The Portfolio Group

Mapping the Journey of Collaborative Reflective Practices through Traveling Journals
Status: Accepted
SIG-Portfolios and Reflection in Teaching and Teacher Education

Mapping the Journey of Collaborative Reflective Practices through Traveling Journals

Abstract
In the proposed paper, we share the development and evolution of several teacher researchers as individuals and as an organized teacher research group involved in a local national reform movement. Since 1998, we have created school portfolios, have participated in Critical Friends Groups (often simultaneously), and most recently, have engaged in a funded teacher research project in which we experimented with traveling journals as inquiry tools and forms of documentation to assist us in our individual and collective “move[ment] toward improved…reflective practice” (Schwab, 1958). This paper, which is methodological as well as substantive in nature, outlines what traveling journals are, and the ways in which our traveling reflections and discussions impacted our thinking, teaching, scholarship, and shared portfolio work.

Purposes/Objectives
In this paper, we:
• sketch the evolution and development of the teacher research group since 1998;
• describe the urban context and the reform movement that forms the backdrop for our teacher inquiries;
• discuss the challenges associated with teacher research communities whose members take on different jobs and responsibilities over time;
• illuminate how a professor worked alongside teachers in a manner consistent with what Schwab (1969, 1971,1973, 1983) would have university professors do;
• introduce traveling journals as a research tool to document our personal and shared inquiries and to inform our collaborative portfolio making;
• offer a fine-grained account of instances in which teachers’ knowledge was developed and expanded in the traveling journals;
• show how the use of the traveling journals in support of teacher learning served as a precursor to traveling journals being used in support of student learning as well the impetus for research and conceptualization in associated areas of inquiry.

Theoretical Framework
This proposed paper is based on the view that teacher knowledge is personally and socially funded (Dewey, 1938) and narrative in form (Bruner, 1987; Connelly & Clandinin, 1990; MacIntyre, 1981). Most specifically, it builds on Clandinin’s (1986) notion of personal practical knowledge which is understood to be:
in a person’s experience, in the person’s present mind and body and in the person’s future plans and actions. It is knowledge that reflects the individual’s prior knowledge and acknowledges the contextual nature of the teacher’s knowledge. It is a kind of knowledge, carved out of, and shaped by, situations; knowledge that is constructed and reconstructed as we live out our stories and retell and relive them through the process of reflection (Clandinin, 1992, p. 125).

This definition of teacher knowledge gives way to another major underpinning of our teacher research work. In order to situate our professional knowledge in the contexts of teaching, Clandinin and Connelly offered a second narrative idea that nested the provisional knowing of teachers in the places within which their knowledge was storied and re-storied. In the authors’ words, a landscape metaphor allows us to talk about space, place, and time. Furthermore, it has a sense of expansiveness and the possibility of being filled with diverse people, things, and events in different relationships…Because we see the professional knowledge landscape as composed of relationships among people, places, and things, we see it as both an intellectual and moral landscape (Clandinin & Connelly, 1995, p. 5).

School landscapes are also storied landscapes composed of in-classroom and out-of-classroom places and influenced by in-school and out-of-school forces. This traveling portfolio work in some ways addresses how politically and socially charged out-of-school forces and issues affect in-school and in-classroom places on school landscapes.

These conceptualizations are integral to this paper on traveling journals. So, too are Clandinin and Connelly’s (2000) and Clandinin’s (2006) discussion of narrative inquiry and Lyons’s (1998) and Lyons and LaBoskey’s (2002) ideas concerning portfolio development and narrative practice. Aggregated, these ideas form the foundation on which this paper will be built.

Method of Inquiry/Mode of Analysis
In our teacher inquiries, we find that the research tools which narrative inquirers typically use (i.e., Connelly & Clandinin, 1990; Clandinin & Connelly, 2000) serve us well. Thus, we engage in interviews and conversations, participant observation sessions, document analysis, and use personal journals—and, most especially in this research enterprise—traveling journals as part of our data collection process. Additionally, a blog was set up to track our developing ideas and interim communications.

Where modes of analysis are concerned, we employ broadening (Connelly & Clandinin, 1990) to set up the general context—indeed, the topics—of our traveling journals. Broadening helped us to identify shared interests pertaining to our teacher practices. It necessarily brings to the fore such contextual considerations as the ethnic, racial, socio-economic, and ability composition of the students peopling the campuses where we work. Through broadening, the influences and complexities of the professional knowledge landscapes where we are employed become revealed. How context—whose reach is believed to be limitless (Schwab, 1956/1978; Bruner, 2002)—shapes what is available for us to know bubbles to the surface.

Burrowing (Connelly & Clandinin, 1990) is the second analytical tool we use. It allows for reconstructing events, which we routinely do in our traveling journals and associated research conversations. In this way, our perspectives deepen as layers of feedback become added to original entries. Burrowing also allows the emotional, moral and aesthetic qualities of teacher knowledge to surface. In the process, tough realities and gritty details are made public as “moment-by-moment relationships and happenings on the landscape” (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000, p. 76) are recorded.

Our third analytical device, restorying, captures changes on our professional knowledge landscapes in terms of our own and others’ actions and meaning making. Restorying allows for “unsystematic, uneasy, pragmatic, and uncertain unions and connections” to be made, that give rise to “changing connections and differing orderings at different times” (Schwab, 1969b, p. 10). Restorying makes the turbulence, tensions, and epistemological dilemmas that invariably arise in our professional lives visible. The ways in which competing and conflicting stories bump into one another are teased to the surface. Through restorying, “new connections become probable, and new ways of interacting…arise” (Schwab, 1956/1978, p. 136). In the end result, restorying does not provide us with answers. Rather, it offers a means to think more deeply about the dilemmas and challenges we face as educators and enables us to revisit our inquiry questions as we become increasingly focused on following where the entries in our traveling journals lead. As Bruner (2002) has explained, narrative “is enormously sensitive to whatever challenges our conception of the canonical. It is an instrument not so much for solving problems as for finding them” (p. 15).

Data Sources/Evidence
Those of us in the research group proposing this paper somewhat mirror the diversity present in the urban core. We represent different subject areas, different career experiences, different genders, different places of employment, and, to a certain extent, different regional cultures. In addition to teachers being in the group, there is also a university professor who has been a longstanding member. Like those of us who are teachers, her role has shifted over time.

Initially, we, as members of the teacher research group, initiated and coordinated the development of school portfolios on our campuses (1997-2002), which were lead schools in the reform movement. More recently, our efforts have centered on individual teacher inquiries about a shared theme. In 2005-2006, for example, the topic of investigation was an examination of how we work with students and, on occasion, fellow teachers who appear to be “falling through the cracks.” In addition to our independent inquiries, we, as members of the teacher research group, met monthly in a local school as well as concurrently with a second teacher research group in 2006-2007 in order to author a yearbook chapter.

In 2006-2007, traveling journals were added to our research repertoire to expand our data sources and multiply our available evidence, but mostly to establish additional “commonplaces of experience” (Lane, 1988) in order to increase the common core around which the increasingly diffuse interests of our group members (due to several promotions) cohered. Our use of traveling journals, in addition to our existing research tools (personal journals, participant observation notes, document analysis, interviews, informal conversations) helped us address the following research questions: 1) How do diverse teacher learners interact and learn in an established teacher research group setting? 2) What common educational issues are examined by group members in the traveling portfolios? 3) How have these chosen topics shaped and informed individuals’ teacher practices over time and who has benefited from our increased understandings?

The evidence (field texts) arising from our individual and collective research will be interpreted in two different ways: (1) in terms of individual teacher researchers as a unit of analysis; and (2) in terms of our teacher research group as a unit of analysis. The over 1000 pages of traveling journal notes—used in conjunction with our other research tools—will greatly assist us in transforming our work from field texts to research texts.

Results/Conclusions/Point of View
The proposed paper makes the following contributions:
• it allows attendees to get inside the current exchanges and activities of a longstanding teacher research group;
• it enables attendees and group members to reflect on instances when traveling journals worked as research tools and times that they did not;
• it elucidates conditions and shared work that are conducive to the development of teachers’ knowledge and teachers’ professional sustenance;
• it shows how reflective work associated with the traveling journals made its way (traveled) into classrooms and other areas of inquiry and became used as tools to spur students’ critical thinking skills and reflectivity;
• it makes an important contribution to the literature concerning the value of self-directed teacher development groups and how such groups affect student learning as well as generate other forms of scholarship.