Re/Imagining time, space and identity through qualitative narrative research with teachers: “These ghosts came back to haunt me”

ABSTRACT

The concepts of haunting and performativity are enmeshed to explore how teacher identity is materialised through shared stories. This sharing is interpreted as a calling forward of ghosts that inhabit memories via an analysis of educational narratives derived from twelve semi-structured qualitative interviews conducted with teachers working in England. Inspired by the quote from a teacher in the title; “these ghosts came back to haunt me”, the narratives offered are interpreted as haunted by individual past histories and experiences of education as well as the ghosts of others. This analysis considers the implications of haunted stories in terms of how they shape the ways individuals materialise their professional identities within conversations. I conclude with a consideration of how haunting can be understood as more than a concept or theoretical lens, but as a central aspect to narrative life history as a qualitative research methodology.

KEYWORDS:

• Haunting
• performativity
• narrative life history
• teacher identity

Introduction

The importance of understanding the creation of teachers’ professional identity has been a long-standing topic of research which continues to be explored within empirically grounded narrative approaches to qualitative research from around the world (i.e. Carrillo & Flores, 2018; Lutovac and Kaasila, 2018; Price, 2019; Tang et al. 2020; van der Want et al. 2018). This ongoing work provides a window into the worlds of teachers and offers suggestions for understanding how their lived experiences inform their identities through the stories they tell, because:

The culturally shaped cognitive and linguistic processes that guide the self-telling of life narratives achieve the power to structure perceptual experience, to organize memory, to segment and purpose-build the very “events” of a life. In the end, we become the autobiographical narratives by which we “tell about” our lives (Bruner 2004, 694).

This quote suggests that identity, professional or personal, is not static or fixed. My aim in this article is to think through and reframe this continual process of identity reformation by considering what informs change. To do so I use empirical research derived from twelve qualitative life history interviews conducted with teachers. The narratives they offered are interpreted as “haunted” (Derrida, 1994) by individual past histories and experiences of education as well as the ghosts of others. This became the underpinning frame for my analysis when the interviewee Naomi (a very experienced teacher from South East England) said “these ghosts came back to haunt me”, which has become the title of this article. This comment kept coming to mind during my analysis of the transcripts from the other teachers, it haunted me. This article is a way for me to make sense of why neither Naomi, the other teachers or indeed I, could be “free” from past lived experience. Accordingly, I make this analysis to consider the implications of living with haunted stories in terms of how individuals materialise their professional educational identities within conversations and influence the way they understand and represent themselves, but also in terms of utilising a narrative life history method within educational research.

Teacher identity

Teacher identity can be interpreted as underpinning who an individual feels they are as a professional and informs what they do, how they communicate with others and how they understand and follow or transgress the performative expectations they are subject to (Perryman et al., 2017). Identity can be understood as precarious; grounded on knowledge and previous experiences, but open to change as the roles an individual fulfils change, or as government deployed legislation and policy shifts. Guo et al. (2021) usefully suggest that:

Teacher identity is an emergent, complex, dynamic and relational construct … subject to ongoing contestation, during which teachers’ knowledge, beliefs, attitude and behaviours about teaching are modified through discourses and situated practices … and are therefore negotiated (p.49).

The importance of professional identity is that while it might be different for each individual, it can also underpin how they integrate themselves within an educational community of practice and communicate effectively with their colleagues (Woolhouse & Cochrane, 2015). Thus the avenue for the study discussed in this article becomes about how a professional identity might develop in dialogue with memories of past lived experiences and the perceived identities of other professionals. In order to explore this in more depth, in this paper I have anchored my discussion and analysis of twelve interview transcripts through an engagement with the theoretical work of Butler around identity as performative (Butler 1993, 2004), alongside Derrida’s (1994) work on hauntology.

Theoretical framing

Judith Butler’s (1993, 2004) work around the construction of identity indicates that it is not inherent, static or natural, rather identity is actively and continually created through the ways in which an individual “performs” themselves. This performance involves everything someone says or does, it is located through the reiteration of identifiable discourses, practices and norms that are conveyed as necessary and important; as aspects that “matter”, as Butler (1993, 12–13) frames it:

Performativity is not a singular act, for it is always a reiteration of a norm or set of norms … it conceals or dissimulates the conventions of which it is a repetition … it is a discursive practice that enacts or produces that which it names.

These discourses, practices and norms precede and condition what is expected from teachers, but they are also revisited and reworked through an individual’s performance, grounded by personal lived experience and memory. Therefore identities are dynamic and in a state of flux; never quite solid, never quite defined or definable. It is for this reason that I wish to explore how this understanding of identity as constructed through performance can be aligned with ideas about how the past can live with us, live through us, haunting every one of us.

The term hauntology (hantologie) was first, although briefly, introduced by Jacques Derrida in Spectres de Marx (1994) to explain how Marx and his work continues to “haunt” capitalists and capitalism long after his death. Hauntology combines the terms haunting and ontology to describe the possibilities for binary and dichotomous thinking to be disrupted. Derrida (1994, 202) suggests that while ontology is the study of what exists, hauntology is the study of what is not there, enabling presence and absence to exist simultaneously. This idea is taken up by Barad (2007, 383) who argues that haunting involves ghosts, which are “absence” with agency, the agency of a past that is never closed but is re/visited and re/figured. She suggests that as individuals we are “materially haunted by, and infused with, what is excluded” (Barad 2014, 179) where past, present and future are forever shifting. In doing so, Barad infuses Derrida’s work with a way to re/configure how meaning and matter within and between bodies are unbounded and how they might influence each other.

Drawing on these initial ideas, the concept of haunting has been engaged with in multiple ways to offer “a science of ghosts, a science of what returns (which) destabilises space as well as time, and encourages an existential orientation” (Fisher, 2014, 21). This has been accomplished by different researchers in varying ways. Within the field of educational research, much of the work has had an historical or geographical focus (Ferguson & Nichols, 2021; Mendel, 2022; Simpson & Simmons, 2021; Walsh, 2021 Zembylas, 2013) or made a critical engagement with provision in higher education (Bozalek et al. 2021; Watermeyer & Tomlinson, 2022). Closest to my own work is Yoon (2019) who utilises narrative research to understand student identity, considering how “haunting challenges the forward march of time” and suggesting that “memories and histories that have been hidden, suppressed, erased, or unacknowledged are resuscitated by ghosts” (pp.424). Noting my debt to this work, I explore how haunting and hauntology might relate to utilising a narrative life history methodology to understand the ways in which teachers emphasise the importance of remembering people, things or events that are no longer present, and recognising their influence in the everyday.

By building on the work of Derrida, it is possible to interpret haunting as a concept that can be utilised to re/imagine the framing of presence and existence as separate and distinct from absence or “not currently in existence”. As Coverley (2020) explains: “Derrida expresses his belief that being and haunting are interwoven concepts, the ghostly coming to invade every aspect of our lives … to be is to be haunted” (pp. 8). Central to Derrida’s approach is the idea of time and temporality; that there is no temporal point of pure origin for understanding and knowledge, but rather that repetition of the past is always present and inescapable in our lives. This presence is materialised through the idea of the spectre (spectre) which represents “the visibility of the invisible” (Derrida, 1994, 125), that structures through its absence, existing outside of time or place and evoking a “non-contemporaneity with itself or the living present” (Derrida, 1994, pp. xix). Thus it is possible to conceptualise haunting as representing that which is neither present or absent, but also both. It represents the past that intrudes on our world from elsewhere and elsewhen, structuring discourses and practices through its absence, much as the use of spaces structure words into sentences on a page. In doing so, the concept of haunting offers a reflective space out of time, within which one possible interpretation of what memory is and what it does for individual teachers can be opened up and new understandings can be brought forth, as Gordon (2008) suggests:

Haunting raises spectres, and it alters the experience of being in time, the way we separate the past, the present, and the future. These spectres or ghosts appear when the trouble they represent and symptomize is no longer being contained or repressed or blocked from view (pp. xvi).

These ideas can be enmeshed with the work of Butler (1993) because she highlights the fluid constructedness of identity, with a focus upon localised, embodied and personal materialisations of it. Integrating Butler’s ideas around performativity and materialisation as embodied identity work with Derrida’s concept of hauntology provides a means for questioning how bodies, individuals, the stories they tell and the practices that they enact bring an identity into being that is structured by absence. It is aligned with normalised or idealised expectations relating to teachers and teaching which are “haunted” by the bodies, individuals, policies and practices that went before. Therefore, the approach of hauntology can be adopted as a metaphor for exploring the discursive and performative relationships of identity between an individual teacher and others in the profession they have known, and as a qualitative analytical tool for interpreting how spectres are materialised within current narratives. In this paper I utilise hauntology as a critical theoretical lens through which to understand the ways in which teachers’ roles and experiences are informed and structured by absent, yet also ever present, spectres, and to do so I explore the stories teachers tell about themselves.

Narrative interview methodology

The data presented within this article is derived from qualitative narrative interviews (Connelly & Clandinin, 1990). This approach was adopted because personal, situated narratives are “world making” (Bruner 2004, 691), positioning individuals within their own worlds in terms of their beliefs and values as they narrate their lives and experiences. But these worlds are not isolated, they are a “form of knowledge creation and inquiry … produced and created within social relationships and between (the) storytellers and their audiences” (Etherington, 2007, 600). Concurrently, these narratives are fluid and changeable because they are situated, and so are never finished, but will continue to be revised as stories are told and retold (Frank, 2012). Framing a research interview around personal narratives can be effective because this process invites the interviewee to go beyond storytelling and explain their reasoning to the interviewer, inviting them to provide “routes into memory” (Bruner 2004, 708) perhaps calling upon ghosts of the past, materialising them and illuminating the spectres that haunt them.

Whilst not specifically focusing on the concept of haunting, the importance of memory within narrative accounts is usefully considered by Widerberg (2020) who explores the possibilities opened up by using memory work as a methodological approach, by Perrino (2021) through an analysis of Senegalese and Italian narratives as discursive practices and by Annabell (2022) who explores remembered experience in digital spaces as positioned across past, present and future. In such cases, these writers note the place of shared social or cultural narratives that have an influence upon individual stories, and as such these cultural narratives might also be interpreted as informing, perhaps haunting the stories told.

A key ethical reason for using qualitative narrative research to access stored memories is that the interviewee or narrator is enabled to consciously or unconsciously control the stories told and determine what is spoken about and what is unsaid. This means that they are able to determine how to situate themselves in relation to their audience (the researcher or imagined future readers) and the focus can be on what they feel to be their “true experience” (Slater, 2020, 41) which goes beyond realist or constructivist notions of reality and instead recognises a more ontologically generative conception of human experience (Rosiek & Snyder, 2020). Of course, adopting a narrative approach requires the researcher to work in a respectful way, to create a comfortable and transparent environment during the interview, and commit to clearly (re)presenting the stories told.

The participants, data generation and analysis

The data explored within this article is derived from twelve semi-structured life history interviews. I utilised a critical event form of individual interviewing (Webster and Mertova, 2007) whereby each participant was invited to draw a life history line on a piece of A3 paper and asked to explain the importance of particular points or events that they marked upon it. This drawn line was later married up to the transcribed audio recording during the process of thematic coding and analysis. I have explain my use of a drawn life history line as a tactile visual method in detail before (Woolhouse, 2017; Albin-Clark, Shirley, and Webster 2019) and have a preference for it because it offers a way for participants to actively create meaning, enabling them to guide the process of the interview, directing the aspects covered and the order in which this is done. Using a drawn life history line “provides space for revisiting memories of past experiences and provides opportunity for rethinking and reimagining the self” (Woolhouse, 2017, 118). As Goodson and Sikes (2001, 2) point out, it can offer a route for interpreting how “individuals negotiate their identities and, consequently, experience, create and make sense of the rules and roles of the social worlds in which they live”. As I have argued before (Woolhouse, 2017) accompanying an interview with a drawn life history line offers an alternative multimodal framework for analysis (Pink, 2011) which invites reflexivity in relation to the meaningfulness of storytelling beyond the content of what is said.

Each of the twelve interviews was individually conducted with teachers at different stages of their careers, from a Newly Qualified Teacher (NQT) to a Head Teacher close to retirement, all working in English education settings. Each interview was between 30 and 60 minutes long and conducted in a place of the interviewees choosing. Table 1 provides a list of the pseudonyms used in this article and some basic information about each of the interviewees whose direct quotes and stories are shared in the discussion sections below.

Table 1. Interviewees’ backgrounds.

Interviewee pseudonym and background
Adam was a dyslexic man living in Merseyside who has a broad range of experience having worked in a children’s home for young offenders and in a range of different roles in care settings before completing a PGCE and becoming a SENCO in a specialist school.
Chana was in her late 20s when interviewed. She had completed an Art degree, PGCE and NQT +2 years in two Secondary schools. Her role was made redundant and she worked as a supply teacher for a couple of years. Since the interview she has become a freelance artist and web designer.
Emma had 20 years’ experience as a maths teacher based in East Lancashire. Emma felt she progressed well through their academic career, but discussed educational issues in relation to experiences relating to her daughter who has dyslexia.
Helen was a Head Teacher with more than 25 years’ experience. At the time of interview she was working in a small Church of England Primary school based in an urban city area.
Joanna was a Key Stage 2 teacher (ages 8–11) with just over ten years’ experience working in a single entry Catholic Primary school in an urban area.
Kerry was an experienced SENCo with 25 years’ experience of working in Early Years and Primary settings across Lancashire. She was brought up by her grandparents after her mother left home and feels this contributed to her struggling at school.
Linda struggled at school, but did not realise this was because she had dyslexia. Her father, and daughter have dyslexia too. She became a teacher as a second career in 2002 and has always been based in East Lancashire.
Makena’s love of music and experiences as a child led her to teach music in primary schools, initially working in South East England before moving to Lancashire. She is also an experienced SENCo.
Matthew was a newly qualified teacher with one year’s experience who was working in a Pupil Referral Unit catering for children aged 5–11.
Naomi was a woman from Kent who struggled at school for health reasons. She has worked for 25 years in education and at the time of interview she worked as an associate tutor at an English university having completed her doctorate.
Pat was a primary teacher and SENCo with 20 years’ experience. She had a particular interest in the subject of history and had worked in specialist settings supporting children with dyslexia.
Saba was a SENCo and Assistant Head with over 30 years’ teaching experience based in North West England.

The interviews were transcribed shortly after they were conducted and the transcripts included brief researcher notes, including field notes made during the interviews. The full version of each transcript was member checked by each of the participants, who were able to edit if they wished and confirm their pseudonyms. The agreed transcripts were analysed in terms of the ways in which the narrators were drawing on memories and stories of their past to actively create meanings about their worlds (Silverman, 2011, 182). What emerged from this process were two key themes that held congruence with the idea of haunting. The first theme I have termed “idealised performativity” which draws together ideas around how current expectations, standards and agendas “haunt” practice in education. The second theme is “personalised haunting” that I identify as emerging from an individual seeking to integrate their own past relationships and experiences into their present self-understanding. I explore these themes in turn by reflecting upon the teacher’s voices.

Key themes of analysis and discussion

Idealised performativity – materialisation and transgression

Butler argues that for someone to be understood as intelligible they need to present themselves in a form that is acknowledged as “mattering” (Butler, 1993) as meeting normalised expectations. Within everyday life this may be defined by the cultural practices and discourses that circulate within our society, but for professionals such as teachers, social workers or health care professionals this can be far more rigorously defined. For example, the teachers in this study are expected to perform being a teacher by undertaking designated practices informed by the regulations and guidance of the UK Government. Yet this guidance is somewhat speculative and open to broad interpretation as most recently illustrated by the revised Teachers’ Standards (DfE, 2021a) against which teachers are judged. For example, the first standard states:

A teacher must set high expectations which inspire, motivate and challenge pupils;

• establish a safe and stimulating environment for pupils, rooted in mutual respect;

• set goals that stretch and challenge pupils of all backgrounds, abilities and dispositions;

• demonstrate consistently the positive attitudes, values and behaviour which are expected of pupils (pp. 10).

These might seem reasonable and appropriate expectations, but how teachers enact these is open to interpretation and subject to various restraints, not least staffing and funding, which is high stakes given that any perceived failure to match expectations laid out in the Education Inspection Framework (DfE, 2021b) could result in a poor Ofsted rating. Teachers are required to position themselves in relation to policies they did not have any involvement in developing and might not agree with, which can be challenging, as noted by Ball (1993, 108) who suggests that “(t)he teacher is an absent presence in the discourses of education policy”. More recently this view has been furthered by Howie (2022, pp. 679, 690) who argues that the process of adapting standardised frameworks is a form of haunting that requires educators to reckon with spectres, as they learn how to exist within a culture of compliance that they may seek to challenge. He points out that in the current neoliberal context it is impossible for school leaders to avoid the audit culture and language of accountability, and yet they have responsibility to their staff and pupils to critically reflect and make use of the absences and “leaky logics” within standardised practices (Howie, 2020, 684). Thus Howie (2022, pp. 681) argues that as a school principal he is required to “bring into view the ghosts inhabiting the aporia of responsibility in my professional work”.

Thus the route for teachers and school leaders to translate into practice the standards and expectations outlined in legislation and policy might be defined as a form of haunting; certain expected outcomes are required or permissible, and while they may be ill-defined (or absent), they are brought into existence and made visible through lived practice. The difficulties with the process of this materialisation was directly commented on repeatedly by the teachers I spoke to in relation to a range of different expectations they were subject to. As the quotes below indicate, they seemed to find the ways in which some schools interpreted guidelines and standards as an imposition that created barriers to teaching and learning;

“Art often isn’t streamed, and in primary that works, but when you get to year 9, people know if they are creative, if they want to do art to GCSE. It needs to be done on art ability though, not maths or English. Pupils can excel in art who aren’t necessarily academically strong. Of course I always hold up the ethos of the schools I work in, and do my best to work with the people that I am with, because it makes teaching easier”. (Naomi)

“Having guidelines in place is a barrier to teaching, particularly around the NQT (newly qualified teacher¹) induction period”. (Linda)

“I think it is about being able to think outside the box, play to a child’s strengths. You can’t just follow a programme to the letter, I don’t think that works because you need to personalise learning”. (Makena)

“I don’t think the government help when everything is so exam driven. Everybody is under pressure and SLT (senior leadership team) want their top marks”. (Emma)

“And you know others have had the same problem. You’re reinventing the wheel, but you only have the information available to you, so early career mentoring needs to be more than the (teaching) standards”. (Adam)

Looking at the comments from these professionals there is a level of negotiation that they are required to undertake to bring to life government policies via the processes set out locally within their own settings. Professional practitioners are required to move beyond the texts that frame their professional practice “into a realm of possibility, the not yet actualised or the not actualisable” (Butler, 2004, 28). They are required to translate policy and “in effect become policy” (Perryman et al, 2017, 754) by interpreting and bringing to life professional policies, discussions and discourses through their individual engagements, as also noted by Watermeyer and Tomlinson (2022) in relation to higher education academics. This process of policy translation can be evidenced in terms of mainstream education in England by the following comments offered by the participants:

“I was Ofsted’ed, well you might do something, but you have to have evidence on paper, things become a paper exercise … so there is proof that teaching plans are happening … so on paper it says a gifted and talented pupil is sitting next to someone who might be weaker. It would normally happen, but now it is on paper so Ofsted will appreciate it more (both laugh)”. (Chana)

“There’s always changes coming along isn’t there to Ofsted frameworks, curriculum etc … and actually sometimes being the very best that you can be means having the courage to discard external policies because that isn’t going to work for our children or it isn’t going to work as well as something else”. (Helen)

“As a PRU (Pupil Referral Unit) I think we need to … I wish we could sort of shake off the shackles of governmental policy and concentrate on helping these children to make the right choices”. (Matthew)

“If you didn’t follow a set routine, if you couldn’t work within the parameters set you were forgotten. I’ve had several conversations with Ofsted inspectors and felt I could show that I can take it (guidance around special educational needs) and place it in a more practice basis that works in my school”. (Pat)

Invocation of choice that works inside, or perhaps beside, regulations is a crucial part of practice and an essential part of how a teacher comes to know “who one really is”. It is through their intentional imagining and then actioning of what is required that they are able to materialise and make themselves intelligible as professionals, but also through what they do not do, what they leave undone or unsaid. As Butler frames it: “the normative force of performativity – its power to establish what qualifies as ‘being’ – works not only through reiteration, but through exclusion as well” (1993, pp. 188). Therefore, creating oneself as a teacher involves materialising the professional self in specific ways and not others. For example, caring for your pupils or reflecting upon your pedagogy as demonstrated by Saba who was an experienced SENCo and Assistant Head, when she stated: “I know a lot of people come to a SENCo role because a member of their family has difficulties … with me I love teaching and working with children”.

Alongside negotiating how to materialise a professional self that is intelligible, is the possibility for teachers to open up temporal spaces within which they imagine what provision for pupils in their schools could be, thus it is within this in-between fantasy space that other, absent possibilities can be summoned to “establish the possible in excess of the real … it points elsewhere and … brings the elsewhere home” (Butler, 2004, 217). These other absent possibilities might include imaginings of previous teachers and how their ghosts influence current practice or offer a call for change. For Gordon (2008) haunting is distinctive for producing “something-to-be-done” because it is “pregnant with unfulfilled possibility” for change (pp. 183). It is to this sense of an individual being haunted by other professionals that I turn now because “Spectres of the past are capable of communicating in the present about the future and, in doing so, launch the possibility of a different future to come” (Shaw, 2018, 12).

Personalised haunting – the haunting of identities

As noted previously in this paper, by re/imagining the work of Derrida and Butler, haunting can be identified as materialised through an ongoing dialogue between a professional and their memories of, or the stories they are told, of others. What I am tracing here are the ways in which teachers have learnt to live with being haunted, to live with and disturb their (n)ever present predecessors, or at least the stories and subsequent imaginings of them. As the comments from the teachers shared below demonstrate:

“I wanted to do things so radically from before, which is now a model of good practice in my LA. (Local Authority) … umm, the amount of resistance that I had from people within the school was … because … I replaced … I was new”. (Makena)

“Being a SENCo it was almost like ploughing my own furrow at school, by saying “I want some inset time, I want some budget for SEN”. I was told no, no, no, we haven’t done it this way. There were challenges with having a very established staff who were there for the duration. They’d say ‘this is how we do it here’”. (Kerry)

“And I remember … dad was always saying to me, ‘what have you done today’? ‘I haven’t done anything, I was just cleaning out a cupboard’. And I always remember this … when the books were sent for, there was nothing in them. I think he (her teacher) had it in for me, so it wasn’t always easy. And I thought to myself, that was awful, the way he treated pupils who struggled so I think, that was my incentive (to be better)”. (Joanna)

The materialisation of the professional self in these accounts can be interpreted as a public activity since individuals are “exposed to the gaze of others” and produce themselves in relation to others (Butler, 2004, 20). Indeed, Butler argues that individuals align themselves to each other based on a shared identity that can draw continuity, or be a breaking with, the practice of predecessors, thus resetting the conditions of identification and differentiation. Aligned to the comment made by Joanna above, Pat explicitly reflects upon a link between her past experience as a pupil and her role as a teacher; “there are teachers who were instrumental in helping me, they pinpointed that I could achieve, … and so I can now help other children and I can see a direct link through”. Kerry also mentions a previous colleague who had a positive influence on her practice:

A really influential figure at school was a man called X. He was amazing when you think about it, He had been a Head (teacher) I wish I knew more about his past. He was very outspoken, his classroom was like something I’d never seen. It had zones and areas, not tables and desks. I was influenced by him for quite a while.

In his work Derrida (1994) turns the question of existence into a question of inheritance, letting the figure of the ghost emerge as that which comes back from the inherited past to haunt someone in the present who, too often, forgets this indebtedness, thus ontology becomes hauntology (Ruitenberg, 2009, 296). This sense of existence being an inheritance is reflected within the stories from primary school teachers Joanna, Kerry and Pat shared above. I am arguing that inheritance is furthered through the ways in which teachers are haunted by the personal experiences they draw upon, particularly the ones they had when they were pupils themselves. In another example, a Head Teacher explains:

“My own experience of primary education was appalling! I loathed it, um I can remember all my friends leaving primary school to go to high school crying and I didn’t get it at all. I can only say that there was only one teacher that made me feel validated … that’s not to say I’m damaged goods but I look back and I do often say I never want children to leave here feeling like I felt when I left primary school”. (Helen)

While, the very experienced teacher Naomi explicitly uses the term ‘ghost’ when she offers a powerful testimony about how she feels past experiences with teachers are still present for her:

“I hated junior school very much, it didn’t help when I had this awful woman who was my teacher Mrs A. … She sort of latched onto people’s weaknesses. She was obviously a very gifted teacher. (said in a sarcastic tone). I remember Mr W. who was a nice teacher, he put a mirror in my desk and said ‘I want you to always look at that when you open your desk to remind yourself that you are special’. I remember vividly the teachers, the smells from my schools, I mean that woman (Mrs A) she was … I used to feel angry, but when I grew up … (I realised) she obviously had a lot of emotional problems. … You know, the ghosts were still there following me and reminding me how inadequate I am. I remembered all the stuff that had happened, … all that resentment and anger that I had I was right to feel pissed off, I was marginalised because my education wasn’t accessible. Now I’m different (as a teacher), I want to be different”. (Naomi)

Naomi’s narrative makes an explicit link between her past experiences as a pupil and her practice as a teacher. She can be interpreted as bringing to life her identity as a caring teacher in contrast to the absence of care ascribed to “Mrs A” through her storytelling. This relates to Butler’s work on performance because who someone is “has no ontological status apart from the various acts which constitute reality” (Butler, 2009, 471). Within the act of storytelling an identity is produced/performed, and it is one that is haunted, unshackled from time and space. As Naomi draws on emotive memories, she revisions the present (and future) by discursively visiting the past, and this haunting offers a route for her to refigure difficult experiences which “registers the harm inflicted or the loss sustained by a social violence done in the past” (Gordon, 2008, pp. xvi). In doing so, questions are raised “of time and chronology” whereby “time is out of joint” (Shaw, 2018, pp. 6, 8), it is no longer bounded, but instead desynchronised as stories of past memories are drawn into the present and retold, inviting the ghosts of the past to haunt the present and imagined futures.

This is furthered later on in Naomi’s account when she describes how she struggled at school because of poor health and felt inadequate. At this point in her interview, she explicitly uses the term “haunt” to explain how certain feelings returned to her at different points in her life, for example when she started teaching:

I realised having to teach general ed, … and these ghosts (came) back to haunt me in terms of being inadequate. It just didn’t work. … So I came back home feeling a bit of a failure really, because I hadn’t stuck at it (teaching) and I wasn’t happy. I didn’t know what I was going to do with my life.

Naomi’s account unsettles the concept of time as linear; past, present and future merge, recasting each memory in ways that can be newly understood. There is “no overarching temporality, of continuity, in place … there is no smooth temporal (or spatial) typology” entwining each moment in time, each memory is “dispersed across and threaded through one another” (Barad 2010, 244–245). The narrative offered by the experienced teacher Naomi introduced me to the idea of framing my analysis using the terminology of haunting. The power of her account and the experiences she describes go beyond the research interview and her individual performative identity, the story is no longer hers alone; as I read it my own memories of school, of teachers, of moments that have shaped me were called forth and the threads of various narratives from different people, places and times became entwined; we might interpret this as being haunted by our own and other’s ghosts.

Are all narratives haunted?

In writing this article I wanted to think through the potential for all life history narratives to exist as a form of haunting. I do this because the process of studying personal histories within educational research can be considered central in invoking spectres because of the role memory plays in the retelling of stories. In addition, narrative research also invites participants to reflectively question or trouble past experiences, which seems to directly invoke the thoughts of Derrida who points out, for ghosts to return there needs to be “some disjointing, disjuncture or disproportion” (Derrida 1994 pp. xix). Such disjuncture calls on ghosts to materialise because it provides an opportunity to question past experiences, to reflect on them and re-engage with how they are interpreted and acted upon in the present. This is a key feature of the critical reflection expected of teachers in their everyday working lives as professionals.

I suggest that this haunting can be a positive experience, guiding teachers in their pedagogy, or settling unfinished business so that individuals can come to terms with past experiences (as noted by Ruitenberg, 2009, 301). In terms of the empirical data discussed in this article, each teacher is learning to live with their experiences and memories, living with the spectres of the past, whether that is within interpretive spaces contained inside guidance documents, policies or discourse, or within personal reflections on experiences and memories. It is through individual negotiations and the ways these are brought to life through practice and the stories we tell as teachers that directs the extent to which ghosts continue to haunt us or can be laid to rest. Thus, interviewees are directly impacted upon by the process of telling their stories, they are drawn out of time and integrated within the past, present and possible futures simultaneously. It is within this moment of haunting that they can “recognise that it could have been and can be otherwise” (Gordon, 2008, 57) because:

(Haunting is) about reliving events in all their vividness, originality, and violence so as to overcome their pulsating and lingering effects. Haunting is an encounter in which you touch the ghost or the ghostly matter of things: the ambiguities, the complexities of power and personhood, the violence and the hope, the looming and receding actualities, the shadows of ourselves and our society (Gordon, 2008, 134–135).

I have sought to take such ideas one step further in the analysis of interviewees’ stories; through the re/imaginings involved in writing this article I have realised that by utilising a life history narrative methodology I directly invited participants to invoke the ghosts of their past, but also to live with haunting by asking that they recall memories, reflect on experiences and explain their stories in the present. Thus I frame haunting as more than a concept or a theoretical lens for understanding memory, it can be understood as an integral aspect of qualitative narrative life history methodologies and the role of the researcher is of a medium who invites the ghost to materialise, acting as a threshold between absence and presence, a threshold over which the ghost can linger (Ruitenberg, 2009, 305), inviting a reimagining of space as well as time.

The concept of haunting presents a case for understanding the spectral presence of the past in contemporary life, and I have used it to understand how disjunctures caused by the vagueness of education legislation and policy, or the absences of others, such as past colleagues, may be gone but not forgotten, continuing to have a troubling presence as a structuring absence; continuing to influence those who remain and their practice. Furthermore, in reading another’s narrative as a researcher, or as someone selecting a journal and reading an article, each story shared has a life of its own, it continues to be re/imagined in the moment of reading so that the connecting threads across time and space, between and within people and stories is re/configured. There is no beginning or end to these remembered narratives and no boundaries to how anyone engages with them; each story and the influence it has on an individual and their own recollections is continually reimagined.

Conclusion

In this article I have sought to engage with Derrida’s concept of haunting and reframe it as integral to qualitative narrative methodologies by drawing the concept of haunting into dialogue with the work of Butler around performativity. In sharing a wide range of direct comments from participant teachers, I frame individuals as actively involved in the process of materialising or performing a haunted identity because “a life as led is inseparable from a life as told, a life is not how it was but how it is interpreted and reinterpreted, told and retold” (Bruner 2004, 708) and each telling relies on experience and memories. While it might seem that the narratives told are individual, personal stories, they can call on known discourses, the imagined expectations of policy makers who design legislations, or the assumed views of previous incumbents of professional roles. These narratives can also contain stories of how others have acted and invite a reader to reflect on the implications this has for informing their self understanding or current practice. Therefore, the (re)telling and (re)living of a personal identity through life history narrative is always necessarily haunted by others who are materialised outside of their own time and place, re/imagined, and possibly re/integrated within ourselves.

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank all the busy teachers who took the time and trouble to actively engage in the qualitative interviews to share their experiences so generously. I would also like to thank my colleagues Jo Albin Clark, Ian Shirley and Maggie Webster who were co-researchers for the Transitions Research Project from which some of the data was drawn.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Clare Woolhouse

Clare Woolhouse is currently a Reader at Edge Hill University. After completing her PGCE, Clare worked in two secondary schools and a further education college before moving into higher education. At Lancaster University she taught undergraduate students for five years while also studying for a PhD. In 2007 she moved to the Faculty of Education at Edge Hill University. Clare’s undergraduate and postgraduate teaching relates to sociological approaches to a range of educational subjects and concerns. She supervises MRes and students, and mentors early career researchers and academic colleagues new to teaching or research in Higher Education, she is a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. Her research adopts a feminist, post structuralist approach to theory, exploring identity formation, multi-modal methodologies and pedagogies, with particular attention given to aspects of educational difference, inclusion and social justice.

Notes

1. The text in italics within quotes throughout this article has been added by the author as part of the transcription process to aid understanding.