“Traces in Narratives About Knowledge”: Fiction and Photography as Method/ology

• In Event: Roundtable Session 6
  In Roundtable Session: Curriculum Beyond Policy and Practice: A Symposium on Research in Curriculum for Postqualitative Times

Abstract

The story of difficult knowledge contains not only the problematic aspects of negotiating with traumatic residuals of learning from/about massive violence and social breakdown, but also point us to the psychoanalytic conclusion that “there is a kernel of trauma in the very capacity to know” (Pitt & Britzman, 2003, pg. 756). While research utilizing difficult knowledge tends to place its focus on the encounter with traumatic historical representations (e.g. Farley 2009; Matthews, 2010; Tarc, 2011), there is another plane of difficult knowledge that speaks to persistent problems of learning, knowledge, the narration of knowing and its resistance to representation. Specifically, Pitt and Britzman (2003) write about the ways in which psychoanalytic processes such as “the unconscious, transference and symbolization…leave traces in narratives about knowledge. We are calling these traces difficult knowledge” (pg. 757). In seeking to engage difficult knowledge along this plane, the “traces in narratives about knowledge”, this paper investigates the illusive ways conceptual change occurs and can be identified within the context of domains in which subjects are becoming social studies teachers.

Working with a psychoanalytic vocabulary, the paper considers utterances as carrying both manifest and latent content. I begin by describing the motivations of my assigning fiction and photography to pre-service social studies teachers. As a “method”, these aesthetic texts were found to be provocative, seemingly strange, but productive of stories that indicate ambivalences and anxieties about learning to teach. There, I draw upon psychoanalytic concepts of free association and symbolization. Next, the paper moves to consider what those practices might mean as “methodology” and poses the question of what kinds of narratives are elicited when pre-service teachers are asked to engage with aesthetic texts. What counts as “data” in this paper are field notes, recollections and interpretations of student work and comments. I further draw upon student work itself, the photographs they produced, the written narrations thereof, and individual interviews conducted with students around their reading of Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved.

The “analysis” of this data is tentative and provisional, as I take care to lend psychoanalytic readings to data (as opposed to psychoanalyzing individuals) for what such a reading could continue to offer curriculum theorists. Psychoanalytic methodologies seem to produce rich interpretations of classroom life and, thus, have the potential for enriching the vocabularies with which we can describe and understand classroom life. In this case, I suggest that the use of aesthetic texts with pre-service teachers might aid in their recognition of the affectively wrought terrain of teaching; something that often comes as a surprise to them. Through discussions of fear, uncertainty, the desire for success and anxious avoidance of failure, the force of that surprise is considered as itself part of the curriculum.

Author

• H. James Garrett, University of Georgia