Letting experience in at the front door and bringing theory through the back: Exploring the Pedagogical Possibilities of Situated Self-Narration in Teacher Education

Abstract

As a means of exploring what ‘learning through experience’ in teacher education might look like, situated self-narration is both conceptualized and performed here as the discursive practice through which already familiar and remembered experience may re-presented and re-organized from a forward-looking vantage point. Drawing on poststructuralist views of language and subjectivity and framed by a “pedagogy of possibility” (Simon, 1992), situated self-narration involves three main discursive strategies: interruption, interrogation and interpretation. By way of illustration, I use memory to interrupt my relationship to the dominant narrative of ‘English Teacher as avid reader’ and interrogate my everyday experiences of being a girl as mediated by popular culture, in both cases, drawing on a poststructuralist understanding of identity as an evolving constellation of discursive practices and foregrounding the distinctive qualities of one’s experiences as a possible source of agency. I consider the pedagogical possibilities of such identity work in the context of English teacher education, specifically in terms of teaching theory through the back door (Luke, 1993). I engage what it means to say that the way we “word the world” matters (St. Pierre, 2000) through my own interpreted experience as an evolving yet situated subjectivity; a consciousness-that-teaches.

Keywords:

• autobiographical inquiry
• poststructuralist pedagogy
• English teacher education