Seeing through Serpent and Eagle Eyes: Teachers as Handlers of Memories (original) (raw)
Related papers
Educational Studies, 2016
Though we are all inevitably familiar with the everyday effects of forgetting, we generally fail to ask about what its internal movements look like, or how we can talk about what they reveal. Despite its necessity as a structuring process of autobiographical inquiry, forgetting’s invisible moves are always obscured by that which remains: the typically unquestioned and seemingly permanent products of remembrance. In this article, I think about how we may conceptualize the status of forgetting in the context of teacher education, and how we may encourage preservice teachers to acknowledge the enigmatic and incomplete status of their autobiographical texts. I begin by looking to theories of autobiography, memory and forgetting (with a particular emphasis on teacher education), and I then look closely at a number of psychoanalytic considerations of the mind and its inner workings, which help to conceptualize forgetting and remembering as in a psychically productive, dialectical relationship. I then turn my attention to 2 multimodal, textual examples, which emphasize the problems of representation in relation to remembering and narrative: a collage from Lynda Barry’s One! Hundred! Demons!, and an autobiographical comic authored by an undergraduate student in teacher education. In the final section of this article, I argue that thinking about forgetting in relation to autobiographical remembrance can lead to an ethical stance of mutual opacity and shared ignorance in teacher education.
Discord and dissonance: Living through and learning from a teacher educator’s memories
2017
This thesis presents the memories of my experiences as a teacher educator in a variety of teacher education programs. In the context of a "kaleidoscope of notions" informing practices in teacher education, several issues persist: conflicting aims between programs and practicums, a lack of culturally responsive pedagogy and weak epistemological or content literacy. In response, teacher educators are called to research their own practices as sites for developing conceptual clarity about teaching and learning. Thus, this study aims to examine my experiences as a teacher educator in order to develop knowledge about practice and reveal insights into the complex nature of teaching prospective teachers. Using self-study research as the primary approach, theoretical inquiry (to frame my questions) and singular case study (to define each experience as particular and unique), I examine a collection of memories, written as memory reflections, of my life as a teacher educator. In selecting these memories, I attend to discordance and dissonance in my learning as a teacher educator and include experiences of teaching that are at times jarring, unsettling, yet provocative and informative. The memory reflections are a composite of narrative, reflective and authentic accounts of my practices with student teachers and colleagues. Drawing from authority of experience and critical reflection, I analyse the memories of discordant experiences and develop: a) understandings about the nature of self-study research; b) knowledge about teacher education practices; and c) assertions regarding learning from experience. The outcomes of this study include the articulation of my practice as an array of pedagogical orientations and the conceptualization of a recurring cycle of discordance as a heuristic for learning from experience.
Mosaic-ing Memory in Teacher Education and Professional Learning
2020
In this scholarly memoir, we use mosaic-ing as a metaphor to retrace research connections between and among memory-work, the arts, and professional teacher learning, charting the course of transcontinental methodological variations and considerations over time and space. We chronologically offer this retracing, looking back to some of our earliest work on memory and teaching in Canada in the early to mid-1990s and then following the movement of our memory-work collaborations across Canada and South Africa up to the present time. The memoir positions imagination, creativity, and the arts at the heart of remembering as an educational project. Throughout, we highlight the value of arts-based tools and methods—such as drawing, photography, filmmaking, creating collages, poetic inquiry, storytelling, and working with objects—in the doing of memory-work. Building on the work of Frigga Haug and others, mosaic-ing memory offers a multifaceted visual, material, and cultural lens to view teac...
The Qualitative Report, 2020
The focus of this article is twofold: (a) It explores how autobiographical memory and future imaginings can be used as a resource for pedagogical understanding in Initial Teacher Education, and (b) The paper engages a methodological experiment where there is a layered reading of texts across time, 2008-2018.The paper presents, through a narrative analysis of autobiographical texts, the stories of two student teachers, Ciara and John (Text 1, 2008). These student teachers were in the early years of their undergraduate four-year programme in my university and I was their English Pedagogics lecturer. Later, I revisit these student teachers’ narratives and read them under new interpretative conditions based on their salient and punctum effects, significant and emotional effects, on me as a teacher educator (Text 2, 2018). Then, theorizing with relevant literature, I consider how to foster conditions and methodologies of growth as student teachers engage their autobiographical memories a...
Bringing Out the Dead: Curriculum History as Memory
Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, 2013
If there requires further evidence of the rude, undeveloped character of our education, we have it in the fact that the comparative worths (sic) of different kinds of knowledge have been as yet scarcely even discussed-much less discussed in a methodic way with definite results. (Spencer, 1884 p. 10) Memory is the raw material of history. Whether mental, oral, or written, it is the living source from which historians draw. (Le Goff, 1977/1992 p. xi) Making fragile the causalities that present themselves as natural and given in daily life is to open spaces for possibilities other than those framed by the contemporary principles of 'the order of things.' (Popkewitz, 2011 p. 164) From this standpoint, reexamination of the historical operation opens on the one hand onto the political problem … and, on the other, onto the question of the subject … a question repressed … through the law of a 'scientific' writing. (de Certeau, 1988 p. xxvii) HERE ARE THE FRAMEWORKS WE CHOOSE TO USE, like Spencer's eternal question, and then there are those we do not choose, but which nevertheless operate, some subverting intent and others opening spaces for possibility. If the frameworks upon which we habitually rely serve to divert us from all but dominant forms of memory, then silenced or invisible frameworks become a form of surveillance from beyond the grave. The Reconceptualization of curriculum studies (Pinar & Grumet, 1976; Pinar, 2013) has long acknowledged the necessity of historical perspective for the purpose of revealing the ways in which history is, and has been, used to codify socio-political/ideological contexts. Nevertheless, curriculum history has largely averted poststructuralist deconstruction and has remained firmly wedded to a teleology of reason, T Hendry & Winfield w Bringing Out the Dead
Narratives about Teaching: Remembrance, Reflection and Controversy
This chapter examines the ways, meanings and outcomes of the acts of sharing narratives on teaching (and by proxy, learning). It considers these topics by considering narratives about teaching from three perspectives: 1) Student narratives, 2) Teacher based narratives, and 3) Popular/Mediabased narratives. It closes with some caveats and cautions about the danger of uncritical acceptance of teacher-learner narratives.
Memory, Postmemory and Critical Language Teacher Education
Analecta Politica, 2018
Narratives and stories of teachers' experiences in pre-service and in-service education are commonly used to understand the identities of language teachers, as they tend to be influenced by their life experiences and are stored in their memories. However, the concept of post-memory has emerged more recently and seems not yet to have been used in language teacher education. In this paper, we discuss the possibilities of using the concept of post-memory in the education of language teachers, through narratives of their life experiences. We intend to explore more deeply the influences of traumatic historical events, such as the Brazilian Military Regime, on the identities of preservice and in-service English teachers in Brazil, through narratives and stories of their experiences. Our main objective is to analyze the relationships and interrelationships among memory, post-memory and life experiences and identities of English teachers, especially in relation to the experiences related to the influences of the Brazilian military period.
This chapter is prompted by a series of oral history interviews with former secondary school teachers who worked in alternative and community schools in Australia during the 1970s. It brings methodological debates about oral history practice and influential arguments concerning the social dimensions and production of memory (McLeod & Thomson, 2009) into dialogue with more recent explorations of the ‘affective turn’, noting in particular the usefulness of the notion of ‘affective practice’ (Wetherell 2011). It outlines methodological challenges and opportunities in undertaking oral histories to research emotions, and argues that such research is both complicated and enriched by the vagaries of memory as it is forged and remade in the present, a process that is understand to be simultaneously about narrating history and making-up the self. Oral history, it is argued, offers a valuable method for researching emotion because of its capacity to elicit and illuminate narratives that cross over subjective and socio-cultural dimensions of memory, allowing exploration of the nexus between private and public feelings. Examples from teacher narratives are woven into the discussion to illustrate themes of nostalgia, temporality and self-making, movement from personal memory to generational story, and inter-subjective dynamics in oral history interviews.