Intersections Between the Politics of Location and Critical Family History in Students' Poetry Writing

• In Event: Preservice Teachers' Transformative Journeys in a Multicultural Education Course

Abstract

Purpose
Preparing educators to improve life chances of all students and work for equity requires that we innovate pedagogically and help future educators locate themselves politically. This study asked to what extent preservice teachers from the dominant culture addressed power relations in “I am from” poems within a multicultural education course, before and after engaging with the novel White Bread (Sleeter, 2015) as the course text and conducting their own critical family history.

Critical Family History
Critical family history (CFH) draws from critical theory, critical race theory, and critical feminism (Sleeter, 2016). Individuals are asked to look beyond typical family stories and consider the four P factors that undergird their heritage narratives: push factors, pull factors, punishing factors, and privileging factors.

Politics of location
Rich (1984) notes that “The United States of America" stands for both a national identity and a political attitude, as well as a locatable place. While an immature depiction of location puts the self at the center, viewing surrounding scales of spaces in concentric circles subordinate to and meaningful only in relation to that centrality of self, a more sophisticated understanding of the politics of location entails depicting power relations that map the assemblages in which we are embedded (Braidotti, 2013). According to Braidotti (2013) locating ourselves politically allows us to account for the conditions that produce us and influence what we do each day (Haraway, 1988).

Methods
The researcher employed qualitative design. Poems from the beginning and end of the course were analyzed for each participant. Using CFH as a guiding framework, poems were coded for instances of pushing, pulling, punishing, and privileging factors, and intersections with how preservice teachers located themselves politically.

Data sources
A total of 58 students across 5 course sections participated in the study, resulting in 116 poems submitted for analysis. Students were provided with instructions and an exemplar “I am from” poem at the beginning of the course. Students were asked to write another iteration of the poetry assignment at the end of the course and were provided with revised instructions. Poems were de-identified, re-coded with a pseudonym, and uploaded into a Google folder for analysis.

Findings
Some students shifted their understanding of “I am from” from family foci, strictly geographic spaces, and concentric circles, positioning themselves at the center, to one that examined the complex and interrelated push, pull, punish, and privilege factors across boundaries of space and time. Some students hinted at questioning the American meritocracy myth, while others wondered about their “past present” responsibilities. Many students, however, carried forth Rich’s notion as a person from everywhere and nowhere, with no relationship to the world’s destructive forces. Many still retained an individualistic notion of hardscrabble ancestors in light of native American experiences and other immigrant experiences.

Significance
This study adds to the literature stating the need for coherent, consistent, innovative pedagogy to be incorporated within and across a teacher education program if equity focused practice is going to be taken up and considered as teachers enter the field.

Author

• Tammy Mills, University of Maine