Spectres of schooling: How Hauntings of Schooling Interrupt Learning in a Critical Professional Development

• In Event: Creative Philosophical Responses to the Challenges of Education

Abstract

Spectres are ghosts, apparitions, phantoms and whispers that were presently absent in a critical racial justice centered professional development, indicating that a haunting was taking place. This paper utilizes hauntology as a lens to investigate critical ethnographic field notes, jottings, memos and interviews in the field. Hauntings was a frame to understand executive decisions to sanitize the curriculum; to understand facilitator moves not to take up conversations of race and to understand decisions to leave racialized images unchallenged. Adding to critical professional development scholarship, this empirical research asks how the impact of schooling is negotiated in courses designed for experienced teachers to support teacher residents? By focusing on the hauntings of school oppression, surveillance, and miseducation, this research presents new understandings about how the relationship with schooling can veil learning opportunities in a critical community engaged continuing education programming.

Author

• Melissa Speight Vaughn, Georgia State University