Abstract
Teacher educators often wonder about how best to prepare teachers for practice within a complex rather than a mechanistic system. As teacher educators, we facilitate a transformative inquiry (TI) course in which students investigate personally meaningful topics reflexively and relationally within larger educational and sociocultural contexts. This braided piece explores our own significant experiences with TI and how these experiences inform what we do as we mentor students through their own experience. By describing our personal entry points, we foreground some of the ways in which we work together to collaboratively and continuously revision the course. By making explicit our entry points into TI, we aim to reaffirm what matters to us as educators to improve our ability to deliberately engage in effective mentoring and to affirm our connections to the passions that sustain us amidst the many challenges and pressures that we face in our practice.
There is an urgent need for teacher education programs to focus more carefully on critical reflection and perspective transformation as a central framework of learning to be a teacher (Glisczinski, 2007). As educators who are interested in the process of transformative inquiry (TI), we have taught numerous sections of an inquiry development course to preservice teachers in the final months of their teacher education program. In the course, the instructors have agreed upon the readings, the structure, and timing of activities and assignments, and the common messages we wish to highlight when we talk about inquiry. To facilitate the TI process (Tanaka, 2012; Tanaka & Starr, 2011), we begin with asking students to connect with their “path with heart” (Chambers, 2004). This involves each student unearthing salient issues about which they are personally and professionally passionate within the context of their teaching practice. Typically these are topics that they feel are relevant to their own students and therefore, topics that also matter to other educators. We then encourage them to develop broad, open-ended, unbounded questions (Henderson, 1992) around their topic, so that they have a lot of room for movement within their inquiry. They spend the course investigating their topic reflexively and relationally within larger educational and sociocultural contexts. This process is assisted by a series of mentoring sessions with the course instructor similar to graduate student advising.
As instructors of the TI course over the past 3 years, the three authors have had the privilege of walking alongside over 400 preservice teachers as they engaged with their evolving inquiries. Since the early days of the course, we met regularly to talk about how best to facilitate the often elusive, but rich process of TI with our students. Having recorded our conversations, we have used transcriptions of our dialogue to look more carefully at what we mean when we talk about TI, and why we care so much about TI as educators. As part of our own inquiry process, we began writing autobiographically around our personal pathways that led us to want to support a TI approach to teacher education. This conversation around our entry points is part of a 3-year study that emphasizes our collaboration as researchers on the larger project.
To share our stories, we draw on the practice of métissage, a creative research and literary approach that braids together gender, race, language, and place into autobiographical texts. Currently being defined within the Canadian context, métissage honors the complex fabrics of our individual stories while resisting the conventional
Šfear of mixing, and the desire for a pure untainted space, language, or form of research … [It] is a writing praxis that enables researchers and their audiences to imagine and create plural selves and communities that thrive on ambiguity and multiplicity. Métissage affirms rather than polarizes difference. (Chambers et al., 2009, p. 142, italics in the original)
This approach enables us to braid our stories together while honouring our differences, the space between our stories and the possibilities that might emerge amidst the complexity of mixing our lived experiences and influences that have shaped our thinking together. This process brings us to a place where we can voice and put into practice our shared hopes for teacher education. With this text, we create a weaving that reflects our emerging, cocreated, layered, and ever-changing understanding of the TI process. We are drawn to métissage because it is a means by which we can effectively disrupt the dominant tradition of presenting a singular voice by providing us with a platform for sustaining multivoice conversations around the complex questions in education today.
As a beginning point for understanding ourselves in relation to our students, we have been exploring our own significant experiences with TI and how these inform what we do as mentors in the course. By describing our personal entry points into the TI process, we also foreground one of the many ways in which we work together to collaboratively and continuously revision the course. By making explicit our entry points into TI, we also aim to reaffirm what matters to us as educators so as to sustain our connection to these passions amidst the many challenges and pressures that we face in our practice.
The following vignettes describe our personal entry points into our commitment to TI. In engaging with the vignettes, we remind readers that each vignette contributes to the ongoing braiding process, and so invite readers to imagine for themselves both how these stories connect and also how their own stories might interlace with ours to form multiple braidings.
Maureen’s Entry Points
On a quiet walk through the woods near my home, I picked pine needles along the path to enjoy their wonderful scent (see Figure 1). When I lifted them to my nose there was virtually no aroma detectable. As I continued to walk, I rubbed my fingernail along the outer tough coating of the needles and once again lifted them to my nose. Suddenly I was enveloped in the deep, rich fragrance of the pine tree and it was a very satisfying experience. The purpose of the walk was to quietly reflect on why, as a teacher educator, I am passionate about taking my students into a TI experience. As I breathed in the richness of the pine, I made a connection between the process needed to release that scent and the process I take my students through in the course.
The scent of pine.
As I teach, I take my students to a place where they can examine and question their deeply held beliefs. There is often a sense of discomfort and a level of emotional distress involved as they become aware of their own worldview, their often hidden fears and emotions. Like rubbing the pine needles, I help them to rub away the exterior shell that is their individual persona in order to reach a place of deeper self-awareness and self-questioning.
Through my experience as a principal, I have learned to see that everything in education is complex, and my hope is that my students will move beyond a “toolbox” approach to education. With the toolbox approach, teachers learn to expect that they can amass a variety of quick fix solutions, strategies, and approaches to teaching and problem solving. I focus explicitly on avoiding the impulse to see TI as one more tool to be added to the toolbox. By dropping this type of approach, students’ thinking will hopefully be enriched by curiosity and a willingness to dwell in the ever-changing uncertainty and messiness of teaching. I want TI to be like the releasing of scent in the pine needle, a place where students often experience some discomfort but as a result they are opened up to new richness and to a deeper understanding of their implicitly held beliefs. Rather than a reliance on a transmissive toolbox approach, the metaphor of the pine needle cultivates a more multifaceted lens or way of perceiving teaching practice.
My entry into TI occurred when I was an elementary school principal where a substantial percentage of our students came from the local Ktunaxa First Nation. There were obvious tensions between the students and often between the students and the staff. As the new principal in a school labeled “tough,” I felt pressured, due to my own expectations and the perceived expectations of others to take a firm hand and to apply severe consequences for all behavioral problems. Fights on the playground were common. The staff connected with each other at every break time in the staff room and discussed the many problems they were having with particular students. When on supervision they would identify problem students and bring them to me, the principal, to be dealt with.
On one particular day in my first year at the school, I was called to the playground by some distressed staff members and observed two large groups of students approaching one another. The tension was palpable. Insults had been exchanged between the groups of aboriginal and nonaboriginal students and it was obvious to us that a very large fight was imminent. I quickly followed crisis management protocols in my “toolbox” to restore safety to the school. First I ended recess, returning students to their classrooms, next I phoned the Board office and asked for additional adult support for supervision during all the break times. I then met with the Director of Instruction and the District Superintendent and together we worked to identify the problems that had produced the “struggle.” I thought that once the key issues were identified, the plan would involve implementing a behavior management strategy to eliminate the problematic behaviors. On the suggestion of the District Superintendent, we invited the aboriginal support workers into the process.
As I listened to the aboriginal support workers, I started to connect with the flaws in my way of perceiving and proceeding as an educator. The way in which the aboriginal support workers spoke about being human rendered a tear in the fiber of my being, so that I was able to see that the problem was much deeper than I had originally conceived. Somehow I had to get beyond my “good intentions.” This realization put me into a personal crisis; I could not move. My “box of tools” had only taken me so far and now that it was not working, I felt lost.
I realized that I could no longer be in charge of solving the issues, as my “toolkit” was totally inadequate. I needed to take time to determine together with others, how to proceed. I came home and my tears flowed. Previous to this situation, I felt that my practice was built on firm ground and now I realized for the first time how narrow and biased my perspective actually was. I started a long process of identifying the factors that had shaped my worldview. Through that process, I was able to see more clearly from the perspective of First Nations people. It was in the lifting of my “cultural veil” that I was able to see the narrowness of my perspective. I started very slowly to realize that the public education system was still attempting to replace First Nations culture and traditions with Euro-western practices.
My own beliefs about First Nations people were based upon stereotypes and judgmental attitudes that I had never consciously been aware of to this point. I knew very little about the local Ktunaxa history or culture and I had taken no steps to learn more. I had assumed it to be unimportant in the business of running a school. I totally failed to see the clash of cultures and traditions and the intolerance that we as a staff had for the perspective of our aboriginal parents and students. This event occurred at a time when our aboriginal support workers were attempting to implement language and cultural programs into our school. I distinctly remember the comments in the staffroom after a suggestion was made that we greet all of our students each day by saying, “kiʔsuʔk wiǂnam,” the morning greeting in the Ktunaxa language. Some teachers were very resistant to integrating Ktunaxa language into their classrooms. They felt that they were doing enough when they taught about First Nations’ cultures in the social studies curriculum. I also remember the resistance expressed to a suggestion that we meet with Ktunaxa parents in a less emotionally laden setting than the school: “Why should we meet them at the reserve? Every other parent has to come to the school to meet with us. If we make an exception for these parents then everyone will expect special treatment.”
Before this pivotal event, my attitude was patronizing and included elements of blaming the victim. With good but misguided intentions, I had often viewed aboriginal students as poor little people in need of special love and attention or as poorly behaved children who needed shaping. Through my TI approach, I began to see them as members of wounded but deeply spiritual, powerful, and ancient nations who had a strong culture and proud history. I had understood that the brokenness stemmed from the impact of colonization and the policy of residential schools. But I was guilty of believing that in spite of the pain caused by contact and the atrocities committed by governments who viewed aboriginals as uncivilized and in need of assimilation, that somehow in the end First Nations people were better off “after contact.” These unconsciously held beliefs and attitudes had shaped all of my interactions with the students and parents to that point.
Over the following 4 years, I was very fortunate to learn from and work with a variety of people who were patient with my ignorance and who took the time to open up a very new and different way of being to me. For example, one of my deeply ingrained Western habits was to fill in empty conversational spaces with talk and to anticipate the other speaker’s words. I was deeply uncomfortable with silence. On one occasion as I repeatedly filled the silence with my words, the Ktunaxa parent I was meeting with, looked at me and said, “You sure like to talk, don’t you?” As I paused to reflect on that one comment, I realized that I had just been taught a powerful lesson.
This continuing process felt uncomfortable for me—transformation is not painless. In a number of discussions with Chief Sophie Pierre she shared her vision of education with me and I listened and attended with a more open and receptive ear. Dr. Gordon Neufeld, a well-respected developmental psychologist, deeply affected my thinking and informed my practice as I worked with students in the school. I came to understand the role of attachment in the learning process and to understand the need for establishing right relationships with students before attempting to guide or teach them. “The key to raising children is right relationships and soft hearts”(Neufeld, 2011).
As a community of learners we began a slow process to open doors in the cultural walls that separated us, to raise awareness of First Nations issues and to begin a process of learning with the First Nations parents and students. Judgmental attitudes and formulated behavioural plans were replaced with collaboration, careful listening, relationship building, and reflective thinking.
At the end of my 5 years at this school, when news of my upcoming transfer reached the community, one of the Ktunaxa parents who had spent many hours in the school over the years came to me and said, “Oh no, now we have to train a new one!” The truth of her statement made me laugh!
My passion to understand a variety of perspectives and to learn from other worldviews has stayed with me since I experienced this first of many transformative experiences. This is why I want my students to experience TI. I know at a deep level that my unconscious beliefs inform my teaching and as a result I cannot risk leaving them unexamined. As a teacher educator, I also cannot risk sending new teachers into schools before they have carefully examined where they are situated for fear that their well packed and well-intentioned toolboxes will cause harm. Instead, I want them to meet their students where they are with openness, humility, and honesty and with a willingness to be transformed by those encounters. As teachers we must always be learners and researchers, curious, questioning, reflective, and open to new ideas and new ways of viewing our world. We must continually be open to transformative experiences.
Those who seek to transform a thing, don’t want to ruffle the edges but to rend the fabric. They don’t want to tweak a few parameters; they want new parameters. (Washburn, 2008)
Diana’s Entry Points
Encountering the paralyzing question—noticing the difficulty
I recall an encounter with a question—a question that made me feel paralyzed—that was perhaps the beginning of my entry point into TI. If that was my entry point, my journey into the promise of inquiry has already persisted for 12 years. But, perhaps my journey into inquiry began when I was a small child; when my innate capacity for wonder and awe (Tobin, 2010) was not yet suppressed (see Figure 2). So maybe it is better to think of my journey as a gradual reawakening.
The awe of entering.
The paralyzing question arose in this context: A few years after completing my masters of arts degree in education, I was hired as a researcher to work on an intriguing project looking at multidisciplinary practice. In particular, we were interested in how practitioners from a variety of disciplines came together to serve children and their families effectively. The paralyzing question was posed to me several months into the research project at a time when I had been immersed in reviewing the literature on multidisciplinary practice and had spent many hours interviewing practitioners and families about multidisciplinary practice. The question was posed with enthusiasm by one of the project faculty. It was simply this: “So, what are you finding out?”
I was perplexed: I knew that the faculty person realized that I had not yet finished reviewing the literature and the audio recordings of the interviews had not yet been transcribed, let alone analyzed. I did not understand how she could ask me to say anything about what was being “found out.” I felt terribly uncomfortable and told her that I really felt like I could not say anything. She smiled at me and said, “I’m sure you’re noticing things. What are you noticing?” The invitation was compelling, and yet I was not able to fully appreciate its significance at the time. Looking back, I think I was particularly uncomfortable with the question because I had learned that knowledge was arrived at in a particular way through the application of particular procedures (formal analysis) for asserting knowledge. My colleague had asked me to bring myself into the knowledge-making process. I did not realize at the time, that this question was to provoke a long journey of inquiring into the broader question of “knowledge.”
Understanding the difficulty: Encountering other ways of knowing
Six years after my encounter with the “paralyzing question” I started to feel increasingly troubled by my research practice. I wondered about unusual voices that were not finding their way into our published “findings.” I wondered in what ways employing other research procedures would engender different “findings.” I began a doctoral program in interdisciplinary studies in education and hoped that through the course of my studies I would learn to do research differently. What I hoped for most fervently was that the discomfort I felt around my research practice would dissolve.
One of the required courses in my doctoral program was a course called Theorizing Knowing. The course asked students to contemplate what theory and knowing mean and how they are related to educational practice, context, language, and culture in ways that guide learning, practices, and relationships. The year in which I took the course it was taught by an indigenous scholar (Dr. Lee Brown) and the majority of the course readings were by other indigenous scholars. Early in the theorizing knowing course I found myself frequently feeling emotional, often being moved to tears by what I heard or read. Two quotes I recorded from early in the course offer a sense of the tone set by the instructor (Brown, 2005):
What you think a human being is will determine how you teach them.
Our energy for learning resides in our values, and when our values are crushed, we lose our desire to learn.
As the weeks went by, I strove to understand what was provoking my emotional responses in the course. Over time, and through a variety of provocative encounters with others through reading and in discussions, I began to realize that I was encountering different ideas about knowing—ideas that disrupted the traditions upon which I had been raised; the traditions that permeated my way of thinking about what it meant to know and where knowledge comes from. In particular, I was learning that other traditions, such as indigenous epistemologies, embraced emotion, and spirit within knowing. That set me on a 4-year dissertation journey of exploring ideas about knowledge that resulted in me not dissolving my discomfort with my research, but finding a way to be comfortable with the irresolvable difficulties inherent in doing knowledge work. Over that 4-year period, I gradually developed a new relationship with knowledge; one that questions the assumption that what needs to be known can be known, and reminds me that the researcher cannot play the master interpreter and should accept instead that misrepresentation is part of telling stories, including our own (Lather, 2001). In order to open possibilities for knowing, inquiry must be sustained to invite enduring self-critique (Caputo, 1997).
As my relationship with knowledge transformed, so did my thinking around the knowledge work that teachers and researchers do. I believe that teachers, like researchers, are engaged in knowledge work—that is, the work of sharing, creating, and hopefully, questioning what is thought to be known and what might be known. My journey into inquiring into ideas about knowledge primed me to respond enthusiastically to a request to become part of a team who worked collaboratively to facilitate a TI experience for preservice teachers through a compulsory course.
I aim to help students in the inquiry course connect with the idea that philosophical traditions both inform and deform our thinking (Minnich, 2005), and to commit to doing the difficult work of becoming aware of formative, implicitly held assumptions (Thayer-Bacon, 2003), so that we can disrupt the hold of the traditions that no longer serve us well. The inquiry course is a place in which we—the students and myself—can strive to become aware of some of the implicitly held beliefs that influence our being-knowing-doing so we can wonder together which of the beliefs we hold might need to be revised so that we can think better.
One of the key things that influences how I approach mentoring students in inquiry is to share responsibility for beliefs. I share with students a diptych of quotes (abbreviated from longer quotes) from Delpit (1988), “We see and hear with our beliefs” and Minnich (2005), “We never think alone.” Together, these quotes remind the students and I that no one of us is singularly responsible for our beliefs. If we share responsibility, it helps to disrupt our urge to be defensive because we then accept that our beliefs, opinions, perspectives are not about us as “persons.” Instead, our beliefs, opinions, perspectives—our knowing—is culturally informed and changes over time and with experience. Thus, we can practice holding our beliefs and ourselves lightly.
It is also very important to me that students feel welcome to bring their whole selves into the teaching–learning encounter. My own experience as a student, for the first 19 years of formal education, compelled me to disregard my emotional and spiritual self. Thus, in the inquiry course, I not only speak about the importance of inviting emotion, spirit, imagination, and intuition (per Thayer-Bacon, 2003) into the inquiry space, but also share videos and stories and engage students in activities aimed at experiencing these aspects of knowing in what we do together. For many students, their experience is not dissimilar to what mine had been: it is the first time they have felt the invitation to bring their whole selves into the learning experience.
What I hope “transforms” through the TI process centres around cultivating an enlarged perspective. I hope that students will develop a knowing stance that is open to divergent perspectives because they recognize that although self is the instrument for knowing, the knowing self is historically and culturally situated and limited by experience. Thus, we need to turn to one another in order to think well (Thayer-Bacon, 2003). Being “open” to divergent perspectives is not merely about a “live and let live” kind of attitude, however; it is about opening oneself to the risk of letting other perspectives disrupt our interpretive horizon (Caputo, 1987). Caputo’s (1987) words remind me frequently to resist the urge to foster “knowledge” about inquiry and help students arrive at conclusions about their inquiry topics, and instead to offer ideas and experiences with which students might resonate so as to create openings into the process of engaging in inquiry.
Michele’s Entry Points
Like whirligig seeds from a maple tree falling through the sky (see Figure 3), my process of TI has layers that cycle back through the complexity of my life stories. As a second or third seed falls, each cuts through the layers differently, visiting the same stories from a new perspective. This recursive process is key to the deep reflexivity required of a TI approach. The following personal vignettes describe significant entry points for me into the TI process, as I engage with the themes of social justice and racism.
Spirals of a whirligig.
Interview (circa 1999)
I left the principal’s office feeling excited and uncertain. I had been substituting for the past year and really wanted this job. Grade 5 would be a challenge after teaching kindergarten for so long, but teaching had been passed down to me—my parents, grandmother, and aunt—all had been teachers. I worried about having answered the interview questions well, especially given the unspoken rules that seemed to lie under the surface. This was a district with both a high incidence of kids living in poverty and a large African American population. It was common to hear the district being labeled as “inner city”—an act of othering that held underlying issues of race, class, and social space. As a substitute teacher, in a position of White privilege, many of my discipline decisions were assessed in terms of racial bias. I became increasingly aware of the inherent racial bias that all teachers hold. How were my own actions biased by my understanding and/or assumptions of race? What was equity within this structure that continues to bring forward the historical privilege of Whites?
Riot aftermath (circa 1967)
As I watched the race riots unfold on TV, I remembered a few years earlier, driving with my family into Detroit to visit my Gramma Alice. Although it was boring in many ways, I looked forward to playing with her paper dolls and to the magical waterfall in the apartment lobby where the musical cascades assured me that fairies were still a possibility. The pictures on the screen were in sharp contrast to these memories, and I was confused and distressed at the site of burnt out homes and destruction. My young self could not fathom the purpose of such violence and desolation that now makes more sense in the context of Black history. The news suddenly had a realness that made me sick to my stomach. My parents had talked to us about race issues, but I did not yet understand the historic violence and indignities Black people continue to endure under the progression of colonization. I was confused by how such devastation might make any sense. What were the issues of integration and segregation all about? And why, a year later, did Gramma mumble that it might be “a good thing” when Martin Luther King, Jr. was shot? Her comment alarmed me, and left me feeling that I should stay quiet. What could I do with this harshness that was settling into my bones? What part of this callousness did I bring forward into my teaching? What privilege did I have that let me choose whether or not to understand these issues as part of my daily life?
Closet tension (circa 2000)
The Grade-5 kids lined up at the door to my room—a repurposed closet, really—and I could tell that it would be a rough afternoon. The two that worried me most, I will call them Carl and Drew, were big boys and they were clearly agitated and loud. Carl was White and Drew was Black. Carl often boasted that his dad had been a member of the Ku Klux Klan. Both boys often arrived at school with a mixed bag of hunger, anxiety, boredom, and anger. On this particular day, their feelings had escalated in the relatively unsupervised context of lunch recess. That morning, I had arranged the seating at my rainbow table with care. Carl was on one end, Drew on the other, with five additional kids between. The colorful readers were laid out—open to a story about saving rainforest gorillas. But the lesson never really started. Carl and Drew were so angry that they continued to argue loudly despite my suggestion that they “leave it at the door.” This was a professional development tip based on exerting power over students that rarely seemed to work for me. The situation intensified, and as I began to fear for the physical well-being of Carl, Drew, the others kids and for myself, I eventually asked the principal to intervene.
The expectation from my teaching colleagues was that I should be able to “control” the kids in my care by keeping them physically safe, quietly attentive, and productively engaged. Given my upcoming job review, I felt anxious when I failed at this endeavor. At the same time, I felt bad that these kids did not like school. It was becoming increasingly apparent to me that reading about rainforest gorillas was not the most suitable way for these kids to spend their time. The reading content may have appealed to privileged curriculum developers, but it was irrelevant and problematic for my students in their day-to-day world. As I continued to acknowledge and grapple with the complexity of the situation, I was beginning to understand why they might not buy into the idea that learning to read was “good” for them. What was it like for Drew to be confronting histories of racism that were often unacknowledged? As a young Black person, what types of racism and violence did he face every day? Additionally, even though I was in a position of authority compared to my students, I felt isolated from the other teachers in my shifting beliefs around power and intent in the classroom. How could these systemic biases be addressed when so many educators preferred not to see them? What was blinding us? What was our responsibility?
Candy fear (circa 1970)
Head down, I ran toward my junior high campus, anxious about being late as the last bell after lunch rang out. I clutched a bag of candy to my chest, having spent my allowance on treats for my friends. As I neared the building, a group of Black girls surrounded me and would not let me pass. They taunted me, pushed me around, and called me names. I thought of the numerous recent fights that had been brawled across racial lines, the frequent fires in the girls’ bathrooms (set by whom, was not known), and became more frightened. In the end, they grabbed my candy bag and scattered, as the vice principal emerged from the building. At the time, mad to lose my goodies and relieved not to have been beat up, I had little understanding of the unspoken privilege I held or the lived experience and histories that might have fueled the girls’ actions. A visceral appreciation of the complexity of race relations was dawning on me. Given our relative positions of power, how might their aggression have made sense? What violence had they been enduring—and do they still endure to this day? In what ways did I carry my fear from this situation forward into my teaching? How might this affect my ability to have an equitable classroom?
Staff room (circa 2001)
I sat in the corner of the small staff room, listening to my coworkers talk. I had recently finished a staff development workshop on understanding poverty and felt I was becoming more appropriately responsive to my students. It was dawning on me that they might see the world differently than I did in fundamental ways. I was becoming aware of my whiteness and privilege, and how that positioning affected my relationships with students. Over her sandwich, one of the teachers was complaining about a student, saying “I don’t see why he doesn’t understand what I want, I’ve said it over and over to him. I had his mother, and she was exactly the same way!” I was embarrassed to be a teacher. What arrogance we had to think that it was our students and not us who might need to change. How could the TI process that I was learning to embody, be awakened in other teachers so that change could be more systemic? I was beginning to see attending to myself, as crucial to systemic change. How might this process be useful to and supported in other teachers?
Slave papers (circa 1980)
When I was a young adult, my dad went to Maryland to help his mother, my Grandma Flo, move from the rambling farmhouse of his youth. Grandma had raised eight kids on that land—through the hardscrabble years of depression, World War II, and postwar boom times. She was a high school teacher, having gotten her BA at the age of 50, alongside my then young father. She was also a collector, and it took days to go through the stacks of newspapers mixed with receipts, medical records, and other potentially important documents. As my dad tells the story, he went out to the backyard incinerator to deliver a load of debris to find Grandma burning official looking pieces of parchment. Concerned that they might be of value, he asked to see the papers. Hesitantly, she handed him slave ownership documentation from her grandparents—relics of a past that she had wanted to destroy.
I remember the muted tone in my father’s voice as he later spoke about this discovery. Since that first telling, it is a story rarely discussed. I have never heard anyone outside of my immediate family acknowledge this shared history. For years, I was comfortable to go along with this complicity. The shame and guilt I felt overrode my niggling sense that I somehow had to find a way to own this story. It was not until I began to really listen to indigenous people and the brutality of colonization that I found the courage to acknowledge my own ancestral past. A few years ago at a celebratory potluck, I stood up in front of a local Aboriginal community and had the privilege and responsibility to introduce myself according to local protocol. As I named my parents and grandparents, unexpected tears flowed. My ancestral beingness as part of my own beingness became profoundly palpable and I knew then that their stories were also my own. We are all inextricably linked, however subtly, to the stories of our ancestors and these connections make us who we are (Tanaka, in press). Through the echoes of my relations, I carry forward the privilege of whiteness. What else might be buried or burned? As a teacher, what is my responsibility to the shared history of our ancestors?
As I recursively attend to these interrelated vignettes, this particular spin of the seed, I know that consciously or not, I bring these stories into the fiber of who I am as a teacher. We teach who we are (Palmer, 1998). The prejudice of my grandparents and the emerging sense of equity of my parents come forward with me (see examples of this in McIntosh, 1990). I am at times distressed, embarrassed, and saddened by some of the acts of my ancestors, and it unsettles me to tell this story here. But TI asks of me, within my privilege, this kind of uncomfortable honesty. It is in this process of surfacing and facing what so often remains unspoken, that I find my way forward as a teacher–learner. As described by Hicks, Berger, and Generett (2005), it is a place of risk where I recursively meet myself, grow from those encounters, and then decide to act differently as an educator.
Through the revisiting of my own stories, I find a deeper sense of place where my actions feel more authentic. I use my past stories as a kind of compass that informs my actions as an educator. I commit to the messy business of TI within teacher education because most teacher candidates come from a place of privilege. And most, being predominantly White, have choices that people of color do not have. Part of my intent in the course is to provide spaces where emerging teachers can enter honestly into the spirals of their own personal stories to acknowledge the ancestral ground on which they stand. I hope that through the process they find their own sense of stability in the messiness of their practice and the courage to attend carefully to complex issues such as race.
Further Reflections
Our personal journeys as educators have given us unique entry points into TI. Maureen, as an administrator faced with an urgent school-wide crisis, felt pushed into her entry point. The rug was being pulled out from under, and her practical focus required that she attend deeply and immediately. In this situation, she began to consider what humanness means and looks like, to question the cultural responsiveness of her practice. Diana was nudged into TI by a question that was initially paralyzing, yet ultimately launched her into questioning ways of knowing and contemplating the importance of encouraging teachers to question inherited assumptions about knowledge. Michele entered TI cyclically through a long-term disquiet around race. Her entry had two distinct interwoven strands. One that rose from her frustrations and anger with a system that did not meet the needs of her students, and another strand that emerged from unpacking racist family history that gave her privilege while at the same time contradicted how she saw herself as a teacher.
There are common threads within our journeys. First, we incorporated deep reflexivity, paying careful attention to our particular dilemmas in order to better understand our own positioning within them. We wondered about our beliefs, intentions, and possible ways forward. We expected honesty of ourselves and tried to be okay enough in our respective, often uncomfortable, places of unknowing long enough to be open to possibilities not yet familiar. Second, we attended to our emotions. We permitted emotions to inform our knowing by recognizing and writing about the anger, confusion, sadness, despair, and frustrations of our particular dilemmas. We acknowledged to ourselves that we had these feelings, shared them with others, and have learned to see emotion as integral to knowing.
Finally, we struggled with the knowledge claims of dominant culture, and attended to finding a path with heart; a way forward that held us relationally accountable within the constraints of culturally dominant traditions that have been perpetuated through colonizing practices that we embody in numerous, complex, and often subtle ways. Interestingly, each of us has been profoundly affected by indigenous ways of learning and teaching. In her dilemma, Maureen released her need to be “answer keeper” and began to listen with a different openness and patience, building some bridges of understanding and respect. Diana began to appreciate the culturally bound nature of “knowledge.” Michele ventured deeper into attending to what she brings forward from her ancestral knowing. Listening carefully to indigenous sensibilities, we have learned to see the world differently and to also find resonance with who we really are as educators. We begin to resonate with the lens of an indigenist perspective (Wilson, 2008), where, in a way similar to how men can be feminists, we echo indigenous ways of knowing-being-doing as we engage in the TI process.
As educators, we are struck by the usefulness of the TI approach in our own practice and feel compelled to share it with preservice teachers. We see research, teaching, and learning as being seamlessly integrated and we continuously weave these common threads of reflexivity, emotional engagement, and relational accountability into our work. This requires us to be flexible and often vulnerable with our students. This means we are honest with what we do not know (e.g., what steps their own inquiry journey should look like). We model reflexivity (e.g., sharing personal poetry or journal entries in class). We share our emotions (e.g., sadness over what we have seen in schools). We strive for transparency in our practice (e.g., how the structure of our program often hinders TI). We welcome learner autonomy (e.g., we let go of being the “sage on the stage” while our students follow and share their inquires in ways they believe to be useful). This vulnerability is an ongoing site of transformation for each of us as educators.
Moving forward from our personal experiences in TI, we are able to assist our students in finding the courage to examine the conceptions that guide practice, and to enter into vulnerable places where deep learning is possible. Yet, we worry about how to support the intent and benefits of cultivating a TI approach within education. Teacher education programs are still wondering about how best to prepare teachers for practice conceived within a complex rather than a mechanistic system (Davis, Sumara, & Luce-Kapler, 2008). Because preservice teachers often believe that all the questions they had when they were in their teacher education program will be answered when they have the opportunity to practice, it is important for educators to appreciate that complexity requires the ceaseless, co-construction of knowledge (Clarke & Erickson, 2003). Our commitment to TI within the professional inquiry course promises to help preservice teachers live with the more spontaneous, irreducible, diverse, and unpredictable characteristics of teaching contexts.
TI aims to help teachers avoid falling into routine and perfunctory practice and to resist blaming others when the “tools in their toolbox” fail to effect the results they anticipated. To cultivate the responsive and flexible kinds of practitioners that we believe education practice demands, we believe that preservice teachers need experiences with living with the uncertainty that arises from the complexity of teaching practice. Through TI, teachers can work to “render the familiar strange”—to think in fresh ways about what we think we already know well (Davis et al., 2008, p. 40). Greene (1995) refers to this as wide-awakeness: a process through which careful attention, imagination, and empathy make possible the ability to believe in the existence of alternative realities.
Despite there being support in the literature for what we are aiming to do, our experience in academia does not always affirm the importance and relevance of our intent. We are trying to stand our ground in a climate that is often not appreciative, trusting, or accepting of the nuanced benefits of cultivating a TI stance for educators. Our personal commitment to the TI process serves us well in these difficult spaces. We continuously try to make transparent (to ourselves, our students, and our colleagues) the rough edges of the myriad challenges we face. How do we assess progress in the course? How do we give students autonomy within an environment that fosters educational dependence? How do we provide a space so that our students can bring the fullness of their being into the learning environment? How do we help preservice teachers look at their own beliefs and values while avoiding solipsism, so they begin to appreciate that self exists always in relation to others and that self-understanding is critical to effective learning–teaching relationships?
In addition to the practicalities of implementing the course, we wonder how to sustain an inquiry that nurtures the richness of the course we teach. We have to embody what we are asking our students to do. The challenge of the collaborative process—to dwell aright in the complexity—is not a comfortable place. We live within collaborative tensions such as the multiple and important voices on the inquiry team. At this writing, we have a diverse group of instructors, graduate students, and undergraduates working on the project who cross multiple lines of gender, race, age, and worldview. We look forward to continuing in the spirit of métissage as a way of bringing out the richness of our ways of understanding TI, with the intent of bringing these conversations forward into the public domain where preservice and in-service teachers can join us. We struggle over issues of authorship, finding the time to collaborate amidst busy academic schedules and we continuously resist putting ourselves forward in a singular voice.
We believe in the power of TI to change our classrooms and our world. To answer our own questions raised in the opening paragraphs, we care about inquiry because we have experienced firsthand the difference it can make in our own journeys as educators. It has made a difference for ourselves, our students, the families, and the communities in which we teach. Defining what we mean by TI is a bit more difficult. The often intuitive process is distinctive to each individual and the educational context in which they find themselves. Paradoxically, there are common elements that we are beginning to tease out through our process of métissage, both with ourselves as instructors, members of our research team, and the preservice teachers whose complex professional lives we hope to support.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: Funding for this project was provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.