Introduction

For some time now I have planned a teacher research project focused on an assignment I require of seniors majoring in communication disorders and enrolled in CD 427 (Therapeutic Procedures II). Each spring I teach this undergraduate capstone course with an emphasis on the following units of study: counseling, ethics, and treatment methodologies for disorders of language and fluency. This particular assignment serves as the assessment for what students have learned in their study of counseling in clinical practice. The product, or tangible outcome, of this assignment is a research paper that comes from analysis and synthesis of numerous pieces of data collected throughout the counseling unit of study.

Initially, I believed my interest and intent was to describe and provide a model of a novel way to use a particular computer technology to support learning. Using this particular technology over the past several years, most of my students have created and submitted acceptable work that serves primarily to affirm what they already know and understand. Each year, however, I have received two or three astonishing products; work that evidenced deep and profound transformations in the students creating them. On June 14, 2002, I wrote in my online journal that I wanted to observe and think about the processes these few students engaged in and attempt to “find patterns in the processes to make them explicit instead of invisible or hidden to the particular thinker.” I needed to know and understand how the transformed students negotiated and navigated the various stages of this assignment. This knowledge, I hoped, would provide me with a better understanding of how to facilitate transformation for more of my students. I decided to begin by explicating the processes utilized by one transformed student, Deidre.

At the beginning of the counseling unit of study, Deidre, along with her classmates, received written instructions explaining the purpose of this assignment, the process of completing the assignment, and the product arising out of this assignment. The complete instructions are available in Appendix A. What follows is a brief summary of the assignment to provide the context for understanding Deidre's story.

Students study a pre-assigned situation and role (one they will play as a speech-language pathologist), complete a pre-simulation writing exercise, engage in the simulation, and then complete a post-simulation writing exercise. Using the texts generated by these steps, students analyzed them, searching for two or three recurring themes or issues that would form the foundation for their analytical paper. During this part of the process, I met once with each of the small groups of students that worked together in class as peer response groups to allow students to talk about their work. Listening to students describe the ways they approached this work and the themes and issues they were uncovering, I attempted to illuminate potential metaphors or organizing structures for their written product based on what I heard them saying. Following these conferences, students wrote a first draft of their paper and brought it to class on the appointed day for peer review. After peer groups responded to the drafts I also went over each paper and provided feedback. After my feedback was added, I returned the student's work for revision. The next version submitted would be evaluated for their final grade on this assignment.

In the spring of 2002, Deidre was one of the students who produced astonishing work on this assignment. In her final semester of her undergraduate career, Deidre (and all the other students in the class) had been in three of my other courses. She had shown herself to be bright, responsive, responsible, hardworking, and eager to learn and please. With a grade point average of 3.86 she had already ordered her magna cum laude honor cords for graduation by the time she began this assignment. Deidre granted permission for her work to be used in this research and participated in interviews, conducted via email, that sought to tease out information about how she worked through this assignment from start to finish. During analysis of my data, I noticed that several points Deidre discussed seemed key to her successfully moving forward with the assignment. Further, each of these key points in her process represented certain tensions, or conflicts, that required resolution before she could move on to the next level. Numerous times, she resolves one conflict only to find herself immersed immediately in another. In the end, Deirdre's transformation came about precisely because she was able to navigate and negotiate through these tensions.