“To Thine Own Self Be True”: One Music Educator’s Transition from Higher Education Faculty Member to High School Teacher

Abstract

This dramaturgically-inspired telling of an autoethnographic narrative evokes theatre-in-the-round imagery to depict one of the two researcher’s significant and elective professional transition from holding a tenure-track university faculty position to high school music teaching, covering a one-and-a-half year time span. Four interrelated theoretical frameworks are used to interpret data, combining existing models with novel concepts: culturally scripted selves; aspects of selfhood informed by cultural scripts; performative markers of tertiary music education; and processes of concealment. Metathemes of time, workload/agency, and support developed and shaped data analysis. Recommendations for the field include changes in: mentorship models, definitions of success/happiness, cultural norms, and worklife balance. The story and our study of it is presented as a play in a critical, published format (non-acting edition). It consists of an Authors’ Note (including General Comments and Cast of Characters); a Play in two Acts, each with three Scenes; a Critical Analysis (including Review of Literature, Theoretical Framework, Discussion, and Implications), and an Appendix explaining research method.

Complexities of selfhood are paramount to this work, with focus on the actor’s changing conceptualization of 12 specific aspects of selfhood throughout her transition: biographical, geographical, relational, socio-cultural, intellectual, academic, musical, physical, emotional, psychological, philosophical, and economic. Levels of emphasis or concealment of aspects of selfhood are indicated theatrically, emphasized through increasingly bright spotlights, and concealing through – in order of intensity – use of a veil, a mask, stepping into a darkened background, and finally through sitting balled up in the darkened center stage to indicate erasure.

Appendix: Methods

We used a blended methodology resulting in a narrative, collaborative performance autoethnography, a “co-constructed, dialogic” product that takes shape in this instance as a theater script (Chang et al. 2013, p. 24). This approach allowed us to disrupt taken-for-granted assumptions about who music educators are (Barrett and Stauffer 2009) and strengthen the narrative through polyvocality. Drawing from Connelly and Clandinin (2006), we share “a metaphorical three-dimensional narrative inquiry space” in which temporality, place, and personal and social interactions are represented as universally human in their subjectivity (2000, p. 54).

“By…‘outing’ their own experiences,” autoethnographers forefront the importance of subjectivity and reveal an individual’s innermost thoughts, which typically lie beyond the reach of other research methods (Chang et al. 2013, p. 18). Lending multiple voices to the critique of data “creates a unique synergy and harmony that autoethnographers cannot attain in isolation” (ibid., p. 24). We used “partial collaboration,” in which “not all researchers add their autobiographical data,” but “contribute to other research steps in the collaborative process” (ibid.).

1.1 Data Collection and Analysis

Data were collected through recorded interviews, note-taking, diagramming, purposeful focused remembering, and review of biographical documents including diaries and journals. We interspersed “solitary data collection periods with group conversations” (Chang et al. 2013, p. 89), allowing regular opportunities to identify and resolve discrepancies between researchers. Researchers co-produced interpretations of emerging meanings as data were reviewed, categorized and recategorized, and thematically grouped.