The course deals with Big Issues in educational theory and philosophy, but
mediates these not only through classic texts but also through analysis and
discussion of student written autobiographical narratives. There is also
discussion of the extensive literature on autobiography as a genre, the
role of narrative in the structuring of experience, the reliability of such
narratives as research data, and the role of narrating and dialogue in the
further development of personal identity, in this case emerging identities
as new teachers.
Teacher education students are very much in a process of restructing their
identities from students to teachers. They often need to cope with their
own feelings of inadequacy, or victimization, or antipathy to various
elements of their own past school experience. School life plays a large
role for many of us in the formation of our personal identities, especially
when in our early 20s or so, we have had very little else in our experience
by way of active legitimate participation in public institutional activities.
At worst, this approach is mildly psychotherapeutic; at best, it helps to
make solid critical connections between personal life experience and
educational issues. Theoretically it owes a lot to Freire and to the
phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty and others who contrast lived experiencing
with formal abstract representations of activity. I have personally always
throught that good phenomenology (Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, Ortega y
Gasset) was the perfect counter-balance to semiotics. As Bourdieu point out
there is an essential complementarity between the participant-stance and
the observer-stance in accounts of activity, and both are needed.
Now if only we could understand how to integrate the time-scales of
lived-events and lived-lives!
JAY.
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JAY L. LEMKE
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
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