connections. However, when I leave,
I often feel that I have also reconnected with
myself. The Annual Convention is an opportunity
for me to realign my goals and refocus on what
matters in classrooms.
MINNEAPOLIS, MN 2015
—Carol Revelle,
University of North Texas

For more information, visit www.ncte.org/annual

bCovs234-Aug15-RTE.indd 4 7/29/15 3:53 PM

 Macaluso, Juzwik, and Cushman Editors’ Introduction 5

Editors’ Introduction

Storying Our Research

Kati Macaluso
Mary Juzwik
Ellen Cushman
Michigan State University

We ended the previous volume year in deep contemplation about the final word
of this journal’s title: English. We asked, Why English? Why English only? Why not
Research in the Teaching of English(es)? We begin this new volume year—RTE’s 50th
anniversary—thinking about the first word in the journal’s title: research. We come
to this first word having thought a great deal over the past several months about
story. Perhaps it has been on our minds as we have brainstormed ways of marking
this 50th volume year—a year that in any person or institution’s life traditionally
invites commemoration through stories. Story has crept into our conversations
about manuscripts as we have pored over them, sometimes hearing the words of
a former colleague, who—in his research methods courses—would often say of a
research report: “I believe the author, but the story’s all wrong.” We know for certain
that story became a centerpiece of the discussions that unfolded at our weekly edi-
torial team meetings after we read the five papers that comprise this issue. Many of
the authors in this issue push on or play at the edges of the conventional research
article published in the social sciences, inviting a conceptual turn from research
report to story. As editors, we feel this conceptual turn, and the articles and essays
that inspire this turn, foreground a set of social and ethical responsibilities that
researchers in the teaching of English(es) carry into their inquiry and writing.
Todd DeStigter opens this issue with an argument about argument. Using eth-
nographic anecdotes drawn from his years of research in AP Composition courses
in a predominantly Mexican and Mexican-American neighborhood on Chicago’s
southwest side, DeStigter surfaces and questions the assumptions undergirding
argument’s esteemed status in the ELA curriculum. Like authors previously pub-
lished in RTE (e.g., Newell, VanDerHeide, & Wynhoff Olsen, 2014), DeStigter takes
up the epistemological underpinnings of argument, but rather than asking how
students might be taught to write better argumentative essays, he explores why
and how argumentative writing has assumed its place of privilege in U.S. curricula
in the first place. In addition to questioning argumentation’s utility in fostering
democracy and students’ socio-economic prospects, DeStigter makes visible a set
of Cartesian and Kantian philosophies that pose questions not just for language
and literacy educators, but also for researchers. To challenge argument’s position

Research in the Teaching of English Volume 50, Number 1, August 2015 5

Copyright © 2015 by the National Council of Teachers of English. All rights reserved.

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 6   Research in the Teaching of English     Volume 50    August 2015

of privilege is, among other things, to call into question the Cartesian and Kantian
claims to “an objective, extra-human reality made accessible through a combination
of rigorous observation and abstract reasoning” (p. 17). After perusing DeStigter’s
article, readers may wonder in relation to their own scholarly pursuits: What does
it mean to know, and how varied or multiple might be our ways of knowing? Is
there really such a thing as an “extra-human reality”? Might the “reality” we re-
port in the written accounts of our research be constructed by a human narrator,
who, in showing her humanity, makes her reliability—or unreliability, for that
matter—more visible? As researchers, we might even walk away from DeStigter’s
article asking ourselves whether knowing, convincing, and/or proving is, or ought
to be, the function of research in the first place. Might research, like stories, serve
to imagine, to evoke, to inspire? In the spirit of DeStigter’s quest to legitimize
“other, nondominant modes of contemplation and expression” as well as “actions
that grow from them” (p. 30), this question seems well worth our consideration
as teachers, as researchers, as persons.
Like DeStigter, Rebecca Woodard contributes to ongoing scholarly conversa-
tions about writing instruction, while also raising questions for the researcher-
writers who comprise the readership of RTE. Her investigation into the links
between two teachers’ writing instruction and their out-of-school writing practices
honors the rich histories and experiences of teachers beyond the confines of the
“professional.” By analyzing these writing teachers’ appropriations of talk and tex-
tual practices across contexts, Woodard challenges the notion of teachers as blank
slates and teaching as a discrete skill set to be acquired and applied. Her research
participants’ writing instruction, combined with their practices as creative and
networked writers, evokes two key tenets shaping the spirit of the National Writing
Project (of which Woodard herself was once a part): first is the assumption that
“teachers are beings who live their identities and practices across times and spaces”
(p. 37), and second is the understanding of “teaching as dialogic” (p. 37), by which
we think she means that teaching, rather than a set of autonomous and observable
practices, is an ongoing negotiation. Past experiences and present circumstances,
conflicting and complementary ideologies, multiple actors and materials, etc. all
coalesce in the act of teaching. Quoting Roozen’s (2007) claim that “we write who
we are,” Woodard’s discussion suggests that teachers also “teach who [they] are” (p.
55). When considered in conversation with the articles and essays that comprise
this issue, Woodard’s boundary-blurring research might also remind the reader-
ship of RTE that we research who we are.
This notion of researching “who we are” seems most palpable in Denise Dávila’s
article, where she writes her own spiritual history into her study of the 79 preser-
vice teachers enrolled in her children’s literature course at a large public university.
Dávila, who examines future teachers’ stances toward including religiously diverse
books and addressing their religious content, comes to this investigation from the
perspective of someone long misunderstood in the American public school system.
Writing herself into the narrative of her research, Dávila remembers:

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 Macaluso, Juzwik, and Cushman Editors’ Introduction 7

Although my Salvadoran grandparents publically identified as Catholic, my family’s

practice of Latin American espiritismo and my grandmother’s position as an espiritista
influenced my worldview as a young person. Discussions of my family’s religious identity,
however, were taboo outside of our home, especially in the secular space of my public
school. (p. 61)

The tweet that colors the content of her second paragraph—“My spiritual ideas
are not superstitious; they are part of my culture and identity. #WNDB1 to culti-
vate critical, pluralistic thinkers”—serves as a powerful example of a researcher
owning her own story. Her autobiographical snapshots answer a question that all
readers of RTE might strive to answer as they compose their next research article:
Who am I to tell this story?
Concluding that privileging nonreligious readings of children’s literature
lends itself to a discourse of othering (Said, 1995) that denigrates nondominant
cultures, including religious ones, Dávila underscores the dangers of authoriz-
ing inaccurate representations of people and cultures in the teaching of diverse
books. In many ways, this article about the dangerous potential for teachers to
de-authorize students’ religious identities, or to authorize an exotic, overgeneral-
ized, or demeaning interpretation of a religious culture, carries implications for
our own ethos-building endeavors and ethical responsibilities as researchers in
the teaching of English(es). While calling upon teachers to question the sound-
ness of their interpretations of religiously and culturally diverse literature, Dávila
extends questions that also surfaced in the Editorial Introduction to our previous
issue: Who has the right to tell whose story, and when? Under what conditions,
and for whom? Though it’s tempting to offer an overly romanticized notion of
story, stories can and have been used to marginalize, to do ill in the world, and to
differentiate “us” from “them,” as can be seen very dramatically in the anti-Semitic
propagandistic stories circulated throughout Nazi Germany. Asking ourselves, as
researchers, what ends our stories are serving may help us to imagine the various
possible ways we might tell our stories to serve those ends as ethically as possible.
It is this last question that Amy Johnson Lachuk takes up so compellingly.
The product of several years’ worth of life history interviews conducted with
persons in an African American majority, rural community in the southeastern
United States, Johnson Lachuk’s article is quite literally a collection of stories. Miss
Sally Harris, an African American educator and community activist, emerges as
the central character in these stories that speak to the “entanglement” (p. 89) of
literacy, education, and sociohistorical context in this community. We hear Miss
Sally’s voice—not through a conventional report of excerpted interview tran-
scripts—but rather through a series of first-person data poems. Johnson Lachuk
constructs these data poems in response to the ethical and social responsibilities
that accompany her role as a listener of other people’s stories. She writes, “I realized
that ‘poetic re-presentation’ (Ward, 2011, p. 357) could help address some of the
ethical concerns related to life history research, such as balancing the representa-
tion of participants’ lived experiences with that of the authorial academic voice

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 8   Research in the Teaching of English     Volume 50    August 2015

(Ward, 2011)” (p. 91). Johnson Lachuk’s poetic inquiry functions as yet another
reminder of the importance of researchers owning their own stories, given the ways
researchers’ own histories can dispose them to hear and interpret others’ stories
differently. Her poems might serve as one example of what happens when the first
voice we, as researchers, listen for is not our own (Royster, 1996), but they also
serve as visible signs of the inevitable creativity—the literal poiesis—of research.
The often-predictable organizational schemas of research articles published in
the social sciences can obscure the creative construction that goes into research.
Johnson Lachuk’s poetic inquiry reminds readers that the data do not in and of
themselves tell the story. Authors construct the “story” of their inquiry—actually
generating, not collecting—data, and then taking readers from data to analysis and
interpretation. The framework for papers published in the social sciences func-
tions as a centripetal force, but—like stories, which also abide by the centripetal
force of narrative coherence—there are always loose ends, details not selected for
inclusion, etc.
Owning our stories as researchers, then, is not only to address the question,
Who am I to tell this story? but also to make visible the inventiveness behind our
research—to approach the manuscripts we’re writing not just as reports, but also as
stories under construction. Of course, there may be reasons why authors elect not
to adopt such an approach in their writing. Making this “made-ness” of research
visible does, to be sure, make a researcher vulnerable—as can be seen in Dávila’s
storying of her own religious ethos. Making such decisions to write dimensions
of our multifaceted selves and lives into papers we write—perhaps especially for
those who hail from historically marginalized groups—can be fraught with tension
and sometimes even pain (Brandt et al., 2001). Aware of this vulnerability, we have
to ask how much researcher storying is enough? At what point does it cease to be
relevant and fall into the realm of too much information or excessive navel-gazing?
It is worth considering, too, the ways that researcher self-storying can ef-
fectively permeate a manuscript, rather than being confined to a perfunctory
sentence or an isolated paragraph about researcher positionality in a methods
section. We think, for example, about choices of pronouns (I vs. the researcher;
we vs. them, and so on), parenthetical asides or footnotes, surprising connections
or synergies between research participants’ stories and one’s own life, words or
turns of phrase that resonate with the social world under study. For example, one
word reverberates throughout Ellen’s research and stems from her position as a
Cherokee woman, researcher, teacher, and scholar. ᎦᏚᎩ /gadugi/ is a Cherokee
term that connotes people working together toward a commonly shared goal.
This tribal ethic of community effort toward a shared greater good has a long
history in the Cherokee tribe. It describes work teams formed at Baptist churches
to support widows and orphans, or to organize socials (Cushman, 2010). It also
describes the ways Ellen has tried to contribute to the goals of the Cherokee Nation
through her work with their communities. As she argues in a piece about Native
American self-representation in rhetoric-composition studies, it is rarely satisfying
for an author to merely self-identify as a particular kind of person in scholarship;
instead, accountability to the communities researchers study occurs in myriad

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 Macaluso, Juzwik, and Cushman Editors’ Introduction 9

ways as a scholar enters into or participates in the life of a community and crafts
an ethos as a credible, ethical researcher (Cushman, 2008). Storying our research,
then, might help us to conceive of an RTE audience beyond the academy and to
imagine our research being accessible to and inviting reciprocity with members
of the communities we research.
We conclude this issue with a Forum piece by historian of education and
teacher-educator Jonna Perrillo, who suggests that “instead of upholding divisions
between ‘creative writing’ and ‘evidence-based writing,’ we should be thinking
about how the two can inform each other” (p. 117). Perrillo looks closely at a
once-thriving movement of poetry instruction and appreciation spearheaded by
Hughes Mearns, a teacher in the laboratory school at Teachers College, Columbia
University, in the 1920s. Arguing that these interwar years in U.S. education mir-
ror the current climate of standardization, Perrillo looks for hope in the successes
of Mearns’s efforts to bring out a “higher grade of artistic achievement” (Mearns,
1926, p. 119) in teachers and students in spite of standardized school programs
that “drummed such creative capacity out of them” (p. 113). We believe that
Perrillo’s archival research into Hughes Mearns’s commitment to poetry speaks
to teachers caught in an era of standardization and to researchers caught in the
quagmires of APA formatting. As teachers, researchers, and writers, we hear in
Perrillo’s Forum essay the wisdom of her Mearns-inspired words: that writing is
“at once both methodical and deeply personal, even if unconsciously so” (p. 117).
In many ways, Perrillo’s Forum piece does what we hope the notion of “storying
research” does for the RTE readership: it positions the creative, the artistic, and the
personal as important and meaningful, indeed as a social responsibility we take
up when we listen to and craft stories, especially the stories of those whose work
has so importantly shaped the field and this journal.
Out of respect for the people whose work has advanced the field of research
in the teaching of English(es), we also wish to correct two errors that appeared in
the Editorial Introduction of our previous issue. First, on p.335, the reference to
Smagorinsky (2014) noted that “changes in the school climate can contribute to the
emotional well-being of neurotypical students.” This should have read “neuroatypi-
cal.” Second, on p.337, in a paragraph devoted to the topic of representing self and
others, there is an omission of words that resulted in a misrepresentation of one
of our authors, Maneka Deanna Brooks, who identifies as African American and
Sri Lankan. The sentence that reads, “What do we [. . .] make of the reality that all
these authors identify as White. . .?” should have read, “What do we [. . .] make of
the reality that all but one of these authors identify as White. . .?” These changes
have been made to the PDF files, and are now available online.
This 50th year of RTE’s existence prompts us to reflect on the most impactful
stories, people, and research that have shaped the conversations unfolding in this
journal’s pages over the last half-century. To mark RTE’s 50th anniversary year, we
have asked Peter Smagorinsky to lead a team of previous RTE journal editors to
select and discuss what they believe to be some of the most impactful pieces this
journal has published. Future issues in this volume year will include Forum essays
from former RTE editors who will discuss the significance of these articles and

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 10   Research in the Teaching of English     Volume 50    August 2015

scholars. As we look ahead to the next 50 years, we hope that the authors in this
issue help readers and future authors find their way toward continuing these con-
versations through research that is not only sound and scholarly, but also “storied.”
Eudora Welty (1984), American novelist and short story writer, once wrote,
“Long before I wrote stories, I listened for stories. Listening for them is something
more acute than listening to them” (p. 16). So now, we leave you to listen not
only to but for the stories that follow—our authors’ autobiographical tales, their
research participants’ stories, the story implicitly constructed in their movement
from problem to research question, to data, to analysis, and so on. We hope that
such listening provokes generative questions of ethical and social responsibility for
all of us as researchers. We hope the five pieces in this issue inspire all of us who
read Research in the Teaching of English to listen for our own life stories shaping
our scholarly interests and inquiry, the stories of the people and communities we
research, and the story we will inevitably create as we write our way through our
next manuscript.

Note
1. #WeNeedDiverseBooks, a social-media campaign calling for children’s books that reflect a wider
range of lives and experiences

References
Brandt, D., Cushman, E., Gere, A. R., Her-
rington, A., Miller, R. E., Villanueva, V.,
& Kirsch, G. (2001). The politics of the
personal: Storying our lives against the grain.
Symposium collective. College English, 64,
41–62.
Cushman, E. (2008). Toward a rhetoric of
self-representation: Identity politics in In-
dian country and rhetoric and composition.
College Composition and Communication, 60,
321–365.
Cushman, E. (2010). ᎦᏚᎩ Gadugi: Where the
fire burns. In S. Kahn (Ed.), Activism and
rhetoric: Theories and contexts for political en-
gagement (pp. 56–61). New York: Routledge.
Mearns, H. (1926). Creative youth: How a
school environment can set free the creative
spirit. New York: Doubleday.
Newell, G. E., VanDerHeide, J., & Olsen, A.
W. (2014). High school English language arts
teachers’ argumentative epistemologies for
teaching writing. Research in the Teaching of
English, 49(2), 95-119.
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Royster, J. (1996). When the first voice you
hear is not your own. College Composition
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Said, E. (1995). Orientalism: Western concep-
tions of the Orient (2nd ed.). London: Penguin.
Ward, A. (2011). “Bringing the message
forward”: Using poetic re-presentation to
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Welty, E. (1984). One writer’s beginnings.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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