Writing and Teaching about the Oppressive ‘Isms’ in Teacher Education: taking a new direction through alternate forms of data representation

Abstract

Foundational teaching typically makes too little impact on the racism, classism, sexism, heterosexism of many pre‐ and inservice teachers in Australia and elsewhere. The problem may rest significantly with the rationalist assumptions and abstract representations utilized in traditional sociological writing and teaching about issues of race, class, etc. It is suggested that this approach may be inappropriate as a starting place when so many pre‐ and inservice teachers in Australia come from a narrow range of relatively privileged backgrounds relatively unchallenged by adversity which may place considerable limits on ‘teachers’ understandings of diversity and social inequality based on race, class, geographic location and the like’. In this paper, I use experimental ethnographic writing in the form of poetics and dramatic monologue to show its potential to representing social knowledge in ways which engage emotions and therefore have greater potential to motivate teachers to commit themselves to social justice than more traditional rationalist approaches. This approach is contextualized in a discussion of recent debates in ethnography.