Reinventing Ourselves as Teachers

Beyond Nostalgia

Claudia Mitchell, Sandra Weber

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781135714857
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Designed for use by teachers and teacher educators, this text should help both novice and experienced teachers reinterpret their working lives. The reader is led on a path of personal exploration that goes beyond standard approaches and leads from the personal to the critical. Illustrative material is drawn from all levels, from kindergarten to high school, to illuminate issues and questions fundamental to teachers' lives. Film and literary narratives supply further case studies and contribute to the fusion of critical reflection and everyday realities that typically inform teachers' experiences of work.

Chapter 1

Childhood as a Memory Space: Teachers (Re)play School

After school I used to go to Poppy’s place to play school in her wash-house, where we lined up her father’s empty beer bottles and made them breathe in and out, and do dry land swim with chest elevator, arms bend upward stretch, running on the spot with high knee raising. We also gave them tables and asked them to name and draw the clouds, cirrus, numbus [sic], stratus, cumulus, while we chanted the names, cirrus, nimbus, stratus, cumulus… We made them learn the mountains in the mountain chains, too—Rimutaka, Tararua, Ruahine, Kaimanawa… And we strapped them, saying sharply, ‘Pay attention. Come out here.’ The beer bottles stood in a row on the bench facing northwest, lit golden by the rays of the setting sun shining through the dusty little window. Sometimes if we broke a bottle, we looked through a piece of glass at the golden world. (Frame, 1991, pp. 42–43)

This memory of playing school is taken from the first volume of the autobiography of the New Zealand novelist, Janet Frame. It operates as a type of signposting for events to come. In the course of the autobiography, we follow Frame from her childhood days through to her experiences in secondary school and teachers’ college where she, like the beer bottle student, also ‘breaks’. The reader becomes aware of her imminent breakdown during a scene from her probationary year of teaching. In the midst of a visit to her classroom by a school inspector who is supervising her, Frame simply walks out of the classroom and out of the school—never to return. Immediately thereafter she has a complete breakdown and is hospitalized. In the film An Angel at My Table, based on this autobiography, you can hear the fading sounds of the school—children singing and chanting, a teacher’s voice—as Janet walks, shoes in hand, across the playground and out on to the street, her bare feet a further act of transgression. In the film the beer bottle teaching scene vividly depicts and foreshadows the idea of breaking and fragmentation. As we see in the following excerpt from the screen play, teachers and schools are associated with this breaking.

POPPY : Faster, faster! Up on your toes, Dot Mather!
They stop running on the spot.

JANET : We might see if they know their New Zealand mountains, Miss Evans.
Poppy and Janet look sternly at their pupils.

JANET : Excuse me, Miss Evans. Sally Oates! Pay attention!
Janet lifts the Sally Oates bottle out in front of the other bottles.

POPPY : You’ll have to stay in at playtime, Sally Oates, and write out the mountain chain.

POPPY : I think we should have geography now, Miss Frame.

JANET : One hundred times!

POPPY : Smack her!
Janet lifts the Sally Oates bottle and smacks it. She drops the bottle. It smashes on the floor. Whoops! Poppy claps her hands, and Janet makes a bell’s ding-a-ling noise.

POPPY : Class dismissed! (Jones, 1990, p. 12)

We have included this scene of playing school for its symbolic significance, as well as for its more literal suggestion that memories of childhood play can relate to adult work. Frame’s return, in her autobiography, to the beer bottle scene from her childhood highlights the significance of re-playing school—playing it again—in the same way that we might re-play a scene from a film or a ‘play’ from the Super Bowl or a World Cup match. When we play it again, we better understand what comes later. Or we understand what led up to something; or we see a particular detail or event differently in hindsight.

For Frame, there is a symbolic value attached to the inventiveness of playing school with beer bottles. Although the image of a piece of broken glass one of her ‘students’ held up to the setting sun seems to foreshadow the shattering of her world, it also becomes a golden lens through which imagining a better life becomes possible. Indeed, it is not that long after she has been hospitalized that word is received from Britain that she has won a prestigious award for her collection of short stories, The Lagoon and Other Stories (Frame, 1961).

At a more literal level, the scene of young Frame and her friend Poppy playing school depicts an activity that many teachers (and non-teachers) remember doing as children. The ways that children play at work—be it as a nurse, doctor, teacher, librarian, or business executive—tell us something about how they are socialized into certain occupational roles. Such memories also provide insights into how childhood experience contributes to adult identity. For our purposes, Frame’s account serves to highlight the potential significance of childhood as a memory space within which to engage in studying ourselves as teachers.

Retrieving and Recounting Childhood Memories of School

It is a poor sort of memory that only works backward. (Lewis Carroll)

What can we learn about ourselves as teachers by going ‘way back’? How can the raw material of school-related memories become central to studying our work as teachers?

Throughout this chapter and the ones that follow, we advocate remembering as a social activity to be done through individual and group work. Some of the prompts we use might loosely be called ‘other people’s memories’. We use other people’s memories of teachers and school as an approach to doing memory work for several reasons. First, because there are many people who claim not to have any early memories, the memories of others can act as a type of memory jog for them. We are also interested in the ways in which memories of school can be seen to run beyond the personal to include the social. Other people’s memories can take us out of our own idiosyncratic remembering, and into broader issues.

Working with childhood memories of school, however, is also about not remembering, not recording particular events in the first place and so on. Working with what we remember and what we have forgotten speaks to the present as much as it does to the past. When it comes to teachers’ memories of school, the raw materials are abundant. We focus in this chapter on three types of memories:

• memories of playing school;

• painful memories of learning something;

• memories of teachers.

We will treat each set of prompts separately, but begin with a general reading guide for looking at childhood memories of school (box 1.1) to provide a context for reading personal memories.

Contextualizing Memory Construction

Recounting memories in a social context may contribute to constructing these memories a particular way. Indeed, the very purpose of and audience for the retellings may colour what is told in the memory account. For example, an adult might retell a particular memory from his or her early school days as a way to reassure a young child who is going to school for the first time. The memory may not have otherwise been that important, but it is told for its relevance to the moment. As another example, we might cavalierly dismiss a memory of a childhood crush as ‘childish’, or pretend not to remember it simply because it isn’t ‘cool’ to own up to that sort of memory.

Sutherland (1997) cautions about ‘the well-used anecdote’—the memories that we tell about ourselves over and over again:

Box 1.1

Guide For Reading Childhood Memories of School

1 Age in relation to remembering school

• from what time period are your earliest memories of schoolrelated episodes?

• what is the relationship between the age of the rememberer and the time remembered? (Do older people remember situations from an earlier period more readily? Do males and females differ in your group in terms of how far back they go with memories?)

2 Recounting memories

• who is recounting the memory?

• to whom and for what reason?

• which memories do you tell over and over again? Why might that be?

3 Memory as mediated by the accounts of others

• which memories are stories you have heard over and over again?

• what are the conditions under which you hear these memories repeated?

• how do you feel about hearing these memories repeated?

4 4 Forgetting

• are there incidents from school that you remember but which your friends or family members don’t remember?

• are there incidents that others remember but of which you have no memory? Why might this be?

5 Vicarious experience (witnessing) and memory

• are there incidents that happened to someone else in school but which are vivid in your memory?

6 Emotion

• what emotions are attached to the memory?

• how do you feel about other people’s memories of school?

7 Gaps and absences

• what’s missing from the memories in the group?

One begins to recognize those items that have become part of a person’s regular lore, told to amuse, or to make a point about the ‘good old days’, or to emphasize to today’s youngsters ‘did I ever have it tough as a kid.’ Each has been told many times to its narrator’s family and friends. These stories are perhaps true in essence, but the fine honing that comes from constant reconstructing, retelling, and polishing also removes them farther and farther away from the reality that they are supposedly portraying. (p. 21)

As an example, we know a retired school teacher who is now greatly in demand as an archivist and raconteur of school stories in her local community. Certain of her anecdotes have become official history, and as such, are practically cast in stone. Similarly, there are less public anecdotes—family stories, for example—which also have a type of ‘official’ status. How have some stories come to be such well-used anecdotes? What is the story of our school days that we tell most frequently? Why this one? How do the multiple retellings contribute to our official history of ourselves as learners and as teachers? These can be important questions for self-study. What does their retelling contribute to our sense of self or to our collective mythology of teaching?

Finally, what we remember, as teachers, about school may also be influenced by the fact that we have chosen to teach. There may be a certain type of ‘self-interest’ at stake, so that we have a vested interest in remembering school a certain way.

Memories of Playing School

Many people remember playing school, which makes the phenomenon an excellent point of entry for self-study. We offer the following prompt around playing school (box 1.2) as ‘a way in’ to early memories of school. We have used this prompt in a variety of ways in our work with teachers. In some cases, teachers have written their responses individually and then explored them in small groups with other teachers. In other cases, teachers have simply used the protocol as a way to bring the memories to the surface during small group discussion. In either case, the idea that we can learn from other people’s memories as well as our own is central. The prompt can also serve to structure discussions about ‘not remembering’. For some teachers, there is nothing to remember; they didn’t play school! Is there any significance in not playing school? What kind of play activities took place instead of playing school? Are there differences in how ‘players of school’ and ‘non-players’ relate to what actually went on at school? If themes of authority, control, helping and knowing can be found in playing school episodes, are there other kinds of play where similar themes can be found? These are questions that ensure that rememberers and non-rememberers encounter each other’s experiences.

When we initially pose the question, ‘Did you ever play school?’ in our workshops and courses, some teachers are surprised. What could possibly be significant about such innocuous childhood play? It is just what they played, like hide-and-seek or hopscotch. Some people may think they have nothing worth remembering because it is not dramatic enough. Others forthrightly declare that they have no such memories (of playing school or any other early memories of school), noting that they have managed—successfully—to block out all early memories of schooling because it was so painful. These reactions are important because they remind us that recollections that deal with childhood can depict unhappy lives. Some memories really might be too painful to recall in the public circumstances of a workshop or class. As one of the interviewees in Sutherland’s (1997) study responded, ‘My childhood was so awful I don’t even want to think about it. Even your asking the question has upset me’ (p. 8).

Box 1.2

Playing School Prompt

Describe an early memory of playing school. Your description could include:

• a detailed account of where you played and how often, how old you were;

• who and what you played school with;

• how the play was organized;

• what you and other children did;

• how you felt about playing school;

• how the game usually started;

• how the game usually came to an end.

Is this the first time you have thought back to these experiences since becoming a teacher?

What meaning do you think that has now in relation to your work as a teacher?

Some teachers have ‘confessed’ to playing school, as though there might be something embarrassing about admitting to engaging in such a ‘school-oriented’ activity. Others have quite pleasurably ‘come out’ in their memories of playing school, going into great detail in describing ritualistic events—who got to be the teacher, who the students were, the positioning of certain objects such as chalkboards and desks, the role of recess and so on. Their recollections include memories of teaching younger brothers and sisters, other children in the neighborhood, teddy bears, dolls, cats and dogs. In many cases they talk about the pride of actually teaching something to somebody.

Martha’s Story of Playing School

Consider this account of playing school written by Martha, a teacher of more than 30 years and a grade 2 teacher—by choice:

My memories of early days are of isolated instances with no sense of how old I was when they happened. I think environment and possession of articles influenced how and what one played. Disregarding imagination that is.

When I was 5, I received a doll for Christmas. With her came a box of handmade clothes—everything from bunting suit to winter coat, rubber boots, dresses, slips, sweaters, etc. That of course, influenced my play because I had something to dress and redress Daisy in as opposed to having one doll with one outfit that is not easily removed. My one vivid memory of that play is of having a clothes line the length of the kitchen laden with her wardrobe and Dad or my brother trying to walk underneath it.

One girl who lived next door came to play with me when I was young. A memory there—she wanted to play nurse and various dolls had to be bandaged or cured or whatever. I never put in such a miserable afternoon! Nursing wasn’t for me.

When I should have been too old for dolls, I was given one plus a package of patterns—so I could learn to sew. I cannot figure out how old I was—maybe 12 more or less. I did not make clothes—Mom made them. Nancy was a Christmas present and I think I pla...