Joe Norris

A Journey Toward Mutualist Teaching and Learning: A Collaborative Reflective Practice on Community Building and Democratic Classrooms

Norris and Bilash have a professional history that spans over twenty-five years. After a few years in the school system, completing their doctorates and holding faculty positions elsewhere, both started their fourth year as professors at the same institution. Upon first meeting at a technology workshop, they embarked on a collaborative reflective practice project employing one of the recently introduced technological advances at that time, email. They shared teaching stories about student resistance to an emergent, uncertain curriculum that ran counter to the traditional prescriptive approach and presented polyvocal texts using a Reader’s Theatre format (Coger, L., & White, M. (1982). Reader’s theater handbook: A dramatic approach to literature. Glenview, IL: Scott Foresman.) at academic conferences. Similar to duoethnography, each spoke her/his own story, making explicit whose voice was whose. Twenty plus years later, they refocus those conversations with new ones that explore each other’s personal and educational histories from early childhood to the present, reinforcing, yet problematizing their beliefs and practices about teaching in mutualistic manner that strives to be dialogic and democratic.

Teaching through Duoethnography in Teacher Education and Graduate Curriculum Theory Courses

In this chapter we discuss how we have incorporated duoethnographies in our teaching to assist our students in an examination of their teaching beliefs and practices. We explore both the teaching of education courses and duoethnography as a methodology as we simultaneously introduce both, adapting lessons to the various types of student who we have encountered. Reflexivity, openness to uncertainty, vulnerability, diversity, placeholders, points of view, and assessment criteria are some of the emergent themes.

Dialogic Interdisciplinary Self-Study Through the Practice of Duoethnography

A number of scholars have begun to use duoethnographies—a dialogic and relational form of research—to examine their own beliefs and perceptions in relation to their curriculum, classes, and professional behavior. Working in tandem with their duoethnography partner, these scholars seek to restory and reconceptualize their perception of these beliefs and of practice. This chapter explores the value of duoethnography to the study of interdisciplinary practice. This value is premised on the view that the “findings” of research are an artifact of its form: dialogic and relational forms of research help to (1) facilitate deeply emic, personal, and situated understandings of practice and (2) promote personal reflexivity and changes in practice. This chapter presents theory underlying duoethnography and, drawing from the subsequent chapters of the book, offers a number of examples of duoethnographies of practice.

Introduction: The Efficacy of Duoethnography in Teaching and Learning: A Return to its Roots

Since its debut in 2003 (Norris & Sawyer, 2003), duoethnography has become a widely known research methodology, through which people of difference reconceptualize their histories of a particular phenomenon in juxtaposition with one anOther. The first publication (Norris & Sawyer, 2004) examined sexual orientation but wasn’t even labeled as a duoethnography until republished in 2015 (Sawyer & Norris, 2015a). After a few initial conference presentations, colleagues in attendance requested more details regarding Joe’s and Rick’s dialogic approach that resulted in a second set of presentations discussing their emergent methodology. By 2005, a name was created (Norris & Sawyer, 2005) and, over time, a series of emergent tenets were articulated (Norris, 2008; Norris & Sawyer, 2012; Sawyer & Norris, 2013, 2015b).

Pioneering the Use of Video in Research and Pedagogy: A Currere of Media(tion)

McLuhan’s (The medium is the massage. Random House of Canada, Toronto, 1964) adage “The medium is the message” is as apropos today as it was when coined in the 1960s. McLuhan articulated that form and content have intricate and complex bonds that collectively produce meaning. The medium chosen frames (Goffman, Frame analysis. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1974) the content in such a way that a different medium/frame would slightly or drastically change its meaning. The written phrase, “What are you doing?” changes when the spoken tone is different due to a particular context; (a) teacher catching a student smoking, (b) a teacher curious about a student’s approach to an art work, (c) a parent fearful of her/his young child discovered climbing a ladder, (d) a couple playfully becoming affectionate, and the list could go on like an Eveready bunny.

Reflecting Upon Teaching Assistant Roles in Higher Education through Participatory Theater

This chapter, through examples from Mirror Theatre’s performance/workshops on educational issues in postsecondary institutions, demonstrates how applied theater (Prentki & Preston, The applied theatre reader, 2009), is a form of participatory reflective practice. Cast members conducted research using the arts-based play-building methodology (Norris, Playbuilding as qualitative research: A participatory arts-based approach, 2009) and presented scenes to students, faculty, and staff who discussed the content and suggested changes that the performers and sometimes themselves replayed to explore other possibilities. Excerpts from ‘Dis’Positions and 4.321 with links to URLs of actual videotaped performances are examined for both content and theatrical choices. The chapter concludes with data from questionnaires distributed after the performance/workshops, which provide the participants’ perspectives on how the work assisted them in reexamining beliefs and practices.