Control efectivo o “ effective control”

Give a toy to some children and they immediately begin taking it apart. This is how they come to know how it works. This is how I began looking at these stories. By looking at the more typical story components such as characters, sequence of events, location or setting, and whether the problem presented in the story was solved, I hoped to discover the function, context and meaning of these stories for these participants (Coffey & Atkinson, 1996; Reissman, 2008). As mentioned in Chapter One, each aspect of the study of the story will be discussed in separate chapters. In this chapter, I will consider the structural components of the stories these teachers shared in the group interview. In chapter Five, I will look at the context and function of these stories in the group interview and supplement my observations will information from the personal interviews. Chapter Six will focus on what these stories mean for these teachers and will draw its conclusions more heavily from the personal interviews.

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In addition to these more traditional components, the language or semantics of the stories were also examined because at their heart stories are composed of words and phrases. The words or phrases become the basis for deciding what the emotional feel and meaning of the story might be. Lieblich et al. offer that “...events evoke emotions, so human beings attempt to deal with those emotions, and their coping mechanisms are reflected in the linguistic features of their discourse” (1998, p. 155). These researchers go on to offer an illustrative list of formal linguistic features that may be tied to emotion. This list includes such features as the use of adverbs to demonstrate unexpectedness, transitions between temporal verbs (past, present or future), transitions in person (first, second or third), intensifiers such as

really or very, deintensifiers such as maybe, word or phrase repetitions, and changes in chronology. These researchers also point out that using these types of analysis can identify emotion “...even when a speaker is unaware of, or denies, the emotional weight of the experience” (Lieblich et al, 1998, p. 162). I looked for these and other linguistic features that may signal emotional ties to the story topic.

Next I looked more holistically at each story to decide what kind of story it was. This later enhanced my findings when I began to look at context, function and meaning. There are many ways to classify stories (Britzman, 2003; Coffey & Atkinson, 1996; Lieblich et al, 1998), but for the purposes of this study, the stories are classified as personal or appropriated and optimistic, horror, or neutral. I chose these designations because they most closely aligned with my research purpose and the questions I was trying to answer. In laying out the foundations for this study, I wanted to know the source of stories, what kinds of experiences were included in the stories, and what kinds of knowledge the teller was

representing. Therefore, personal stories are those that relate events the beginning teacher personally experienced while appropriated stories are those that the beginning teacher heard from others and had chosen to share in this setting. This helps explore the source of the story. Horror stories are those in which something went terribly wrong and there was no effective resolution to the dilemma. These types of stories are important because as Reissman points out that “Respondents narrativize particular

experiences in their lives where there has been a breach between ideal and real” (1993, p. 3). Optimistic stories, on the other hand, are those in which something went right. The main character in optimistic stories, which was often the participant, was satisfied with the outcome. Neutral stories are those in which there is neither events that go wrong or especially right but the events just happened. There may

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or may not be a resolution to the neutral story dilemma. This also begins to illuminate what kinds of experiences the teller is having and what kinds of knowledge might be gained from telling or hearing the story. For example, if the horror story is about inappropriate student behavior, the story may demonstrate something about student behavior that a teacher should know when planning a lesson, a kind of

knowledge. An optimistic story, on the other hand, might show that the participant was able to successfully apply a principle learned at the university or from a classroom teacher.

From this structural analysis, I wanted to learn what images, events, and characters were included in the stories as well as the linguistic aspects of the stories. Narrative researchers have

discovered that these images, events and characters are more easily remembered and are more likely to guide future behavior (Schank, 1993; Swap et al., 2001). In total, twenty-one stories were told in the group interview.

As discussed earlier, finding the stories in the transcript presented some challenges. It was important to find the stories. Defining the sequence of events and dilemma resolution were critical in finding them, so it is discussed first. Then other aspects such as characters, topic, setting and image of teacher were considered more fully.