The Whisperings of an Old Pine: More-Than-Human Narratives in Teacher Education

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Friday 9:50 am Four Seasons Ballroom 2-3
  In Roundtable Session: Personal Narratives and Identity in Education (Table 5)

Abstract

Informed by posthumanism, my research examines more-than-human narratives from the Bread Loaf School of English. The oldest professional development institution of its kind, the graduate school has invited teachers to spend six-weeks each summer studying at its mountain campus since the 1920s. Bread Loaf’s landscape is teeming with narratives that blossom like wildflowers each summer before fading with the coming winter. Within those narratives—much like the Deleuzoguattarian orchid and wasp—the human and non-human transform one another in an intra-active entanglement of bodies. My research attempts to follow these entangled narrative threads in order to better understand how human and non-human bodies “meet, collide, and contaminate one another” over the course of a summer on the mountain.

Author

• Ashlynn Marie Wittchow, Louisiana State University