Navigating Solitude: Teachers as Public Intellectuals

• In Event: Pushing Methodological Boundaries and Performing Dissertation Writing

Abstract

Stacey Brown explores the importance of scholarship and the implications of solitude and isolation, as well as exile. She asserts that solitude is a realm of time and space that is regenerative in nature. It is a place where scholarship is nurtured and encouraged, while isolation is a very negative existence that is a result of the lack of solitude that scholars need in order to develop as teachers. Isolation is a place of loneliness and hopelessness, where scholars feel there is no return back to solitude or to a well-adjusted way of teaching or existing. Many teachers leave the profession due to their state of isolation. Exile is a place where the teacher knows she is different and outside of what is “acceptable”, but it is not the wasteland of isolation. One can be in exile and find solitude. Once can be in exile and find those who are like minded who are also in exile.

Brown argues for the time and space, which she calls solitude, necessary for reading, writing, and creating. She is fighting for teachers as intellectuals. At the same time, she believes that teachers cannot simply stay in solitude and navigate from that safe space into the classroom and back into solitude. Teachers must come out of the allegorical cave and bring as many students and teachers with them as necessary. Teachers must become more than scholars. They must be public intellectuals. They must be activists for what they believe in order to create the change necessary in our educational system. They must fight for the time and space necessary for true scholarship and use that solitude to create a political platform that will provide for a discourse that will eradicate the harmful effects of standardization and create a space of solitude for teachers.

We are under the constraints of standardization, yet there are ways to be subversive. We can exercise creative subordination (He et al, 2013) to accomplish our goals and to be successful as scholars and teachers. This symbiotic relationship of the public and private intellectual encourages an environment of synergy and scholarship and solidarity. Solidarity is important because teachers who feel isolated need to know how to navigate out of that isolation. They must have a way of teaching in between and against the grain. Brown writes about her own personal persecution by her fellow teachers in order to share with others how she overcame the persecution and found herself empowered. She finds peace in a state of exile. She wants to be “other” forever. She finds ways to continue to tip the scale, challenge the status quo, and bring her students along on the journey.

Brown is energized by what she reads and writes. She employs the works of those who explore the ideas she shares, such as bell hooks, Paulo Freire, Bill Ayers, Ming Fang He, Henry Giroux, Edward Saïd, and many other important theorists and writers.

Author

• Stacey Tucker Brown, Georgia Southern University