Engaging New Politics of Pedagogical Possibility

• In Event: Roundtable Session 2
  In Roundtable Session: Challenging Hegemony in Self and Society: An Analysis of Three Teacher Educators’ Critical and Self-Reflexive Research

Abstract

Objectives: This paper explores my engagement with new politics of possibility in the teaching of Social Foundations of Education. It continues my scholarly practice of researching from inside my classroom (White, 1988; White, C.J., Andino-Demyan, D., Primer, D., & Storz, M., 1996).
Theoretical framework: Here I write from inside a transformative pedagogy that privileges discovery over knowledge, arguing that it is what we discover for ourselves within our lived experience that makes a difference in our being and actions as teacher/leaders. After nearly forty years of teaching toward radical democracy with pre-service teacher candidates, I listen newly and reorient my work as a professor. Radically democratic citizen-action-in-the-world requires teachers who are committed to the emergence of such citizens in their classrooms. And, commitment alone is insufficient. Teachers must have access to the power to realize their commitment within the constraints of neoliberalism (Lipman, 2011; Giroux, 2013).
The new part of our course involves a "textbook" of about 800 slides (Erhard, Jensen & Granger, 2012). Summer, 2012, I took this course at Dartmouth Medical School where the dean, Chip Souba was one of the course leaders (Souba, 2011).
Methods: This paper is a participatory action research inquiry into what is happening in my classroom as I engage this new intervention. It is facilitated within "collective biographical method (Davies & Ganon, 2006) with two of my colleagues, working from self-reflexive perspectives across the country. Other research methods include auto-ethnography and analysis of journal narratives written by me and my students.
Results/Conclusions:
I saw that my career had been devoted to preparing teacher candidates to craft powerful philosophies of education to inform their future teaching, a crucial undertaking, but I was approaching this without sufficient attention to ontology (who they were being) or phenomenology (their lived experience) within the present. I re-imagined writing a philosophy of education as giving one's word to high school students, their parents, the administration and staff in the school, and to the community, as a sacred vow. While I have never believed in teaching from power-point slides, I now use these slides because they enable a first person engagement on the court of our lives—a process of discovery, not a third person abstract engagement about what we might do someday.
Scholarly significance:
This pedagogy inspires us to craft power-full contexts that call forth new ways of being and acting to incite futures that were not going to happen without collective action. We listen together for any power relationship, not simply those of government or elected officials. We also point to the always, already political nature of knowledge claims. This is a crucial and extremely difficult listening given that many of my students have been trained to view politics and political action as dirty, to be avoided, and even dangerous to effective teaching or honorable living. It invites us to view "political action" newly.

Author

• Carolyne J. White, Rutgers University