Further Comment: Pragmatizing the Imaginary :

In the Voices Inside Schools section of its Fall 2000 issue, the Harvard Educational Review published an article entitled, “Historical Perspective as an Important Element of Teachers’ Knowledge: A Sonata-Form Case Study of Equity Issues in a Chemistry Classroom.” The article was coauthored by Zachary Dean Sconiers, a middle school science teacher, and Jerry Rosiek, a university-based teacher educator and research methodologist.

The first part of the article consists of a case study, written in story form, of the teaching of science to traditionally underserved groups of students, especially Hispanics and African Americans. An extended “methodological afterword,” authored primarily by Rosiek, follows the case study. A justification of methodological choices is, in my judgment, wholly appropriate for the second half of this article, primarily because the protagonist of the case study is not exactly Zachary Sconiers. It is Jerome Jameson, who is, as the abstract explains, “a fictional [emphasis mine] chemistry teacher, whose story is based on Sconier’s actual teaching experience” (p. 370).

Readers of the article may be understandably surprised to learn that it does indeed contain elements of fiction, insofar as the word “fictional” does not appear in the title. But readers who are aware of certain developments within the social sciences and the humanities will not be startled to discover that a prestigious journal of educational research published an article in which the central character is indeed fictional. Why not?

Sconiers and Rosiek’s article makes its appearance at the end of a long trail of events in the fields of the social sciences and the humanities. Over the last few decades, several turns in the trail have signaled reorientations of the linguistic, rhetorical, and methodological proclivities of many scholars in these fields. These changes signaled an increasingly greater acceptance of inquiry approaches with features that were more naturalistic, interpretive, personal, literary, and artistic than those found within traditional social science. In the field of education, these turns first became evident in the work of trailblazers such as Maxine Greene (1965, 1977), Elliot Eisner (1977, 1979), William Pinar (1975, 1980), D. Jean Clandinin (1985) and Michael Connelly (Connelly & Clandinin, 1987). These scholars and others encouraged educational researchers to engage in autobiographical, narrative, literary, and arts-based forms of inquiry.

Their work appeared during a period of genre dispersion identified by Norman Denzin and Yvonna Lincoln (1998) as the third moment of qualitative research, a time in which “boundaries between the social sciences and the humanities had become blurred” (p. 18).1 The border between the two disciplines previously served to separate the realm of the social sciences from the domain of imaginative literature. This border would soon be crossed by a few social science researchers intent upon entering the terrain of fictional writing.

While Anna Banks and Stephen Banks (1998), in their book Fiction and Social Research, observe that by and large “fiction remains a no-no, a mode of expression . . . that is simply off-limits in conventional academic discourse” (p. 17), a few unconventional ethnographers from outside the field of education (including Angrosino, 1997, Berger, 1998, and Coyle, 1998) have nevertheless experimented with the fictionalization of their texts. Educational researchers have been likewise reticent to explore the research possibilities of fiction. At the time of this writing, only a handful of educational studies have moved boldly across the border into the realm of imaginative literature. One is indeed a dissertation — Rishma Dunlop’s Boundary Bay: A Novel (1999). Also over the line are parts of two recent books on curriculum and pedagogy, Brent Kilbourne’s For the Love of Teaching (1998) and my own Touching Eternity: The Enduring Outcomes of Teaching (Barone, 2001).

Despite the scarcity of examples, further experiments with fiction seem likely. Moreover, if Sconiers and Rosiek’s case study is the result of a rather predictable mutation within the phylogeny of qualitative social science, its publication is also presaged by a simultaneous shift in perspectives on the nature and purposes of imaginative literature. This was movement away from classical, formalist, and modernist notions of literary art to postmodern and poststructuralist ones. Facets of this shift are reflected in the Sconiers and Rosiek piece. I will elaborate.

Many contemporary literary critics have come to doubt that a good piece of literature should be viewed as a formal object, ethereal in nature, distanced in origins and use from mundane acts of commerce. Literature that once was seen to exist for its own sake is now measured in terms of its practical value. Literary theorist Wolfgang Iser offers one formulation of this notion of utility.

Iser (1993) posits an “imaginary,” an array of “arbitrary apparitions . . . diffuse, fleeting impressions,” endowed, in the act of fictionalizing, “with an articulate gestalt,” shaped into an “as if” world. As an opening into a possible world, the imaginary is pragmatized when a reader inserts this fictional world into the context of her daily experience in order to see what it suggests about familiar conditions, conventional practices, and the values and ideologies that support them.

Iser’s arguments recall the rationale for reading imaginative literature articulated by Maxine Greene. Fiction, she suggests, can serve us well in the quest for meaning in our lives, “in our longing for something better than unacceptable present conditions” (Greene, 1988, p. xi). Good literature causes us to question our values, prompts new imaginings of the ideal and the possible. It can even stir action against the conventional, the seemingly unquestionable, the tried and true (Greene, 1991).

Sconiers and Rosiek mine a vein of possibilities in the world of science teaching. The authors are clear in their pragmatic intentions for their text, in their hopes that it will ultimately serve important educational ends. Theirs is not a text intended merely to provide aesthetic pleasure. Moreover, its utility for educational practitioners lies not in an ability to represent a set of conventional truths about teaching, but rather in its capacity, as the authors explained, “to problematize oversimplified conceptions of science education practice” (p. 400). Ultimately, their desire for action against the conventional resembles Greene’s. They want their text to facilitate reflection about, and even change in, prevailing teaching practices.

The shape of the gestalt, the structure of a text, is important to the advancement of this heuristic purpose of fiction. Formal qualities play a role in enticing readers into engagement with the text, in sustaining narrative drive, in shaping a denouement, which, rather than achieving a final resolution, invites readers to contemplate the story’s open meaning for their own situations.

Sconiers and Rosiek chose to structure their fictional case study into a form analogous to a sonata, “one in which teachers’ intentions to teach their subject matter come into tension with a seemingly secondary consideration, the sociocultural dimensions of a student’s experiences” (p. 398). The authors outline several steps in which this tension is played out. These include descriptions of a problematic teaching episode, revelations of the biographical sources of a fictional teacher’s (Jameson’s) contribution to that episode, and a reconsideration by Jameson of its meaning in light of what he has learned about himself.

But the form of the Sconiers and Rosiek article is actually an elaborate variation of Aristotle’s (1961) more sleek eidetic structure that is composed of phases in which a tension between binary opposites is revealed, complicated, and temporarily resolved. The variation employed here promotes the purposes of the text, but it is hardly the only one available. The authors themselves understand that their sonata form is an experiment, “one way of representing [teacher knowledge], one which we hope will take its place among a variety of case-study styles and formats” (p. 319).

Of course, postmodern theory accords literary content a status equal to that of form. This content, or aesthetic substance, serves to ground the text, to locate it within the specific contingencies of an experienced world. Even as ethnographers discovered the uses of “thick” description (Geertz, 1974), the virtues of detailed observations of the minutiae of everyday experience became apparent, especially (but not only) in novels of social realism and works of literary nonfiction. The crafting of a literary text came to be equated with the careful selection and combination of pieces of this aesthetic content, rather than a primarily formal process of composition.

The case study section of the HER piece is rife with closely observed details of the life of a specific (if fictional) middle school teacher. Consider the following passage:

Any optimistic visions I had for the day’s progress quickly fade when I notice some students actually mixing powders ahead of time, and then testing them — an understandable error, given the fact that the final trials will be with mixed substances. [Then] I notice another common error. Once a substance does not get a reaction, some of the students are adding the next solution on top of the just-tested sample. I wouldn’t have caught this had Louis not claimed that sugar was reacting with phenolphthalein solution, a substance that turns red in the presence of a base. They had drenched the sugar with a basic solution first, then added the phenolphthalein, which reacted with the base, not the sugar. This will come out in class presentations but I don’t want them to be set up for public failure. I express skepticism and encourage them to share their results with other groups before signing up to present. (p. 374)

This passage demonstrates a close acquaintance with subject matter content, laboratory materials, and activities often associated with teaching science in a middle school. It also describes a fictional incident of pedagogical tactfulness that reminded me of teaching strategies of my own. Indeed, as a former science teacher of young adolescents, I can report that, upon reading this article, I was returned to a classroom analogous to Jerome Jameson’s. While the precise events and situations described here may not have occurred in my own classroom, they could have. For this reader, the empirical details of the account render it plausible, believable, credible. Similarly, the particulars of Jameson’s life story ring true, fostering an empathic identification with a figurative character and entrance into his virtual world. A reader may place the rendering of this possible world alongside remembered life events. Any dissonance that results may prompt the questioning of certain habits, attitudes, and practices that the reader had come to take for granted. Old values and outlooks are rebuffed, or (as Iser, 1974, prefers) negated, in favor of fresh ones. But only a story that the reader deems credible holds out this possibility.

I believe Sconiers and Rosiek earned this credibility through careful research. As described in their article, the research and writing was an intensive collaborative effort, originating out of the Fresno Science Education Equity Teacher Research Project. In the collaborative reflection phase, ten experienced teachers (including Sconiers) were given time to reflect on their practice and to discuss the content of their reflections. In the writing phase the insights of individual teachers were described, and drafts of teachers’ case studies turned over to Rosiek, the university-based collaborator. With the consent of the teacher-researchers, Rosiek’s revision efforts included “creating composite characters, elaborating on descriptions, and fictionalizing some minor scenes in an effort to more effectively convey the theoretical point the case study was making” (p. 397).

Details uncovered in the research process were transmuted in the writing process and so are not truthful in any narrow sense of that term. As Iser (1993) notes, the “reality” represented in a fictional text “is not meant to represent reality; it is a pointer to something else which is not, although the function is to make that something conceivable” (p. 13). Still, a fictionalized text must reveal to readers, however subtly, the appropriate attitude with which it should be regarded. Otherwise, as Iser (1993) quite rightly notes, “inappropriate reactions will ensue” (p. 12).

The postpositivist Phillips (1994) agrees that there is a danger in mistaking fiction for fact:

[Sometimes] it is important to identify the correct narrative or narratives. . . . If an action is taken on the basis of an incorrect narrative, even if disaster does not always ensue, [we will likely] end up with consequences that we neither anticipated nor desired; we are more likely to act successfully if we act on the basis of correct information. (p. 17)

For Phillips, therefore, actions that rely upon nonfictional (“correct”) accounts of events that actually happened are more likely to be “successful” than those based on stories that are “incorrect,” fictional, not “true.” But the success of an action, I suggest, very much depends on the purpose for which it is undertaken. A reader might indeed use the Sconiers and Rosiek text inappropriately — “unsuccessfully” — as, say, part of a dossier for the summative purposes of the hiring or firing of James Jameson — if he were a real teacher. Since Jameson is a fictional character, that purpose is confounded. But professional judgments made about teachers similar to Jameson (Sconiers, perhaps?) would likewise imply a serious misconstrual of the intentions of a text that explicitly admits its fictional nature.

For a text like this one, acting “successfully” implies a reexamination of the basic values and premises upon which readers’ teaching practice is based. I will attempt to entice readers into an engagement with the Sconiers and Rosiek text by merely hinting at the nature of those values, premises, and practices. They involve reconsidering taken-for-granted beliefs about the inevitable appropriateness of using inquiry-based approaches to science teaching with students from historically disenfranchised ethnic groups.

For the purpose of prompting such reflection, “correct” information may not be as helpful as a fictional account. Indeed, if the reader hankers for what Greene and Iser (and I) have suggested that vivid imaginative literature can provide, then she may benefit from a text in which carefully observed details of the world are selected and then recast into an account that distorts rather than mimics reality. She may need a text that, as Jean-Paul Sartre once said of fiction, “lies in order to tell the truth” (in a broad sense of that term). Or at least one that is able, in the words of James Baldwin (1962), to “lay bare the questions that have been hidden by the answers” (p. 17). For that purpose a text must pull the reader into, not “real”-life worlds, but imaginary ones. It must provide for readers a heightened sense of reality that will, as Greene (1988) would have it, “prompt new imaginings of the ideal and the possible” (p. xi).

With that end in mind, Sconiers and Rosiek did not, fortunately, proceed as Phillips (and other cautionaries like him) might have recommended. Instead, they boldly chose to fictionalize, to make that which is not, conceivable. Still, I do not want to suggest that, as a fictionalized case study, their article achieves the degree of power found in the greatest of imaginative literature.

One crucial dimension of any literary form is its capacity to embody literary content. Or as Dewey (1934/1958) would have it, it must express the meaning within that content, rather than directly state it. This requires language that is consistently connotative, metaphorical, and evocative, rather than linear, denotative, or technical. Here the authors’ case study offers mixed results, as when a strikingly evocative sentence

A military jet peeled through the summer sky, leaving a white streak that divided the darkening evening stratosphere into two equal and infinite parts. (p. 387)

is set against the didactic linearity of another:

I am suggesting that we have a problematic situation where equity in science teaching is concerned, one that requires us to think about it in more nuanced terms than a single teaching technique. (p. 391)

Stating rather than expressing meaning is, of course, not a triumph of evil over good. But Sconiers and Rosiek’s language choices do sometimes tend to diminish the power of their case study as a literary artifact. These choices may suggest the authors’ hesitancy to travel further down the research trail toward full-fledged imaginative literature.

Nevertheless, the creation of a great work of fiction, meticulously researched and masterfully crafted by a member of the educational research community, is, I predict, “right around the bend.” That fortuitous event seems inevitable, as those of us within that community expand our understanding of the potential utility of fiction and our talents for writing in ways that have been historically dismissed as admirable but useless by traditionalists within the field of educational research. Meanwhile, Sconiers and Rosiek’s fictional case study offers teachers an important opportunity to imagine questions about their own practice that may have been previously unimaginable. A growing number of us see that as a useful service indeed.