Rebecca Luce-Kapler

(Un)Becoming a Teacher: Negotiating Identities While Learning to Teach

Becoming a teacher involves more than transposing teaching skills onto an already- established personal identity: it means including the identity “teacher” in one’s life. Beginning teachers must negotiate at least three teaching identities: those they bring with them into teacher education, those they develop while doing university course work, and those they develop during student teaching practicums. Because university and school experiences are generally only weakly connected for beginning teachers, the negotiation of these disparate teacher identities often remains unacknowledged and uninterpreted. By describing what happened when we used a “writerly” text in the teacher-education classroom, we show the importance of creating curricular locations for the interpretation of the teaching identities student teachers negotiate as they learn to teach. Devenir un enseignant implique plus que de simplement transposer des habiletes d’enseignement sur une identite personnelle deja etablie: cela signifie plutot d’inclure l’identite “enseignant” dans la vie d’une personne. Les enseignants debutants doivent composer avec au moins trois identites reliees a l’enseignement: celles qu’ils amenent avec eux dans le cadre de la formation des maitres, celles qu’ils developpent en suivant des cours universitaires et celles qu’ils cultivent au cours de leurs stages en enseignement. Puisque les experiences du milieu scolaire et celles du milieu universitaire ne sont generalement que faiblement reliees pour les enseignants debutants, composer avec ces identites disparates demeure souvent un aspect non reconnu et non interprete. Les auteurs, en decrivant ce qui s’est produit lorsqu’ils ont utilise un texte de type “litteraire” dans une classe de formation des maitres, demontrent l’importance de creer une place dans les programmes universitaires pour l’interpretation des identites reliees a l’enseignement avec lesquelles les stagiaires composent pendant qu’ils apprennent a enseigner.

AS IF WOMEN WRITING

When we write literary texts such as fiction, poetry, autobiography, or memoir, we initiate performances of meaning that subjunctivize reality. Because the subjunctive traffics in human possibilities rather than settled certainties (Bruner, 1986), writing becomes a site of possibility, an “as if” that works in multiple ways with, through, and beyond the text. What such contingency does is broaden the possibilities for experiencing, acting, understanding, and creating. If there is no “solid” sense of self, but rather an ever evolving story of identity that is always in revision, then our stories about ourselves are fraught with possibility - the subjunctive possibility of writing. Women, using the fluidity of writing to express a variety of experiences, shape a story of subjectivity where they begin to see themselves as having multiple possibilities for understanding and acting. This article explores some of the possibilities of writing that the author realized from working with women writers and describes how, as a result of this work, she has revised her thinking about writing and the teaching of writing.

The Sideshadow Interview: Illuminating Process

Drawing on the conception of the literary sideshadow, the author describes the development of a sideshadowing interview used to investigate the decision-making processes of writers in a research group. To prepare for the interview, the researcher reads and notates the text that she will discuss with the participant using a process of “close reading.” Sideshadowing interviews ask not only the “why” but also the “why not” and the “what if questions, following a process of both prepared questions and conversational discovery. In the interpretation of a sideshadow interview, the researcher describes how this approach characterizes the complexity of a process. Furthermore, the researchers biases and influences became readily apparent through this analysis. The author suggests that her conception of the sideshadowing interview is a research technique that might offer useful data to qualitative researchers interested in exploring the nature of processes such as writing, reading, or teaching.

Stitching texts: gender and geography in Frankenstein and Patchwork Girl

This paper considers how two related texts—one in print and one in hypertext—are locations for adolescents to undertake the work of ‘literary anthropology’ in considering questions of gender and subjectivity. The first text is Mary Shelleys Frankenstein, which invites readers to grapple with questions of how adolescents negotiate relations with their parents and others, of how masculinity and femininity are produced and construed, and of how cultural mores inform both processes. The second is Shelley Jacksons Patchwork Girl, a hypertext novel that parodies the former. Both texts offer a multilayered reading experience for adolescents juxtaposing print and digital technologies, themes of boundary and displacement, and issues of identity and sexuality.

Looking beyond the academic and developmental logics in kindergarten education: the role of Schwab's commonplaces in classroom-based research

Kindergarten has become increasingly academic in nature. One of the primary dilemmas arising from this shift is the tension between the use of developmentally appropriate practices and the obligation to teach academic standards. To gain a deeper understanding of how kindergarten is enacted in the evolving curricular landscape, we look beyond these competing perspectives to develop a theoretical framework informed by Schwabs conception of the eclectic and the four commonplaces. We re-envision the four commonplaces – subject matter, teacher, milieu, and learner – to align them with contemporary conceptions of educational purposes, practical theory, classroom climate, and childhood. Acknowledging that kindergarten is an eclectic space, we create a robust theoretical framework for researchers interested in classroom research. The application of this framework is explored using an ethnographic methodology that integrates data from classroom observations, teacher interviews, and photo elicitation interviews with the students in one kindergarten classroom.

Educating Consciousness through Literary Experiences.

In this essay, the authors describe human consciousness as an embodied experience that emerges from a complex relationship of the biological and the phenomenological. Following arguments made by ) and ), they argue that one primary way that human beings develop self‐awareness of their own minds is by becoming aware of other minds. These mind‐reading abilities become fundamental to the continual adaptations that human beings must make in their daily lives. The authors offer descriptions of two literary texts (one print‐based and one electronic) to illustrate how these texts participate with other forms of culture and with human biology to produce experiences of self‐conscious awareness. They argue that if consciousness is understood as an emergent property of biology and culture, and if human beings develop self‐awareness of their own minds by becoming cognisant of other minds, then it follows that literary experiences create productive mind‐reading practices that contribute to the ongoing development and emergence of consciousness and, as such, are important for education. They conclude that extended opportunities to critically inquire into readers’ imagined identifications with characters and their situations can support the development of empathic understanding of others.

Becoming a community of researchers1

Abstract Poststructural action research highlights the ambiguity and uncertainty for those involved in research with other individuals. This article chronicles how such an action research group with seven young women, 15 – 18 years of age, used personal writing as a basis for exploring identity, and how the researcher and the teacher had to acknowledge and critique their own feminist agendas within such a setting. Relying on reciprocity and dialectical theory-building, the group evolved into a collective of women where new opportunities were created for all the participants.

Voicing Consciousness: The Mind in Writing.

In this paper, the authors investigate the enduring power of voice as a concept in writing pedagogy. They argue that one can benefit from considering Elbow’s assertion that both text and voice be considered as important aspects of written discourse. In particular, voice is a powerful metaphor for the material, social and historical nature of language. Drawing on current psycho-neurological literature as it is used in literary studies, the authors suggest that voice can also act as a metaphor for consciousness. Using findings from a study that used writing practices designed with a focus on consciousness, the authors offer examples that illustrate the potential in recognizing the relations among voice, text and consciousness.

Fragments to Fractals: The Subjunctive Spaces of E-Literature.

This article chronicles the experience of two writers working in digital technologies to write fiction. One writer, the author of the article, describes how her experience writing with the software Storyspace influenced her writing of print fiction, changing her processes and challenging her notions of genre. The other writer, a 16-year-old secondary student, also wrote with Storyspace. While she did not find the form as challenging as the first writer, she followed similar processes of creation. The author compares the possibilities of digital and print text writing and suggests that there are different potentials. She also suggests that moving from a metaphor of fragments to fractals when thinking of hypertext writing may be a productive way to consider digital literary work.

The Slow Fuse of the Gradual Instant Reprised.

The opportunity to revisit and reflect upon one’s work over twenty years is a gift, the greatest of which is the realization of enduring influences that bring a center of gravity to that work. Rereading allows a retrospective consideration that enables one to interpret her life and imbue it with meaning (Sumara 2002). In the novel, Fugitive Pieces, Anne Michaels describes history as the gradual instant, that moment when we recognize how things have continued to move and change even without our awareness. It is only in revisiting that we see the traces of rivulets in our experience that reveal how profoundly our engagement with others’ thinking brings depth and meaning to our own. The strongest path I chart through my work is the influence of Maxine Greene. Her insistence that imagination is a force that can be ignited by the arts, releasing an ethical and life-affirming power, is a belief that underlies the commitment I bring to my teaching and research. When Maxine Greene writes about the importance of aesthetic experience and the imagination, she threads the voices of literary and philosophical writers through her text, thereby mapping a rhizome of connections and extending the network of influence. In this article, I revisit the paths of Greene’s work and influences that have particularly impacted my own moments in the vast territory of her thinking. By pausing to focus on those instances, my aim is to honor the depth and enduring impact of Greene’s legacy.