What Literature Is of Special Interest in the Supervision and Instructional Leadership SIG, Exhaustion or Replenishment? A 35-Year Commemorative

• In Event: 25.064 - Thinking About the Field: Supervision Scholars Think About Its Past, Present, and Future

Abstract

In the form of a speculative essay, I will briefly narrate the beginning of the the Instructional Supervision SIG, review the major trends in supervisory discourses over the 35 years, and speculate about possibilities for a post-modern future for the SIG.

Objectives

** summarize the significant role of the SIG in establishing supervision as a legitimate field of study.

** consider primary modernist narratives that influenced supervision practice and research over the past 35 years.

** describe how the existing political and cultural structures of schooling maintain archaic barriers that have exhausted the imagination necessary for post-modern research and practice.

•• speculate about ways to imagine what it might take to replenish the work of the SIG.

Theoretical Framework

I will draw on two essays by John Barth (1984), “The Literature of Exhaustion” and “The Literature of Replenishment,” considered by many literary critics to be a manifesto of postmodernism. “The Literature of Exhaustion” focuses on a body of work as a “used-up” tradition. In addition to Barth’s notion of “replenishment,” I will also turn to Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities (1972) for his explication of imagining the future.

Mode of Inquiry

I intend to consult the work of William Schubert (1991) in addressing the research essay as a form of rhetoric embodying speculative or personal knowledge. In order to explore educational issues and practice, I follow rhetorical inquiry as Edwards (et al.) examine the ways in which rhetorical strategies guide persuasive acts.

Sources

I was fortunate to be in a place to be able to facilitate the establishment of the Instructional Supervision SIG (along with Helen Hazi). It is a story tinged with struggle and irony. From a personal perspective I’ll briefly narrate the quirky story of the birth of the SIG. I’ll call on my personal experiences as well as various SIG fugitive documents (e.g. Newsletters, personal discourses, conference papers, etc.) as warrants for the modernist narratives that have endured.

Results

In telling the story of the birth of the SIG, as well as the dominant discourses, I hope, not only to add to the history, but also to show that the Instructional Supervision SIG signaled the birth of supervision as a field of study. Although no formal criteria exist for defining a field of study, academics continue to assume significant consequential results when such a group is formed and named (Pinar, 2004). As the story unfolds, I hope to argue that much of the dominant discourse, for the most part, can now be thought of as retro-scholarship that can contribute to an impoverished literature of exhaustion. I speculate about the possibilities inherent in a literature of replenishment, positing that a post-modern mindscape is necessary to imagine a richer body of knowledge. Barth and Calavino provide aesthetic literary devices to help us see that it is humanity who pays the ultimate price for impoverished schooling if we continue as modernist educators. We need to proceed with wisdom and commitment because that price may very well be the future of our children.

Author

• Noreen B. Garman, University of Pittsburgh