Teacher Education Practices Supporting Social Justice: Approaching an Individual Self-Study Inquiry into Institutional Self-Study Processes by Michael Vavrus [vavrusm@evergreen.edu] and Olivia Archibald [oliviaa@elwha.evergreen.edu] Prepared for the Second International Conference on Self-Study of Teacher Education Practices, Herstmonceux Castle, UK, August 16-20, 1998

  

 

Theoretical framework for individual self-study investigation

 

During this transitional era (Fullan et al., 1998) the work of co-author Michael Vavrus as a teacher educator in a faculty-administrator role has required significant intellectual, emotional, and time commitments to the institutional and teacher education program self-study processes. In our paper Vavrus investigates his own activities and thinking as one who has consistently been intent throughout his career on addressing the moral responsibility of educators in a society that envisions itself as a pluralistic democracy. To embark on an individually designed self-study on teacher education practices (see Cole & Knowles, 1996), this aspect of the study draws on a research practice utilizing an autobiographical/personal narrative (Carter & Doyle, 1996; Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 1993; Tellez, 1996). The theoretical framework behind this aspect of the paper is guided by the tenets of action research that are both critical (Hursh, 1997) and emancipatory (Zuber-Skerritt, 1996b). Although post hoc in being able to realize all of the ideal principles that can inform action research, the study does attend to the key links within action research: connecting the process of self-reflection to changes in practice (Winter, 1996). While recognizing the shifting postmodern nature of knowledge and value claims, the context of the self-study is placed within the philosophical inquiry tradition of teacher education that calls for action "by appealing to shared ideas and values" (Lee & Yarger, 1996, p. 15). How a philosophical context as advocated by an individual faculty member such as Vavrus can lead to teacher education programmatic changes for furthering a social reconstructionist agenda is analyzed from an emancipatory action research approach as applied to organizations (Zuber-Skerritt, 1996a). Because "we are objects of social institutions and processes while we intentionally engage in meaningful behavior" (Cherryholmes, 1988, p. 35), the unit of analysis is interactive and shifting between the individual and the organization despite being aimed initially at the institutional level as perceived and experienced by Vavrus in his goal of shaping institutional processes while directly involved in those actions. Since the work of individual self-study researchers is inherently "personal, subjective...and usually creatively communicated in narrative form...[while laying] bare for public scrutiny aspects of themselves, their practices, and their institutions" (Cole & Knowles, 1997), we try to provide, as Winter (1996) suggests, non-traditional approaches that have developed outside of the usual domains of educational research and scholarship (see, for example, Archibald, 1995; Atkins, 1994; Dillard, 1976; Faery, 1990; Rodriguez, 1982; Sanders, 1993; Thompkins, 1993; Woolf, 1925/1993). For this aspect of the paper co-author Olivia Archibald enacts a thesis calling for alternative structures when writing personal narratives that are coupled with reflection and analysis. Archibald provides an examination of how these various forms may apply to teacher educators who are attempting transformative work and seeking a means to document and assess their experiences. We conclude with a dialogue between us on the individual self-study process and its promise for individual self-study as a means for understanding the formidable task of incorporating social justice priorities into teacher education practices.

 

 

An individual search for the intersection of social justice and teacher preparation

(Vavrus) During my undergraduate days I became steeped in an interdisciplinary, liberal arts notion of how curriculum should be conceived and how to think about social issues. Whether it was Frantz Fanon (1967) critiquing the impact of a colonial ideology of dominance upon a subjugated populace or William Domhoff (1967) unveiling economic power disparities in the US or Herbert Marcuse (1966) clarifying how the ideology of capitalism is capable of co-opting the language and expressions of social dissent over status quo political actions, I was introduced the idea that schools were not neutral institutions but rather places were dominant ideologies were transmitted daily to children and youth. From this period I also understood that the transformation of the policies and procedures of existing social and political institutions for the benefit of a participatory democracy involving the historically disenfranchised was not going to happen by simple, rational presentation of "facts" under the shadow of a dominant culture quite successful in domesticating claims of bigotry and economic discrimination. Through work in an urban area with economically disenfranchised African-Americans and in a multilingual African nation characterized by internal ethnic discrimination, I personally began to experience how school curricula around the world successfully silences subordinate cultures. My orientation was eventually extended into graduate studies, culminating in analyses examining the unequal distribution of resources and opportunities among students (Vavrus, 1979a) and the alienating work conditions of teachers (Vavrus, 1979b). The world of teaching and teacher education at that time, however, was still ensconced in a world of imagined behavioral characteristics that were thought to be capable of uniform dissection and quantitative measurement. Concepts like empowerment, multicultural education, curriculum transformation, and democratic classrooms and schools were rarely found in professional education journals nor advocated within teacher preparation programs. By the mid-1980s the dialogue on schooling and teaching had broaden considerably, providing some space for considering social issues. Nevertheless, issues related to social justice and democracy continued to find limited voice in the teacher preparation curriculum, if at all, and were usually located in a single course devoted to the social foundations of education. In the liberal arts colleges in which I found myself working for during the 1980s, both my social advocacy for voices historically marginalized and for opposition to oppressive schooling practices generally found more interest and acceptance externally at various conferences and publications (e.g., Vavrus, 1987, 1988, 1989) than in my own work setting. Advocates of social justice, I was painfully being reminded, tended not to work within teacher education programs for it seemed to me that those faculty who dominated the ranks of preparation programs were oblivious and somewhat impervious from this growing national and international political critique. The new NCATE standards of this period calling for a guiding program model or framework for the entire curriculum, though, opened a door to considerations historically outside the bounds of teacher education discourse, an opportunity I seized. Only through the external accreditation requirement to include in an institutional self-study an orienting curricular conceptual framework built upon an underlying knowledge base have I been able to directly engage colleagues with whom I directly work on the implications of our individual worldviews upon the teacher education curriculum. Here I will limit my individual self-study reflections to two settings in which I have worked: (1) a consortium of three traditional small, private liberal arts colleges accredited to delivery a unified teacher education program and (2) a state-supported liberal arts college originally chartered to create innovative curricula.

 

Advocating social justice perspectives in a status quo environment

 

Like most teacher education faculty taken as a collective entity, the faculty of the consortium of the education program I found myself directing in the late 1980s felt no ownership for its mission statement and really had no vision of the kind of beginning teacher they would like beyond that of perpetuating status quo schooling environments. In fact, most had never read their program's mission statement and only one member had an inkling as to where it had come: a mere paraphrasing of the technical skill requirements for program approval within that state. The closest curricular offering to a social foundations course was actually a mish-mash of someone's idea of what it takes to be a teacher, glittering generalities and all. A course on "human relations" was the only place where issues of diversity were discussed and this was done primarily with an apolitical look at multicultural concerns. The 15-member faculty in the teacher education consortium were woefully uninformed on the literature and research surrounding the interaction between social-political forces and student learning. Theirs was a Pollyanna world of neutrality in which schools were assumed to be progressing and the subsequent role of teacher educators was to serve children by offering future teachers a better grasp of the application of technical skills. As one faculty member tried to explain to me, she was a teacher of reading and issues of race could not, therefore, be included in her curriculum. Or, the special education professor who contended that since all behaviorally disordered students were supposedly abnormal, he did not need to address multicultural perspectives in his courses. Or, the educational psychology faculty member who refused to allow his courses make any connections with field work of students since social variables were considered irrelevant to his conception of the individual learner. Or, the curriculum and instruction faculty who emphasized draconian classroom management systems more suitable for a dictatorship than a democracy, never realizing the inherent contradictions with her rhetoric about serving every child. Or, the early childhood professor who insulated her courses from multicultural concerns because she forwarded the misnomer that children don't form racial and social identities until later in life. Once it was clear I was advocating inclusion of social justice issues in the curriculum and was seeking collective means for keeping faculty accountable to one another on issues of race, gender, and class, I was besieged regularly from the ranks of that particular faculty group through acts of resistance and public attacks on my actions and motives. Although a very modest shift at most is afoot, I would argue, these attitudes represented the norm - research agendas not withstanding - in teacher education at the turn of this decade and unfortunately continue to be widely held among faculty in teacher education units in the United States (see Fullan et al., 1998). Only under the scrutiny of national and state accreditation was I able to persuade the teacher education faculty in the consortium of colleges to begin the arduous endeavor of talking together about their own course syllabi and the kind of teacher we as an entire faculty might want to see. With the restructuring of the curriculum - significantly aided by the hiring of two new, critically-oriented faculty members - an avenue was becoming available for considering viewpoints outside the insular bounds of traditional teacher education. Eventually the education faculty was able to move to elaborating a conceptual model that included a "critical social perspective" element with a multicultural orientation within its overall curriculum model. The faculty defined a teacher education curriculum addressing issues from a critical social perspective as one that takes into consideration the interaction between the school and the socio-political environment in which it exists. This perspective requires a critical approach to looking at the existing environment. Reflective teachers thoughtfully question status quo arrangements and consider alternative visions and actions. Reflective teachers affirm as essential an awareness of a critical social perspective on all professional decision making." (Vavrus, 1993, p. 1) Thus, academic conditions were established for addressing social concerns from a critical perspective and having that orientation move into actual course syllabi - albeit in just a few cases significantly embedded while in most others rather superficially (Vavrus, 1994; Vavrus & Ozcan, 1996; Vavrus & Ozcan, 1998). The struggle for me during what became a six-year period of development and enactment resulted from the intellectual and emotional strain of having constantly to keep social justice issues in the forefront of a generally resistant faculty so politically uninformed, uninterested, and unreflective. Trying to legitimize a social reconstructivist consideration as a program priority found me calling for extra departmental meetings and utilizing weekend retreats in the name of meeting external accreditation requirements. In many ways I was an obstructionist to allowing business-as-usual from proceeding in the institutional self-study process. Maybe my critics were right: I was destroying their notions of autonomy and complacent modes of operations since I openly opposed a kind of faculty autonomy that served as a veil for repressive and authoritarian practice perpetuating the subjugation of disenfranchised children and youth. I was intent on including theories, practices, and research which acknowledged the growing social discourse looking critically at race, gender, and social class and was unwilling to allow the accreditation process to unfold as faculty had been accustomed to in the past. To do this, I had to act in the absence of support from my own academic administration since they preferred benign neglect over any statements or actions that could result in political controversy for their institutions. My own local collegial isolation on these issues was compensated by regional and national professional contacts, that is to say, by the awareness that there were individual pockets of faculty at other colleges also pursuing these topics. At the same time when I was in the process of creating departmental procedures which could be truly participatory, I was in a constant confrontation with the sad realization of seeing the effects upon a teacher education faculty indoctrinated in the ideology of representative government while never having considered what it might mean to engage deeply in actual democratic practices. This condition was again forcefully brought home to me in the mid-1990s toward the end of my tenure with the consortium and when I was president of a national organization of teacher education institutions and was soliciting papers for a small conference on democracy and professional education. A member of the executive board of this organization at a planning meeting eventually expressed his frustration with the topic, explaining that he did not see the point of the theme since, if we live in a democracy, there was really was nothing to say about "program initiatives from liberal arts colleges," the subtitle of the conference. Unfortunately, it is this same one-dimensional view of democracy that continues to hold sway on curricular designs across teacher education programs as this century closes. Continuing to place myself on the institutional fringes of the consortium through social justice advocacy and holding expectations of faculty for participatory democratic decision making and the associated requirement for individual accountability to the faculty as a whole made me realize the limitations of my efforts, despite the advancement of the inclusion of a social critical perspective across the consortium's teacher education curriculum. This social element would only continue to be addressed as long as there was an administrator such as myself who regularly reminded faculty of the need and importance of this viewpoint for future teachers and sought documented evidence that faculty were being responsive and accountable to this goal. I came to understand this reality despite having positioned the colleges to become the only preservice teacher education consortium in the US to receive full NCATE accreditation. The possibilities of emancipatory education for marginalized children and youth from the socio-economic underclasses were simply outside their collective consciousness. Indeed, I am understating when I assert that it is difficult to deconstruct and transform for faculty their comfort zone in a dominant ideology that promises a better and more equitable life for all through the expansion of consumer capitalism. Knowing this, I began to look elsewhere for a teacher education program where social justices concerns which I considered vital to teaching, learning, and schooling could find a broader faculty consideration and deeper commitment to enactment and where I would feel safer giving voice to my beliefs. Lest I had any doubts about my departure from the consortium, a chilling event confirmed why in that particular work environment I had become increasingly guarded emotionally: One year into my current position, my academic supervisor received a letter slanderous of me attributed to two of my former "colleagues," a behavior that took legal intervention to quell - a direct reminder of how deeply the venom of reactionary ideology can run.

 

Validating a social justice perspective

 

Arriving in my current position at The Evergreen State College in the mid-1990s, I was exhilarated to find a group of teacher education faculty who embraced critical theory perspectives. Talk among faculty of "liberatory classrooms," "democratic education," and the implications of "cultural encapsulation" for developing beginning teachers who would become "anti-bias advocates" in their school buildings was the norm. This was a small, state-supported liberal arts college where an interdisciplinary curriculum - including teacher education - is planned and delivered in a program format (rather than discrete courses) by teams of faculty from differing disciplines in an setting absent of traditional departments and faculty rank. I was entering a setting that was capturing in many ways my years of yearning for what I believe ideally is the emancipatory potential of the liberal arts academic environment. What I found missing, however, for the teacher education program was a clear, public expression of the faculty beliefs or conceptual framework which actually informed the design and enactment of the curriculum. Although students entering this graduate-level, initial certification/licensure program as well as cooperating public school teachers in local schools where teacher candidates would have their field experiences knew the program was radically different from the norm of teacher preparation, some were, nevertheless, reportedly unclear on the social justice connections faculty might make with pedagogical practice. These kinds of philosophical associations were apparently not always widely shared nor understood among faculty members in teams coming from various liberal arts backgrounds. For the college's institutional self-study for regional accreditation I attempted to describe what I perceived as an historical flaw for successfully infusing a coherent social justice perspective across the teacher education curriculum. I took what I considered a personal and professional risk by bringing these issues to the surface within an institutional self-study. The shift into expressing my own perspective of a challenge for the program about what some faculty suggested as possibly inappropriate for describing in an institutional self-study was a new direction for me, someone who had been charged over the years to attend to such reports. My goal was to try to describe the previously and officially unexpressed values and actions based on what I had been able to piece together through various oral historical accounts and filed, written documents that had been forwarded to me as the incoming faculty-administrator of the program. For the purposes of individual self-study analysis and to provide a look at the dilemma as I perceived it, I find it appropriate to quote at length from the program's self-study document under a section I titled "Interaction among the Evergreen philosophy, faculty teams, & K-12 schooling" and for which I had invited faculty to review an earlier draft for tone and accuracy: During the formative years of the MIT [Master in Teaching] program faculty team composition and collegiality proved to be key components for determining the successful delivery of the program. The progressive social philosophical goals and orientation of the MIT faculty teams along with the college's abiding commitment to a theory-to-practice model - both manifestations of the undergraduate interdisciplinary curricular conception and structure - periodically has had difficulty navigating and negotiating through the social-political realities of K-12 classrooms and schools in the context of the accreditation requirements of the Washington Administrative Code (WAC) criteria for preservice teacher education program approval. Fragmented requirements such as the WACs...were perceived as the antithesis of the holistic, interdisciplinary foundation upon which the college was designed and under which the faculty had historically conceived and enacted their teaching. Goals of the faculty were often perceived as compromised in conservative and reactive schooling environments. In this early period of the MIT program [i.e., early 1990s], faculty teams generally shared a social reconstructionism or social change conception for what a teacher education program ought to be (This contrasts with the behavior of most education programs which tend to prepare future teachers simply to fill teaching slots for the transmission of status quo values to children and youth.). However, when disagreements among team members did arise, such conflicts may have been a function of faculty team members not necessarily having a concurrent shared vision of how social change ought to unfold in actual public school settings for MIT students. In some MIT cycles, faculty teams broke apart for the above described reasons [italics/emphasis added] as well as for interpersonal reasons and had to be reconstituted by the MIT director and/or the remaining team members. Additionally, some students reported being caught in the middle of theories promoted by the program and the actual conditions of schooling and had to depend on the student teaching experience to figure out how to negotiate this gap in expectations - and faculty were not always successful with such students in helping them realize the time and effort it takes for realizing theory into practice[italics/emphasis added]. In some instances where students and faculty were unable to deal appropriately with the existing world of K-12 classrooms, ill feelings in some sectors of the public schools developed toward Evergreen and the MIT program, a perception reported by some K-12 educators. During the first half of the 1990s faculty tended to question the critical nature of external accreditation accountability and had reluctantly participated in that process. In some instances faculty teams lacked consensus on the degree to which bureaucratic elements should or could be part of the program and, therefore, part of their faculty role. Thus, administering the MIT program also has proved to be a challenge. In a departure letter [in 1992] based on a medical problem, the founding director of the MIT program stated to his academic dean, "Evergreen is such a wonderful place to be a student and a faculty member, but so bloody awful a site in which to be an administrator." [italics/emphasis added]. (Master in Teaching Program, 1998, pp. 22-23) And now I was the administrator of that same program trying to negotiate with the faculty similar territory. I realized that in expressing this in such a formal document as a report for an accreditation self-study, I could potentially be distancing myself from some of my colleagues in and out the program who would prefer not to have this history revisited and summarized. Thus, my former elation over working collectively with a faculty holding a progressive social consciousness had been tempered by the complexities I came to report in the program's self-study. I had discovered for myself that a group of faculty members just holding a social reconstructionist view toward schooling in the larger political milieu was insufficient for affecting real change within the program curriculum and eventually the dispositions and actions of the program's teacher candidates. How the faculty came to a resolution of these matters, while a continuing process, was a story of two years of candid deliberations. Crucial to this process for me was working with the faculty to have them articulate the previously unstated, i.e., those philosophical groundings that informed the design of the curriculum. Again, it was the external demand, this time by new state program approval standards, that gave me the justification for pursuing this direction. Although I was told by some faculty that having a written conceptual framework would inhibit the creativity of their work, I only saw an unstable curriculum defeating faculty-held philosophical goals as the alternative - this a faculty committed to a social reconstructionism vulnerable to conservative attacks. Also, I was miffed at the collective hesitation and minimizing of the importance of the task since I found the core of the faculty held very similar views - all of which were aimed toward promoting social justice and human dignity within public schools. Part of the challenge I faced was having to reassure a faculty with a high degree of autonomy that flexibility and creativity would not be lost by this step and that it would also benefit liberal arts faculty who periodically rotate into the program's teaching teams, prospective program applicants, admitted students, and cooperating teachers and administrators in K-12 schools by better understanding our collective orientation. The faculty's desire for creating emancipatory conditions within school buildings, I argued, could be advanced by giving us a legitimate statement that could be placed in the program's official documents, such as the catalog and the handbook for student teaching. Furthermore, as long as we could provide a scholarly knowledge base to support our program's model of teacher education, the state would eventually be placed in a position of sanctioning publicly our vision of schooling, teaching, and learning. After agreeing on three defined themes - "Democracy and Schooling," "Multicultural and Anti-bias Perspective," and "Developmentally Appropriate Teaching and Learning" (see Appendix) - the faculty began to make overt their weaving of these elements into the curriculum (Evergreen, 1997a), including into a performance-based assessment rubric for full-time student teaching (Evergreen, 1997b). Continuing in the program's institutional self-study within the same section, "Interaction among the Evergreen philosophy, faculty teams, & K-12 schooling," I brought the accreditation reader to this new balance and understandings within the program: [In 1998] faculty teams continue to find challenge and tension between the MIT [Master in Teaching] program's goals for future teachers and the actual conditions of K-12 schools. Nevertheless, through their collective historical experience of the 1990s the MIT core faculty are more mindful of these constraints and more intentional in finding means for enacting a graduate-level, preservice teacher education curriculum that attends to K-12 school reform and improvement efforts - yet retains the spirit of social reconstructionism and change embedded in the program's conceptual framework [italics/emphasis added]. Based on this history, the MIT program core faculty has become more deliberative in its efforts to construct faculty teams. This is an issue with not only the MIT program, but is also an important consideration for any Evergreen program. However, this is a more complex issue for the MIT program than any other program at Evergreen because teams are constituted for two years rather than one and the program has a visible public mission with external accreditation expectations. The collaborative work of the faculty in successfully completing the State of Washington accreditation review in 1998 and their continuing willingness to attend to and resolve these thorny issues are positive indicators of the program faculty's resolve to develop processes and common understandings for providing appropriate staffing of MIT faculty teams. (Master in Teaching Program, 1998, p. 23) The act of articulating a social-political conceptual framework enveloping a constructivist approach toward teaching and learning allowed faculty to address difficult concerns surrounding its radically different view of how schools ought to be structured when faced with status quo schools in which our teacher candidates do their field work and eventually seek employment. Formerly implicit references to the interconnection among the processes of democracy, schooling, and advanced capitalism while instilling a multicultural, anti-bias perspective throughout the curriculum have become valid for discussion with wider audiences, especially how we as a program faculty confront conflicting expectations for schooling (Vavrus et al., 1998). For me these developments have been a satisfying turn, mirroring my original anticipation of being able to work collaboratively with colleagues committed to similar social justice goals within the practice of schooling and teacher education. Without this commonality of vision I believe it is nearly impossible for a teacher preparation program to deliberate seriously on the nuances facing social reconstructionist concepts. In my former setting with the consortium of liberal arts colleges I found that despite forwarding such ideas, even to the point of an articulated statement on a "critical social perspective," I always had the gnawing sense that if I were not the advocate of such an orientation, the faculty on the whole would have been pleased to let such politically-infused notions fade away. But in my current situation I realize that social justice is at the heart of faculty thinking, that I have primarily been a catalyst of sorts to bring a structure and thread to their curricular ideology, and that if I departed from the campus today, faculty would continue to make social-political issues the frame for placing the image and practice of teaching and learning.

 

A reflective postscript

 

When I revisit my individual self-study, I realize that the considerable background required to put my actions into local and national context also is an impediment to telling our (i.e., teacher educators') personal stories about teacher education practices in relationship to social justice advocacy. I also feel the vulnerability Cole & Knowles (1996) describe since I am still at Evergreen and in contact with some former colleagues who were supportive of my actions and fear their misinterpretation of my purpose in publicly describing and sharing my narrative account, leading potentially to unanticipated negative repercussions. I could have spoken more in the suggestive and indirect language of metaphor and provided myself more of a professional shield but sense this would just have been a means to skirt the hard realities I have shared here.

 

 

Seeking (Author)ity in the Personal

(Archibald)

 

Boundaries, One

 

West Virginia is sandwiched between the North Atlantic and Southern states within the US. Legend has it that the area in and around Wyoming County, West Virginia, was once hunting grounds for Indian tribes such as the Mingo, Tuscarosa, Susquehanna, and Delaware, and, later, for the Algonquin, Sioux, and Iroquois after they were shoved westward. The county's name is supposedly a Delaware Indian term meaning "extensive plains," a most inappropriate title considering the region's terrain of steep mountains and narrow valleys. Located in the extreme southern part of West Virginia, Wyoming County encompasses over 500 square miles of swollen earth pockmarked with ravines in testimony of the land's central position within the Appalachian Mountain range. The range itself - much older and at one time much higher than that the Rocky Mountains - carries within its innards a black sedimentary stone compressed during the Great Coal Age when primeval seas time and again flooded the swampy land ancient forests had tried to call home. It was below one of these coal-veined mountains towering above Pineville, the county seat of Wyoming County, that I was born. My dad had been transferred a year before my birth from his hometown just outside of Charleston, the capital of West Virginia, to work for United Producing, a natural gas company. And his transfer was the product of two lonely people - my grandparents - missing their only daughter - my mother - after Grandfather relocated to Wyoming County a year before Dad's move to supervise gangs of men who laid pipeline in the gas fields. Although the Appalachians are present in most parts of West Virginia, no county except perhaps bordering McDowell witnesses the constricted valleys dominated by steep mountains as does Wyoming. Hills slope in an east-to-northeasterly direction and stand from 1,600 to 3,000 feet above sea level, offering home to rattlers and dense forests, shrinking God's heavens in many places within the county to only a guiltpatch-sized horizon. During the first twelve years of my life, my family lived in five different towns within Wyoming County, each town positioned in a narrow valley carved by the Guyandotte River or by one of its tributaries. Behind each of my houses was a steep mountain; in front, a snake-shaped road following the course of a stream or river nearby. Across the road stood another house; and, behind it, another towering mountain. Only a few places exist within Wyoming County which offer a valley floor wide enough for several houses to fit between the sovereign mountain and the road or river. One of these sites in the 1950s was the gas company-owned valley bottom in Brenton where my grandparents lived. Their white, box-shaped, cinderblock house was one of three sitting perpendicular to the river in a row that faced three others. Alongside these white row houses, I spent innumerable summer days in the clover-grassed company bottom playing with other children who lived in the camp or playing by myself on the fifteen acres of land which was part of the gas camp. To a young child the company bottom's fifteen acres offered abundant possibilities for solitary play: riding my bike up and down the two sets of sidewalks that edged the row houses, leaning against the camp's north white fence and watching the Guyandotte River in its swift path southward, gazing mindlessly at the steep mountains fronting the gas camp while sitting or standing on a swing, searching the ground for the small holes of grub worms. The best place to find these holes was the ball field behind my grandparents' house. By sticking a blade of grass into a worm hole, you could watch the white incest crawl out, it's slow and silent movement in contrast to the coal trucks that whizzed by the highway, me hunched over the ball field to catch these bugs, naming them the familiar names of my childhood, names like Sophie, Belinda, and Dreama. I'm not too sure about the history of the camp's ball field. I don't remember seeing anyone play ball on it, but I know my grandfather had once been involved in a camp ball team as evidenced by the hard balls, bats, and mitts kept in a muslin bag in the south part of the basement. But since the field was still practically grassless, its tan-colored soil was ideal for my task. As with all aspects of life and land within Wyoming County, West Virginia, the ball field was towered by the steep, ancient Appalachians. At the east end sat the playground, at the west end, the coal-darkened Guyandotte River. To the south was the first series of cinderblock houses, my grandparents' house the first one in the row. The Hope Gas Camp, another gas-company owned residence, bordered the ball park's north side, its boundary marked with a row of forsythias fronting a ditch. All the years I spent playing by myself or with others in the company bottom, I never stepped over that ditch. I came very close once. Hearing the laughter of children playing some sort of running game, I stopped my grub worm hunting and pushed my way through the bushes, even crouching, ready to jump to this new land and explore the people and land on that side. Instead, I remained on the land that was familiar. Despite their enticing laughter, the children, their homes, their gas camp appeared too different to me, too strange. They were the "other," the different, the foreign land, and the land I stood on was the familiar, the accustomed one. It was easier for me to stand on the side I knew.

 

Boundaries, Two

 

In a 1990 article in the Journal of American Studies, Liam Kennedy discusses Susan Sontag's habit within her writings of challenging the names and meanings that our culture gives to human ideas and experiences. According to Kennedy (1990), a Sontag essay often "seeks out the concealed contingency of discourse, while recognizing that discourse is (politically) specific in its functions - its powers of organization, legitimization and exclusion" (p. 24). The very names we give to human ideas and experiences assist us in organizing and legitimizing our thought processes. But in the fixing of meaning, names mark all that is not within the boundaries as outside, as not belonging. . . . not belonging. . . .not legitimate. This powerful aspect of language, its ability to organize, legitimize, and exclude via "names," is what comes to mind when I think about this conference and its grappling with the practice of writing self-studies. The questions we negotiate when we confront such a writing task often focus on issues of authority. How do we garner authority within self-studies when much of what we have to say comes from the personal? I wish within this paper to address this problem, not from a knowledge based rooted within the disciplinary field of teacher education, but rather from experiences as a teacher and practitioner of a form of writing called "the personal essay." The personal essay. Birthplace, France. First recorded use, 1580. Father, Montaigne. Descriptions include "a loose sally of the mind," according to Samuel Johnson; a violator of school-learned composition rules, according to Scott Russell Sanders (1993); "a rogue form of writing," according to Carl Klaus (1989). Often seen in the company of words like familiar, literary, and, more recently, disjunctive. The personal essay. A rebel. Antischolastic and anti-genre, we sometimes say. An attempt at anti-system in a system-governed world. Jeans at a black-tie dinner. A bank teller with a ring in her nose. The free-spirited horse that jumped boundaries to find more fertile fields. "My style and my mind alike go roaming" (p. 761), Montaigne (1580/1965) declares. To simulate this, the writer of essays orders her subject loosely, letting ideas meander through the piece like an Appalachian mountain road. The personal essay. Tentative. A vote for the pronoun "I." A witness for subjectivity in the ongoing discourse trial, her testimony refusing to pretend that any sort of objectivity is ever possible. The personal essay never claims wholeness or finality - never, "This is the answer to the question," but, rather, "This is what I think in answer to the question. These are my thoughts, my sensibility, my response, my reflection, my evaluation, my tentative feelings on the subject You may not agree with them. And maybe tomorrow I won't, either." The personal essay, then, an attempt at truth with a little "t." This, of course, is not the writing form we privilege within the academy. Although a 16th Century Frenchman named Montaigne (1580/1965) was first to call his nonfiction pieces "essays," educational institutions and scholarly journals typically appropriate as their definition of the essay a different kind of writing - a rigid, impersonal essay form which is more in line with essays written some twenty years later by Montaigne's contemporary, the Englishman Francis Bacon (1597/1985). After Montaigne, the essay's form split into two types: One which kept the informal, loosely structured, subjective, conversational aspects of Montaigne's writings; the other, a more formal, objective-sounding kind of nonfiction which relies for authority on secondary sources and on what I like to refer to as "faceless, encyclopedic God prose." It was the latter essay form which became the preferred structure and developed into the thesis-driven structure which we call the "academic essay." Writing forms, like language, are typically transparent. They appear rooted in transhistorical, apolitical realms and thus seem dangerously neutral. They appear common sensible. Such semblance of political innocence and transience makes them easy candidates to ignore within critical examinations of theory and practice, especially when the general mode of thinking uncritically assumes that these critical examinations are only valid in the academic world if they are presented in thesis-driven forms and if their authority comes from quantitative research juxtaposed with a plenitude of citations from the "experts." Much of our definition of the "academic essay" - much of this boundary-setting - has been defined, reproduced, and validated as a result of how the "essay" is typically presented within composition textbooks. In these very influential texts, the essay's definition is often limited to writing that describes, narrates, compares, analyzes, and persuades within the parameters of linear, monologic, thesis-driven, and often binary modes. Such a form of the essay is perfect for writing situations that allow for authority via seemingly objective data and research outside the world of personal experience. The author's authority comes not just from a carefully constructed thesis which, in turn, is supported via a rendering of details directly connected to the thesis. In thesis-driven essays, authority also comes from the voice(s) within the essay, the author's construction of self relying on an ability to become Godlike, all-knowing, within the faceless, encyclopedic, objective-sounding prose. Sometimes when we author a piece, our (author)ity is enhanced when we pretend we are not part of the erring, subjective, human race. But what about those times we write from the authority of personal experience? Which tradition of the essay might be our best form to use, the traditional thesis-driven structure or a looser Montaignian one? How do we want to construct ourselves within the writing, a position of all-knowing or one more vulnerably human? Much of the struggle in writing a self-study on teacher education practices lies in how we confront these issues, issues which largely hinge on how the writer is defining "essay." If we examine how professional writers write via the authority of the personal, a looser, more Montaignian form emerges, in contrast to the essay form typically privileged within our disciplines' journals, course syllabi, and promotion/tenure meetings.... Personal essayists, for example, rarely begin with a thesis statement. When Joan Didion (1979) begins her essay "On the Road," she does not immediately state that her essay will be a cultural critique about the shallowness of American life; instead, we enter the piece with a question that's repeated throughout the essay: "Where are we headed?" Our slow journey to discover the thesis unfolds while we journey through her essay - while we experience her experience of a cross-country tour promoting a book she has written. Scott Russell Sanders (1992) essay "Grub" begins with some seemingly disconnected commentary about how Indian leads the country in overweight people; we have to travel through the essay, read multiple narratives of past and present happenings, to understand his point that we eat unhealthy food those times we long to connect to a lifestyle and social class we are no longer are a part of. Annie Dillard's (1976) very disjunctive essay "The Death of a Moth" begins with a section explaining all the dead insects she finds in a spider web behind her toilet; not until we reach the end of the essay do we realize she is discussing both the pros and cons of living the solitary life of a writer. Just as personal essayists rarely begin with a thesis statement; they rarely provide closure at the end of their pieces. Alice Walker's (1988/1993) thought-provoking "Am I Blue?" concludes with the narrator spitting out a piece of meat; she offers no definitive closure to her essay's issues on animal and human mistreatment. Sander's (1992) "Grub" concludes with him just leaving the restaurant. Dillard (1976) ends with the cryptic sentence, "I think it is pretty funny that I sleep alone" (p. 27). Didion's (1979) "On the Road" ends, refusing to answer the "Where are we headed?" refrain, except in a personal way: "I don't know where you're heading...but I'm heading home" (p. 179). Besides different ways of beginning and ending their essays, personal essayists have a tendency to ramble within their essays, as opposed to using a more methodically structured, thesis-driven form. Montaigne (1580/1965) describes this "rambling" style in one of the most-quoted comments he made about his craft: "My style and mind alike go roaming" (p. 761). Scott Russell Sanders (1993) uses an extended analogy in explaining the meandering aspect of a personal essay's form: The writing of an essay is like finding one's way through a forest without being quite sure what game you are chasing, what landmark you are seeking. You sniff down one path until some heady smell tugs you in a new direction, and then off you go, dodging and circling, lured on by the songs of unfamiliar birds, puzzled by the tracks of strange beasts, leaping from stone to stone across rivers, barking up one tree after another. (p. 190) The personal essay's "dodging and circling," its "leaping from stone to stone," has much to do with the reality of personal experience. Personal experience is not linear; it is not thesis-driven. Not every concept can or should be summarized in a neat summary paragraph. Not every idea can be closed. The looser, Montaignian form of the essay gives writers relying on the authority of personal experience, the option of not pulling together all the loose ends when dealing with subjects that in actually cannot be and should not be treated in a more rigid, single-visioned, closed way. Alongside presenting information in a different form, personal essays typically differ from academic essays in the ways the author represents herself within the text. Whereas the thesis-driven essay relies on an invisible, seemingly objective narrator, the personal essay's narrator is visible and openly subjective. Unlike the "traditional" essay, the personal essay relies on the sense of a human presence, a presence who, rather than standing above the reader on her soapbox preaching the thesis, is situated at the reader's level. As essayist E.B. White has stated, a personal essayist "gets caught with his pants down." Didion's (1979) construction of self in "On the Road" is as shallow as the radio and TV personalities surrounding her. Sanders (1992) in "Grub" eats the same greasy food as others in his restaurant. Dillard (1976) has a religious experience in one section within "Death of a Moth," but the essay concludes with the writer representing herself as a lonely, confused woman. Walker (1988/1993) in "Am I Blue?" argues throughout the essay for more humane treatment of animals and humans, yet she does not and seemingly cannot prevent the horse's lonely fate. When we first meet the "I" in Nancy Mairs' (1986) "On Being a Cripple," she has fallen backward on a toilet seat, performing "the old beetle-on-its-back routine" (p. 9). Having to construct a visible self within writing which relies on personal experiences is not without risk. As Ardra Cole and Gary Knowles (1996) have acknowledged, those who participate in self-studies make themselves and their institutions "vulnerable and accountable." Virginia Woolf (1925/1993) in an essay on "The Modern Essay" describes the risk of self representation this way: "[T]hat self...is also its most dangerous antagonist. Never to be yourself and yet always - that is the problem" (p. 801). Unlike the "traditional" essay, the personal essay and the self-study both rely on self representation. But what if that "self" represented is one the reader does not like? (I can no longer tolerate any more essays written by noted writer Edward Hoagland (1968) after reading his essay about spanking a pregnant girlfriend.) When does telling too much become problematic? How does one present personal experience and still maintain authority? My experience with reading, writing, and teaching the essay has led me to think that much of the authority within a personal essay comes from the writer's willingness to position himself at the same level of the reader and find ways not to "preach" - to avoid what Virginia Woolf has called "the voice of the scold" (p. 798). Using the writer's experience as a starting point, a personal essay typically presents experiences in narrative form and in such a way that we feel invited into the text as the writer shares his thoughts on the experiences. We feel welcomed into the text to share the writer's speculations, reflections, and evaluations. Writing about personal experience typically requires both critical thinking when the writer reflects on and evaluates his experiences, and also requires the concrete examples - the real world - when the writer presents us with specific examples to support his generalizations made within the evaluative claims. The personal essay form gives us that: The inner and outer; the writer's mind and the writer's experiences. "Thought itself in orbit" (p. xviii)," Elizabeth Hardwick (1986) calls it. Joseph Epstein (1984) says the form of the essay gives us "generous boundaries" (34). And it is because of these "generous boundaries" that I like to call the essay a Trickster form. Never totally within any one group, tricksters live in the margins of their culture, standing in nomadic spaces, moving in and out, back and forth, through multiple identity constructs. Tricksters subvert and invert rules. They are the shape-shifters in the Native American and African myths. My part of this paper is a particularly-trickster form of the essay called the collage or disjunctive essay. Such an essay presents itself to the reader as a collection of prose segments, each segment enriching and complicating the other sections with its new layer of meaning, and with all sections held together by deeper links than surface cohesion. Usually separated on the page by the boundaries created by spacing, the prose segments of a disjunctive essay can also differ in such ways as topic, time, place, mode, point of view, or even prose style. Each section often demands a different mode of response, often invites a different kind of reading. Reading or hearing such an essay read, we find ourselves discovering that our journey through the piece is a continuous process of adjustments to a fluid, changing sense of meaning, a meaning that remains plural. Readers and listeners become co-creators of the text as they are woven into its textual web, its architecture demanding that they too become an author in the text's writing. What I would like to suggest is that personal essays - whether they're disjunctive or are written with more structural cohesion - can serve as good models for the needs of teacher educators who are writing self-studies. Their typical form and authorial representation are generally not part of the academy's accepted definition of "essay." But the possibilities they offer a writer willing to risk new writing strategies are abundant.

 

Boundaries, Three

 

I went back to my childhood land of steep, ancient mountains, the land within Wyoming County, West Virginia, for a week in May three years ago. I had not been back for thirty-three years, and now I had decided to make this journey into my past to try to rediscover something about that little girl who stared back at me in all the school photos I had kept of myself as a child. The green of the mountains was just as I had remembered it. The am radio station still played the same bluegrass record on its Trading Post show, the river was just as swift, the May air just as warm and dry. The sky confined by the landscape still held those down-like clouds during the day and presented within its dark heavens the most resplendent stars I've ever seen at night. But where my grandparents' house once stood was now only a bare grassy bottom, the house's presence evidenced by just a sunken impression left in the ground. Gone also were the swing set, the croquet court, and all the people whom I had known. The row of forsythia bushes in the north end of the camp are also no longer there, and in their place now stands a twelve-foot fence that separates Hope Gas Company's land from the gas camp where I grandparents once lived. And, to get to the fence, you have to walk through a succession of gas tanks sitting on what was once the ball field. Crossing the camp from the north side has become no longer just a psychological barrier that was created when those within the powers of naming gave these two pieces of land their respective boundaries and names. That which I had not crossed, the new land and people I had be unable to explore - all this was now impossible. Other barriers had now been added, including that impossible barrier of time which has made all of us children who played within the two camps in the 1950s now adults. Yet, the laughter I heard that day has stayed with me down through the years. By never stepping over the trench that separated our two lands, by staying within all that was familiar, by not becoming a free-spirited horse that jumps boundaries to find more fertile fields, I can't help but wonder all that I must have missed.

 

 

A dialogue: Approaching an individual self-study in teacher education for advancing social justice

(Michael Vavrus & Olivia Archibald)

 

Place in a self-study

 

MV: After reading Olivia's response, I want to situate where we are as we have this tape-recorded dialogue -Olympia, Washington, on a gray northwest (of USA) day in a local coffee shop located on a downtown corner with a window view in an area that is frequented by a wide diversity of folks. So, that is to say, we are not sitting in a library in an academic setting. My first comment or question for Olivia is regarding "place" that really comes out strongly in her West Virginia essay and I am wondering how I can address place in a way that gives some grounding to a reader in this kind of self-study. OA: I think place is a great anchoring in any sort of story that has as its authority in the personal experience. So I think that's a good question. Sense of place is for me in every essay I write as my way of representing human presence in the essay - my way of presenting a representation of myself. Probably one way to do that here is to think again of the construction of yourself in your self-study. How do you come to the issue of social justice - which is something I only see from an academic way from your readings of various writers. But I kept wondering as I got into the piece where you were in terms of more personal ways because coming from the Midwest yourself, being a white male from the middle class, talking about social justice for the marginal or incorporating it into the curricula, that was one of the ways I thought you might be able to gain authority in your piece in a much richer way, that is would be making those sorts of personal connections. That may come from thinking about place. MV: It occurred to me how much background information do I give, how much foreshadowing of my background do I provide in order to cut to the chase in my immediate self-study. Do I go back to my childhood and what led me to this perspective? I do imply that there were certain readings and perspectives I was open to in late adolescents and as a young adult and that I hinted at urban inner-city and African experiences I had had, but I don't go into those, just sharing those as an indication that I just didn't wake up one morning with a social justice consciousness.

 

Place and the cyclical

 

OA: I think that your question of "place" brings you to that whole sense of how important is it in your piece and how willing are you to go back and explain the process where you are now in terms of social justice. I think it's just not a journey that included all the positive moves that brought you to advocating that now; there are probably times - since we're all human and contradictory - and places within the past where that wasn't such a positive, linear journey but was perhaps a more cyclical kind of going back and forth. That may be the aspect of those stories that might be significant in this piece so that the reader feels as though you are positioned with him or her as he or she goes through the piece. I believe that's really important and I think that's where your authority can come from. You do that a lot. MV: Clarify what you mean by "cyclical." OA: We have a tendency when we move into an idea to hold onto old beliefs. The movement into a way of thinking dialogic in the sense we are going back and forth. There is a tension going on as we move into a new idea. We don't totally see the light. If we do, where were we before we saw the light? MV: So in the case of one kind of personal self-reflection/self-study/personal essay it might be useful to talk about how a person came to, in this case, a social justice perspective. OA: Exactly. MV: As opposed to assuming the reader may not want to know that and moving into the "story" - the latter of which is basically what I did. OA: What you do emphasize is your process of moving faculty into an understanding, but we have only what is called process prose which a personal essay will offer you: the process of how a writer was transformed or moved from one idea to the next. Often times, again, there are contradictions going on because as we take that journey into a new idea, we go back and forth over certain issues. Once we even accept that, it's generally what happened last week. Were you sitting a coffee shop and suddenly your sense of social justice in one particular way was somehow challenged and you had to reconstruct that? It probably was - and probably is continually going on in that it's not some kind of linear I-was-there-then-I'm-here. Process is the right word. In terms of social justice we find as we enter into your piece, it is what I call product prose. That's a result of that Baconian, thesis-driven essay so I think you have a foot in that tradition and holding onto that sense of authority where you do in an academic piece - you don't have to explain how you came to thinking about a certain idea.We don't do that simply because the reader generally doesn't have the time to find that out.

 

Tension in voice and time among essay approaches

 

MV: When I move into the self-study portion of the paper, I can see that it is hard for me to let go of what you call in our paper the academic essay vs. the personal essay. In some cases I feel I can not let go of the academic essay with a personal essay, or I do need to come to some kind of understanding for myself and the reader/audience where I end up on this social justice point. So I do feel a sense of conclusion and I don't feel the freedom that you describe that someone like Montaigne felt with the essay. OA: You are right to question that. I don't think the personal essay and the self-study equate exactly. But there are elements that can be gleamed from the personal essay. What we are talking about here is the authority of the construction of self. You have referred to that in your piece, "the tone" when you asked your faculty at one point to review something you had written about them in [an institutional] self-study. How is that you can still have authority and still reveal yourself, as E.B. White says, "caught with your pants down." How do you do that? That is an honest dilemma. One of the ways that I do it in the piece that I present is by time. We need to be more expansive in the ways we see things, and the idea that certain names we put on certain experiences or concepts limit us - the two sections framing my piece where I'm looking back on my childhood finds me limited. I situate myself in the past which is a safe way to do that. One can, I assume, in self-study be able to work with time. Where we often come out in questions of preaching vs. a more democratic position with the reader has to do with where we evaluate experiences. So maybe that would be a recommendation I would have: within those evaluation parts that you think about time - where was I in the past and where am I now? MV: Do you think I'm doing some of that when I move through my story using APA-style parentheticals, now I'm in the 1980s, now I'm in the early 1990s, and now I'm at 1998? OA: You do it really well when you talk about moving two faculties through the process of [institutional] self-study. But getting back to the issue of social justice I don't feel that beginning, as we move into your piece, is really done. I'm not sure that you get into how you, in a personal way, enrich that point. MV: That's true. I don't go very much into experiences that were happening in my life - and that to me almost seems like another story. Is that the story that this particular audience wanted to hear? I made a judgment that, no, they did not. OA: Let's go back to your question that you began, the question of place. Why would you feel like that would be important in your piece? MV: I ask that question because when you had mentioned physical location, West Virginia, you describe the settings. I think of the personal essay of what someone is thinking and seeing from their location. Your reference to Annie Dillard's "Death of a Moth" - what she is seeing, the language of metaphor. As my postscript indicated, I did not use that approach because I did not think it would be accessible. OA: I didn't start out my part of this paper actually even thinking about that I wanted to write about sense of place. Rather that narrative that frames my story goes back to wanting to use something metaphoric that would somehow enact my thesis and position me in the piece where I was again "getting my hands dirty." MV: What you say is intriguing and encourages a much deeper autobiographical inclusion (that's noted in the paper in our theoretical orientation description) but I haven't really let the autobiographical totally inform my actions in the '80s and '90s in teacher education. I just have to have the reader accept the fact that I hold something called a social justice perspective that I'm advocating. OA: I'm really appreciative of your ability to narrate and to tell a really good story or multiple stories. I'm also appreciative of your definition of the essay: it's very broad, not narrow. You are not afraid to pull together those two traditions of the essay and to tell a very passionate story. I'm appreciative of your goal of social justice; it's so ethical, so noble, so passionate in terms of your discussion. Sometimes when we are surrounded by what we do in critical ways that are post-modern, we often forgot the idea of ethics and are never really sure how to even include it. I appreciate how you bring it in and go for it. MV: Actually you are giving me more credit on negotiating two forms of essays than I may deserve. I was in some regards just blundering ahead trying to figure out how to tell this story and not go on too many tangents or get side-tracked with details that wouldn't keep the story moving forward and being accessible. So, thank you. OA: I also appreciate your historical moves that you make to situate concepts like multicultural education and social justice in professional education journals. I did wonder, though, as I read your part, how you reached those social justice values outside your readings. Going back to your construction of self, which I found very candid in some places - you do talk about, for example, the complexity of having to do [an individual] self-study - that the sort of getting your hands dirty approach is what readers like because they like to feel that the writer is not on soap box higher than them, preaching to them, rather than being at their equal.

 

Construction of self in the self-study

 

MV: I feel as if talking about social justice issues has revealed a side of myself as someone living in a culture dominated by economic wealth resting with a ruling elite, that talking about these issues in nearly all groups I've worked - since I've tried to work "within the system" - at times results in a lone or minority voice. I have found myself bringing up the unstated that tends to make many people uncomfortable. I've always felt very vulnerable in doing that throughout my life for reasons I guess I'll explore in my next paper. I continue to do so, however, because I believe in the righteousness of the issue. And, yes, that's in some way an obligation I carry with me as someone who is white, middle class, male, and privileged to some degree, not in a powerful, politically positioned way, but in a place where I can state in public settings the issues that many others want to skirt around, that don't fit into a technical, measurable form. OA: So far we've talked about the construction of self in terms of the overall sense of social justice. I'm wondering about the position of the writer in your piece in this sentence: "The struggle for me during what became a six-year period of development and enactment resulted from the intellectual and emotional strain of having constantly to keep social justice issues in the forefront of a generally resistant faculty so politically uninformed, uninterested, and unreflective." This is one place in the text where the position of the writer is one that is no longer equal in terms of the reading and the writing. The writer is somehow constructing himself above all of this as if it is "them" and "me," as if on a platform looking down upon them, evaluating them, talking about them. MV: You just might be right because I felt separate from them as a group. I felt, as I had mentioned in the paper, collegial isolation. This is really hard to respond to, I want to say, because my decision could have been to not have to have raised social justice issues or to let them go on and believe that they were addressing those issues. At a certain point my opinion was that they were "uninterested," they were "uninformed" on these topics. If that puts me in a position of a I'm-superior-they're inferior, that's not my intent. My purpose was to say that they were not open to these topics - and I say this from a political point of view. I approach teacher education as a form of political action so in that regard I was separate from them. They represented the transmission of dominant ideology and I was opposed to it yet I had to work with that faculty and I wanted to move them ahead. It was a very difficult process to do that. OA: I think it would be. I wonder if that could be a place where you could still say that and then implicate yourself in some way and again talk about a time when you felt that way. This goes back to process and sharing with the reader - because the reader may have been in a place where he or she felt like that faculty, even if not at the present time. The question is how much do you want the reader to share in your process of discovery, and at this point you do. Likewise, in your paper where you are talking about validating a social justice perspective and about your work with the Evergreen program in realizing that some students historically were "reportedly unclear on the social justice connections faculty might make with pedagogical practice." I think there are ways you can mediate that. MV: What do you mean? OA: To construct the "I" in the piece in less than a preachy sort of voice. MV: Actually that was post hoc reporting.

 

 

Implicating self for self construction

 

OA: I'm not questioning the valid evaluations you are doing in either place in the paper. How might you, if indeed the personal essay form can serve in some ways as a good model to talk about getting authority for personal experience, implicate yourself in what you are talking about? MV: Describe what you mean by "implicate" here. OA: By implicate, I mean in ways to somehow getting involved. I go back to that quote by E.B. White that says a personal essayist gets caught with his pants down. The examples I gave within my narrative I think fit very well here. When Joan Didion constructs herself in "On the Road" and she's talking about the shallowness of American culture, she becomes as shallow, at least the self she constructs, as all those radio and TV personalities that are interviewing her on her book tour. When Scott Russell Sanders is talking about the unhealthy, greasy food that he is describing in a restaurant, he is eating the same food as others. MV: For me to implicate myself in terms of my reference to the faculty as "uninterested" and "uniformed," I need to go into the political - where the personal is the political for me, that I did not separate my actions with them with who I am. I can't identify with their reactionary politics that reduces teaching to technical skills that in turn oppress children and youth by perpetuating the status quo. For me, if that sounds "preachy," at this point in my development, I'm stuck with it. OA: I think what you are talking about goes beyond the social justice issue you have within your portion of the paper. It is probably a problem that all teacher educators have when conducting [an individual] self-study, that is, I am accountable suddenly, I am very vulnerable. I don't just represent myself but I am also representing my institution. I am representing not just myself personally but also professionally. What happens if the self-study teacher educator says or does something that turns off his or her audience or jeopardizes him or her? MV: That's right. I couldn't have said those things - uninterested, uninformed - to them at that time. In both settings I was trying to articulate what was going into public documents and institutional self-studies that were high stakes in that these reports contributed to the continuing operation of the college(s), at least our particular unit(s) for external accreditation. You are right; this probably does seem like I'm on a soap box of sorts, as you have stated it. OA: Again, I return to that question of authority and how do we get authority from personal experience. If you look at personal essayists and the way they construct themselves in their writing, that authority is coming from some degree of implication, implicating themselves in the problem as well. Authority works for the reader in that a personal essay wants the reader to go into the text and enact the same experience as the writer has done. There is something about that construction of self as to how welcome the reader is in being offered to experience that. Some of comes from a more democratic reader-writer approach.

 

Audience and purpose of the self-study

 

MV: Part of my concern is not knowing where the audience for this paper is, going back to Ardra Coles and Gary Knowles' point about vulnerability. These pieces will be on-line, on the web. The proceedings will be collected and distributed. I don't know where the audience is regarding faculty-administrator roles and being responsible for these larger, institutional reports. Those kinds of unknowns contributed to me holding back on some issues. Although I think the immediate audience is sympathetic to self-disclosure, revealing of processes that could advance a deeper infusion of a social justice orientaton in teacher education, I know from national conferences such as the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education that these topics tend not to be discussed widely at the institutional level. They are generally addressed within special interest groups devoted to social and political issues; they are not in the mainstream. I want to return to the personal essayists who are keeping journals that are for themselves and if they write it up and it becomes published, that is good for them. People are interested in their writing and perspective. In some regards that's a skill and luxury that I don't feel that at this point in my life/career I can go into or indulge. OA: It is even more than audience; it goes back to the purpose of the writing. The purpose for a personal essayist is different than a purpose of [an individual] self-study in many ways. MV: What are you thinking here? OA: There is less risk for the personal essayist because there is not a larger institution involved - although it could be more risky for the personal essayist because we are putting our guts on the table more so in many ways. When I teach the personal essay, a suggestion that I have for students as a means for gaining authority when they are still speaking from a Baconian, thesis-driven voice(s), they need to mediate that somewhat by using the past, layering the past, talking about where they were in the past. Another suggestion is using words to qualify comments like "it seems to me" or "typically," in other words not appearing so absolute and reminding the reader that "this is my opinion," and this is truth with a little "t," not some God-truth but from "me." MV: In places I tried to do that with phrases like "for me," but I need to return to the "uninformed and uninterested faculty" - at a certain point I wondered why are they uniformed and uninterested and to me it did not seem that was just my opinion. It appeared to be the absolute situation: social justice was not in their collective orientation to teaching and that I was coming to teacher education from a whole different perspective. It just happened that I encountered that faculty at that point in time. I think that I would have also locked horns with a vast majority of faculty around the country if I had landed some place else. The reasons in part for this is because I got into teacher education not because I consider myself a good teacher or because I loved teaching, but because I saw schools as one of the largest social service agencies that are politically impacted and I wanted to connect to that process - so my motivations for even being in the field are very different, I have found, than, for example, most teacher educators teaching curriculum and instruction courses. OA: I think what you have said here could have been incorporated into your [individual] self-study and removes you from this sort of soap box preaching. MV: Would you say that would help me to "implicate" myself? OA: Yes. [collective laughter, chuckles]

 

Sharing and vulnerability

 

MV: You raise some interesting points that might make it impossible for me to tell the story. For example, when you state, "When does telling too much become problematic? How does one present personal experience and still maintain authority?" And, then that Virginia Woolf quote, "[T]hat self...is also its most dangerous antagonist. Never to be yourself and yet always - that is the problem," wow! I really wonder how much can I be myself and if I am the antagonist that created these situations. OA: When you are writing about your personal experiences, your personality goes into that story as well. What if the reader doesn't like your personality, or at least the side of your personality that you are constructing for this particular essay? MV: For example, some readers may conclude by discounting my perspective by saying he's just a left-wing authoritarian. OA: That's a possibility, but it is even more than that. Whenever we write, a piece of us is shared. Less of us is shared when we are writing a thesis-driven essay because we are trying to appear as an objective sounding, God-like, all-knowing individual - that's part of the authority that comes with that. We don't have to explain our personal processes, just primarily our product and how we prove our way of thinking. MV: However, I find when speaking against the dominant ideology, one always has to justify terminology, literally where are you coming from, what are your facts. Whereas the one-dimensionality that comes out of the dominant culture is never questioned. People only appear to be made uncomfortable when that dominant ideology is questioned and then it appears to reveal more the personality of the one who is challenging that perspective, motives are questioned in a way that a person who engages in transmission ideology is not questioned. OA: The form of the self-study itself is in itself in many ways questioning or challenging or subverting the dominant ideology as to the way we write in the academy. You are having to negotiate new strategies as you talk about personal experiences and weave those in. MV: There are some notable exceptions such as bell hooks who writes about her own experiences and comes from a social justice perspective. Although she writes about education, she is outside the direct practice of teacher education yet I find her insights interesting and valuable. I tend not to find people within teacher education circles challenging in those kinds of ways. But people like hooks give me the encouragement to think and engage in combining the personal and the academic voices.

 

The disjunctive essay form for a self-study

 

MV: This leads me to your disjunctive style of the essay. It has really made me wonder how I might be do this with an individual self-study. OA: One of the reasons I chose that particular form of the personal essay for that part of the paper had to do with ways I thought perhaps self-studies could be done and still stay with the traditional writing form, in other words, be able to meet the thesis-driven expectations that the readers would have, but also use alternative form to subvert those reader expectations by providing a way to challenge dominant ideology. MV: The more I think about it, I recall how Art and the Zen of Motorcycle Maintenance was set up as a philosophical discourse and then the we are grounded in the real with this trip across the United States, this man with his son. I wonder if there are ways to construct the self-study that would allow us to describe our experiences and then turn to some deeper, disjunctive approach, giving a concrete description of an event that might be illustrative or connective to the description of the teacher education practice or schooling practice that we are trying to reveal. OA: I wondered that myself when I was writing my section: if in one way at least the disjunctive essay might resolve being able to do a self-study. Any good personal piece of writing has to have two things going on. You have to have some sort of concrete, sensual, sensuous way to bring me into the text. I want to be able to smell, taste, see, hear the "I" that is being constructed so that I can identify with the experience. Along side that, there has to be a move into evaluation of that experience, that is, a going back and forth. When I look at your writing, you have done that in nearly every paragraph. Maybe not that sense of grounding of place that you asked me at the beginning of this conversation, but you are bringing in an instance, a concrete experience and then you move out of it and evaluate it. MV: In so many regards I feel as if I am at the embryonic stage of understanding the potential of the individual self-study and the personal essay and due to finite time requirements (and having reached our coffee refill quota at our local cafe here), I have to consider this paper concluded and will have to explore those other possibilities through future self-study ventures into teacher education practices.

 

 

 

Appendix

 

Program Conceptual Framework

 

In the spring of 1996 the faculty revisited the program's conceptual orientation and elaborated upon it. That more descriptive version now appears in the program's catalogues and handbooks. This expanded articulation allows faculty teams to continue to identify over-arching cycle themes that are based on the faculty's agreed upon conceptual framework. For example, the faculty for the 1996-98 cycle chose "Weaving the Web of Democracy" as its specific theme whereas the 1998-2000 cycle faculty are using "Teachers of Native American Learners" as their organizing theme. The following is the conceptual framework of the MIT program: We, the faculty for the Master in Teaching (MIT) program, believe the MIT program's success lies as much in the learning processes used to investigate the content as it does in the content itself. Though we teach particular subject matter content, our processes are also "content." Community building, seminars, collaborative learning, group problem solving, extensive field experiences and critical and reflective thinking are not just ideas MIT students read about and are then directed to use when they teach. Rather, these are the processes used daily in the program to help graduate students learn to become skilled, competent professionals who can assume leadership roles in curriculum development, child advocacy, assessment and anti-bias work. The MIT program is centered around the exploration of how public education might meet the needs of the diverse groups of people who live in this democracy. We examine what it means to base teacher education and public education on a multicultural, democratic, developmental perspective and how performance-based assessment can promote these values. Using an interdisciplinary approach, we weave together the following three major themes that inform both the content and associated processes of the program throughout the MIT curriculum.

 

• Democracy and Schooling

 

We look at schooling from the perspective of what it means to work and learn in a democracy operating within a state-supported, advanced capitalist economy. We help students both to understand the evolution of our current democracy and to critique the practices that exclude particular groups from equitable participation in our society. Democracy is presented as a multidimensional concept as prospective teachers are guided toward professional action and reflection on the implications for the role of the teacher in enacting (a) democratic school-based decision making that is inclusive of parents, community members, school personnel and students and (b) democratic classroom learning environments that are learner-centered and collaborative.

 

• Multicultural and Anti-Bias Perspective

 

The curriculum reflects Evergreen's strong commitment to diversity because we believe that both teaching and learning must draw from many perspectives and include a multiplicity of ideas. We believe in preserving and articulating differences of ethnicity, race, gender and sexual orientation rather than erasing or marginalizing them. We seek to expose MIT students to the consequences of their cultural encapsulation in an effort to assist future teachers in the acquisition of a critical conscientiousness. We believe that future teachers must be ready to provide children and youth with culturally responsive and equitable schooling opportunities.

 

• Developmentally Appropriate Teaching and Learning

 

We understand that no instructional model or limited set of methods responds to the complex cognitive processes associated with K-12 subject matter learning. Our curriculum reflects the social, emotional, physiological and cognitive growth processes that shape how children and youth receive, construct, interpret and act on their experiences of the world. We also understand that the competence of students is performance-based. A broad-based curriculum that is interdisciplinary, developmentally appropriate, meaningful and guided by a competent and informed teacher, as well as by learner interests, results in active learning. (Evergreen 1997a, p. 3; 1997b, pp. 3-4)

 

 

 

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