Getting a Handle on Memories: Teachers, Curriculum, and Philosophy

• In Event: 67.053 - Rethinking Our Understanding of Curriculum, Teaching, and Students Through Collaborative Interdisciplinary Inquiry

Abstract

Purpose: There is a vital connection in teaching between curriculum and memories that we argue should be fostered in our classrooms. Because memories are alive and bring meaning to our lives, they need to be handled with care. Unfortunately, however, much of teaching risks to simply embalm what is already dead. We examine how the living work of teachers might re-position curriculum as a body of dynamic memories: a constellation of struggles and belongings, failures and accomplishments. The role of the teacher, in this context, is as a handler of those memories so that they can help students learn how to enact such work themselves. We will argue that this practice can render the experience of school more substantive and meaningful.

Theoretical Framework: Combining scholarship in teacher education and philosophy of education, we frame the concept ‘handling’ by drawing upon several sources in curriculum theory, memory work, postcolonial thought, and critical theory of education. Through this composite frame, teachers’ voices are brought to the foreground of our inquiry in an effort to articulate the relationship between teachers, memories, and curriculum.

Modes of Inquiry: The methodology of the inquiry is mixed in that it combines teacher narratives (our own) with critical conceptual analysis, collective memory work, and phenomenology as found in our diverse set of sources.

Materials: Materials for this work include the two authors’ systematic reflections on their own teaching practices (as memories), along with philosophy and scholarship on teaching and learning. Drawing on a bibliography of texts organized collaboratively by the research group referred to in the symposium introduction, our main authors of reference are Freire, Gramsci, Anzaldua, Style, and Britzman. We will feature several fine-grained narratives that illuminate what we mean by ‘handlers of memory’ in the educational setting.

Conclusions: Our shared philosophizing in this paper is a response to the concern that classroom teaching contributes to the deadening of curriculum as a source of meaning and an avenue for students and teachers to learn about themselves. In response, we propose the image of teachers as handlers of memory who, through their handling, work to cultivate and keep memories alive and central to learning. The image is justified through theory and phenomenology and is thereafter examined and refracted in concrete classroom situations, offering some specific ways that this image can foster teaching and learning. The authors suggest, for example, that teachers explore collective memory work (Haug, 1999) and reflective teaching narratives (Furman, 2015) as ways to get a handle on their own powerful memories of teaching.

Significance: The paper offers a new image to conceptualize teachers’ work in relation to curriculum, personal sense of self, and pedagogy. It does so by a mixed methodological frame informed by dialogue and collaboration between teacher education and philosophy of education scholarship. We hope to show how this image can serve teachers in their reflective practice for the purpose of cultivating more humanizing and liberating schools and classrooms.

Authors

• Cristina Cammarano, Salisbury University

• Erin Beeman Stutelberg, Salisbury University