Canines, Consciousness, and the Autobiographical Animal: Nagarjuna and Derrida Clearing Paths to Digital Storytelling

• In Event: Cross-Cultural Dialogues on Public Scholarship: Rethinking Self-Other, Community, and Social Change

Abstract

Objectives and Significance:
The purpose of this research is to present understandings around post structural and Buddhist philosophical critiques and deconstructions of subjectivity and consciousness. Identity is an intricate concept evidenced widely in current educational research pedagogies. This paper explores the challenged posed by preservice teachers in teacher identity politics while conceptualizing news ways of engaging with the identity process beyond western anthropocentric perspectives of consciousness around the recognition of what is real. The author examines the use of Digital Storytelling as a method of enhancing pre-service student teacher’s ability to engage in recursive reflective practices around identity, difference and consciousness. Historically, teacher educators have utilized the reflective practitioner model to encourage pre-service teachers in a reflection around the professional experience of teaching (Sutherland, 1997). However, reflective pedagogies are complex practices for pre-service teachers to engage in and are often constructed as yet one more task to perform in an already overburdened schedule.
Mode of Inquiry
Examining the sharp proliferation of identity based discourses and claims in [ask historical research lib for dates] from the 1980’s to current pedagogies in light of broader structural transformations beyond a humanist perspective, I contend that engaging pre-service teachers with critical literacy practices such as Digital Storytelling, can open to clearings of “consciousness” that present students with the possibility of understanding their identity formation as dynamic, constantly shifting and renegotiating an aesthetics of subjectivities. This literary process of Digital Storytelling, calls on pre-service teachers to critically assess the processes that produce specific ways of viewing and organizing the world rather than compliantly naturalizing these beliefs and practices.
Methodology and data sources
The qualitative methodologies I implemented in this research study around emerging pre-service teacher subjectivities integrates personal and student digital documentary research, autobiographical writings around difference, and Digital Storytelling literacy practices. Participants in this study included university pre-service educators as well as my personal teaching experiences around the topics of difference, teaching, and consciousness. Participants were involved in the interpretation process and collaborate to design their Digital Stories and autobiographical writing through personal journals, peer edits, “subject” collaboration and teacher conferences.
Findings
Educators could benefit from a serious reflection around the intentions and goals of education. Derrida’s challenge to reconsider the “animal”/human binary in relation to what constitutes truth and humanity provides a catalyst into a world of responsibilities and possibilities. For educators, this translates into designing a curriculum that teaches forms of contemplative practice and explicit modes of consciousness enabling all involved to actualize an interdependent awareness between all species. Curriculum can no longer be organized around humanist modes of knowledge to learn but rather must work around practices of self and consciousness that revolve around other species. Educational goals must move through static notions of learning and identity and open to the possibilities of freeing the self by engaging with the aporias of difference.

Author

• Lisa Hoon, University of Wisconsin - Madison