Teacher Education in Memory's Light and Shadow: Autobiographical Reflection and Multimodalities of Remembering and Forgetting

Abstract

Though we are all inevitably familiar with the everyday effects of forgetting, we generally fail to ask about what its internal movements look like, or how we can talk about what they reveal. Despite its necessity as a structuring process of autobiographical inquiry, forgetting's invisible moves are always obscured by that which remains: the typically unquestioned and seemingly permanent products of remembrance. In this article, I think about how we may conceptualize the status of forgetting in the context of teacher education, and how we may encourage preservice teachers to acknowledge the enigmatic and incomplete status of their autobiographical texts. I begin by looking to theories of autobiography, memory and forgetting (with a particular emphasis on teacher education), and I then look closely at a number of psychoanalytic considerations of the mind and its inner workings, which help to conceptualize forgetting and remembering as in a psychically productive, dialectical relationship. I then turn my attention to 2 multimodal, textual examples, which emphasize the problems of representation in relation to remembering and narrative: a collage from Lynda Barry's One! Hundred! Demons!, and an autobiographical comic authored by an undergraduate student in teacher education. In the final section of this article, I argue that thinking about forgetting in relation to autobiographical remembrance can lead to an ethical stance of mutual opacity and shared ignorance in teacher education.

Notes

1. Importantly, throughout this article I propose remembering and forgetting as essential elements of the work that memory accomplishes. If forgetting is always a part of what happens when we remember, it follows that neither should be construed as separate memorial enactments. As such, the concept of memory I am working with is necessarily dialectical and speculative: as “the grasping of opposites in their unity or of the positive in the negative” (Hegel, as cited in Prabhu, 2007, p. 108).

2. As Marion Milner (2010) describes, although there is “a permanent gap between the perfection we have it in us to conceive of and the actuality of what can really happen,” or in other words, between our desires, fantasies and psychic ideals and the various limitations of social reality, “there is also a gap between the inner reality of feeling and the available ways of communicating what we feel” (p. 153). Although language can approach this unbridgeable gap, there nonetheless remains a necessary tension between the meanings that language signifies toward, and those experiences, memories, desires, and emotions that language can never achieve or express in full. Although words will certainly move toward meaning, their movement is inherently frustrated-caught in a cycle of repetitive motion “within the constraints of a transindividual symbolic order” (Brooks, 1984, p. xiv)-that, as Peter Brooks notes, “is never pinned down or captured since there is a perpetual sliding or slippage of the signified from under the signifier” (p. 56). For proponents of multimodal literacy, however, the limitations of language, although certainly not surpassed, are nonetheless brought to the fore when readers are put into the play of multimodal textual engagement.

3. As one example of how such a narrative may be composed, O'Brien and Schillaci (2002)-who turn to autobiography as “an instructive method of self-discovery and understanding” (p. 33)-pose the following questions as prompts for their students' writing: “Why do I want to teach?; When/how did I know?; What/who influenced my decision?; What is teaching to me, anyway?; and What does the future hold for me as an educator?” (p. 30).

4. The literacy autobiography-“a reflective, first-person account of one's development as a writing [and reading] being” (Steinman, 2007, p. 563)-is a particular kind of educational autobiography, focused on the field of literacy education.

5. Image from One! Hundred! Demons! copyright Lynda Barry, courtesy Drawn and Quarterly.

6. Along with One! Hundred! Demons!, the students in this class read a number of other graphic novels, including Castrée's Susceptible (2012), Tamaki and Tamaki's Skim (2008), and Lust's (2013) Today is the Last Day of the Rest of your Life. Each of these books narrates a difficult story of growing up, using the hybrid structure of comics to engender a reading experience that pushes forward in time across gaps in space and meaning, and where the reader is compelled to draw connections that are absent in the text itself. As Chute (2011) describes, because they necessarily require the reader's active interventions in the creation of meaning, graphic narratives are inevitably “incomplete.” For students in teacher education-and this is especially true in regards to the open structure of graphic narratives-the meanings they produce, and the representational choices they make, will speak to the unconscious dynamics involved in the development of their emergent professional identities.

7. This idea of dispensability reminds me of Ashton-Warner's (1986) practice of starting anew through burning her pedagogical materials. As she writes in Teacher, “I burnt most of my infant-room material on Friday. I say that the more material there is for a child, the less pull there is on his resources” (p. 118). Similarly, the more that the creations of students in teacher education (including their memory scripts) are treated as disposable objects (metaphorically or otherwise), the more they may realize that their teacher identity and the act of teaching itself is a moveable collage; “with or without punctuation and polish; backwards, upside-down or downside-up” (p. 26)