Session Information
07 SES 04 A, Teachers' Professional Development Regarding Social Justice
Paper Session
Contribution
This paper reports results of a longitudinal study in the framework of the government funded research project NOESIS (2010-2015) to evaluate a highly political Austrian school reform program, the “New Middle School” (NMS). The overall goal of the school reform project is to limit marginalizing processes and to improve transitions and trajectories within an inclusive school setting. The reform suspends tracking in lower secondary schools with the emphatic policy goal of alleviating the problems of transition to upper secondary and providing better educational opportunities for all. Within this study the author focused on processes involving immigrant students, known to be more susceptible to marginalization, with a keen interest in questions revolving around teachers’ experience of teaching, acting and interacting in school settings where the heterogeneous set-up of student populations appeared to pose a challenge to inclusive schooling for all. The proposed paper explores teachers’ learning within these ‘difficult’ situations, and attempts to trace, understand, and explain teachers’ learning processes by drawing on a longitudinal single case study, i.e., the story of one teacher from the onset of the NOESIS study to its conclusion, drawing on a number of interviews spread across a period of four years.
The paper is situated within the discourse on teaching and teacher competencies in ‘globalized societies’ which are characterized by a “transformation in the spatial organization of social relations and transactions ... generating transcontinental or interregional flows and networks of activity, interaction, and the exercise of power” (Held, McGrew, Goldblatt & Perraton, 1999, p. 1). In schools we catch sight of these flows most visibly in transnational flows of people, in children of immigrant families and the diverse networks of belonging and identity they introduce into everyday school life. Migration and transnational population movements not only affect people who are themselves directly ‘on the move’ but also the places in which they settle, “converting them to translocational spaces, thereby affecting in different ways all who live within these spaces” (Anthias 2008, p. 6). Migration has thus converted many a classroom to fluid social spaces that are constantly reworked through migrants’ simultaneous embeddedness in more than one society (Levitt & Glick Schiller, 2004)
The paper is interested in the inbuilt oscillation between familiarity and strangeness in the relationalities of the individuals involved in these spaces, and the learning that may or may not take place. With relationalities at the centre of interest, and with learning in mind, disagreement, incongruence or mismatch in ‘intercultural’ interactions reveals itself as an inherent property of a learning encounter, indeed as the very basis for learning, because “learning necessarily involves confronting something that is yet unfamiliar and new” (English 2013, p. xxi). The irritation or discomfort that arises in encounters with difference and otherness, reveals itself not only as inherent to the relation but also as an opening.
German educational philosophy, based on the tradition of the philosophy of experience (or phenomenology of experience, or phenomenology of lifeworld), as developed in particular by Husserl, Heidegger, Gedamer, and Merleau-Ponty, has developed a rich discourse on the experience of breach, break, rupture and discontinuity, often termed “negativity of experience” (Negativität der Erfahrung) and also “negative experience” (negative Erfahrung). Drawing on Andrea English’s (2013) outline of discontinuity in learning, which provides a sustained study of negativitiy of experience as it relates to learning, the paper attempts to make sense of the irritations and tensionalities in the ‘difficult’ zones of multicultural/translocational classrooms as teachers encounter difference and otherness, and to explore if, how, and to what extent this “negative experience” serves as a basis for teacher’s learning.
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
Anthias, F. (2008). Thinking through the lens of translocational positionality: an intersectionality frame for understanding identity and belonging. Translocations, Migration and Change, 4(1), 5-20. Atkinson, P. & Hammersley, M. (1994). Ethnography and Participant Observation. In N. K., Den-zin & Y. S., Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook of Qualitative Research (pp. 248-261). Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications. English, A. (2013). Discontinuity in Learning: Dewey, Herbart, and Education as Transformation. New York: Cambridge University Press. Giorgi, A. (1975). An application of phenomenological method in psychology. In A. Giorgi, C. Fisher & E. Murray (Eds.), Duquesne Studies in Phenomenological Psychology (Vol. II) (p. 82-104). Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press. Held, D., McGrew, A., Goldblatt, D. & and Perraton, J. (1999). Global Transformations: politics, economics, culture. Cambridge: Polity. Levitt, Peggy/ Glick Schiller, Nina (2004). Conceptualizing simultaneity: a transnational social field perspective on society. In: International Migration Review 38 (3). pp. 1002–1039. Schensul, J. & Schensul, S. L. (1992). Collaborative Research: Methods of Inquiry for Social Change. (pp. 161-200). In: M. LeCompte, W. L. Millroy & , J. Preissle, (Eds.), The Handbook of Qualitative Research in Educa¬tion (pp. 161-200). San : Diego: Academic Press Inc. Van Manen, M. (1990). Researching Lived Experience; Human science for an action sensitive pedagogy. London, Ontario: The Althouse Press.
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