"Sitting With" the Past to Move Into the Future: Aufarbeitung as Disruptive Force in Teacher Education

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Saturday 9:45 am - Gold 1
  In Roundtable Session: Disrupting Neutrality, Designing Justice: Minority-Serving and Antiracist Innovations in Teacher Preparation

Abstract

As part of an innovative teacher preparation program, preservice teachers have the opportunity to engage in a short term study abroad in Germany. In addition to interning in schools, the students visit sites of Holocaust commemoration. Qualitative analysis of interviews with participants reveals the ways that "lived encounters" with the difficult past shift preservice teachers' perceptions of self and the world. In many cases, these experiences "undo" teachers, unraveling all they thought they knew. The certainty with which they entered teaching–learned from years of apprenticeship of observation–falls away. Here we consider how preservice teachers experience uncertainty, its role in futuring and how we might cultivate Aufarbeitung in teacher education through pedagogical hinges, leading to transformative futures for all students.

Authors

• Jocelyn A. Glazier, University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill

• Taylor William Schmidt, University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill

• Abigail Paquin, University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill

• Anja Wilken, University of Hamburg

• Andreas Bonnet, University of Hamburg