Contrapuntal orchestration: an exploration of an interaction between researchers’ and teachers’ stories around the concept of culture

Abstract

What occurs when an African American woman professor and a European American woman professor review narrative data and interpret what the students write differently? This research illustrates how race and the experience of two ethnically different female researchers impact data analysis of teachers’ interactions with narratives of personal past experiences. These interactions exposed multiple voices and intrapersonal as well as interpersonal contexts, resulting in a dialogue which embraced multiple equally valued individual voices, interwoven yet distinct – a contrapuntal orchestration. This resulting contrapuntal orchestration suggests the importance of intentionally creating a dialogic space which includes researchers of diverse theoretical backgrounds within diversity discourse in education classes, and within that space providing for self-awareness of the cultural attributes we use to construct cultural meaning of everything around us. This paper explores how analyzing teachers’ autoethnographies challenged the researchers’ own construction of culture and what it meant to provide for dialogic space in that construction process.