From Reflective Nostalgia to Reflective Practice: Undermining Myths With Memories

• In Event: Demoralization and Schizophrenia: What Lives Should Teacher Education Prepare Candidates For?

Abstract

Nostalgia has been institutionalized in museums and other cultural heritage institutions (Boym, 2001). I argue that nostalgia is similarly present in schools, which hold our collective memories of teaching and teachers. By reading current studies on perceptions of school librarians through the lens of Boym’s (2001) distinction between restorative and reflective nostalgia, I explore nostalgia as both a limiting cultural force in the lives of school librarians (as teachers), and a practice that teacher educators can use to help librarians more accurately portray and intentionally pursue their work.

Nostalgia refers to longing for a lost home (Lasch, 1991), or desire for an idealized past (Boym, 2001). Restorative nostalgia glorifies past universals toward rebuilding lost ideals. The trope of the school librarian alone, stamping books in a silent silo full of books is restorative, since it draws on a past ideal that in itself is an oversimplification of the school librarian’s historical role. Conversely, reflective nostalgia exists in fragments and anecdotes and dwells in the longing for the past without expectation of return. Through reflective nostalgia, criticality can emerge as the nostalgic simultaneously occupies the present and the context of memory. Reflective nostalgia is the foundation of a reflective teaching practice that may aid teacher educators in the prevention of teacher burnout and demoralization (Santoro, 2011).

Restoratively nostalgic reformers rhapsodize about accountability, basic skills, and core competencies that are rarely related to classroom experiences of teachers, and instead are connected to outcomes that are highly measurable. Similarly, school librarians teach the research process, which is often invisible, since it is absorbed into classroom projects and not measured per se. In New York City, despite an early alignment of the citywide school library curriculum to the Common Core (New York City School Library System, 2012), the library remains a teacher shortage area, though it is not recognized by the Department of Education as such. This lack of acknowledgment, both of the work of school librarians and of their relevance to the changing landscape of the educational field, widens the gap between the lives of school librarians and calls for reform. By practicing reflective nostalgia school librarians can look at the past through the lens of the present to realistically portray their lives and work. This conceptual analysis thus contributes to the project of research innovations that make the lives of teachers more visible, salient, and significant in the context of educational reform. Further, it does so by providing teacher educators with tools for helping librarians, and classroom teachers, to stave off the demoralizing effects of current reforms.

Author

• Jessica Lee Hochman, Pratt Institute