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Preface
Before starting the PDP, I wanted to include my initial impressions, establish a positionality, and outline some considerations that I think inform the work that I hope to complete. I have assembled a few epigraphs as prefatory remarks for thinking more broadly about this process, the institution, and my overall orientation to the experience of a school-sponsored professional development program.
Untangling Some Tacit Assumptions
“I want to make a preliminary remark on the completely artificial character of this situation.” –Jacques Derrida
I call on Derrida, in this interview alone, firstly, because my own intellectual pretense goes only so far. While I do not feign to possess a command of Derrida’s theory, I find myself returning to the central idea in this interview over and over. Even with a clumsy understanding of the principals of deconstruction, I think the practice of naming that which is not named (the foundation of critical practice), and reflexivity—looking for the places where unnamed or unexamined forces are shaping an experience—should remain central to any intellectual pursuit. In that spirit, to begin, I would like to name the following:
- I am being inaugurated into this program at the ‘instructor’ level, despite two teaching degrees, nine years of experience, and several academic publications. More importantly, more personally, in my journey to become a teacher, I overcame a number of obstacles, including being told by the director of my education program that I would not become a teacher. So, to arrive in this program, as instructor, a level below teacher—after completing an EdTpa, student teaching, perfect scores on both GACE tests, feels misaligned with my professional identity and somewhat demoralizing. To me, for an institution that prides itself on being so attentive to both the importance of naming and to the complexity of human experiences (based on neurodiversity or identity difference) overlooking this detail in its constructed hierarchy indicates a certain carelessness.
- The presentation of the PDP as an opportunity for professional growth, a benevolence afforded to teachers by the institution, obscures the imbalance of knowledge production and the economic realities which compel participation. To elaborate: gathering, cataloguing, and providing rationale for teaching practices and materials that I have developed over the past 15 years (some materials and practices I began developing/compiling began during my time as a pre-service teacher) has more value to the institution, in both promoting itself as the vehicle of professional growth, and in acquiring these knowledges than it does to me. The 2% pay increase hardly counts as a fair exchange for the labor and intellectual property that the institution extracts from its candidates.
- The underlying assumption of the PDP as an insular, self-contained mechanism to grow, recruit, and train teachers denies the expanse of prior knowledge and best practices in educational research and teacher education programs across the country. Here I hope to seriously interrogate why the PDP program does not include an opportunity for training, experiences, and resources outside of EPS. It seems the existing structure could easily be supplemented and enhanced by coupling with an outside experience, which could also include a course release. By offering a course release, the institution would demonstrate its commitment to professional development and honor the time and space required for genuine reflection and artifact cultivation. That is, the labor of the PDP would not be wedged into the existing demands of the school year but breathed into a separate space set apart for growth and inspiration.
- Lastly, I want to draw attention to the mechanisms of surveillance inherent in my complicity in the PDP experience—a particular form of surveillance, captured in Bentham’s famous design—in which I am simultaneously seen and rendered sightless. To illustrate: even in this short preface, I have made my values, beliefs, even my position as a PDP skeptic visible where the PDP architects, the power of the institution itself, remains largely invisible. For example, I am not aware of any of the misgivings, doubling backs, subsequent revisions, goals for the future, financial constraints, or any number of other administrative-level details that now beset the program or the early inspirations that initially set it in motion.
On Finding Meaning and Authentic Writing and Reflection
“Go, my son, and do something worth doing.” (MacDonald 219)
Based on the misgivings noted above and what Derrida has termed the ‘artificial character’ of the PDP, I felt some trepidation about the benefits of a seemingly bureaucratic process of evidence gathering and displays of professional competence. However, as I approach almost a decade of classroom experience, I find the timing appropriate to engage or revisit my position as an educator—my beliefs and values. As such, I invoke the directive above as an invitation into an experience of writing and reflecting that might hold meaning and value for me.
The subject of the address above, Anodos (sometimes translated as pathless, sometimes as upwards), is the hero from an obscure Victorian fantasy by George MacDonald. In the story, Anodos travels east, in Fairy land, in the direction of rebirth, which is also the direction of self-discovery.
The second reason I summon Anodos, the hero, is for the way in which my scholarship on Phantastes marked the height of my own literary stimulation, excitement, and energy. In some ways, I feel like each year of teaching marks a deadening of my own relationship to way literature and writing have nurtured me. I also recall Dr. Davis, the professor who helped me first publish on Phantastes—as a pinnacle of mentorship, collaboration, and a shared excitement about literature that I have yet to recapture. During that experience, as a bright-eyed undergraduate student, I first began to construct my scholarly identity and also experienced a profound example of the possibility of transformation through literature and through writing. At my most idealistic, I might say I see something alchemical in this work. Yet all of these—Anodos, Fairy Land, alchemy, going east—exist in a world of ideas not easily categorized, surveilled, or delineated into One Note tabs.
Narrative Inquiry as Qualitative Method
“We all, novice and experienced researchers alike, come to inquiry with views, attitudes, and ways of thinking about inquiry. These histories, these personal narratives of inquiry may coincide or cross a boundary to varying degrees with the actual inquires that we undertake” (Clandinin & Connelly 46)
After noting a few hesitations along with a possible way forward, I would also like to remark on my approach to method. Instead of the model of competencies or evidence gathering, I plan to frame my experience more ethnographically and narratively. That is, I hope to situate the school, my classroom, colleagues, and students as a place and a story, using a teacher-researcher approach to organize my thinking and gather data. I plan to employ narrative inquiry as a possible method or way of ‘doing’ the PDP—as an ethnographer ‘in the midst’ (sometimes in the mist) of the teacher-researcher experience.
As such, rather than beginning with the architecture of the PDP—its domains, criteria, etc., and then trying to fit moments of practice to fulfill various predetermined categories (an implicit set of values), I want to begin with my teaching, thinking, and inquiry to see what emerges.
As an example, the above preface offers a narrative explanation of my positionality, the orbiting spheres of experience, influence, and institutions that inevitably shape my orientation to the research (reflection/PDP) experience. In brief, narrative inquiry uses story as way to interpret and understand an ethnographic context. Here I will use story to reflect on the lived realities of my teaching experience (my stories, the stories of my students, the stories of my colleagues, and the stories I might gather through various ‘field texts’ or other forms of evidence). In sum, I intend to foreground my own practices as a writer, researcher, and teacher.
At last, the qualitative approach to my work breathes a narrative exhalation against the constrictions of the quantitative instrument of the PDP taxonomy.