Fish Jumps Over the Dragon Gate:An Eastern Image of a Western Scholar’s Career Trajectory

ABSTRACT

This autobiographical narrative inquiry uses an ascribed, stock Chinese metaphor to make sense of my career trajectory. My thinking with the metaphor reaches back to my childhood, follows how various metaphorical images surfaced longitudinally in my research program, and characterizes the increasing incommensurability between my local work landscape and my growing international reputation. Foundational to my stories of experience are the narrative concepts of sacred stories, secret stories, cover stories, and counter stories. When I received a major international research award in 2015, my career reached a crossroads where I knew I either would have to quit the profession or find employment elsewhere. I could no longer remain healthy in an environment profoundly unhealthy for me. This research story captures my journey of confronting and transcending the dragon gate. It illuminates how I freed myself of one institution’s challenges, while making peace with, and becoming part of, a more hospitable university environment. This narrative research study makes public how a myriad of stories has shaped and re-shaped my academic career over time.

KEYWORDS:

• Career trajectory
• metaphor
• best-loved self
• autobiographical narrative inquiry
• reciprocal learning

Article highlights

• an ascribed, stock Eastern metaphor is used to describe a Western female professor’s career path

• the Chinese metaphor offers a ‘narrative line’ for the professor’s retelling of her career trajectory

• stories about the theory-practice divide, gender, age, and ‘beginning again’ emerge

• culture and context serve as a powerful shaping forces

• the autobiographical narrative inquiry metaphorically showcases how productive reciprocal learning is

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Even more incongruous, I was moved to his large, corner office with a panoramic view of the campus following his death. The move happened without my knowledge while I was presenting at a conference during the summer months in the UK. I requested a different office shortly after that.

2. I had successfully supervised nearly 70 doctoral students and over 50 master’s degree students at that point in time.

3. The Portfolio Group is a teacher research group I initiated in 1998 with funding from the $60 million reform movement. Currently, five members and I remain in the group. The Portfolio Group has amassed a significant body of scholarship and assisted urban schools in a multitude of ways over three decades.

4. The Faculty Academy, a higher education initiative involving teaching and teacher education professors, was founded in 2003 by a reform movement leader and me. The group’s purposes were to help one another thrive in the academy, to improve teaching and learning in primary, elementary and secondary schools and to assist the school change process.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Cheryl J. Craig

Cheryl J. Craig, Ph.D., is a Professor and the Houston Endowment Endowed Chair of Urban Education in the Department of Teaching, Learning and Culture at Texas A&M University, College Station, TX.  She is an American Educational Research Association (AERA) Fellow, a recipient of the AERA Division B (Curriculum) Outstanding Lifetime Career Award and has received the AERA Michael Huberman Award for Outstanding Contributions to Understanding the Lives of Teachers.