Too tired to catch up and post anything new about cutting my losses today as thumb drives erase elder submissions, somehow symbolic, still there are heros who can locate the lost voices, retrieve the unretrievable only to find they have been corrupted yet again, and its up to us to go looking once more. So, I've stolen a few pages from my 2006 thesis. How appropriate to begin with an apology.
Sorry.
I have not found research initiated by white women who have lived and taught on Northern Canadian First Nations reserves. Nor have I found a singular methodology into which I fit. In attempting to ground my research in a variety of methodology, I note that the literature that inspires me is from a variety of methodology camps.
This non-fiction narrative writing, therefore, is qualitative in methodology, specifically utilizing hermeneutic phenomenological memory work – with a scattering of poetic post possibilities – framed within social justice and feminist perspectives: informed by clouds of witnesses, genealogy and métissage. (It’s taken me six years – one meditative maternity leave included – to have a sniff of what these spicy words might mean.) Like a chef-in-training, I sniff at this dish and that, taste what smells good, then imagine where my research fits on an educator’s menu.
With invitation from Smith (1987) via my “Abstract, Abstract”, I will enter my research kitchen through hybrid approaches and perspectives. Like Richardson (1997), “I like the form of my writing to ‘tell,’ ‘signal,’ ‘display,’ ‘be’ what it claims to talk about, but I also believe texts should be accessible” (p. 5). Or, at least this is what I want. I will cross genre and methodology like a mixed cooking metaphor on a mission. And yes, mission is a loaded word.
While living for five years as a white woman on a First Nations reserve, I did a lot of thinking about racism. In the six years following as a white woman teaching off-reserve, I deepened my thinking given serendipitous literature and mentor-teachers. Memories of my thinking and actions, on and off-reserve narrate my research. “Think of narration as the way you describe and make sense of your experience. Narrative is the story that you weave in order to make sense of your life and world; it is the glue that holds experience together in a coherent way (Arhar, Holly & Kasten, 2001, p. 238).
Maria Campbell (1995) writes:
An dah stories you know
Dats dah bes treasure of all to leave your family
Everything else on dis eat
He gets los or woe out.
But dah stories
Dey las forever.
Too bad about dat man hees kids.
Jus too bad (p. 144).
As I have read articles on anti-racist pedagogy, moments of narrative within text have grabbed me. My lived experience reacting to another’s lived experience. “The link (from narrative inquiry) to phenomenological studies is obvious. All hold in common the assumption that storytelling is integral to the understanding of our lives and that it is ubiquitous. This, in and of itself, makes narratives worthy of inquiry” (Rossman & Rallis, 2003, p. 99).
I am happy to be researching during a period within education which embraces narrative lived experience as championed by those like Bruner (1996) and Richardson (1990, 1997, 2005) in the last two decades. Bruner (1996) says, “We devote an enormous amount of pedagogical effort to teaching the methods of science and rational thought… For these are the ‘methods’ for creating a ‘reality according to science.’ Yet we live most of our lives in a world constructed according to the rules and devices of narrative” (p. 149). Richardson
I write because it changes me. “Phenomenology embraces the world as we live it, but in the process, invites us to change the way we live. Our taken-for-granted notions of self-understanding, reflection, and practical competence are all reconceived in phenomenological inquiry” (Pinar, Reynolds, Slattery & Taubman, 1995, p. 413). “Theory without practice is for geniuses, practice without theory is for fools and rogues, but for the majority of educators the intimate and unbreakable union of both is necessary” (Langeveld quoting Gunning, 1979, cited in Van Manen, 1996, p. 11-12). This reminds me of the book of James which pursues the notion: faith without works is dead! I will write/right myself into act-I-on.
Narrative and lived experience must work hand-in-hand with memory. Norquay (1993) uses the term “memory work”, although she does not apply all of Frigga Haug’s (1987) memory work methodology. Norquay (1993) says,
The sense we make of our past, the stories we tell about our lives, the very events we remember, are derived from our understandings of self and our investments in those changing understandings. The stories we tell are constrained by the discourses that frame our vision. This paper is a personal account of how I have arrived at a point from which I can begin to take up the political work of anti-racism. (Norquay, 1993, p. 241)
I latch onto the next phrases, “I take up ‘the personal’ as something that is neither static nor given and I explore how what is ‘known’ to be ‘personal’ can shift, as new meanings are acquired through the hard work of remembering” (Norquay, 1993, p. 241). When I first read Norquay (1993), I underlined “hard work of remembering.”
I remember summer bible camp and memory work. One year I memorized the entire second chapter of Acts. I sat on the long logs beside the blackened daytime fire pit, reading sections over and over, looking away from the scripture and trying to remember, I can still recall some of this passage word for word. Perhaps my memory work includes the story surrounding the remembering. The feelings, the impact, the hermeneutics.
I first heard the term hermeneutics in reference to bible study. I understood it to mean a variety of ways to interpret scripture. I have grown up in deep, inter-generational fellowship with Christians who have looked to scripture as inspired or “God Breathed” (2 Timothy ).
Hermenutics, as an educator’s term, found me in an Action Research class, categorized with or under reflective epistemology, an examination of words. I wondered what would be the hermeneutic crossover from my faith-world to my school-world.
David Jardine (1992) says, “The returning of life to its original difficulty is a returning of the possibility of the living Word” (p. 119). Jardine is playing with the allusion to John 1, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God… In Him was life, and the life was the light of men… He was in the world, and the world was made through Him, and the world did not know Him… And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us…” The search for anti-racist pedagogy is a “returning of life to its original difficulty.” Research on such a quest may entertain the “possibility of the living Word.”
Jardine (1992) refuses to call hermeneutics a method. He states, “Its (hermeneutics) task is to re-collect the contours and textures of the life we are already living, a life that is not secured by the methods we can wield to render such a life our object” (p. 124). Anti-racism cannot be an object; rather, it is full of living contours, living textures.
Michael Koops, my husband, who is a fellow educator, says, “I like this definition of hermeneutics. We examine our life through words and images. Memory is very much caught up in hermeneutics.”
Jardine (1992) continues, “It returns inquiry in education to the original, serious, and difficult interpretive play in which we live our lives together with children; it returns inquiry to the need and possibility of true conversation” (p. 124). In writing this research, I hope to invite conversation with educators, students, friends, and family, not to mention the on-going-conversation with myself. “Inquiry so conceived cannot lay out a methodical agenda of pre-given concepts and methods as if the epistemic conditions of inquiry take some sort of precedence over the conversation of life itself” (Jardine, 1992, p. 125).
Jardine (1992) says, “Inquiry in hermeneutics is, therefore, a form of recollecting what is granted, a way of ‘gathering’ that recognizes how inquiry itself already belongs to the very life for which it gives thanks, that very life which it ‘thinks’” (p. 125). My research is a gathering. Brady (1991) adds, “The point is not only to keep the system (the progressive spiral of hermeneutic understanding) grounded in self-awareness and self-conscious participation in the subject matter; it is also to keep the premature closure of monologic thinking in check while encouraging creativity in research and reporting that reaches for the polyphonic and related forms of intellectual harmony (including antiphony)” (p. 12). My research awakens my multi-layered voices of “self-awareness” and “self-consciousness” as I harmonize and call-back, respond to the voices around me. In a way, this research is an educator’s antiphonary.
Jardine’s reference to the divine – Word becoming Flesh – personifies a divine form of hermeneutic phenomenology: God as researcher inside creation’s lived experience: finding meaning from the inside out.
My husband who is also a lay-minister with our small community church says, “This has been a fundamental point of debate from the first century: How could Jesus be both God and Man? The generally accepted Christian view of humanity is that we are threefold creatures (which may be how we are created in ‘God’s image’): spirit, soul, and flesh. Our soul is the battleground and meeting place of our Spirit and Flesh. For some Christian theologians the Word (both Scripture and Jesus) is to bring balance and peace to our soul.”
Perhaps the non-divine hermeneutic phenomenological researcher must conversely represent the flesh using the word. The spiritual connotation of Word certainly elevates the importance of using words well. “As Richardson
Brady (1991) says, “The subject matter of ‘culture as lived,’ and theory that surrounds it, has elusiveness as a permanent attribute. It frustrates scientists even as it inspires poets” (p. 9). “Words are no longer conceived illusively as simple instruments; they are cast as projections, explosions, vibrations, devices, flavours. Writing makes knowledge festive” (Barthes, cited in Brady, 1991, p. 18). Welcome to the landscape of poetics.
Poetics is important epistemologically in Hurren’s (2000) exploration of geography curriculum. First, active poetics is a language of creation. Second, it is possible that geography may entertain poetry. Hurren’s poetics present moments of pause so that her audience may join her in the writing/reading of the atlas genre. “My choice of an atlas form is also my attempt to do some scribbling – to color outside the lines of what is expected within an atlas; to refute the science and objectivity of the atlas; to explore poetic possibilities” (Hurren, 2000, p. xv).
Brady (1991) says, “… there is more than one way to say anthropology. They also argue that some things said poetically about anthropological experience can’t be said with equal effectiveness any other way” (p. 5). He goes further,
Even less conventionally, in fact far beyond the realm of clinical positivism, increased understanding of our poetic embeddedness in what we do should support the value of acting on these things as they affect social consciousness and the politics of cross-cultural relations. At the very least, this aesthetic tact works against the dogma that science (of any kind) can grow satisfactorily richer in isolation, without art, without aesthetic enlightenment, in denial of its own cultural and experiential foundations. (p. 7)
My husband, whose degree is in Arts Education says, “Humanity has often held the belief that truth may come from imagery, beauty, art.”
Brady (1991) says,
It may be better seen – more susceptible to deeper, more satisfying and challenging interpretations – when “bracketed” in a relatively unanalyzed state of poetic richness (as close to undefended “firstness” in experience as possible) than when reduced to the flat cakes of normal science (and the indefensible conceit of “lastness”) (p. 8).
As I consider the possibilities that poetics will bring to my research toward anti-racist pedagogy, I also want to allow for ambiguous spaces, post- possibilities, and anti-oppressive initiative to dwell together. Kevin Kumashiro (2004) says, “Anti-oppressive education is premised on the notion that its work is never done” (p. xxvi). Likewise, poetics invites its audience into co-creation. As the reader reads, she also writes her world (Hurren, 2000). The reading and in-dwelling of poetry opens the doorway to coalition and potential change.
Although my research seems to come from within me, my experience, my relationships, I cannot forget that I am a construction within a context. The “posts” or “after that” categories or lack of categories was the Pablum of my generation. We don’t want absolutes or rules. We want story and choices. We want to be inspired, not told. “Through arch-writing on the body, out of ourselves, jagodzinski tells us, ‘a new visionary myth’ (p. 181) will be born. This work seems to reflect a phenomenological postmodernism, an embodied but dispersed subject, whose fundamental experience is aesthetic” (Pinar et al., 1996, p. 491). I don’t know if my education research will amount to a “visionary myth” but it certainly meshes with Gauthier. “For Gauthier, education is “a process of infinite connection” (p. 37), a series of passageways” (Pinar et al., 1996, p. 491).
Just as a scientist must remember that science is based on hypothesis, so a post-practitioner must remember that to say there are no absolutes, is an absolute. My lived experience, my teacher’s narrative, is full of absolutes (faith, hope and love) and ambiguity (possibilities, potential, chaos).
Hurren (2000) says,
The argument is often given that poststructuralism or deconstruction or postmodernism in the end leaves the world foundationless, and in a situation where no thing is better than other things. For me, these three terms are affirmative rather than nihilistic. They reveal that all this “naturalness” has been constructed and that we can continue to (re)search/construct the best possible worlds. I do not wish to close down meaning and further inquiry with my research. (p. xvii)
I am happy to add my voice to the postmodern movement and beyond, not only to process my own needs, but to address the needs of our society as well. Denzin & Lincoln (2003) say:
The postmodern moment was defined in part by a concern for literary and rhetorical tropes and the narrative turn, a concern for storytelling, for composing ethnographies in new ways (Ellis & Brochner, 1996). Laurel Richardson (1997) observes that this moment was shaped by a new sensibility, by doubt, by a refusal to privilege any method or theory (p. 173). But now, at the beginning of the 21st century, the narrative turn has been taken. Many have learned how to write differently, including how to locate themselves in their texts. We now struggle to connect qualitative research to the hopes, needs, goals, and promises of a free democratic society. (p. 3-4)
As I attempt to present my narrative teacher stories, I can’t stop interrupting myself. As I attempt to explain my teacher’s being, I interrupt myself. Beth Cuthand (1994) might say, “What took you so long” (p. 262). There is so much going on at any one point. In so doing, I have made a choice; sometimes, as a pointer, as Aoki (1992) outlines below, and sometimes, a teller. Aoki (1992) discusses the importance of narrative disruption.
When we are writing and the pencil breaks, suddenly the content of our writing disappears and goes into hiding, and the pencil that we really did not see before comes out of hiding to reveal itself to us. What we see here is how the experience of breaking can help us in breaking out of the seductive hold of an orientation to which we are beholden. I wish to offer short narratives – stories – that point to, more than they tell, what it means to be oriented in a way that allows the essence of teaching to reveal itself to us. (p. 20)
Narrative, phenomenology, memory work, hermeneutics, writing, poetics, posts, can take turns using and breaking pencils. Making the unseen, seen, through frames of social justice and feminism. By naming social justice I refer to initiative which challenges inequality with the expectation that change is not only possible, but necessary. While invoking feminism I struggle to define the term, although just the self-identification – this is a woman’s voice – gives me great freedom to search my writer/teacher’s soul. “Isn’t it feminist because it disrupts and unsettles taken-for-granted patriarchal language patterns that oppress women?” (M.R. Cherland, personal communication, June 27, 2006 ). Can a definition be that easy? Another broken pencil.
I could imagine the frame of feminism to include social justice, yet, “…rather than recognize their participation, ‘mainstream’ feminists have historically presumed a universal sisterhood among all women, erasing important differences in power and status” (Grande, 2003, p. 329). I could also imagine the frame of social justice to include feminism, yet this would miss an opportunity as a women writer to name my bias. “Postructural feminists, however, serve as eloquent models – savy bricoleurs 10– women who, having duly struggled with the schizophrenia of language, move resolutely toward faint intelligibilities they hope will enhance the lives of women” (St. Pierre, 2000, p. 479). She goes on to define bricoleur in the footnote:
Bricoleur is a term used by Levi-Strauss, and Derrida (1970/1967) explains that a bricoleur is “someone uses ‘the means at hand,’ that is, the instruments he finds at his disposition around him, those which are already there, which had not been especially conceived with an eye to the operation for which they are to be used and to which one tries by trial and error to adapt them, not hesitating to change them whenever it appears necessary, or to try several of them at once, even if their form and their origin are heterogeneous” (p. 255). Feminists have a long history of adapting a variety of theories to suit their political work. (p. 507)
Even as social justice and feminism are sometimes viewed inseparably, phenomenology and emancipatory epistemology are often viewed exclusively, Rossman and Rallis (2003) say of phenomenology, “When framed by feminist or critical theory, the purpose may become emancipatory” (p. 99). Rossman and Rallis (2003) categorize life history research and narrative research under phenomenology, of which they say, “Central are the notions of intentionality and caring. Throughout, the researcher engages in critical self-reflection about the topic and the process” (p. 98). Helen Harper (2002), involving interviews with northern white women teachers within First Nations communities. This gave me my first taste of vocabulary, which intensified my gnawing suspicions: Janey Cannuck, Lady Bountiful (Harper & Cavanagh, 1994). I hope my pages bring a white woman teacher’s first person voice to the messy and complicated topic of anti-racism.
Schick’s (2000) work gave me three key words: white, anti-racist and pedagogy. My last pre-thesis class was “EC&I 820: Multicultural and Anti-racist Education”, serendipitously with Schick, who now holds the Canada Research Chair in Social Justice and Aboriginal Education at the University of Regina. Social Justice has literally book-ended my grad studies.
The idea of social justice is both attractive and elusive. In our increasingly multicultural society, questions of how to address issues of inequality and achieve social justice routinely meet with many contrasting ideas…
Achieving more equitable education outcomes for Aboriginal peoples increasingly concerns education providers in Saskatchewan
The language used to describe inequality informs us about the unstated assumptions of where problems of inequality reside. Tracing the language is essential because it informs our thinking about Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal identities. Dr. Schick contends that the discourses used to describe inequality have a direct influence on – and are implicated in – the construction of what the problem of inequality is considered to be… (Government of Canada
I want my research to support these initiatives. Likewise, Dr. Meridth Cherland’s encouragement for me to explore post-colonialism will continue to inform my growth as an anti-racist pedagogue.
Kumashiro (2000) also aligns himself with social justice in his research, bringing forward four ways to think about and work toward anti-oppressive education: Education for the Other; Education about the Other; Education that is critical of privileging and “Othering”; and Education that changes students and society. These four windows present progressive sophistication. Audrey Hill (2006) presented this conclusion in her précis of Kumashiro’s theory:
Using only approaches #1 and #2 to anti-oppressive education, while well-intentioned, has every possibility of reinforcing oppression. Educators are called to make use of an amalgam of the four approaches to anti-oppressive education. Strategies to bring about change must be situated, must recognize that teaching involves unknowability and learning involves multiple ways of reading. Exploring poststructural, psychoanalytic and non-rational ways of knowing and relating may be ways to work against the repetition of sameness. To implement change in our present educational system and today’s political climate means to commit to a subversive view of the purposes of education.
Peggy McIntosh’s (1998), social justice work regarding white privilege, came to her, as she, a feminist, considered how her male colleagues’ privilege was invisible to them. I hope that in my research, social justice and feminist frames may work together like a pair of binoculars or maybe different coloured mattings, each, in turn, bringing increased clarity or distinct colours in the landscape.
Even as I try to focus these binoculars, I pull back. A sharp eye headache pulses into my mind. My social justice lens seems stronger. I have a troubled past with the feminist lens. My idealistic self loves feminism, women participating wholly in society according to individual gifts, passion, insight and desire; however, as a young girl, growing up in a church, which limited the role of women leadership to Sunday school teacher and “women’s ministries,” I was angry. I wanted to be me which included leadership roles. At home and school, my family and friends respected me as a thinker and emote-r. I was feminist, yet many women and men in my church were afraid of that identity, or so it seemed to me. My mother, a leader within our fellowship of believers, was open to feminist thinking. I am similar to my mother in many ways. As I have grown up, I have begun to understand why church and feminism do not seem to mesh. Our church family considers us liberal. Our political family considers us conservative. Still, like my mother, I have wished to be a peacemaker. Perhaps this research is a step toward a peaceful and emboldened identity. Why should peace and boldness not walk hand in hand?
Rather than further defining feminism, I have used Smith’s (1987) words to define feminist writing in the context of this research as shaped in my “Abstract, Abstract”, written here as a quote: feminist writing “…they characterize as plural, continuous, interdependent, nonsensical, roundabout, a narrative of ruptures, gaps, wordplay, and jouissance, fundamentally different from the forward drive of logocentric certitude and individuality” (p. 13). Perhaps I should say that my lenses are social justice and feminist writing. Even more fun, my writing may promote feminist education writing. “For where in the maze of proliferating definitions and theories, in the articulation of teleologies and epistemologies, in the tension between poetics and historiography, in the placement and displacement of the ‘self’ is there any consideration of woman’s bios, woman’s aute, woman’s graphia, or woman’s hermeneutics?” (p. 7).
Smith (1987) goes on to say,
Thus when they (indifferent or conventional critics) enter the “wild zone” of woman’s bios (experience), her aute (sense of identity), her graphia (textuality), and her reading (interpretive strategies), they recognize some familiar codes of the languagescape – those that have been influenced by male models and by male theorizing about female models – and thereby presume to speak authoritatively about the entire zone. Yet they remain insensitive to and mystified by the dynamics of women’s experience and her texuality. While they know how to fit some women’s autobiographies into the lines of the male tradition from some points of view, they do not know how to fit them between the lines. Nor do they know how to treat them seriously enough… (p. 16)
As a woman writer/reader/researcher, I am not sure how seriously or how playfully to take/make myself.
At the 2006 Saskatchewan Writers Guild conference in Regina Hamburg
I would like to organize the methodology of my research by associations, which are often ignored in the shadow of methodology juxtaposition. Likewise, Manguel referred to an essay by Borges (1952) called “Kafka and his precursors” which says, “Every writer creates his precursors.” Manguel went on to say that “we too create these associations… creating links we have not had before we thought about it.” With this in mind, I would like to tell stories, think on stories, challenge story, and act on story using hermeneutic phenomenology, social justice pragmatism, feminist playfulness, and post epistemology.
If I would choose a metaphor to situate my research in a heavenly Warburgian library, I would find my Blue Eyes in a cloud of witnesses (Hebrews 12). Aoki, Jardine, VanMannen hovering to the left; Schick, Harper, Cherland hovering to my right; Hurren, Norquay, Richardson lighting above me; McIntosh, Thomas, olsson grounding beneath me; Kumashiro and St. Pierre calling from the other side. Smith and Brady calling from within. (Bishop calling…).“Therefore, since we have so great a cloud of witnesses surrounding us… let us run with endurance the race that is set before us…” (Hebrews 12: 1). A white race toward anti-racism? A white race, currerre, to run toward anti-racist curriculum.
Perhaps I have stumbled into Foucauldian archaeology. “Archaeological analysis disrupts the standard practice of grouping ideas and events around particular writers and their books or into well-defined categories, historical periods, and disciplines. History rests on the fragile contingencies and precarious convergences of human activity, not on transcendental absolutes” (St. Pierre in Richardon and St. Pierre, 2005, p. 496). Or maybe I’m employing Foucault’s genealogy,
A genealogical analysis is not a metaphysical search for an origin, a foundation, or a truth that precedes the material world and props it up but a patient and rigorous description, a documentary, an accumulation of details, “errors,” “minute deviations,” “false appraisals,” and “faulty calculations” (Foucault, 1984/1971) that operate to produce truth. (St. Pierre, 2000, p. 497)
In the inner tension between
illumination and concealment,
the elusive Word can live.
Hermeneutically conceived,
the task of inquiry is not to dispel this tension,
but to live and speak from within it.
It is this tension that propels the
generativity of the Word –
that makes education hopeful,
that makes it possible.
(Jardine, 1992, p. 126)
Some narratives are organized chronologically, others are structured around episodes, and still others are hypothetical narratives. The analysis of narrative data can be highly structured or open-ended… abstract…orientation… complicating action…evaluation…resolution… and coda…A less structured analytic strategy focuses on the thematic content….” (Rossman & Rallis, 2003, p. 297)
“It is only when the journey is plotted with precision that they become programs of repression…Educationally, we must recognize that all lines are bridges to new directions” (jagodzinski cited in Pinar et al., 1995, p. 490).
Pinar et al. (1995) says,
When we read poststructuralist curriculum theorists like Daignault, jagodzinski, and Gauthier, we confront writing that disturbs the usual linear logic we have come to accept as being synonymous with rationalistic curriculum theory. Conservatives are apt to dismiss these scholars’ work as nonsense. That would be a mistake. Rather, we should read their work as perhaps a kind of poetic theory. These theorists seek to dissolve, explode, and deconstruct the taken-for-granted and reified forms of curriculum research that are frequently mistaken for the reality of educational experience they pretend to map.” (p. 491)
Perhaps I am braiding echoes of “métissage”(Chambers and Hasebe-Ludt, 2000) heard on a road trip to Lethbridge
As I, an educator who has benefited from white privilege, move toward social justice, I hope to extend and receive multi-layered inspiration to convict my change. This praxis marries reflection and action. “By uncovering and calling attention to these practices, I hope to create a location from which I can move forward” (Norquay, 1997, p. 241).
Maybe, I’m not sorry anymore.
Pages 6-24 in BLUE EYES REMEMBERING TOWARD ANTI-RACIST PEDAGOGY, A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research In Partial Fulfillment of the RequirementsFor the Degree of Master of Curriculum and Instruction In Education University of Regina By Sheena M. Koops Regina, Saskatchewan June 2006 ã June 2006: Sheena M. Koops
Very powerful words: Maybe, I'm not sorry anymore.
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