F. Michael Connelly is Director, Centre for Teacher Development, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto, 252 Bloor St. W., Toronto, ON M5S 1V6, Canada. He is editor of Curriculum Inquiry and Director of the Hong Kong Institute of Education--OISE/UT Doctoral Program. His studies on teacher knowledge are connected with a 20-year association with Bay Street School. His latest book, with his long-time collaborator, Jean Clandinin, is Narrative Inquiry: Experience and Story in Qualitative Research (San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 2000).

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 In April, 1999 F. Michael Connelly was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award of Division B (curriculum studies) of the American Educational Research Assoication. The paper that follows is a revised version of the speech he gave as he accepted this award. The citation accompanying the Award reads:

F. Michael Connelly has been a insightful and prolific writer about curriculum research and theory. He was a major figure in the 1960s as the field shifted from being principally a technical enterprise to rediscovering and developing its intellectual foundations. He contributed to the institutionalization of the shift as a long-standing editor of Curriculum Inquiry, one of the field’s pre-eminent journals. The Centre for Teacher Development at the University of Toronto, which he initiated and directs, is arguably one of the most innovative graduate programmes in educational studies to be found.

Michael Connelly has also practised curriculum. Begining as a high school teacher of science in 1961, he later directed science education programmes in Canadian and US univerities, including the University of Chicago, where he received his doctorate in philosophy of education and science education in 1968.

On all counts, Michael Connelly is ‘made a demonstrable difference in curriculum studies’, the words used to describe those who merit Division B’s Lifetime Achievement Award, and those us us who claim the field are richer for his example.

In the afterword to her memoir, Crossing Ocean Parkway DeMarco Torgovnick (1996) responded to a question that she was asked by a reader. The question was, ‘What did your mother think?’, and she wrote in response:

In my book, my parents and brother appear as characters &endash; by which I mean, representations, based on fact refracted by memory. As in any memoir, they . . . figure in not their own right, but as actors in the drama of my life . . . . I realized this when I casually mentioned to my secretary that I was leaving my office to pick up my parents. She replied, ‘Oh, are they the same parents as in your Benhurst essay?’

Jean Clandinin and I use this vignette in our recent book on narrative (Clandinin and Connelly 2000) to show how difficult it is sort out matters of fact and fiction in narrative inquiry. Who is the mother in De Marco Torgonvnick’s memoir? A fictional creation, or the mother that Torvognick is leaving the office to pick up? When I walk off this stage, somebody will surely say, ‘Is that the same Mick Connelly that teaches in Toronto?’ This fictional character, at least for me, is quite wonderful, far more interesting than the Mick Connelly who teaches in Toronto.

Fiction, some of the literary theorists tell us, is richer and more informative than the life on which it draws and I must tell you that is exactly how I feel standing up here. I love the fictional Mick Connelly. It is much better to know him than the muddling Toronto teacher. I don’t at all mean to sound ungenerous to this group that has honoured me. I am tremendously honoured to have been fictionalized. But it feels oddly unreal, as fictions do, and as I reflect on my academic life as a whole I am struck by just how lucky I have been. This is what I want to talk to you about in the next few minutes, academic luck, the stuff of my fiction.

I grew up on a cattle ranch in the foothills of southern Alberta in Canada. Foothills define the transition landscape between the mountains and the prairie. We received radio signals from due south of us in Great Falls, Montana and, listening to the then Brooklyn Dodgers triple-A baseball farm team, I dreamed of wearing a Dodger uniform but, instead, I landed in Chicago, at the University of Chicago (not with Cubs or the White Sox, the Chicago baseball teams) when the University was great and its faculty members were giants. I took a course from Ben Bloom the year he was President of the American Educational Research Association and its meetings were in Chicago, and he would run off to meetings that I believed were more important, and significant, than anything we were doing. Not only was I lucky to arrive in Chicago a year after Phil Jackson and Jack Getzels had become famous for their creativity studies, but I was just a few years before Joe Schwab became the first real icon, at least in my books, of curriculum after John Dewey and Ralph Tyler. But in addition the entire social sciences were literally ablaze at the time that I graduated.

Schwab taught me about ‘substantive structures’, the set of assumptions and starting points that drive entire realms of thinking. To top things off the Selma march took place while I was in Chicago, and I left town for Toronto the summer of the famous Chicago Democratic Convention. Think of how it felt for a young person to be told that intellectual possibilities were everywhere, that if I could think it, it could be done. That is the world I came into.

It turns out that I was on an especially lucky run. I got to be lecturer and Director of the Master of Arts in Teaching Program in Science at the University of Chicago. While I was doing this I was offered a position at a new institution in Canada, the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE). Luck again. If you couldn’t do what you wanted to do and if you couldn’t do it well at OISE you didn’t belong in the business.

Coming to this stage in my academic life, and thinking of the fictional character I have become has got me thinking about what made the difference to me during my OISE years. People often say it is good colleagues that one has had, and I have had some stunning colleagues. They have made a difference to me. But to be honest my collegial life feels so tinged with political intrigue and battle that I am muddled on my debts. There is a more compelling influence in my work.

Jean Clandinin, whose work I am completely unable to separate in any way from my own, told me a telling story. Jean was visiting with Vivian Paley shortly after the publication of one of Paley’s many wonderful books about teaching and the conversation turned to collegiality. Paley said that her students were her colleagues. These were her collaborators. When I heard that a light went on, and what had been for me unconscious practice became something I paid attention to and worked at self-consciously. I realized that the thing I enjoyed most about my professorial life was my connection to students. My classes are always part of a research inquiry at the time, and the students in them always a puzzle to me.

One of the ideas that has driven Jean Clandinin and I is that we should never merely be users in our research. When we go to school, we should do good for the school. When we leave they should say, I am glad they were here! This is the idea that stands in behind my teaching. I want my students to say, ‘He was useful. I am glad he was here.’ For me teaching and research are pretty much the same thing in spirit. Vivian Paley is profoundly right, at least right for me. My colleagues have been my students, and I have been amazingly lucky with the array of students that have entered my world. I have been able to think long and hard on a wide range of topics because of my students, areas that I would never have gone into on my own. I want to give you just one example and that is the area of multiculturalism.

I know very little about the academic study of multiculturalism, and I have difficulty with some of the rhetoric of anti-racism. I have always thought that in the field of language-acquisition there was too much collusion between the linguists and the analytic philosophers who used to drive me crazy in graduate school. Yet, one of those interesting areas that I am privileged to think about right now is multiculturalism. JoAnn Phillion and Ming Fang He, and before them Carola Conle, long-term members and co-ordinators of my research team in Toronto, carried me into these intellectual waters where I discover exhilarating writers like Martha Nussbaum (1997) and Charles Taylor (1994) and rediscovered the imaginative writing of people like Maxine Greene (1993) and Sam Hollingsworth (1994). In our new book on narrative inquiry I had a chance to trace my personal relationship to other cultures through reflecting on my relationship with Ming Fang He who appeared out of the deepest reaches of China to come and study with me, and Long Him who ran a general store in the nearest town to the Connelly ranch. These are treasures that only teaching can nurture. Although I know that the last thing in the world that anyone in the audience wants is someone with grey hair up here giving advice from this stage, I wish, as my gift back to you who have honoured me today, the hope that you also have the good fortune to come to terms with genuine collegiality and communality with your students. It will make your academic life worthwhile.

It would be unfair, though, for me to say that everything I learned about teaching I learned from my students. Most of you probably know the little Robert Fulghum book, All I Really Need To Know I Learned in Kindergarten (1988). My mother was my kindergarten teacher and my grade school teacher, but when I got to Chicago I realized that Robert Fulghum was plain wrong, at least for me. There were still things to be learned about teaching. Joe Schwab was a great teacher and he more than once won the University of Chicago’s Quantrell Award for outstanding teaching. He and my mother couldn’t have been more dissimilar. She would say ‘That’s great, dear’, and he would say, ‘That’s the stupidest thing I have ever heard you say’. She would say, ‘Well that is one way of thinking about it, but you could think about it in another way’, and he would say, ‘For God’s sake read the damn text’.

I learned an immense amount about teaching from both. Luck again to have these two dramatic figures teach me about teaching and, in their oppositions, provide me with insight into Dewey’s dialectics. I try to be at that point of tension between my comforting one-room country school lessons with my mother and Schwab’s driving for universal meaning. Somehow a teacher needs to know when to say, ‘That is great’ and he or she needs to know when to say, ‘Smarten up’. It is always a tension.

I want to conclude by taking that tension back to the foothills Connelly ranch and at the same time to give proper credit to Jean Clandinin for my thinking. I want you to picture a cattle ranch in the foothills of the Rockies, mountains to the west, prairie as far as you can possibly see to the east. The ranch house is situated on Connelly Creek, named after a grandfather-settler, with bedroom windows opening towards the soaring mountains and living-room windows facing the prairies. By turning around one could move from staring off into a vast flat distance to an eye-sweep up the rocky mountains to the heavens. This may be a little dramatic but it represents for me an intellectual in-between place, a kind border-place, the foothills, a nexus where the mountains meet the prairies, where theory meets practice. A child who looks at the heavens and wonders at its mysteries one moment and stares off into the distant plains, to a kind of dust-bowl empiricism, the next, must, I have come to think, have an intuitive bodily understanding, or at least a resonance with, the confounding links between theory and practice. These have confounded me through my life.

When I puzzle over why I was so attracted to, and then influenced by Joseph Schwab, Philip Jackson, Elliott Eisner, Leo Klopfer, Harold Gall, the botanist on my committee, and when I wonder why John Dewey got so deeply into my psyche that I can’t think about anything without imagining it in John Dewey’s terms, I come back to the foothills, theory on the one side, practice on the other, ideas on the one hand and dustbowl empiricism on the other.

Through all the curriculum field’s chaos, of challenged assumptions and unfounded, but brilliant thoughts, the idea of experience and the theory/practice twins provided some stable ground while everything else quivered and, I might add, where we, Jean Clandinin and I, and our students, were known by all the very best journals by virtue of their rejection letters.

I am now at the end of my memoirette. I want to share with you some of my reflections as I came to the end of it. As I concluded the draft and thought about my opening remarks on fictional characters I got to thinking about who the Michael Connelly character was that wrote the text I have just read. It wasn’t written by those who nominated me for this award. It wasn’t even written by Mick Connelly who teaches in Toronto, since this would never have been crafted had it not been for this event. It dawned on me that it was the fictional Mick Connelly created for purposes of this meeting who is the author, a fictional character creating another fictional character of himself. This is all quite puzzling, I thought and still think, because a Mick Connelly actually did write this in his office a few days ago.

It occurred to me that narrative inquiry has literary theory beat four ways to Sunday when it came to puzzles since literary fictional characters can never, on their own, write another draft of themselves. It is puzzling enough to make a rancher’s son take to the foothills of curriculum and leave ranching and baseball dreams behind. This is a fun business and I am deeply honoured, whoever I am, for this recognition of my life in the foothills of curriculum.

Clandinin, D. J. and F. M. Connelly (2000) Narrative Inquiry: Experience and Story in Qualitative Research (San Franciso, CA: Jossey-Bass).

DeMarco, M. T. (1996) Crossing Ocean Parkway (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).

Fulghum, R. (1988) All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten: Uncommon Thoughts on Common Things (New York: Villard Books).

Greene, M. (1993) The passion of pluralism: multiculturalism and the expanding community. Educational Researcher, 22 (1), 13--18.

Hollingsworth, S. (1994) Teacher Research and Urban Literacy Education: Lessons and Conversations in a Feminist Key (New York: Teachers College Press).

Nussbaum, M. (1997) Cultivating Humanity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press).

Taylor, C. (1994). The politics of recognition. In A. Gutman (ed.), Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press), 25--75.

 

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