Inheriting the Future and the Past of Learning: Nomadic Returns to a Primary School

• In Event: 68.061 - Roundtable Session 30
  In Roundtable Session: 68.061-9 - Curriculum Parts in the Context of the Whole: Past, Present, and Future

Abstract

Through an experiment with poetic inquiry, this study examines a series of autobiographical “returns” to my primary school: a public school in an affluent, mostly Jewish suburb of Boston where I was a student in 1984, 1985, 1987, and 1988. I theorize the sociocultural dimensions of this site as I re-encounter it through a series of nomadic returns—both physical and in memory. This autoethnography examines the relational manifestations of memory, history, affect, and knowledge unfolding through a process of returns to a primary site of schooling. I mobilize the ghazal form of poetry, threading its emotionally autonomous couplets and steady refrain with poetic manipulations of the only photograph I was permitted (and encouraged) to take at the school.

Author

• Maya R. Pindyck, Teachers College, Columbia University