ABSTRACT
In Chapter 1 of The Call of Stories, Robert Coles (1989) described how he learned to become a practicing, competent psychiatrist. During his internship, he had two supervisors, “two senior psychoanalysts who were there to help [him] make sense of what [he] was hearing” (p. 3). One, Dr. Carl Binger, repeatedly told him to “read more in psychiatric literature” (p. 3) and helped him to see that he had a professional language consisting of words such as “treat,” “phobia,” and “defenses” (p. 4).1 Dr. Binger continually exhorted him to “formulate the case” (p. 5), to get “a new appraisal of ‘the state of [the patients’] psycho - dynamics’” (p. 8). The other supervisor, Dr. Alfred O. Ludwig, didn’t push him to
“reformulate,” appraise, or sum up his position. Instead, he asked him “to tell . . . a story or two” about the patients he was seeing (p. 11). At first, Coles leaned more in the direction of the former, working to set down the patients’ problems and solve the cases, embarrassed by the advice to seek stories. However, stymied by reluctance on the part of his patients to talk, he tried this other “method” of asking them to tell stories; the result is worth repeating:
Coles learned “how to” learn, “a procedural suggestion” that changed the way he helped patients. He further refined this “method” as he retold the stories to Dr. Ludwig and was asked to concentrate on “clinical moments” (p. 14). These “moments” marked when the person revealed key information that would enable the psychiatrist/listener to help. Despite this initial success, Coles con - tinued to resist Dr. Ludwig (he saw him as odd and out of step with those in power), sticking to reformulating and theorizing. Ultimately, however, he came to understand that listening to his patients’ stories helped him make discoveries and act on their behalf (p. 22).2 Coles’s (1989) story as an apprentice doctor is an appropriate example for a discussion of techne that I began in my dissertation and continued in several articles or book chapters, focusing on teaching, program building, and citizenship (1998, 2002a, 2002b, 2010). In a manner similar to teachers, Coles too was “bound up in relationships of interdependency” in “a network of other people” (Dunne, 1993, p. 263), exemplifying a technite whose goal is to put his patients “as far as [he can] on the road to health” (Rhetoric 1.1.1355b10-14).3 Thus, like teachers, he is someone in that permeable zone between techne and phronesis. In addition, he relied on narrative methodology to create knowledge (Clandinin, 1993; Clandinin & Connelly, 2004; Eisner, 1998; Mishler, 1990). His text and story are models from which I learn and borrow, and by borrowing his method and following his examples, this chapter is a narrative “argument” to demonstrate the importance of storytelling to the techne of teaching and by extension to program building and administration.
