Teacher‐writer memoirs as lens for writing emotionally in a primary teacher education programme

Abstract

This paper examines student teachers experiences of writing emotionally through the lens of teacherwriter memoirs. The participants were ninety-nine postgraduate student teachers in a sociology of teaching module in an initial primary teacher education programme in the Republic of Ireland. Analysis of journal responses indicated how student teachers shaped and reshaped their emergent identities through discourse, memory, emotions, and personal biography and along a values-action continuum.Individual freedom was evidenced in moving towards danger and new ways of doing things. Conformity was evidenced in maintaining the status quo and familiar ways of doing things. Implications for teacher education renewal and reform are discussed. IntroductionThere is a long history of research on writing emotionally and identity in social discourses (Barbalet, 2002;Calhoun, Rojek & Turner, 2005;Denzin, 1992Denzin, , 1989Denzin, , 1984 Ellis & Flaherty, 1992;Goleman, 1995;Hochschild, 1983;Kemper, 1990;Lupton, 1998;Rosengeil & Seymour, 1999), and a comparatively more recent history in educational discourses (Clandinin, 2005;Clark, 2001; FlorioRuane, 2001, Hargreaves, 2002Lyons & LaBoskey, 2002;Loughran, Hamilton, LaBoskey & Russell, 2004;Strong-Wilson, 2006). One of the stories told in writer's lore is that Aldous Huxley, the English novelist, author of Brave New World (1932) once advised a budding writer that a white page and a sharp pencil were the pre-requisites for a good writer-a visceral metaphor for splicing the emotional vein, releasing memory, writing subjective, lived experiences, and building identity capital. This metaphor reminds us that all writing is a dialectical tick-tacking between notions of self and emotions at any given time in any particular milieu.While there have been a number of positive developments in initial primary teacher education related to curriculum renewal and development in the last decade in the Republic of Ireland, the official discourse continues to privilege structural matters related to teacher quality, demand and supply (OECD, 2005). In counterpoint to other leading scientific and knowledge-based economies, there have been no major debates and controversies about teaching and teacher education as a technical problem, a problemsolving problem, or a policy problem. There have been no paradigm wars about reflectivity, constructivism or diversity, notwithstanding their centrality in the Primary School Curriculum (1999).One of the outcomes is that little research exists on the ideological, moral and emotional dimensions of teaching and teacher education. What is especially missing is a significant corpus of research on teachers ' "substantive, attitudes, values, beliefs, habits, assumptions, [and] ways of doing things" (Hargreaves, 1992, p. 219).The research project reported here examined how, and in what ways student teachers bridged memories of their own childhood experiences through the prism of teacher-writer memoirs with scenes they are currently experiencing as student teachers in a pr...

The Emotional Dimension in Becoming a Teacher

“…Thoughtfully designing the assignment, monitoring and engaging in critical feedback are essential conditions to trigger critical deliberation and refl ective inquiry . An example of the biographical approach is found in the work of Deegan ( 2008 ). Building on autobiographical understanding and narrative inquiry, 2006), he analyzed the memoirs of 99 Irish primary student teachers' experiences with "writing emotionally", defi ned as, as a way of coming to know, understand and act on the emotions through writing, including sympathy, imagination, intentions, feelings, and thoughts of self and others.…”