Longhouse School

Can World-Building Impact the Educational Ideosphere?

Authoethnographical Studies

In qualitative research, there is a long history of intermingling personal lives and research. For example, Zumwalt’s partially (1984) autobiographical study compares the induction of new teachers into their profession to her own experience as a new mother. Both shared, she finds, the shock of glamorized ideals crashing into the rocks of reality, frustration, and exhaustion. Both eventually embrace compromises and reconcile themselves to more reasonable expectations. 

In another example, Joffee attempted backyard autoethnographic research in his dissertation, which was a 14-year account of the formation and development of “The Value Creation School” (Joffee 2007).

Backyard autoethnographic studies are, indeed, fraught with difficulties. In “Easier Said than Done: Writing an Autoethnography,” Wall (2008) reflects on writing such a qualitative study and provides many cautions, perils, and solutions.

For personal reasons, the author here felt a need to mask his identity. This presentation, therefore, moves beyond  “story as scholarship” and describes a fictional (or real or partially fictionalized) account of the (supposed) founding of what might be a mythical “Longhouse School” which is based on assumed reconstructed values of the ahistoric Haudenosaunee people before the European invasion and the resulting disease, depopulation, cultural degradation–and even genocide—that must have resulted in unmeasurable intergenerational trauma.

Of course, it is not likely, but what if the imagined Longhouse School–despite the masked identity of the main author–were to somehow pierce the Ideosphere and morph into an award-winning novel and/or Netflix series? Then this presentation would achieve the status of a meaningful “roots” exploration. More likely, however, it may attract only the attention of the small group of people reading about it on a social media platform. But even with such limited impact, it can still contribute to altering the ideosphere!

A counter question: Is this research plan really so radical? Anthropologists have studied mythology for generations. Claude Lévi-Strauss wrote about a “structural theory” of mythology in which there are interlocking component parts to myths that can by analyzed through metrics. Joseph Campbell sought to discover the overriding themes underlying all myths and piled myth on top of myth to find commonality.

Likewise, there are multiple academic sources analyzing the use of fiction to promote learning. The main contributor to the Longhouse posts has discussed the deep influence the biographical works about three young educators had in his own growth as a teacher and school leader. Little Town on the Prairie and These Happy Golden Years were fictionalized versions of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s story of working as a teacher from the age of fifteen. The Headmaster by John McPhee is a journalistic account of the 23-year-old Frank L. Boyden who became the leader of a fledgling Deerfield Academy and then served it for 66 years, transforming the school into a unique elite academy. In The Thread That Runs So True, poet Jesse Stuart recounts his rapid rise from a 17-year-old teacher to a superintendent in rural Kentucky. 

But how can personal autobiography meet the bar of objectivity that is essential to research? Renner (2001), Steiner (1975), and Krall (1988) propose solutions.

The next post will cover the work of Florence Krall.