Airport Notes 3/20

Revisit Tom’s article on case study research

What makes case studies work, he says, is the “cultural myths” or “mythic narratives” (135, 136) that researchers use as warrants in order to make the move from the “empirically collected data” (Brodkey, “Writing” 48)—that is to say, from the responses elicited by the surveys an answers brought forth by interview questions—to the stories “not yet heard” by the academy (Brodkey, “Writing” 48).

According to Newkirk, because my research is of the case study variety, the story I present will be convincing only if it retells some cultural myth my readers already believe or want to. That’s easy enough: The mythic narrative I tell is perhaps the essential American narrative: people remaking their lives, reinventing themselves.
Find:

Brodkey, Linda. “Writing Ethnographic Narratives.” Written Communication 4 (1987): 25-50.

I’m thinking about the story—10 years. My first course—The Fiction of Madness, at the Manchester CLL. And I’m thinking that there is a story here that I somehow have to find a way to write and tell. It’s the backstory to EVERYTHING that I’ve researched. The story is about me and my experiences, it involves mom. It involves graduate school and dissertations and my new work with adult students at RIC. It is a story that might take me to that bar in Dover and the classroom in Heidelberg Harris, to McIntosh Community College, to the afternoon I sat down to begin to design my first online class, to the second F2F meeting with my adult learners in The Writing Process when we all read and shared our work. There are all these scenes, all these changes. Where do you begin telling a story that is ten years long. I first taught at GSC in the fall of 2000. Now, we approach the fall of 2010. This story is a part of this book. It’s not just about them, it’s about me. The narrative arc of the story…from the tower to the campus. And so many things that are important that I thought to leave out or it never occurred to me to put in:

That CLL has changed it’s name and almost closed a few years
That the Manchester classrooms are no longer there.
That I now work with a totally different kind of adult student.

And I’m thinking it might be useful to conduct a retrospective interview with mom. I might do it via skype/ichat and if I turn on the Garageband I might be able to record it as we talk.