"Private" Lessons in Horace Mann 327: On Becoming a Reflexive Educator

• In Event: Millennium Hotel Roundtable Session 7
  In Roundtable Session: . . . In-the-Making: Generating Curricular Possibilities With Janet L. Miller

Abstract

It was Janet's second semester at TC when I became her research assistant. Since the winter of 2001, Horace Mann 327 became a special place to me. For most of the time, I would simply sit in the room sorting files and organizing research data, including Janet’s notes and interview tapes with Maxine Green.  For some other days, I would stand in front of the copy machine Xeroxing chapters from a huge stack of books so that Janet may pack "light" for her getaway trips.  Occasionally, I would pick up the office phone to follow up on reprint permissions for Janet’s book project Sounds of Silence Breaking (2005).  Yet, little did I know that these “routine” tasks and interactions between my professor Janet L. Miller and I, the research assistant, “evolved” into precious and priceless “hidden curriculum” (Pinar et al, 2006), aside from my formal training in the English education program.
Janet, from time to time, would casually “share” her “reflexivity” moments (Miller, 2005, p.238), by discussing, examining, interrogating, troubling, confronting, and monitoring her pedagogical biases, assumptions, dilemmas and decisions with me. I was blessed to “join” her “think aloud” processes as she, a curriculum theorist of “reconceptualization” (Miller, 1996), pondered on how her multiple identities, subjectivity and her agency (Davies, 2000) responded to other people’s “selves,” differences, and educational discourses and practices (Miller, 2005, pp. 232-233).
Janet’s one-on-one lessons modeled possible ways of “understanding curriculum as encompassing and examining personal and political dimensions of educational experience” (Miller, 2005, p. 45). Her openness and willingness to acknowledge the conditions of being “always caught up in the very languages and resulting practices” that she wishes to challenge (Miller, 2005, p. 233) became my great inspiration. What I found in Horace Mann 327 is a professor who rejects to be a dispenser of knowledge (Freire, 1970), and values “what students and teachers [could] construct and re-construct daily as knowledge-in-relation” (Miller, 2005, p. 105).
Seventeen years later, I still benefit from the “hidden curriculum” I received from my mentor, Dr. Miller. Her commitment to reflexivity (Miller, 2005, p. 238) demonstrated the importance to consider our “selves” as always “in-the-making” (Miller, 2005). Additionally, if curriculum must be conceptualized as “particular discursive, cultural, historical, social, economic, and political forces, events and intersections in individual’ lives” (Miller, 2005, p. 104), we should also recognize that “[o]ur pedagogical, professional selves… are always ‘sites of disunity and conflict,’ unfinished and incomplete” (Miller, 2005, p. 229).
The “stories” and “tales” (Van Maanen, 1988) that took place in Horace Mann 327, where I received countless “private” lessons from my beloved professor, Dr. Janet L. Miller, became this telling that can no longer be separated from my multiple “selves” (Davies, 2000). I am grateful that “our” inter-subjective “experiences” (Scott, 1991) showed me the possibility and need to live with the incoherence and contradictions “that simultaneously come with the process of coming into being” (Miller, 2005, p. 229) a professor, a scholar, a researcher, a woman, a minority, and many more.

Author

• En-Shu Robin Liao, State University of New York