Making Time for Failure.
Prepared for Working Data Imaginatively. Data consultation session conducted at the
34th Annual Ethnography in Education Research Forum, February 23, 2013.
Consultants: Gerald Campano & Betsy Rymes, University of Pennsylvania
Charles Vanover
vanover@mail.usf.edu
I went into the field to collect narrative interviews about how Chicago Public School
teachers made a difference. I used semi-structured narrative interview techniques adapted from
Weiss (1995) and Benner, Tanner, and Chelsea (1996) intended to help participants share
positive stories about their work. The first three of the five questions in the interview guide were
 Please tell a story about a student, or a group of students, for whom your teaching made a
difference.
 Describe a unit or a group of lessons where you made a difference in your students’ lives.
 Describe moments during the year when you felt you had learned something new about
your teaching or your students.
I would listen affirmatively to the teachers’ stories and, when they paused, ask them to, “Tell me
more about that,” or just grunt in agreement.
Many of the beginning, first year teachers I interviewed used much of the interview time
to tell stories about the challenges they faced in the system. I would not cut the teachers off when
they offered these stories. I knew vulnerability and suffering were major parts of teachers’
experience (Biklen, 1995; Kelchtermans, 2005), and that by asking teachers to describe their
efforts to make a difference I would surface difficult problems of practice. I was taken by
surprise, however, by the amount of pain the first year teachers experienced. The events the
beginners describe fell within previous research (Knowles & Cole, 1994; Le Maister & Pare,
2010; Richert, 2012; Roehrig, Pressley, & Talotta, 2002; Ryan, 1970), but listening attentively to
those stories for ninety minutes was more troubling than I expected.
The narrative that I am submitting to Working with Data Imaginatively is one of the most
painful I collected in my fieldwork. The story I call ‘The Homeless Girl’ was shared after the
main body the interview was completed, when I asked the beginning teacher to tell me about
other students she cared for. All I know about the child described in the narrative is what was
voiced in the excerpt published at the end of this document. The teacher never discussed the
child in her other 3 interviews. The story was voiced without analysis, and the narrative was
shorter than many of the teacher’s other descriptions of schoolchildren. The individual pieces of
the narrative do not hold together, and there is much the reader has to infer and piece together.
In the notes I took during the session, I did not flag this text as an important part of the
interview. I began circling back and pondering this story (Alvesson & Skoldberg, 2000; Denzin,
2001; Feldman, 1995) after the interviews were completed. I first noticed the story as I
transcribed the interview tape, and then came back to it as I coded the text with the system I used
MAKING TIME FOR FAILURE
2
to mark the transcripts in the first round of interviews. Even though the coding for this text was
not substantially different from other sections of the transcript, the analysis pushed the story into
my consciousness. There were more than 100 stories about students in the interviews I
conducted, however, and I focused on other narratives during the first years of the inquiry.
What brought the child’s story to the surface was the process of creating ethnodramas
from my fieldwork (Denzin, 2003; Kazubowski-Houston, 2010; Saldaña, 2002, 2011; SnyderYoung, 2010; Vanover, 2005; Vanover & Saldaña, 2005). I feel that there is something powerful
in the text I would like to communicate to others. My questions do not focus on how to analyze
the data or reduce its content to a theme, but how best, in Feldman’s (2005) term, to expand the
narrative. I would like the consultants to discuss how I might flesh out the incidents the teacher
describes and bring the child’s story to life. I am interested in inquiring into what I might do to
produce what Tyler (1986) describes as a meditative vehicle and allow others to feel what the
teacher felt when she was told the child’s family had been kicked out of their homeless shelter
and had to move to the suburbs. The teacher’s part in the story had ended; the matter was now
out of her hands.
Data
That’s Christopher. He was an interesting kid. And one—one girl who is also repeating. She
lived in a homeless shelter. She was my best student—like, not academically, but behaviorally.
So appropriate—never inappropriate. Never—but she missed so much school because of their
living situation. There were times where she told me she couldn’t get to school because I don’t
think the shelter was [near us]. So, they had to take a bus, and the school used to give them
reduced fare bus cards, but, like, they were out of them. So, I would always slip her money every
once in a while, just so they could get to school and back. She was already repeating 3rd grade,
and she was smart. I mean, she had the skills—I just wanted her to get through and to pass, and
she still is going to have to go to summer school this year which makes me so sad. I don’t know,
it was just really weird. Her mother withdrew her at the end of the—withdrew her at the
beginning of last week because they couldn’t even stay at their shelter anymore. They had to go
somewhere in the suburbs. But, she had missed so many days—she had missed almost 50 days of
school. So, and there was no way that I could pass her. No matter where she ends up next year I
think maybe they will let her take the ITBS [the Chicago high stakes assessment] again. I don’t
know, but I have a feeling she’s going to have to do something, you know, something’s going to
have to happen before she can go to 4th grade. Which is pretty upsetting because she is such a
sweet girl and, by far, my most appropriate, most behaved student and with every teacher that
dealt with her. Just always, just really wonderful, respectful. I used to use exit tickets at the end
of the day with my kids. ‘What did you learn about reading math and life?’ Inevitability, like her
and a lot of other kids too would write, “I learned that this class is really mean to you.” She was
just, she’s a doll and just a sweet girl. I learned a lot from her because other kids were very
resentful of the treatment she received, but it’s like, ‘She doesn’t get this treatment for any other
reason other than she always follows directions. And she always makes good choices. She
always does what she thinks is best, and that she never tries to hurt someone.’
Charles Vanover vanover@mail.usf.edu
MAKING TIME FOR FAILURE
3
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Charles Vanover vanover@mail.usf.edu
MAKING TIME FOR FAILURE
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Charles Vanover vanover@mail.usf.edu
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