And now for something completely different ...

... my Master's Thesis!

Yes, I am a woman of many identities - Teacher by day; Storyteller whenever and wherever the opportunity arises; Musician in stolen moments, and STUDENT ... always have been, always will be, for ever eternal ...

At the moment, being a student means pursuing a Master's in Education. I'm in the last stages, with "only" a thesis left to complete. Easier said than done. However, it is a fascinating process, and I wanted to be sure to take my time with it. It is serving several purposes: it's not just the fulfillment of a requirement of my program, but also an exercise in "real" research, similar to what I might pursue in a Ph.D. program sooner or later, as well as my first attempt at writing something not just for the grade, or even just for myself, but for possible publication. It is my personal goal that something - anything - that might come out of this thesis might be published in some shape or form. We shall see ...

What am I writing about? Well, as the eternal connection-maker that I am, I cannot help but recognize how ever more embedded my practice of teaching and my practice as a storyteller are in each other, and ask myself whether other storytellers have ever felt like teachers, too? How can storytellers be understood as educators? What insights can storytellers offer on what it means to be a teacher?

The origins of education can be traced back to the tradition of storytelling, which emerged within human culture as the first form of teaching. Thus, we might think of storytellers as the world’s first teachers. Today, storytellers continue to practice in the oral tradition of old, surely with as many developments as we've seen in the practice of teaching, yet observably grounded in something that reaches back - way back - to some common memory of human culture. In this was, I wanted to design a study that would explore what insights into teaching and being a teacher are gained from today’s storytellers.

Pending approval from the Human Subjects Department, I will interview 4 or 5 tellers in what is called an "exploratory" or "descriptive" study, which means that the questions I ask will be mainly open-ended. Later, in the process of analysis, I will take what I anticipate will be very different responses to those questions and attempt to identify patterns ... again, easier said than done.

Yet, I am eager and inquisitive, curious and intrigued, but more than anything: my ears and eyes are open and ready to find something amazing that won't necessarily make everything make sense, but will remind me why I am eager and curious, and that being so is something so natural and so integral to who I am and how I will continue to be in this world, regardless of whether I go on to pursue more academic study or not.

So! This fall, I have prepared my proposal and will submit it very very soon, along with an application to Human Subjects. Both are proving to require more reading and reflection already than I had anticipated. Especially in preparing the proposal, it has been hard to know when to stop reading and connecting ideas for a theoretical framework, and start writing them into a cohesive paper. There is a lot of back and forth to this process, and I find I am enjoying it. Most entertaining is, most certainly, my literature map of post-its on a wall:

What can I say? An external processor at her finest ...

More news on this process to come!