I would think most students learn to "do" school, and survive it - I've asked
so many adults what they remember learning in school, like, what
in the curriculum do you actually recall...? and few can remember what
they learned in geography class, or math, or whatever.
Everyone recalls
the events of shame, humiliation, failure; or the strategies/tactics they
used to get through it all; the horrible teachers, the wonderful teachers,
the detentions, the dances, and so on.
It can be very painful to recall many of those experiences, because
what we dredge up are the emotions as well as the experience.
> This learning about survival they carry to
>their teaching to repeat the cycle. They often separate their own student
>experience from discussions on teaching exactly because they are guided by
>survival in both cases.
I think we separate, or detach ourselves from our
student-survival days precisely *because* it is difficult to reconcile
ourselves to the switch... Teacher education could be more sensitive
to this, of course; which is what Walkerdine is getting at;
but, as she says,
if we theorize from our experiences and memories, we contradict the
formal teacher-education theory, the formal teacher-education curriculum,
and, as she says, this "explodes the boundary between theory and practice."
>What do you think?
Well I think a lot about this actually.
(1) Maintaining the distinction between
theory and practice: this is an industry-based practice.
Institutionally-embedded
in education's fictions about who the teachers are, and who the students are.
I, like Walkerdine, think psychology is the culprit: as a discipline, it
*needs* to separate theory and practice.
I also think William James stumbled
onto this early in the century, but it was never really picked up on. If
anything,
psychology became more rigorous, more experiment-dependent; more
behaviouristic; more about psychology than about people-in-the-world, and
people-in-the-schools...
and where did that bring us? To Cognitive theory. Flow-charts as models
of the mind. Modules. Schemas. [shriek]... like, the worse it gets in schools,
the worse it gets in educational psychology. Control freaks.
(2) I am, more and more, fascinated by the relations between memory and
experience (I'll spare y'all my theory of genetic memory for now...);
but whether or not we are willing to acknowledge it, our memories shape
our interactions with others; our memories organize our perceptions.
This is precisely *why* student-teachers need to work through who
they were as students. The maintainance of that distinction, like theory
and practice, is about the need for control. And so much of teacher-education
emphasizes control, classroom management, behaviour modification,
children with behaviour problems; children with learning "disabilities";
more and more, the classrooms are emerging as chaotic; and so more and more,
the emphasis is on controlling that, "managing" that - what Walkerdine
calls, "the impossible fiction"...
The chaos comes from within. The chaos is not "out there", it's inside of us.
And the more we repress it, the more it manifests in activity and interactions.
I sincerely
believe that.
The harder teachers suppress their memories, the more they
teach in reaction to those memories. Deborah Britzman is the only scholar I know
who has had the courage to say it: Student-teachers should be required to
spend a year in therapy before going to the classrooms.
It ought to mandatory.
Teaching IS social work.
It should be regarded as such, and the education
of teachers ought to be respected as such.
That's what I think.
thanks for asking Eugene.
diane, with a bit of trivia: Gertrude Stein studied with William James
for several years before drifting off the France. Neat eh?
"Every tool is a weapon if you hold it right."
Ani Difranco
*********************************
diane celia hodges
faculty of education
university of british columbia
vancouver, bc canada
tel: (604)-253-4807
email: dchodges who-is-at interchange.ubc.ca