Notes on: Lanas, M., Rautio, P.,
Koskea, A., Kinnunen, SViljamaa, E and Juutinen
J. (2017) Engagingwith theoretical diffraction
in teacher education. Discourse: studies in the
cultural politics of education. 38(4), 530--41
DOI: 10.1080/01596306.2015.1126917
Dave Harris
[This looks quite interesting because these are
people who have tried to teach theoretical
reflection to trainee students, and then looked to
what they actually did. However, the usual
findings of partial understandings and incoherent
clusters of constructs selected pragmatically is
now to be understood as 'theoretical diffraction'
and there are implications for conventional forms
of education which required discipline and the
notion of answers. As a result, I really don't
know quite what to make of this. At first I read
it as implying that we could see the common
sense that seems to afflict practising teachers
as diffracted, and therefore back off from any
critical enquiry into it. Now I've read it
again, it might be simply that seeing common
sense as having diffractions that include past
theories together with an amalgam of ideals and
professional ideologies, might be just a way of
getting us to investigate it more carefully
instead of just seeing it as some irrational
resistance. Even so, doesn't the term
'diffraction' imply some equality with explicit
theorising?]
Resistance to theoretical reflection is well
known, and often the students get the blame rather
than pedagogical practice. Instead we should think
about why some students 'don't want to hear what
we have to say' (530). Student resistance protects
us from thinking out our own work. Luckily, we
found that 'our research problem ended up partly
undoing itself' — 'there is theoretical
diffraction' instead.
They start with Haraway on diffraction as an
optical metaphor to record '"interaction,
interference, reinforcement, difference"'. Barad
says that reflexivity reproduces the geometries of
sameness instead of being attuned to differences,
especially those that we make when we attempt to
produce knowledge. In education, diffraction tends
to be confined to critical reflection on theories.
There, reflection and reflexivity might 'document
categories of difference' (531) but diffraction
makes a difference and makes it matter. It enacts
flows of differences according to Taguchi and Palmer.
The point is to identify 'intra-activities that
emerge in the intersection of data, theory,
methodology and researcher'. We can apply this to
the problems of engaging with theory in teacher
education.
We examined theoretical reflection and also the
need for '"transitional space"' where different
ways of understanding and imagining can be
cultivated, new excluded ways made visible.
Initially they were puzzled about even how to go
about this examination of how people might think
in what looks like an impossible way.
They describe the way in which they teach theory
to students — six of them to 140 punters. They
want to avoid the problems raised by 'voice'as in
St Pierre [which turns on the difficulties of
arbitrating between different voices as I recall.
Lather
has a good discussion too -- eg narrative and
representation of the other seems to be based on
things like empathy and mutual knowing, but risk
'imperial sameness'(1).] and they want to not see
students as autonomous subjects. So they formed 'a
plural teacher educator–subject' for the six of
them and a 'plural teacher-student subject' for
the 200 students [weird — they coded and
listed individual responses?].
Everyone says we should do theoretical reflection
in education, even to liberate students by helping
them decide between contradicting discourses and
thus not be subjectivated by one of them. This is
seen as especially important after years of
passive schooling. Students are still in that
habit and 'have been subjectivated by it' (532).
Their toolbox has already been filled. Reflection
on the contents is required to avoid 'normalising
discourses'. Teacher education, after all, can
reproduce social life — '"theory produces people"'
[another St Pierre]. Educators need to realise how
they categorise children, gender, race, success
and failure, and that contents of learning are not
innocent but constitute the world and power
production in it.
Theory can be taught as a catechism again a way of
preventing thought [very common these days my view
but with progressive 'theory' ]. It can provoke
questions and open minds. Much will depend on what
we think teachers will do with theory. They should
think about their own practice, 'implicate their
own teaching with theory', re-examining earlier
personal ones if necessary. In particular they
need to '"understand the processes through which
students are made subject"' so they can resist
'"particular forms of subjectivity"' [citing
Davies and Banks]. However, students can 'present
reflection' rather than engage in it [citing
Atkinson here: [Atkinson, B (2012) Strategic
compliance, silence, 'faking it' and confesssion
in teacher education. Journal of Curriculum
Theorising 28(1) 74--87 ].
Teacher education should do '"epistemological
gatekeeping"' [citing Kinsella and Whiteford].
This will involve rules of exclusion, boundaries,
closures on what counts as legitimate and valid
knowledge. However, often these are 'largely
implicit, taken for granted and unacknowledged'
(533). Disciplining the community is required, and
the 'existing community of experts'also apply
standards. What is needed is 'epistemic
reflexivity' including who makes choices in the
profession and how that affects theories.
Reflection should be more than pragmatic and
instead investigate knowledge claims, how they are
accepted and constructed and in what social
conditions. This may appear strange to the
profession, even dangerous or absurd.
They describe their own approach, intending to use
theory to provoke questions, enable different
lives, think with and in practice and fully
reflect 'contradictions and tensions between
discourses in order to transform those structural
aspects that hinder the accomplishment of
educational goals' (533) [by doing a sociology of
knowledge?]. They cite Segall to list three
challenges — (a) 'reading without writing' where
practitioners implement theories generated by
others; (b) 'ignorance' where people refuse to
acknowledge their own implications in information
and dismiss the theory as not working before it
has had a chance 'to break the learner' [Britzman
is cited here as well], because understandings of
teaching and children are at risk. Successful
students in particular see critical reflection on
teaching and learning as irrelevant and want to
use their time to gain confidence rather than
undermine that confidence; (c) 'reflection as an
individual rather than a collective process',
where the teacher sees herself as an autonomous
and rational individual, and individuals supply
answers unrelated to the work of others. In
particular this diminishes social conditions of
schooling and broader political social and
economic discourses. [No connection with
assessment and instrumentalism?].
They
wanted students to generate theory not just
consume it, to interrogate knowledge claims and
to recognise the social dimensions of knowledge
generation. They should be re-examining the
theories that they already hold and
acknowledging their impact on categories used.
They found 'post structural theories of
childhood' particularly relevant, through
Britzman — development is not 'a correction for
childhood', although that has been a dominant
idea in the students' own education. They ran
through the course twice — lectures, an
assignment, and final workshop sessions. They
kept notes of their own observations and
experiences and met once a week to discuss them.
The constant worry was that students had not
learned '"correctly"' and did not reflect
adequately.
They changed their assignment, hoping it
would prevent students just presenting reflection
or seeking the right answer. The task was to ask
students to reflect on arguments based on the
theories they had encountered, prompted by a
statement '"the up-bringer makes the child"'. They
were told the title from the first lecture. They
could work in pairs. Mostly their essays discuss
the theories mentioned in the lectures connected
to their personal histories and experience and
'justifying the students' own ideas of school'
(535). [I would love to know how they were
actually assessed, whether they were graded.
Essays discussing the theories that have been
mentioned are not exactly the same as trying to
work out the impact of those theories. If their
own ideas of school were justified, was that
defensively? Is that a success for theory or
not?]. Then they had a month of workshops where
students had to write learning journals and
compile mini research designs: 'in one group the
students carried a non-boiled egg with them for a
week in order to try and interrupt their thinking
and "default settings" in their everyday
practices' [this is an exercise based on trying to
make vulnerable teenagers aware of the
responsibilities of having a kid, as I recall].
Another group re-read their own undergrad theses
'in order to analyse the construction of a child
in their own work'.
What happened? It's not just an on-off matter.
They compared assignment responses to 'spontaneous
responses' of the kind they met in the workshops
[they obviously suspected that the first ones
involved students presenting learning in a
conformist way]. They asked what had prevented
learning with the essays and what the challenging
responses in the workshops are actually asking.
They use this strange device of the plural subject
instead of one student, although they deny this
helps them make generalisations, especially
stereotypes. They wanted the strange plural
student subject to be 'as ambivalent and plural as
any other subject: the outlines are temporary
cuts', [concealing?] multiple voices and
frameworks. It represents 'one affective
complexity' but there is no single us. It is a
version of what teacher educators construct when
they think about addressing numbers of students
and trying to anticipate their responses. [good
point -- fictional subjects for Bourdieu].It
helped them refer to the living body of the
students. [Did they have thse fictions already and
use them to select statements? Modify them after
reading statements?]
They coded the essays, highlighting particular
responses and filing them, thus producing 'one
single response of one student–subject, as it
were' (536). It is not the view of any particular
individual student. There are internal conflicts
and repetitions, just as in the actual essays.
They placed all the repetitions together and saw
how they differed from conflicting arguments [this
seems to have helped them reduce the responses a
bit]. Overall, they reacted to something that
looked like 'a text produced by a subject engaged
in a discussion, the content and participants of
which we do not know'. Generally, essays also
revealed a debate about what education or
upbringing is — this was emergent, an occasion
when students engaged us. [Subsequent coding?]
revealed four 'different takes on education', most
popular one first:
(1) 'education is
adult influence over the child', although this
is not entirely trouble-free and can produce
ethical dilemmas
(2) 'education is responding
to needs', which the educator knows
(3) 'education is a
relationship between humans' with the
personalities of both being important, and
adults responsibility taking the form of
obligation.
(4) 'education, environment
and childhood are phenomena that produce each
other', with the whole environment influencing
education and producing 'children of certain
kind [sic]'.
Then they wrote down the responses, 'fleeting
comments, the spontaneous reactions, the silences,
and the initiations' during the workshop
discussions. Not all responses made sense. Some
were frustrating or challenging and they were
tempted to refer to them as 'student failure to
present learning' (537). They discussed them
collectively. They were sometimes too frustrated
to engage with students or see what they were
engaging with themselves — 'on/off thinking'. They
made a deliberate effort to discuss what the
responses were saying, not what was lacking in the
challenging responses but what was present — the
other discussions which challenged this one. They
identified three possible '"clusters"' of topics
in this student record:
(1) 'disciplining
emotions and focusing on control and answers',
the emotions of teachers as someone in charge.
They were not sure if it was okay to feel
insecurity or uncertainty. Some of the responses
indicated polarised thinking where the teacher
has all of the control or none of it. Empowering
students was seen as depriving teachers of
control. This was good for the children,
though, for example in providing a safe
environment, and was generally doing the best
for children.
(2) 'personalising school
into the teacher and personally defending it'.
This focused on the broader 'societal ethos of
Finnish school as a saving grace'. This was
personalised in the excellence of particular
teachers. They had grasped the idea of the
reflective practitioner developing their own
responses, but had also been able to 'look away
from the discourses within which they develop
their teacher selves'. This led to them taking
critique of those discourses personally as well,
often polarising the question [the example
involves interpreting a question about how
students can be heard as a statement that
students cannot be heard]. Questions about
practice was seen as questions about teachers
and their suitability, and in one case this led
to a simple statement of belief in the teacher
[the question was whether assessment is linked
to power].
(3) 'prioritising practice
over theory and seeing both as dogma' (538).
This emerged in 'broader instrumentalist and
school centred educational discourse' reducing
the relevance of theories to immediate
applications in schools, rather than something
enabling, a skill. Theory was deemed irrelevant
or inapplicable relying on a series of 'real and
imagined factors'. Nothing that did not relate
immediately was seen as relevant. On the
occasions where theory was discussed more
broadly, 'the discussion was multiple and
theoretically rigourous' but as soon as it was
located in schools it became 'repetitive of old
norms, prioritise the school context over
theory, and deemed theory is unfitting or
irrelevant'. They already knew about practice
and did not recognise anything left outside. In
particular they 'tended to take a stand against
questions without answers' saying that teacher
education was meant to provide answers. Theory
was similarly seen as dogma — for example one
student apologised for falling short of
theoretical expectations in her essay, [which
might mean not explicitly siting or quoting
them]. Despite the fact that there were lots of
theories referenced implicitly
[All good stuff so far, but
then…] Theoretical reflection is not a simple
on-off question. Student teachers do do
theoretical discussions although this is patterned
by existing discourses. We can grasp it as
diffraction, because there is no simple mirroring
and sameness [between explicit theory and working
ideologies]: a range of theories pass through
obstructions and become spread unevenly. We can
now make sense of these topics 'as interference
patterns created by waves interfering with each
other'. Theory becomes diffracted as it passes
through these various topic clusters. The original
intention to get students to reflect and generate
theory, and critically interrogate it can now be
seen just as 'one more cluster in which the
theories twirl' (539). This is just like what
Davies says about a diffractive approach which
apparently opens a space of encounter, some
'"immanent subjective truth"', which becomes true
in the encounter; something experimental,
something that does not fix analytic or educative
processes into a methodical set of steps, but
rather '"seeing how something different comes to
matter"' [but the students' responses are of
course conservative, closed, designed to stave off
experiment, not a bit interested in truths,
emergent or otherwise, certainly not a methodical
set of steps, to be sure, but rather managing and
denying anything that might come to matter from
theory]
So we can now see the entangled structure of
[students] ontology, just as diffraction suggests.
[We can now reassure ourselves…] Students are not
disinterested in theory. We have just not
recognised the diffractive nature of their theory.
We have been dogmatic in suggesting a particular
notion of theoretical reflection where students
are told to reflect on something. This naïvely
assumes that we can undo or discharge previous
discursive practices, instead of seeing them as
clusters which pattern diffraction. [So can we do
anything as educators?]
Student teachers have to make sense of discourses
in the same terms as the existing community of
experts, 'in order to be understandable', [real
apology here] and, especially in preservice
teacher education, this community is not academics
but practising teachers in the field. Even so, the
'practising teacher' is a construct, 'a faceless
construction' composed of all previous
experiences, media images, input from peers and
their own processes of subjectivation. In Finland,
teachers do enjoy professional autonomy and
respect [which props up this conventional view
--and makes theorists timid?]. Nevertheless 'it is
the students' idea of a practising teacher' which
is generalised to this apparent community of
experts, and there are 'epistemic practices'
including maintaining 'epistemological borders' to
defend this idea.
back to social theory
|
|