The Terrible Problem of Knowing: Two Teacher Educators' Self-Shattering and Subjective Reconstruction

• In Event: Lives of Teachers: Preservice and In-Service Implications and Perspectives

Abstract

Theoretically framed in Foucault’s theorization of governmentality, this paper uses autoethnographic and visual methods to represent the authors’ evolving understanding of identity and positionality as White teacher educators working in predominantly White, rural institutions. Pinar’s method of currere further informs the research, which engages with historical context in the process of subjective self-shattering and reconstruction. The authors offer three implications of their inquiry process into identity and positionality for teacher education. Teacher educators must: a) engage in self-shattering to disrupt partial frames of reference that structure institutional and personal thinking; b) understand the impact of governmental practices on themselves and their students; c) counter false narratives of educational neutrality which threatens to eviscerate the subjectivity essential to individual self-understaning.

Authors

• Westry A. Whitaker, The University of North Georgia

• Jim Burns, Florida International University