Who am I? Questioning Teacher Education with Irony

• In Event: Relationality and Methodology in A/r/tography

Abstract

1. Objectives
This paper discusses recent research that explored the trope of irony in order to invite teachers, teacher candidates, and teacher educators to question “appearance and reality” and to ask questions that can startle, surprise and arrest our perspectives and views so we can begin to imagine new possibilities.
2. Theoretical Framework
This work suggests that teacher candidates need to bring theoretical perspectives to interrogating their past experiences in schools as well as their beliefs about the vocation and responsibility of teaching. This paper argues that irony forms part of “the basic rhetorical structures by which we make sense of experience” ( Barakett and Cleghorn,2008, p. 73) and that irony is integral to critical and creative thinking. This research is connected to postmodern perspectives on autobiographical studies, addressing themes of identity, representation, meaning, and agency.
3. Methods
The researcher invited teacher candidates to investigate their understanding of teacher education with an ironic perspective steeped in poetic imagination and to ask questions, to inquire about issues of identity, representation, meaning, and agency in the processes of becoming pedagogical. Teacher candidates were invited to question theories and practices of teacher education, especially with an ironic openness.
4. Data
This research is based on two sources of data. First, from September to December, 2009, a class of thirty-eight teacher candidates at the University of British Columbia completed a Bachelor of Education course titled English Language Arts: Secondary Curriculum and Instruction. Second, during a three-year lengthy review of the teacher education program at UBC many questions emerged that contributed to this research project. Data gathered included: student assignment, focus group discussions, formal and informal interviews and field notes.
5. Results
Three themes emerged:
• In teacher education we constantly compose and recompose our sense of identity which is always malleable and changing.
• Teacher candidates need to bring theoretical perspectives to interrogating their past experiences in schools as well as all they think they know about the vocation and responsibility of teaching.
• Irony is integral to critical and creative thinking. The trope of irony can help us ask insightful questions. Above all, teachers need to move beyond imitation and mimicry in order to create new positions and possibilities. In order to remain flexible, agile, and strong, teachers need to engage in ongoing processes of thoughtful questioning.
6. Significance
Doll (2000) writes that “wisdom, not knowledge” is “education’s only real concern” (p. xix). For Doll, comedy is “a genre entirely suited for the postmodern classroom” (p. 168). Teachers and teacher educators need to embrace a keen sense of their agency, of their ability to question and imagine, to act with conscientious commitments to education as a way of becoming in the world. Irony promotes questioning and wonder. By attending to the trope of irony, we can all continue to live our experiences as teachers and learners with an artographer’s commitment to creativity and inquiry and teaching as transformative and hopeful.

Author

• Carl Leggo, The University of British Columbia