Possible Stories and Memories of Children

• In Event: How to Live Teacher Education: Reparative Perspectives From the Pacific

Abstract

My identity as a Asian American working in a “local” Hawaiian milieu, the family history that propelled my decision to become a teacher of children, and the moments that I spent celebrating and mourning my childhood in the elementary classroom are precious and complex experiences that resemble nothing more than a flattened reproducible within the regulated and standardized discourse of contemporary teacher education. The impulse as a teacher educator to impart problematizing and productive illegibility into my conception of a teaching then becomes irresistible (Owens, 1984) and I attempt to conjure alternate readings of my identity as a teacher educator from within the possibilities of a thirdspace where the binary and specific relationship between institutional tropes and lived identity can be commingled and re-envisioned (Soja, 1996). The utilitarian and technicist aspects of this activity are expressed as autoethnographic stories and poems based upon the experience of teaching critical literacy to first graders, the rememoration of my childhood in Hawaii, the joy of parenting, and the raucous critiques of standards-based education that take place surreptitiously in university classrooms (Edwards & Blake, 2007; Ellis, 2004; Vasquez, 2004). The meaning of the stories are exposed when heightened emotions and the presence of children is juxtaposed against subjectivities of teaching that are linked to images of authority and normalization, and as I weave and retell these narratives, I glimpse a changeable and unfixed curricular form through which children and student teachers might co/author a world, and emerge refreshed and open to the possibilities of teacher education, once again (Barthes, 1978).

Author

• Christopher Au, University of Hawaii