Autoethnography (The Science of Telliing Your Story)
Chapter 1: Background- The Art of Story Listening
In the book The Intercultural Campus by Greg Tanaka, the author
describes his challenges as he tried to lead a group of college professors
to embrace multiculturalism and change their courses to include more
diverse content. Tanaka writes:
An attempt to conduct workshops in how to teach a diverse classroom
met with partial success. One possible reason was that neither outside
nor internal faculty consultants used the kind of “small group” format
that was proving successful in the staff intercultural training
workshops. Lecturing about what they considered “best practices,”
some facilitators addressed the faculty only on an intellectual register
and, as a result did not lead participants to investigate their own
feelings, perspectives, or assumptions about diversity. With attendees
“intellectualizing” their involvement rather than learning from each
other through storytelling, there was less self-introspection concerning
their own positions of power and their own rootedness. (Tanaka, 2007
p.139)
Here, Tanaka describes the difficulty of getting mentally dug-in
intellectuals to change, their ways of thinking and listening. His research
found that the staff and students (for a business this would be
management and customers) who sat down together in small groups of
four or five people and shared their life stories had more meaningful
experiences.
Inclusion: The Art of Story-Listening creates a small-group, life, story-
telling session. You will find humor, insight, faith, fear, shame, and love in
these pages. Multiple people spent their time to think and feel deeply
about their lives in the re-telling of these stories. We invite you to grab a
cup of coffee or tea and sit down at our small group table to listen to the
courageous authors as they spill their stories and lie bare their lives,
naked before you. Then, we challenge you to do the same in your office or
classroom. Share your story with others and develop a keen “ear” to hear
more life stories. In the end, our hope is that you will begin to put into
regular practice the art of story-listening.
The Art of Story-Listening
Art is expression. Every expression is unique and beautiful. Even in thick
and dense forests, each tree is unique, and no two are exactly alike.
There is not a standard definition or procedural steps to explain the Art of
Story-Listening. I believe it’s a space that is created when a person
genuinely cares about another human enough to listen to them.
The Art of Story-listening is a mindset that subconsciously tells you when
you meet someone new or different, “I wonder what his or her story is?” or
“I wonder what the story is behind this person.” It is a mental eagerness to
learn, not born of gossip or nosiness, but an eagerness to story-listen,
which is born of love.
Stephen Covey’s description of “empathic listening” is a tool for improving
the Art of Story-Listening. Covey’s research consisted of interviews with
some of the most successful business leaders in the world. He found that
one of the qualities that made these leaders so successful was their ability
to genuinely listen to different types of people. In the book The 7 Habits of
Highly Effective People, Covey writes:
Empathic Listening
“Seek first to understand” involves a very deep shift in paradigm.
We typically seek first to be understood. Most people do not listen
with the intent to understand, they listen with the intent to reply.
They’re either speaking or preparing to speak. They’re filtering
everything through their own paradigms [or mental lens], reading
their own autobiography into other people's lives. “Oh, I know
exactly how you feel!”, “I went through the very same thing. Let me
tell you about my experience.” (Covey, 1989 p.239)
Similar to Covey’s description, a theology scholar, who was consulted in
the preparation of this book, pointed to the scripture: “be quick to listen,
slow to speak and slow to become angry” -James 1:19. I then asked
myself this question, “Ok. It’s clear that listening is important, but how can
I improve my artistic expression of listening in a way that’s personal,
unique, and real?” I found the answer in an emerging research method
called autoethnography (life-story research), which helps people articulate
their life stories in ways that help others understand race, culture,
oppression, power, etc.
Autoethnography (Life Storytelling) Approach
Life stories help readers with the understanding of processes,
characteristics, people, context, links, multiple meanings, and cultural
practices (Noblit, Flores, & Murillo, 2004). The thick and rich stories in
autoethnography research help readers to understand the multiple
perspectives of complex racial problems. Since racism is one of the top
three threats to democracy in the United States, it is important to add
diverse points of view to the ways in which we perceive and conceptualize
racism, diversity, and inclusion. The use of the auto-ethnographic research method allows each co-
contributor to delve into their own reality while using the widely respected qualitative research tenets of autobiography and ethnography (Ellis, Adams & Bochner, 2010).
Learn Auto-ethnography
A comprehensive overview of the autoethnography research method can
be found in a work by Caroyln Ellis et. al. (2011), entitled
Autoethnography: An Overview. In Chapter one Ellis writes
“autoethnography is an approach to research and writing that seeks to
describe and systematically analyze (graphy) personal experience (auto)
in order to understand cultural experience (ethno).” Ellis explains that this
approach challenges canonical ways of doing research and representing
others as well as treats research as a political, socially-just, and socially-
conscious act. The method of autoethnography is noted for providing an
alternative venue for marginalized voices (Hayano, 1979).
To get the full 136 pages of the book Inclusion: the Art of Story-Listinging click here