Aesthetic Learning,Creative Writing and English Teaching

My article argues that the concept of ‘aesthetic learning’ can be helpful for English teachers on two levels. First, it can be a useful identity for English teachers and students to adopt, based upon my own experiences as a secondary English teacher, creative writer and PhD student. Second, I argue that ‘aesthetic learning’ is an effective and productive way of analysing some of the learning processes that happen in the English teacher’s classroom. In order to arrive at these conclusions, I examine my own creative writing, teaching and learning processes from which I extrapolate the notion that we are all ‘aesthetic learners’ in the sense that we learn to appreciate the qualities of the worlds we inhabit, whether these are actual or virtual. Throughout, my own writing, learning and teaching are used to illustrate my argument. In particular, the article seeks to re-position my own teaching in secondary schools within the context of ‘aesthetic learning’.     

EVALUATING A TEACHER RESEARCHER'S CHOICE OF ACTION RESEARCH

In this paper I discuss my reasons for choosing educational action research in my enquiry into the process of writing, redrafting, learning and autonomy in the examination years (Eames, 1987). I look first of all at my own interests as a teacher‐researcher, and then explore my reasons for rejecting the ‘dominant research paradigms, which seemed to me inappropriate for what I was trying to do. I explain what I understand by action research, and examine objections to it, as well as considering its strengths.     

What I ‘Know’: Literary Studies and the Teaching of English

This essay unfolds through a series of juxtapositions, involving storytelling and writing of a more analytical nature. In thinking about what I ‘know’ as an English teacher, my aim has been to present my ideas in a form that might do justice to the contradictions and complexities of my professional life, including my continuing efforts to negotiate a pathway between the rich particularities of the educational settings in which I have worked and my knowledge and values as an English teacher. My primary focus is on how my literary education has shaped and been shaped by my work as an English teacher vis-à-vis a devaluing of teachers’ disciplinary knowledge that has occurred through standards-based reforms. I attempt to make the standpoint from which I am writing an object of scrutiny, thus producing an account of what I ‘know’ that arises out of my work as an English teacher and returns to it as a necessary dimension of a politically committed praxis.     

Fostering Childish Tendencies in Teacher Education and Young Adult Literature: The Problem of Teaching Ideas You Love

In teaching young adult literature in a teacher education programme at the undergraduate level, I pose the question of how I can best introduce my personal theoretical stances into the formal curriculum and syllabi, without unintentionally conveying such theories to my students as necessary postures. I first outline the theoretical underpinnings that inform my own work: which include psychoanalytic theory, ideas of fantasy and loss in reading experience, the concept of adolescence as a psychic and cultural relation, and the dynamics of forgetting in teacher education. In theorizing part of the process of learning to teach as the productive activation of a person’s internal archive, I then describe the methodological choices I made while constructing my course in young adult literature, where, in reference to Lynda Barry’s One Hundred Demons, my students consider the ways to best approach their own adolescent ‘demons’.     

Confucius stands on the London eye- an auto-ethnographic study

Confucianism has had a profound influence on Chinese learners’ academic achievements, moral education and education for citizenship. It is often suggested that the influence of Confucianism leads to educational success. Situating the Confucian ideology in a Western educational setting in so far as how those involved in teaching and learning according to Chinese Confucian-based education. This paper is based on a BBC documentary that leads me to reflect on Chinese education. The documentary sought to investigate what would occur when Western learners undertake Chinese Confucian-based learning. In this article, my personal reflections on the content and messages of the documentary are interwoven with reflections of the teachers and others involved in the documentary. I begin this auto-ethnographic account by reflecting on my cultural upbringing in China and the influence that Confucianism had on my own early learning experiences. Selected diary entries show my identities within a unique Confucian cultural framework.     

Beyond the doorstep. Arabian (k)nights and personal nightmares: a working life in Oman

Working in a country where the work culture is unknown to you—Oman in the Middle East—you are faced with yourself. What you need is a profound knowledge of the cultural, social and educational surroundings you are working in, which I did not have. Coming from a working‐class background, I was not unfamiliar with adjusting to cultural differences, but here I was the ‘advantaged’. I was the ‘expert’, with western knowledge: highly valued by some, feared by others. Living up to your expert role in unknown territory is a daunting process, as this article highlights.     

Adapting the boundaries in primary physical education: an account of my learning,my educational influence and improved practice

In this paper I explore how I have come to theorise my work as a critical emancipatory practice as a lecturer in primary physical education (PE). I give an account of what I understand to be the epistemological foundations and practices of practitioner research and my potential educational influence in my own and other practitioner-researchers’ learning. I explain how I have generated my living educational theory of practice and discuss the changes in my learning from a propositional approach towards a dynamic epistemology of practice that is grounded in inclusional and dialogical ways of knowing. Within my paper I position myself as a professional educator and researcher, and share the exciting and transformational experiences of teaching and learning in evolving action research cycles of practice. I view my learning to date as an active act, working with the novice teachers I support to offer improvement and change in our future practice. I celebrate my reconceptualised view of education as a learner from within my practice and explain my move from knowledge transfer to knowledge co-creation. I make an original contribution to educational knowledge by explaining how I try to inspire others to research their practice and contribute to a new scholarship of educational enquiry.     

Understanding Candidates’ Learning Relationships with their Cooperating Teachers: A call to Reframe my Pedagogy

Abstract

This self-study frames the influences of cooperating (or mentor) teachers on teacher candidates in my teacher education classroom as an action-at-a-distance on my pedagogy of teacher education; that is, a tacit set of influences and expectations that teacher candidates develop about my course before it even begins. Interviews with teacher candidates enabled me to develop two conceptual metaphors to think about the relationships candidates develop with cooperating teachers on practicum. The first, freedom with foundation, reflects the fact that teacher candidates hope to have considerable autonomy in their practicum placements while simultaneously having the support from their cooperating teacher to receive meaningful, regular, feedback. The second, power and performance, names the tensions teacher candidates feel in experiencing the practicum as a site of performance rather than as a site of learning. I offer some specific pedagogical ways in which I have responded to these issues before making a turn to self. I examined journal entries from my own experiences as a teacher candidate 20 years ago with a view to understanding the ways in which the two metaphors may have played a role in my own development as a teacher. This research compels me to attend explicitly to action-at-at-distance forces in my teacher education classroom, such as candidates’ relationship with cooperating teachers and my relationships with my former cooperating teachers.     

“That’s Not Very Deleuzian”: Thoughts on interrupting the exclusionary nature of “High Theory”

In the following essay, I discuss my own uneasy and nonlinear journey from the classroom to Deleuze, describing the concepts and lines of thought that have been productive in thinking differently about teaching and teacher education. I also detail my encounters with the surprising orthodoxies of using Deleuzian/Deleuzoguattarian thought. From these, I suggest that ‘being Deleuzian’ is itself a molar line that serves as an exclusionary mechanism, working to preserve high theory for the use of only a select few. Instead, I argue for the potential of making such nonlinear thinking accessible to mainstream audiences to interrupt the linear, status quo thinking undergirding a global educational neoliberal movement.     

Doing Feminist Educational Theory: A post-modernist perspective

This paper arises from my work as a teacher of courses in feminist educational theory in a New Zealand university. Students usually encounter educational theories as disembodied abstractions scattered in fragments in various, often seemingly unrelated, courses. In a crowded curriculum there is little space for them to create their own educational theories or to reflect on the processes of educational theorising. In this paper I speak with two voices as a means of modelling - for students and teachers of feminist courses - a process of doing educational theory. It is written in two columns. In the left-hand column I speak with an academic voice. I begin by reviewing some theoretical writings of post-modernist theorists who have drawn attention to the ways our educational and social theories are generated by our circumstances - biographical, historical, cultural, generational, and geographical. I then argue that post-modernists have seldom practised what they preach - their abstract, and often inaccessible, writings remain severed from the lived realities at their base. In the right-hand column I speak with a more personal voice. I introduce some everyday experiences which are usually rendered invisible in academic writing in order to demonstrate how a few moments of 'lived reality' can be generative of feminist educational theory. The paper also contains ideas about how its unorthodox form can be used to trigger multiple and idiosyncratic readings and as a trigger for students' writing.     

Critically Teaching Criticality?: Modeling Social and Pedagogical Inquiry with Literary Texts

Within US teacher preparation programs, critical pedagogy and a desire for social change can lead teacher educators to prioritize transformation of prospective teachers’ beliefs through self-reflection. In pursuit of effective critical pedagogies, teacher educators also need to examine their own practices and beliefs. This self-study, a manifestation of teaching as inquiry, reframes evaluations of teaching away from what students do toward what teachers do. Here I undertake a reflexive examination of my own recursive practice as a teacher educator in children’s literature. Drawing upon a complex notion of teaching and learning, I argue that student learning outcomes are unpredictable, and as a result, successful teacher education should model self-inquiry as a vital part of teaching. Findings show that teaching choices (and omissions) in response to students’ responses led to unintended outcomes that undermined my motivations. I conclude that teacher educators’ self-inquiry and reflection in broader social contexts offers access to critical ways of thinking that underlie their work toward developing similar capacities among their prospective teacher students.     

Reflective Practice,Literature, and Critical Theory

In this article, I offer a case of the predicaments I encountered in conducting teacher education research at my own institution and re‐examine these predicaments using an ethic of mindfulness and compassion. I explore how this Buddhist perspective might help researchers navigate what can be a lonely, ethically complicated research journey among their own colleagues. Based on this analysis, I propose that an ethic of mindfulness and compassion holds potential for guiding teacher education research and challenging researchers to see differently. I argue that conducting teacher education research using the lenses of mindfulness and compassion might propel social change aimed at increasing educational and social opportunity for all people and, in doing so, further the hope for justice in our relationships, teaching, and research.     

On not becoming ‘a mere empirical existence’: exploring ‘who’ and ‘what’ narratives in pre-service English teachers’ writing

Standards-based reforms of education favour narrow forms of teacher professional learning tied to generic standards and pre-determined, measurable outcomes. In high-stakes accountability-driven environments, in schools and initial teacher education programs, educators are rarely encouraged to inquire into their work and professional identities through narrative writing. This article describes and analyses an assessment task in a pre-service teacher education course wherein students explore dialogic forms of critical autobiographical writing as part of an ongoing process of examining and clarifying their views and values about English teaching. Drawing on Cavarero, we argue that the writing these preservice teachers do provides a space for them to negotiate ‘what’ and ‘who’ narratives as they journey to become English teachers. Their writing productively grapples with generic ‘what’ stories such as what standards documents attempt to tell about English teaching, and the ‘unrepeatable uniqueness’ of ‘who’ stories developed out of their individual cultural, educational and linguistic difference.     

Developing holistic practice through reflection,action and theorising

This article outlines how I, as a primary teacher engaging with a self-study action research process, have come to a deeper understanding of my practice. It explains how I have also come to an understanding of why I work in the way I do; of how this understanding influences my work, and the significance of this new understanding. My work as a teacher frequently includes doing collaborative digital projects with my class. As I engaged in research on my practice, I initially experienced difficulties problematising this work. I struggled to achieve clarity not only with engaging in critical thinking but also with articulating my educational values. I found Mellor’s idea about ‘the struggle’ helpful as he explains how ‘the struggle’ is at the heart of the research process. My new understanding around these collaborative projects emerged in terms of holistic practice; clarifying my ontological values and learning to think critically. I am now generating an educational theory from my practice as I see my work as a process for developing spiritual and holistic approaches to learning and teaching. I conclude by outlining what I perceive to be the significance of my work and its potential implications for education.     

Biography,Identity, and Inquiry: The making of teacher,teacher educator,and researcher

This is a self-study of my professional and cultural biography and identity, a history which directed me first toward the work of urban teaching and then into teacher education and research into comparative educational issues of racial and national identity. I use this inquiry to demonstrate how biography and identity influences the lived experience of teaching and the researcher's stance. I also examine areas where preservice urban teacher education programs must improve. My personal recommendations describe experiences that would have better prepared me for urban teaching. Suggestions include expanding coursework in the historical, political, and sociocultural influences on urban education and in designing culturally responsive curricula. I also recommend restructuring field experiences to offer richer classroom-based learning opportunities for preservice teachers and extending fieldwork into urban communities. Finally, I suggest ongoing inservice teacher education in learning-community models that respond to educators' context-specific teaching concerns.     

‘A Not-so-simple Story from My Life’: Using Auto-ethnography and Creative Writing to Re-frame the Heteronormative Narratives of School Life

Reflecting on my experience as a teacher and a lesbian in a second-level school in Ireland in the early 1990s, I use an auto-ethnographic approach first to explore some of the ways dominant narratives can silence, constrain and marginalise some people. Projecting forward to an imagined future, I draw on creative writing to ‘re-frame’ how identity could be represented and experienced. While it is noted that context, attitudes and experiences have changed for the better in the intervening decades, legislative frames still hold fast, and heteronormativity continues to curb expressions of difference. Adopting a creatively disruptive style and format, I hope to provide a glimpse of a new normal in schools where more positive and less alienating experiences are imaginable … for everyone.     

“Until I Became a Professional,I Was Not,Consciously, Indigenous”: One Intercultural Bilingual Educator’s Trajectory in Indigenous Language Revitalization

Drawing from long-term ethnographic research in the Andes, this paper examines one Quechua-speaking Indigenous bilingual educator’s trajectory as she traversed (and traverses) from rural highland communities of southern Peru through development as teacher, teacher educator, researcher, and advocate for Indigenous identity and language revitalization across urban, periurban, and rural spaces. Neri Mamani grew up in highland Peru and at the time I met her in 2005 was a bilingual intercultural education practitioner enrolled in master’s studies at the Program for Professional Development in Bilingual Intercultural Education for the Andean Region (PROEIB-Andes) at the University of San Simón in Cochabamba, Bolivia. Drawing from my ethnographic research at PROEIB that year, situated also within a broader context of my ethnographic research on bilingual education in the Andes across several decades and Neri’s life trajectory across those same decades, this paper analyzes her narrative as it emerged in a 4-hour interview with me. I argue that Neri and her peers’ recognizing, valorizing, and studying the multiple and mobile linguistic, cultural, and intercultural resources at play in their own and others’ professional practices around bilingual intercultural education enable them to co-construct an Indigenous identity that challenges deep-seated social inequalities in their Andean world.     

‘Me at university doing teacher training – what a big laugh’: narrative and parrhesia

This paper uses Foucault’s notion of parrhesia to analyse the story of another and to interrogate teacher education in terms of the particular moral order or the forms of socialization that it uses. I examine the context of my own teaching in terms of truth‐telling and the normative expectations that were found to exist. Through reflection and analysis and using the patterns of action research came the realization that some of what we do within teacher education examines a student’s moral performance rather than their pedagogical ability. The particular moral code that fits within teaching and teacher education needs to be considered in terms of social justice and social change. It argues that there exist collegial restraints and the typifications that serve to find the kinds of students and future teachers we consider appropriate. As an example of an action research study, the paper raises many questions that need to be further considered particularly in regard to ‘regimes of truth’ within teacher education.     

Teachers' environmental education as creating cracks and ruptures in school education: a narrative inquiry and an analysis of teacher rhetoric

This article discusses a narrative inquiry as a methodology for understanding and examining teachers' interpretations of their environment‐related teaching experiences. Focusing on the value of teacher stories for interrogating the discursive practices of schools as institutional contexts, four main rhetorical themes are identified to illustrate how teachers' engagements in practice and thinking with environmental education display ongoing identity work. Five Korean secondary science teachers' stories illustrate the dynamic processes and interplay between multiple discourses, such as the ‘proper’, ‘good’, ‘science’ teacher, and the cultural norms, resources and subject positions available to them, as they take up and explain their own and others' meanings and subject positions in science education and environmental education. The paper discusses the value of narrative inquiry to conceptualising teacher agency in ways that offer alternatives to conventional research perspectives in this field, and in taking account of the possible meanings of environmental education, the possibility of creating cracks and ruptures in the ‘sense‐making’ discourses and ‘sense that is made’ of experiences of environmental education and school education more widely.     

Foregrounding intersectionality in rural youth’s schooling experiences in China: a queer re-reading

This article uses a queer lens in an intersectional analysis of students’ schooling experiences in rural China. I argue that a queer perspective has been largely neglected and issues related to sexuality have not been carefully investigated in Chinese educational contexts. Drawing on queer theory and an intersectional framework, I re-interpret one of my earlier qualitative studies ‘queerly’ and examine the different ways that the discourses of sexuality and gender shape rural Chinese students’ schooling lives. Findings reveal that these discourses marginalize both effeminate boys who demonstrate ‘too little’ masculinity and male ‘troublemakers’ who perform ‘too much’ masculinity. This queer route of rereading also disrupts other constructions of normalcy associated with class- and place-based identities, such as students’ ‘half-rural identity.’ The analysis shows the importance of foregrounding the intersectional dimensions of inequalities and embracing a queer theoretical framework in understanding rural education in China.