Imagined Worlds and Classroom Realities

Mythopoetic Provocations for Teachers and
Teacher Educators
Steve Shann
University of Canberra, Australia
Stories matter. Stories speak about complex aspects of our lives that intuitively we know
are important but for which the language of rational discourse is often inadequate.
Stories draw on archetypal structures and evocative language in ways that create
affect: they penetrate, provoke, and disturb.
This is a book of nine stories about teachers and students. A young woman sits in
her first teacher-education lecture and wonders what kind of a tribe she is joining.
A preservice teacher clashes with his mentor teacher on a practicum. A teacher and
students inhabit an online space with unpredictable consequences. Sally discovers
the Universarium. Joseph writes a story that undoes his therapist. Sylvia struggles to
free herself from an oppressive discourse about the nature of teaching. Two siblings
support and console each other through their complex inductions into classroom
lifeworlds. A secondary student goes missing and police, the media and his teachers
wonder why. A teacher-education academic wrestles with elusive ideas in order to
prepare a lecture that he hopes will make a more-than-passing impact.
Imagined Worlds and Classroom Realities
Imagined Worlds and Classroom
Realities
There is no other book like Imagined Worlds and Classroom Realities. It not only tells
nine gripping stories, but also positions these stories as part of a growing scholarship
about story-telling. It includes, as well, practical ways of using the stories in teacher
education and professional development.
Cover design by Solomon Karmel-Shann
Steve Shann is a teacher and writer with over forty years experience in
primary, secondary and tertiary classrooms.
ISBN 978-94-6209-885-5
DIVS
Steve Shann
SensePublishers
Spine
8.382 mm
Imagined Worlds and
Classroom Realities
Mythopoetic Provocations for
Teachers and Teacher Educators
Steve Shann
Imagined Worlds and Classroom Realities
Imagined Worlds and Classroom Realities
Mythopoetic Provocations for Teachers and Teacher Educators
Steve Shann
University of Canberra, Australia
A C.I.P. record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN: 978-94-6209-885-5 (paperback)
ISBN: 978-94-6209-886-2 (hardback)
ISBN: 978-94-6209-887-9 (e-book)
Published by: Sense Publishers,
P.O. Box 21858,
3001 AW Rotterdam,
The Netherlands
https://www.sensepublishers.com/
Cover design by Solomon Karmel Shann
Printed on acid-free paper
All Rights Reserved © 2015 Sense Publishers
No part of this work may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted
in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming,
recording or otherwise, without written permission from the Publisher, with the
exception of any material supplied specifically for the purpose of being entered and
executed on a computer system, for exclusive use by the purchaser of the work.
To Jo Karmel, who in so many ways made the writing
of these stories possible
… learning to teach is not a mere matter of applying decontextualized skills
or of mirroring predetermined images; it is time when one’s past, present, and
future are set in dynamic tension. Learning to teach – like teaching itself – is
always the process of becoming: a time of formation and transformation, of
scrutiny into what one is doing, and who one can become.
Deborah Britzman (2003, p. 31)
… for our old-fashioned country life had many different aspects, as all life
must have when it is spread over a various surface, and breathed on variously
by multitudinous currents, from the winds of heaven to the thoughts of men,
which are for ever moving and crossing each other with incalculable results.
George Eliot Silas Marner (p. 23)
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Preface
ix
Acknowledgements
xiii
PART A: Storytelling in Teacher Education
Storytelling in teacher education
3
PART B: The Stories
Great Expectations
Both Alike in Dignity
Agitations and Animations
Sally and the Universarium
The Two Boxes of Mystery
Sylvia’s Distress
Talk
Missing
The Lecture
11
13
29
35
51
65
73
93
101
PART C: Notes About the Stories and Provocations
Notes about the Stories
Provocations for Teachers and Teacher Educators
Bibliography
vii
119
129
135
PREFACE
1.
This morning as I was putting the kettle on to make the morning cup of tea, I noticed
on the kitchen bench a printout of one of my son’s recent university essays. This was
one was called ‘Can Winnie-the-Pooh be seen as an educational text?’. I read it as I
drank my tea.
There was a section in it where he’d drawn on Hoff’s The Tao of Pooh to discuss
the poem ‘Cottleston Pie’, the first verse of which reads:
Cottleston, Cottleston, Cottleston Pie.
A fly can’t bird, but a bird can fly.
Ask me a riddle and I reply:
Cottleston, Cottleston, Cottleston Pie.
In what I found to be a delightful paragraph, my son connected this to a game he
used to play as a toddler.
When I was a great deal younger, I owned a plastic house that had holes in its
roof. Each hole was a different shape; for example, there was a square slot, a
circular slot, a triangular slot and a star-shaped slot. The aim of the game was
to fit all of the toys that were provided through the holes and into the plastic
house. The toys were different shapes, and only corresponded to their particular
roof slot. The square toy, for example, didn’t go through the triangular slot.
The lesson, according to my son (and Hoff) is that Things Are As They Are; it is
important to know your own capabilities and limits in life and you shouldn’t try to
be something you’re not.
It is frighteningly tempting, now that I’m an academic working in a modern
university, to try to be something that I’m not. The university wants me to be a
researcher at the cutting edge of the latest educational trends and technology, but I’m
not. It wants me to be an expert ready and able at a moment’s notice to make some
public comment on the latest educational issue, but I can’t. It wants me to conduct
longitudinal quantitative research that will bring in grant money and is likely to have
an impact on educational policy, but I don’t. When I try, I’m like a fly trying to bird.
Instead, I am a teacher who has wanted, for the last forty years since I first
began teaching, to know more about how to set up the right conditions for learning.
John Holt once wrote: ‘Birds fly, fish swim; man thinks and learns’, and in many
ways my teaching life has been about trying to understand how to create the right
conditions for learners to do what comes naturally. A part of this has been a desire
ix
PREFACE
to free myself from superficially attractive but ultimately fruitless discourses around
student motivation and performance.
I am a thinker. I’m not sure that I’m a particularly powerful thinker; my mind
meanders, ponders and mulls rather than analyses and grips. But I’ve always needed
to think, in particular about the connection between human nature (what is it that
moves us, that causes us to act as we do?) and the classroom. John Holt again. And
Spinoza, Nietzsche, Deleuze, Winnicott, Jung and many others.
I am a reader. My thinking is nourished by what I read, mainly in literature and
philosophy, though I’m an expert in neither. Writers help me find words for what
I’ve come to know.
I am a writer. I need to write in order to make sense of things, or in order to make
enough sense that I form a better relationship with the world as I experience it. When
I write, the complexity becomes manageable. Writing helps me to understand and to
act. My PhD thesis was called ‘Mating with the world’ (Shann, 2000); writing helps
me to connect with the world.
I am a storyteller. From the moment I discovered the capacity of a story to shift
a student’s or a class’s mood, to create a connection to something mysterious and
potent, I’ve wanted to tell stories. Our world is grounded in mystery; stories, it seems
to me, are our intuitive connection to what our rational minds cannot encompass or
comprehend.
2.
This is a book of stories and for some readers the stories will be enough. Any
commentary from me (including Part A) will not only be superfluous, but runs the
risk of robbing the stories of their potential to work in unpredictable and unintended
ways. Those readers should skip Part A and ignore Part C.
Perhaps, though, there are some who would like to hear more about my claim
that a certain kind of storytelling has a role to play, in scholarship generally and in
teacher education in particular. Part A is for these readers.
And there may be teachers or teacher educators who would like to know more
about the background to each of the stories, or who want suggestions about how
these stories might be used in professional development or teacher education. Part C
is for these two groups.
3.
The cover image is Rembrandt’s ‘Aristotle with a Bust of Homer’.
I saw this painting a couple of years ago in the Met in New York, and the first
thing that struck me was the deep thoughtfulness in the philosopher Aristotle’s eyes
as he reaches out and rests his right hand on the bust of the storyteller Homer. He
seems more than lost in thought. He’s also full of feeling, wondering perhaps about
the place of poetry and mythology – with their evocations of beauty, love, courage,
truth and the good – in his thinking about the world.
x
PREFACE
Then I remembered that Aristotle was a teacher. In fact we can just see the image
of his most famous pupil, Alexander the Great, on the medallion which hangs from
the chain around his neck. Aristotle’s left hand is touching the chain, representing
(perhaps) Aristotle’s connection to the world of action, power and the everyday.
These two – the mythopoetic represented by Homer’s bust and the political
represented by Alexander’s chain – are the teacher’s worlds.
We teachers necessarily pay attention to everyday necessities and realities – the
bells, routines, timetables, expectations, demands, complexities, resistances, power
dynamics and so on. At the same time, we try to stay in touch with the values that
brought us into teaching in the first place, and which animate our best moments in
the classroom.
The stories in my book are stories of teachers living in the tension between these
two worlds.
xi
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
My first debt is to my students. All of the stories have been shaped, in one way
or another, by what we’ve experienced together. I owe a specific debt to my three
co-authors of ‘Both Alike in Dignity’, CeCe Edwards, Libby Pittard and Hannah
Germantse.
Many people responded to early versions of these stories and their feedback was
invaluable. These included many students (sometimes in tutorials, often in emails
after they’d read one) and many colleagues (J.D. Wilson, Charlotte Liu, Affrica
Taylor, Jo Caffery, Kathy Mann, Misty Kirby, Anita Collins, Iain Hay, Jen Webb,
Janet Smith and Anna Hutchins). I owe a particular debt to Rachel Cunneen for
her comments and suggestions, for our ongoing discussions about the nature of
mythopoetics, and for continually encouraging me to use more of my own voice.
Giles Clark – the Giles in ‘The two boxes of mystery’ – was my supervisor when
I worked as a psychotherapist, and his gentle and intelligent proddings were both
deeply helpful and unforgettable.
The story ‘Both Alike in Dignity’ was published in the English teaching journal,
English in Australia (Shann et al, 2013). Part of ‘Agitations and animations’ was also
published in English in Australia (Shann, 2010), as was parts of ‘Sylvia’s distress’
(Shann and Cunneen, 2011). English in Australia is the national journal of AATE,
the Australian Association for the Teaching of English (www.aate.org.au/).
The story ‘Sally and the Universarium’ was first published in Changing English
(Shann, 2014b). Details about the journal can be found on the Taylor and Francis
website (www.tandfonline.com).
xiii
PART A
STORYTELLING IN TEACHER EDUCATION
STORYTELLING IN TEACHER EDUCATION
1.
‘Are you Steve Shann?’
The keynote speaker had just finished the conference opening session. I was
about to join the hundreds of delegates as they left the hall and made their way to
morning tea when I felt a tap on my shoulder.
I turned around.
‘Steve Shann?’ a scowling middle-aged man said again. I was sure I’d never seen
him before in my life.
I nodded.
‘Sit down,’ he ordered, verbally pushing me back down into my seat. ‘I want a
word with you.’ I sat. He sat down next to me.
‘I’m a deputy head teacher in a large government school here in Sydney,’ he
began, his chin thrust forward. ‘I’ve been a teacher for a while and I thought, before
the last summer holidays, that perhaps I’d got a bit stale, that maybe it was time to
do a bit of reading to freshen me up. I saw your book, School Portrait, in a bookshop
and bought it thinking this might be the thing. So, on one rainy day on my camping
holiday, I started to read it. I read 20, maybe 30 pages, and then I threw the book
across the tent and said to my wife, “This prick wouldn’t know if his arse was on
fire!” I was furious, really angry. All these platitudes about teaching and learning and
none of them applicable to the real world.’
I opened my mouth to reply but he shot me a glance that said he wasn’t done yet.
‘I was furious. But, for some reason,’ and suddenly his voice softened, ‘I picked
the book up again the next day and read it right through. I got drawn into those
stories, and there was one part that had me in tears. I was deeply moved. I was
hoping you’d be here. I want to talk to you about it. I want to talk to you about those
kids you wrote about, and what they did, and how they managed. I’m really glad
you’re here, because I haven’t stopped thinking about those stories and what they
mean.’
What is it about certain kinds of story that has the potential to have this kind of
impact? Is it that we all just like a good yarn, that it’s a pleasurable diversion from
the realities of everyday life? Do school kids like being read to, or hearing stories
after lunch, because it means there’s less time in the school day for the less fun stuff?
It’s possible, but I don’t think so.
I think stories matter to us for two reasons. Firstly, they can speak about (or allude
to) complex aspects of our lives that intuitively we know are important but for which
the language of rational discourse is inadequate. Secondly, because of the way they
are structured and languaged, stories have the capacity to penetrate, to move, to have
an impact, in deep and significant ways.
3
IMAGINED WORLDS AND CLASSROOM REALITIES
They acknowledge and speak to life’s complexity; and they have the potential to
penetrate.
2.
The curriculum theorist James Macdonald (1995) suggested that there are three main
ways in which scholars attempt to understand complexity: the scientific, the critical
and the mythopoetic. The scientific, he said, is aimed at explaining for control
purposes. The critical is aimed at reducing illusion in order to emancipate. The
mythopoetic engages with the mystery; it draws on ‘the use of insight, visualisation
and imagination in a search for meaning and a sense of unity and well being’. (p. 179)
The three methodologies (science, critical theory and poetics) are contributory
methodologies to a larger hermeneutic circle of continual search for greater
understanding, and for a more satisfying interpretation of what is. (p. 180)
These three methodologies, he suggested, are collectively aimed at ‘providing
greater grounding for understanding’ (p. 176) of a world which we know is far more
complex than our minds can possibly comprehend.
I like to imagine that Macdonald’s inclusion of the mythopoetic represents a
moment in our scholarly history when there is a shift from an exclusively rational
structuralist perspective to a post-structural sensibility.
The structuralist imaginary sees a world characterised by a single narrative with
atomistic individuals and groups (teachers and students, for example), some at an
early developmental stage (students) needing to be inducted by others (teachers) into
a workable way of seeing and being in the world. It imagines space (the classroom,
the staffroom) as a collection of closed and contained systems, susceptible to
structural analysis and measurable outcomes. It assumes the existence of established
hierarchies and relationships.
The post-structuralist imagination sees a quite different picture. It imagines space
(a classroom, a staffroom) as an open, contingent, fluid and chaotic site containing
not a single narrative but many. Instead of given identities, it imagines identities
shifting and being shaped by context, discourse and circumstance. It imagines
multiple intersecting life-trajectories coming in and out of connection, affecting
and being affected by common worlds with complex and fluid interactions and
relationships. The post-structuralist imagination suggests that we come in and out
of awareness of the myriad flows and shifting rearrangements, and we never know
them all completely. Life is, to a significant extent, shaped by the invisible, the
chaotic, and the complex.
This post-structural sensibility allows us to see more complexity. To a significant
degree, however, educational scholarship is still stuck in structuralist ideas about
fixed truths and stable identities. Exclusively rational versions of Macdonald’s first
two categories (the scientific and the critical–emancipatory) have such a hold on our
more public and institutional thinking (in universities, in schools, in the press, in our
4
STORYTELLING IN TEACHER EDUCATION
public debates) that the mythopoetic tends to be marginalised, excluded, undervalued,
despite a capacity to include in its purview aspects of what is unavailable in more
rational discourse. Macdonald, at least, thought so.
… non-scientific curriculum theory is a mystery to most educators … It is a
mystery because it deals with the mystery. (p. 182)
The book (School portrait) that upset my conference colleague was, to a large
degree, an attempt to draw on intuition, imagination and metaphor to see more
deeply into the experienced world. It was an example, I suspect, of a mythopoetic
attempt to understand teaching. This is the methodology of the novelist and
the poet, a methodology that attempts to unearth particular aspects of a studied
phenomenon: its invisible underbelly, its ordinary affects, its specificities. ‘The role
of imagination,’ writes Maxine Greene (1995, p. 28), ‘is to awaken, to disclose the
ordinarily unseen, unheard and unexpected.’ It is what Margaret Somerville (2007)
has called a methodology of postmodern emergence.
The poet Rilke had a particularly apt phrase to describe the ordinarily unseen,
unheard and unexpected. We exist, he said, in the presence of ‘rustling resonances’.
(Dowrick, 2009, p. 220)
My room and this vastness
wake over a darkening land, – as One. I am a string,
stretched tight over broad rustling resonances.
Things are violin-bodies
filled with murmuring darkness …
Mythopoetics seeks to allow for (though usually only by hinting at) the rustling
resonances. In each of the stories in this present book, there are many invisible
resonances present: the lingering affect of the father in the first story, Susan’s
complex non-school life in the second, the struggle with loneliness for Andrew in
the third, and so on. Resonances like these are present in all our teaching lives.
Different writers use different phrases to allude to these rustling resonances.
Kathleen Stewart (2007) has called them ‘ordinary affects’. Doreen Massey (2005)
talks about an open interactional space of loose ends and missing links. Deleuze
and Guattari have their own versions which I draw on in some of the stories. The
philosophic tradition out of which psychoanalysis was born has its particular way
of talking about the invisible. The point here, though, is that story has a capacity to
include, through hints and allusions, through tone of voice or unconscious gesture,
an elusive complexity.
3.
A story, then, attempts to tell us something about rustling resonances. It also attempts
to create them. My conference colleague threw the book across the tent, and later
5
IMAGINED WORLDS AND CLASSROOM REALITIES
was moved to tears. My education students, when I tell certain kinds of stories in
lectures, talk about being upset, energised, worried, surprised, consoled, angered,
reassured or unsettled.
Anna Hickey-Moody (2013), drawing on Spinoza, Deleuze and Guattari, has a
useful way of explaining how an aesthetic object makes an impact. A work of art,
she says, is an assemblage, ‘a bloc of sensation’.
A bloc of sensation is a compound of percepts and affects, a combination of
shards of an imagined reality and the sensible forces that the materiality of this
micro-cosmos produces. (p. 94)
These shards and forces contained in this micro-cosmos (in a story, for example)
create an imprint on the body/mind of the viewer/reader. Art has ‘the capacity to
change people, cultures, politics. Art is pedagogical’. (p. 91)
Other scholars agree, though they use different language. Maxine Greene (1995,
p. 44) says:
… literature, unlike documentary material, resonates. That is, the words mean
more than they denote, evoking in those willing to pay heed other images,
memories, things desired, things lost, things never entirely grasped or
understood.
Malcolm Reed (2011) talks about the ‘semiotic traffic’ that travels between people
when stories are told, how what he calls ethnographic fictions function as connectors,
mediators, bringing the author and the reader together, giving readers access to
others’ worlds and affording opportunities to reflect freshly on their own. Stories, he
says, evoke, provoke and engage ‘whereby readers correspond to experiences coded
in the text with feelings, imaginations and understandings’. (p. 35)
Laurel Richardson (1997, p. 73) writes about the way this kind of writing
penetrates.
Voices do not deeply penetrate when they are interview snippets or homogenised
story (re)telling. They do penetrate more when the voices become ‘characters’
in dramas, but most deeply when the voices become embodied, take form, as
legitimated coauthors, writing different meanings in differing styles, rupturing
‘our’ texts …
She uses lyric poems to tell ethnographic stories, but the point she makes applies to
all mythopoetic forms.
… lyric poems are consciously constructed through literary devices such as
sound patterns, rhythms, imagery, and page layout to evoke emotion. Like the
lived experiences they represent, poems are emotionally and morally charged.
Lyric poems concretise emotions, feeling, and moods – the most private kind
of feelings – in order to re-create experience itself to another person. A lyric
poem ‘shows’ another person how it is to feel something. (p. 180)
6
STORYTELLING IN TEACHER EDUCATION
There is a story in Herman Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game (1943), which speaks
to this aesthetic affect. Knecht is the Rainmaker in an ancient tribe. One night the
villagers look up and see what appears to be a collapsing of the stars in the night sky.
Immediately, there’s panic, a kind of group madness, as the villagers are confronted
with a catastrophe beyond their minds’ capacity to comprehend. The panic starts to
spread and the Rainmaker realises that he must act.
Up to the moment he reached the group, Knecht had hoped to be able to check
the panic by example, reason, speech, explanations, and encouragement.
But his brief conversation with the tribal mother had shown him that it was
too late for anything of the sort. He had hoped to let the others share in his
own experience, to make them a gift of it. He had hoped to persuade them
that the stars themselves were not falling, or not all of them, that no cosmic
storm was sweeping them away. He had imagined that by such urging he
would be able to move them from helpless dismay to active observation,
so that they would be able to bear the shock. But he quickly saw that there
were very few villagers who would hearken to him, and by the time he won
them over all the others would have utterly given way to madness. No, as
was often the case, reason and sensible speech could accomplish nothing
here.
Fortunately there were other means. Although it was impossible to dispel
their mortal terror by appeal to reason, this terror could still be guided,
organized, given shape, so that the confusion of maddened people could
be made into a solid unity, the wild single voices merged into a chorus.
But there was no time to be lost. Knecht stepped before the people, loudly
crying the well-known prayers that opened public ceremonies of penance
and mourning: the lamenting for the death of a tribal mother, or the
ceremony of sacrifice and atonement in the face of perils such as epidemics
and floods. He shouted the words in rhythm and reinforced the rhythm by
clapping his hands; and in the same rhythm, shouting and clapping his hands
all the while, he stooped almost to the ground, straightened up, stooped
again, and straightened up. Almost at once ten or twenty others joined in
his movements. The white-haired mother of the village murmured in the
same rhythm and with tiny bows sketched the ritual movements. Those
who were still flocking to the assemblage from the huts at once joined in
the beat and the spirit of the ceremony; the few who had gone off their
heads collapsed exhausted, and lay motionless, or else were caught up in
the murmur of the chorus and the religious genuflections. His method was
effective. Instead of a demoralised horde of madmen, there now stood a
reverent populace prepared for sacrifice and penance, each one benefiting,
each one encouraged by now having to lock his horror and fear of death
within himself, or bellow it crazily for himself alone. Each now fitted into
his place in the orderly chorus of the multitude, keeping to the rhythm of
7
IMAGINED WORLDS AND CLASSROOM REALITIES
the exorcist ceremony. Many mysterious powers are present in such a rite.
Its greatest comfort is its uniformity, confirming the sense of community;
its infallible medicine metre and order, rhythm and music. (pp. 446–447)
‘It’s infallible medicine metre and order, rhythm and music.’ The mythopoetic form.
It casts a spell. Our educational world could do with some spells which encourage us
to act together more mindfully within the complex worlds of classrooms.
4.
Many of the stories in this collection are about secondary English teaching, and
a number of these are about English teachers wrestling with different notions of
why we ask our students to read certain texts. Do we read To Kill a Mockingbird to
analyse its language and structure, to ferret out its buried meanings, or to understand
the world a bit better?
Maxine Greene (1994, p. 456) has no doubt it’s the latter.
We know now that we are not asked to seek out buried meanings in Toni
Morrison’s Beloved (1987) or in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1962)
or in Albert Camus’s The Plague (1943). We are challenged to bring each text
alive in our experience, to allow it to radiate through consciousness and open
up new perspectives on the lived world.
This (if you’ll excuse the inexcusable hubris) is how I hope my stories will be read.
I have not written them as containers for buried meanings, and I’d be embarrassed if
they were subjected to the kind of analysis all-too-common in our English classrooms.
I hope, instead, that they’ll operate as mythopoetic provocations, drawing attention
to complex aspects of our teaching lives and creating their own rustling resonances.
8