Re: affectivity: feelings and emotions -- New book

Gordon Wells (gwells who-is-at oise.utoronto.ca)
Sun, 1 Mar 1998 11:32:30 -0500 (EST)

I have just finished reading Karen Gallas's most recent research on the
grades 1 and 2 community in which she is the teacher The title gives a
good idea of both content and approach: '"Sometimes I can be anything":
Power, gender, and identity in a primary classroom.' For the last eight
years, Karen Gallas has been observing and reflecting on the events in
her classroom, supplementing her fieldnotes with audio recordings and
other forms of data collection, and using her data to understand the
way in which the development of individuals and community is mutually
constitutive in a constantly emerging and unpredictable manner. Her
vignettes of classroom life and her insightful interpretations of what
she observes have the multidimensional richness that only a teacher, who
lives with the same children month after month over a year - or sometimes
two - can achieve. In this respect, she sees herself continuing the
research tradition of Sylvia Ashton-Warner and Vivian Paley and, in my
view, her writing has the same quality of empathetic delight in young
children's ways of making sense of the social and material world and trying
out possible lives within it.

This most recent book focuses on the social and affective dimensions of
boys' and girls' ways of participating in classroom life, in particular
"bad boys" and "silent girls" and of ways in which their life in the
classroom community can allow them to "cross boundaries" and try on and
appropriate different ways of using their power for the benefit of the
community rather than solely for their own ends.

Gallas concludes by saying:
"It is clear to me now, as I finish writing this book, that teaching
(and for me, by extension, teacher research) is always an unfinished
project. The "worlds of possibility" that I .. hoped to create for
children have changed. When I was younger I thought I could orchestrate
those worlds through my understanding of what _ought_ to be.

Now I understand that I cannot orchestrate what ought to be when I do not
understand what _is_. And further, I know that what is changes with each
new class of children I teach, and with each additional year of life that
I myself experience. Who I am is something I can apprehend only within
the context of social relations. And I would add that who I am, or who an
individual child I teach is and will become, is always a continuing piece
of work, constructed in relation to the other, in conversation with the
other, and, in the best of all possible worlds, in communion with the
other."

Karen Gallas, "Sometimes I can be anything": Power, gender and identity
in a primary classroom. New York: Teachers College Press, 1998.

Gordon Wells, gwells who-is-at oise.utoronto.ca
OISE/University of Toronto
http://www.oise.utoronto.ca/~ctd/DICEP/

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