Abstract:
This year’s conference call for papers recognises, “Education is characteristically positioned as both a harbinger of change and a cog in the social machinery sustaining systems of inequality and injustice and resisting change.” The tension between systems that maintain the status quo of inequity and injustice, versus pursuit of transformation and radical hope can be seen in teacher professional development and models of reflective practice. This individual presentation contributes to teacher research that aims to restore teacher-as-researcher agency and voice which is often eroded by neoliberal processes, and the presentation promotes interventions in teacher praxis that chart personal, professional, and political transformations toward hope.
As a method of teacher research, The Crystallizing Teacher develops critcal reflective pracitce and looks inwards at phenomena that shape personal identity, and it looks outwards at the socio-political context in which teacher and teacher-researcher work is performed. This is a method that is underpinned by an onto-epistemology of hope which comprises imagined alternative ways of being as well as the necessary struggles and resistance to attain them. The Crystallizing Teacher is underpinned by Freirean crystallizing conscientização that notices political relationships between personal identity and the professional and political worlds, and then asks questions about how the personal, professional, and political yield and resist each other. This looking inwards and outwards bears the hallmarks of autoethnographic interrogation, and it can be performed as mystories of praxis which rub against each other, or attract and repel each other, in acts of resistance and surrender.
This presentation will show The Crystallizing Teacher as a method that embraces creativity, curiosity, and criticality. It is a three-phase method of critical and performative reflective practice that includes:
(i) gathering artefacts and reclaiming stories,
(ii) performative representations and development of mystories, and
(iii) reflexivity, reflections, and collegial conversations.
As a method of teacher research, The Crystallizing Teacher develops critcal reflective pracitce and looks inwards at phenomena that shape personal identity, and it looks outwards at the socio-political context in which teacher and teacher-researcher work is performed. This is a method that is underpinned by an onto-epistemology of hope which comprises imagined alternative ways of being as well as the necessary struggles and resistance to attain them. The Crystallizing Teacher is underpinned by Freirean crystallizing conscientização that notices political relationships between personal identity and the professional and political worlds, and then asks questions about how the personal, professional, and political yield and resist each other. This looking inwards and outwards bears the hallmarks of autoethnographic interrogation, and it can be performed as mystories of praxis which rub against each other, or attract and repel each other, in acts of resistance and surrender.
This presentation will show The Crystallizing Teacher as a method that embraces creativity, curiosity, and criticality. It is a three-phase method of critical and performative reflective practice that includes:
(i) gathering artefacts and reclaiming stories,
(ii) performative representations and development of mystories, and
(iii) reflexivity, reflections, and collegial conversations.