Navigating the Community College Landscape Toward Relationship and Community

Unravelling (of Identity) in Narrative Inquiry

My work in narrative began in the summer of 1995 when I entered my master’s program. Through my courses in narrative, taught by Professor Michael Connelly, I was introduced to the theoretical underpinnings and methodological perspectives that have come to shape my thinking, my research and my teaching practice. It was during these courses that I was introduced to narrative both as a phenomenon and as a research methodology. When I reflect back, I can see that my work in narrative allowed me to question my teacher identity. What I thought I knew about teaching in the community college system began to unravel. I discovered, in a painful sort of way, that, what once succeeded in the classroom no longer worked. The more unsettled I felt, the more I realized that I had become a teacher who was entrenched in the certainty of knowing herself, her students and her practice, despite daily evidence to the contrary.

A Community College Teacher Seeks Community and Conversation in Higher Education

In June of the year 2000 I attended an adult education research conference in Vancouver, British Columbia. I attended the conference hoping to meet others who were studying, working, and researching in the field.

The conference fell on the tail of my exhaustive search into the adult education literature, a task that was fraught with visceral responses, and one that tugged at my professional identity. On reflection I now understand that the conference presented further challenges to, rather than affirmation of, my professional identity. For someone who thinks herself an adult educator and who uses the terms educator and teacher interchangeably, my feelings of discomfort were further intensified by the experience.

Conference: Day One

During a session entitled “Problems with Mapping the Field of Education for Adults” the presenters amplified some of the intricacies of their research journey into a field whose nature is “contestable,” and where “it is almost impossible to connect where the literature should be.” Reinforcing my own sense of the field’s fragmentation and using the adjective “hodgepodge,” conference presenters, Jarvis and Griffins, suggested that the field’s development is like that of a branch of a tree with many twigs and that constructing a history of a discipline leads to the problem of creating artificial categories, which are essentially meaningless.

The parameters of adult education discourse are seemingly boundless. I thought of my own uncertainty about where to begin, and how I moved among the literature in Higher Education, Continuing Education, Vocational Education, Community Development and Andragogy. It was during this particular session that I felt affirmed – I was not alone in feeling the struggle within the literature.

In my journal I wrote,

The session ‘Problems with Mapping the Field of Education for Adults’ was scheduled alongside three other roundtable presentations in the same room. I couldn’t help but notice that one of the presenters appeared surprised by the number of people in attendance, and perhaps a little embarrassed that the other three roundtable groups abandoned the room to make further space for the people who kept coming. Extra chairs were retrieved from all corners of the room to accommodate the interest. (Journal Entry, June 3, 2000).

Conference: Day Two

Except for an abbreviated conversation with a woman from the United Kingdom who also approaches her research in a way that resembles narrative inquiry, I felt disconnected. The familiar sense of distance and exclusion from the general discourse of adult education set in and evolved throughout the rest of my time at the conference.

The panel discussion, held in the university auditorium, promised to outline future research paths and priorities in adult education. I sat in anticipation of hearing about new ways to think about the field. I expected to hear about research puzzles and inquiries for the future. When the second speaker addressed the audience, it was by far one of the most eloquent assemblages of words I had heard. The beautifully crafted words were evidence of many hours of exhaustive searching for empirical detail. Terms such as oppression, coercion, liberal conservatism, capitalism, individualism, globalism, and existentialism were threaded throughout the presentation.

As I sat listening for connections to my experience and the research questions that I bring to adult education, the speaker’s eloquent words continued to tumble forward into the audience. Seconds after the speaker’s closing remarks, and within a sliver of silence, a strong male voice came bounding from the seats before me. “Bravo. Bravo.” He had jumped to his feet and clapped his hands forcibly together. “Bravo!”

I sat stunned. My first inclination was to check that I wasn’t at the theatre. I sat in amazement and I wondered what would happen next. Person after person stood, and the applause continued. I stayed seated and the shadows cast all around me from the people standing and applauding tugged at me.

As the applause subsided, an older man sitting in my peripheral vision leaned to the women on his right, and whispered in what I interpreted as exasperation, “This is nothing new. They were talking about this twenty years ago.” Relieved to have overheard this comment, it suggested that I was not entirely alone in my thinking and my sense of disconnection. I would have liked to have been a part of their conversation, but unfortunately it moved to words on the page as the older man and younger woman continued to communicate by writing on a pad of yellow lined paper.

After the meeting I wrote:

I use language that no one else here uses. I think in terms of curriculum. I talk about students, teachers and their lives.

With this intensity came a feeling of voicelessness and the notion of being on the outside of a community of adult education scholars I had hoped to join.

Most students in adult education contexts have been a part of curriculum, yet the term curriculum is used minimally in adult education literature. There is little to no attention paid to continuity of the teaching and learning experiences for the life narratives of students who attend the community college.