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Teacher Lore: Learningfrom Our ExperienceMary‐Ellen Jacobs a

a Louisiana State UniversityPublished online: 28 Jul 2006.

To cite this article: Mary‐Ellen Jacobs (1992) Teacher Lore: Learningfrom Our Experience, Teaching Education, 5:1, 153-157, DOI:10.1080/1047621920050118

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1047621920050118

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Teacher Lore:Learning from Our ExperienceWILLIAM H. SCHUBERT AND WILLIAM C. AYERS, (EDS.)

(NEW YORK: LONGMAN, 1992)

Reviewed by Mary-Ellen Jacobs, Louisiana State University

The prologue to Teacher Lore reminds us: "The secret of teaching is tobe found in the local detail and the everyday life of teachers; teacherscan be the richest and most useful source of knowledge about teach-

ing; those who hope to understand teaching must turn at some point toteachers themselves" (p. v). Unexpectedly stirred by these words, I recallmy own first year of teaching when I suspected that something subtle, mys-terious, and enormously powerful was happening as I listened to my col-leagues tell their stories while I struggled to tell my own. My teaching diaryrecords one particular moment in early spring:

Friday afternoon I found myself chatting with Lynn and Claire afterschool. Like me, they had experienced an equally discouraging weekwith their students. "This time of year is the doldrums," one of themcommented. I ask Claire, who has had a decade of experience workingwith students like my ninth graders, how she manages to reach her kids.She pauses, knits her dark brows together not quite sure what I mean:"Oh, I can reach my fifth period students individually but I hate them asa group. Last year my lower track ninth graders drove me absolutelywild." Although Claire has always enjoyed working with the sloweryoungsters, she wistfully admits: "I'm hoping for some better classesnext year."

Claire is an energetic, committed teacher who cares deeply about herstudents and tries to figure them out. I tell her about my problems withKaren. Claire's eyes light up. She seems to know exactly what I'm talkingabout: "When a child lashes out at you, step back and look at the largerpicture. Usually, it's not you. You're doing the right thing. Instead, some-thing else is going on in the child's life — often something pretty drastic

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154 TEACHING EDUCATION VOLUME 5, NUMBER 1

— and you're just the most convenient target. You learn not to take itpersonally. To work around it."

As I listen to Claire, the culture of teaching slowly begins to unfoldand I am enthralled — both heartened and disheartened — by what Ihear. Yet it is here in this cramped classroom splintered with late after-noon sunlight where momentarily we meet to pour out our lives, ourhopes, our frustrations as teachers, as persons; it is here I sense the pos-sibilities emerge for change, for empowerment (both for ourselves andfor our students), for movement toward a more authentic curriculum.Always, we are haunted by the mystery of teaching — never knowing ifor how we touch other lives. Usually, we must content ourselves with theslimmest of satisfactions. Claire begins bundling her papers together forthe trip home: "If you need to be told continually what a great job you'redoing, you should be selling houses or something."

I re-focus on my ninth graders, a blur of faces — Karen, Kevin, Anna,Dwayne, Brian — and how I might connect with them, then returnthrough a maze of silent corridors to my own empty classroom where Iscrub the board, bang the dusty felt erasers together, straighten the snarlof chairs and wait — impatiently — for Monday. (11 March 1988)Teacher Lore prompts me in ways few texts have to look back on my own

coming-to-be as a teacher and, in so doing, to re-value my perceptions andreflections. The "local detail and everyday life" depicted in my journal nolonger seem commonplace but suddenly appear vibrant with meaning. Suchsensitivity to the lived world of teachers is what I cherish most not only inthe prologue to Teacher Lore but in each of its essays. As editors, Schubertand Ayers allow us to hear their own distinctive voices as teachers.Similarly, the volume's contributors share with us provocative examples oflore from the dailiness of their own lives as classroom practitioners and aspersons. In reading their stories, I cannot help but read my own.

The book is divided into three sections. The first "What Is TeacherLore?" features two essays, one by Schubert and one by Janet Miller. Bothare autobiographically grounded and, thus, set the stage for the personalreminiscences which are woven throughout the book. Both help enrich ourown understandings of what we do — or might do — as teachers.

Schubert cautions that we should not define teacher lore "in terms ofsomebody else's philosophy. It is to relate insights of teachers and to uncov-er teaching philosophies embedded in teaching practices" (p. 9). Lore is notsomething we memorize in a textbook but is, instead, knowledge accumu-lated over a lifetime. Teacher lore is deeply personal: Schubert's experiencespiecing together a "multi-text curriculum" to create a richly textured patch-work of collaboration and community within his classroom or Miller'smemories of sharing morning coffee and teaching worries with colleaguesin a crowded workroom while a ditto machine wheezed in the background.By so candidly revealing their own lived experiences, both Schubert and

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TEACHER LORE: LEARNING FROM OUR EXPERIENCE 1SS

Miller carve out a space for us to begin reflecting on how we make sense ofour own teaching so that we might develop what Miller calls "knowledges"— "the multiple perspectives that teachers bring to their work" (p. 13). Weare invited to tell our own stories, untangle the skeins of our own classroominteractions, recognize our own lore.

The heart of the book is its middle section "Teachers' Stories and Ideas"— five essays which illuminate, with compelling clarity, the lived world ofteaching. Palma Millies introduces us to Alice, a 61 year old veteran Englishteacher, and helps us see the dense web of interconnections between Alice'sprofessional and personal life. The single thread woven throughout Alice'snarrative is her perception of time, and we listen intently when she speaks:"I feel sincerely that life is made up of beautiful moments. But not majesticevents. Waiting for that in life, you're going to wait a long time. But if youcan find little pauses...just something to bolster you up for the next day,then you always have the wherewithal to deal with what is coming" (p. 30).

Alice's search for "beautiful moments" colors her teaching and her inter-actions with young people. So, too, does it seem that Alice's delight in thejoy of the moment — however transitory — embodies "lore" which, at itsbest, suffuses ordinary classroom moments with the extraordinary.

Mari Koerner's essay explores teachers' perceptions of self. Drawing onextensive interviews, she describes in detail three of the images teachersmost frequently use to describe themselves: creators of the body electric,subordinates, and perquisitors. This trio of images is alternately intriguingand troubling. Though a teacher can empower students, create a dynamiclearning community, and reap an abundance of intangible rewards, class-room practitioners still view themselves as marginalized by the politics ofschooling. Teachers "are familiar, of course, with being ignored and theiropinions disregarded; that is more natural for them than being seen assources of important knowledge or information" (p. 51).

Teacher Lore seems the ideal antidote to such dismal images of selfbecause its essays repeatedly call attention to — and, thus, help legitimatize— teachers' day-to-day wisdom and reflective power. Perhaps, these oftenneglected gifts are best illustrated in Virginia Jagla's "Teachers' EverydayImagination and Intuition." Reflecting on conversations with eight teachers,Jagla discovers a variety of characteristics which seem to point toward moreimaginatively grounded classroom practice: connections and context, spon-taneity and openness, confidence and experience, variation and possibili-ties, and emotion — excitement, caring, love. Despite frequent references toJohn Dewey, Nel Noddings, Maxine Greene, and others who have writtenprolifically on education and the imagination, Jagla remains true to theintent of teacher lore, for we never lose the voices of the teachers whom sheinterviews. As they relate their personal experiences, their words, equally asresonant as the language of the philosophers, allow us to understand morefully what it means to teach imaginatively and authentically.

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156 TEACHING EDUCATION VOLUME 5, NUMBER 1

In each of the essays in Teacher Lore, there is an impetus to contextualizeteaching practice as it unfolds day-by-day in particular settings with partic-ular students and teachers. Context is especially vital to Carol Meinick asshe perceptively discusses how the out-of-school curriculum influenceswhat occurs in classrooms. As she interviews teachers, she encourages themto reflect on childhood memories, parenting experiences, and other life his-tory events which may have opened new perspectives for their teaching. Arecurrent theme is teachers' coming to value students as whole humanbeings: "Celebrating students as fully, completely human means that chil-dren are not foreigners, aliens, a thingified commodity, defective, handi-capped adults or nameless, faceless cardboard bodies" (95).

The life histories of teachers and students intermingle most dramaticallyin the classroom and can spark a "synergistic relationship in which teachersand students combine their life histories and develop a shared trust" (97).Though frequently overlooked, the out-of-school curriculum offers endlessopportunities for students and teachers to connect at increasingly deeperand more human levels. For Meinick, this reaffirmation of the multiple real-ities of students' and teachers' lives becomes the essence of a responsive andresponsible pedagogy, one of the many knowledges of teacher lore.

For me, the most fascinating essay in the volume is Patricia Hulsebosch's"Significant Others: Teachers' Perspectives on Relationships with Parents," areflection on the occasionally uneasy interplay between teachers and par-ents. High involvement teachers, Hulsebosch discovers, prize parental inter-actions while low involvement teachers tend to shun any contact withparents. Using a feminist lens to compare and contrast the themes and val-ues of high involvement and low involvement teachers, Hulsebosch helpsme re-see collaboration and connection; yet, I question whether thedichotomy she describes is quite so tidy. Instead of choosing either female-associated values of collaboration (high involvement) or male-identifiedvalues of autonomy (low involvement), I hunch many of us wrestle, oftenheroically, with the competing forces of both collaboration and autonomy— a struggle which becomes yet one more chapter in the lore of teaching.The tension of this duality perhaps is what Hulsebosch alludes to so beauti-fully in the final paragraph of her essay:

Moving from elementary teacher to university teacher, I have found itincreasingly difficult to stay loyal to my female self. If elementary class-rooms are unfriendly to the personal, the emotional, the spontaneous,and the instinctual, then university classrooms are even more so. And soI rely once more on connections — to the women's community, tofriends and family, to colleagues who see the world as I do — andencourage my students to do the same. (p. 131)The final section of the book "Learning from Teacher Lore" offers a

wealth of resources to help us delve further into our lives as teachers. Anabundance of teacher lore books is described in just enough detail to tanta-

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TEACHER LORE: LEARNING FROM OUR EXPERIENCE 1S7

lize; addresses of networks are provided — places teachers can turn wheretheir ideas, their insights, and their experiences will be listened to and takenseriously. Most importantly, the final chapters encourage teachers to tell theirstories because, as Ayers notes, "Teaching is a deeply personal experience,but it is at its heart a social activity, even a political act" (p. 155).

Teacher Lore invites us to look even more searchingly into our daily prac-tice in order to understand the mystery, the wonder, the intangibles ofteaching which cannot be isolated in rows of statistical tabulations but canonly be discovered in the countless stories we tell and re-tell so that wemight come to understand ourselves and our students more fully. The bookseems ideal for preservice or inservice teachers, a moving tribute to who weare and the lore that we are only beginning to call our own.

Again, I return to my teaching diary where I was beginning to create myown sense of lore, my own sense of professional and personal becoming andwhere now, four years later, 1 find echoes of Teacher Lore and the themeswhich I will spend a lifetime embroidering into the fabric of my own beingas a teacher:

Educare — to lead out — to invite meaning — to make the momentswe share together in the classroom an experience which somehow res-onates deeply and authentically within each of us no matter where ourlives might eventually take us. The endless opening out, the movement,however hesitant, towards still unimagined possibilities.

To teach, to move forward, to enrich — a journey which lasts a life-time. A journey which I realize in the deepening spring twilight —

I am onlynowstarting to makein earnest. (22 April 1988)

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