Becoming-parent-teacher: Reclaiming education as an ethical, caring practice

• In Event: Case studies of policies, programs, and interventions toward improving girls' education and women's higher education

Proposal

This presentation explores the multiplicity of the subjectivity of teachers who are also parents, who have “the second shift” (Hochschild, 1989) of raising and caring for their own children at home after teaching and caring for their students, or "other people’s children", at work. It is prompted by my acute awareness of the precarity in the contemporary, neoliberal ways of life and my own pursuit of hopeful, ethical alternatives grounded in the desire of enabling both human and nonhuman entities to flourish. I consciously push back on the impulse to universalise through “saming” (Currie, 2004) so as not to reduce the complexity of situated lived experiences or to conflate the tensions, challenges and considerations of teachers who teach, care for, and raise children and young people both inside and outside of their home with the general struggles experienced by all working parents. Leaning on Bergson’s (1946/2012) method of intuition and his notions of time and differences, as well as Deleuze and Guatarri’s (1968/2020) ontology of difference and their ideas on subjectivity and becoming, I attend to the specificities, texture, and nuances of the situation of being a (former) teacher raising a school-aged child at a time when the “normal” flows of life are persistently interrupted and disrupted, both due to the global pandemic of Covid-19 and other forces in private and public life. I map out some of the forces at play in the becoming of this specific subjectivity in the hope that it will initiate the theorisation of becoming-parent-teacher as the basis to re-think and re-imagine the roles of teachers, education, and relations in and around teaching and learning.
According to Bergson (1946/2012), external, observable differences are the mere actualisation of internal, constitutive differences, which can only be found when we “go down into our own inner selves” (Bergson, as cited in Grosz, p. 8, 2005). Intuition in the Bergsonion sense is not simply “discernment of natural difference”, but attunement to the “inner orientation”(Bergson, as cited in Grosz, p. 9, 2005) to tendencies, their differences, and the ways they converge. Grosz (2005) sees in intuition the capacity to restore to philosophy the “multiplicitous links and connections” and “the complexity of undecidability to the real”, and to acknowledge “the real’s capacity to be otherwise, its ability to become more and other” (p. 9, 2005). In this exploration, I intend to heed Bergson’s counsel, and delve deeply into my own experiences, memories, thoughts, assumptions, and discomforts both as a mother and a (former) teacher, with a focus on how the respective desires of these roles, seemingly separated by spatialised time (Bergson 1946/2012), tend to orient themselves, converge, and turn into forces of becoming. The purpose of this presentation is not to represent the subjectivity of parent-teacher, but to allow new possibilities to unfold through the consideration of some of the forces of life that constitute this specific subjectivity, and how these new possibilities may support individuals entangled in assemblages related to education to live good, ethical lives (Fisher and Tronto, 1990; Lorraine, 2011).
Grosz (2005) understands intuition as an “emergent and imprecise movement of simplicity that erupts by negating the old, resisting the temptations of intellect to understand the new in terms of the language and concepts of the old” (p. 8). One of the “concepts of the old”, or put differently, unchallenged, uncriticised statement or belief, is the idea that being a teacher gives individuals the “priced” insights and knowledge to become a better parent, but not vice versa. It stems from the hierarchisation of professional knowledge and life knowledge, their respective capacities of being monetised in the market, and the inferiority attached to the unquantifiable care work, affect, memory, and consciousness. Undergirding this exploration is a desire to push back on static boundaries between public and private, professional knowledge and life knowledge, and the reductive notion that life can be disembodied, divided, and diminished into separate compartments. Discerning the ways the desires as a parent and those as a teacher converge is to flatten the hierarchy as dictated by neoliberal values, move away from binary, opposition, and dichotomy, and recognise the desires embodied in roles separated by spatialised time are intertwined, inseparable forces that constitute subjectivity. I propose that attuning to the constitutive differences and the convergence of these desires, with Bergson’s and Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophical frameworks in mind, may initiate the reconstitution of unchallenged beliefs and convictions about education, and enable us to become more response-able (Barad, 2007) to the rapidly changing world. It also offers an affirmative ground for post-capitalist (Deleuze and Guattari, 1972) possibilities to unfold, allowing education practitioners to explore the pathways through which education as an ethical practice of care and attention may be reclaimed.

Author

• Winne Wong, University of Fribourg