Nostalgia and Longing in Teachers' Biographical Narratives: Researching Emotion Through Oral Histories of Educational Change

• In Event: Methodologies of Researching Emotions in Teaching and Teacher Education

Abstract

Drawing on oral histories, this paper investigates teachers’ recollections of their educational experiences, aspirations and desires to be a good teacher. It examines the social production and effects of these potent memories, focusing on nostalgia and longing as offering insight to historical and generational change in conceptions of teaching and educational reform. The analysis is informed by theoretical frameworks derived from debates within cultural studies of emotion (Ahmed 2010), the role and movement of ‘public feelings’ (Berlant 2011), in this case those of nostalgia, regret and optimism in education, and the conception of ‘affective practice’ (Wetherell 2012). The paper seeks to critically engage with these theoretical frameworks in the field of education and studies of teacher identities. Methodologically, the paper offers an historically-informed approach for exploring memory and emotion, examining, for example, how nostalgia is mobilized not simply as loss but as an account or critique of the present, and mediates shifting attachments to and relations between past and present. The social, collective and historical dimensions of seemingly private feelings and memories are examined. Boym argues that nostalgia is ‘not merely an individual sickness but a symptom of our age, a historical emotion (Boym, p.xvi). The presentation draws on oral history interviews with Australian teachers from the 1950s and 1970s, which provide reflections on their work and hopes as teachers, encompassing both the signal and ordinary memories of teaching alongside their own memories of being a school student.
Wetherell (2012) argues, contrary to influential strands in affect studies, that affect is not adequately understood as either more than or separate from discourse but is instead ‘inextricably linked with meaning-making and with the semiotic …and the discursive’. The notion of ‘affective practice’ emphasizes both the orderly and disruptive aspects of emotions in personal and public life and captures the converging forces and factors that produce feelings and their effects: an affective practice ‘recruits material objects, institutions, pasts and anticipated futures’ (p.20). The paper develops an argument regarding the paradoxes and ambivalences at the heart of public feelings (Ahmed, 2010). Teachers’ expressions of nostalgia and longing, or of hope and optimism, are also part of an ethical and practical concern with the purposes of education, and with what it means to be a good teacher. The paper offers methodological and conceptual resources for teasing out the effects and ambivalences of nostalgia for lost days and muted hopes in critiques of the present. The paper contributes to the history of teacher professional practice and subjectivity in transnational contexts. In examining the movement and social production of memory, the discussion brings situated, historical perspectives to bear on current methodological and theoretical debates concerning the turn to emotion and affect as it moves across the social sciences and the field of education.

Author

• Julie E. McLeod, University of Melbourne