In response to a colleague who found these passages resonated …
… there can be no learning without conflict, but the conflict that animates learning threatens to derail the precarious efforts of trying to learn. (3) …Essentially, individuals must interfere with one another because having to learn and having to teach is felt as interference, as a battle of wills, and a confluence of influence. Paradoxically, significance, or better, education, is made from this conflict. And this conflict … feels like a crisis of the self … (8) Felman insists that meaningful learning begins in the scramble to make sense of the force of knowledge. Significant learning, she suggests, is first felt as a threat and a surprise. (9) … If learning to teach wavers on this precipice of meaning – of making sense of both personal and historical crisis – this is very difficult work, far more complex than the measures we have made. Indeed, the very measures for success and failure in learning shut out the existential crisis that allows the newly arrived their chance of becoming. (9) … While there is always more than one discourse in any institution, one discourse on learning to teach predominates and readers will see its problems over the course of this study. It is a discourse that sustains a particularly isolating and competitive view of the individual: a discourse that confines asking for help, or having feelings of helplessness, vulnerability, ambivalence, and dependency to a sign of individual weakness. (11)
The second (related) theme was about pedagogical reasoning, though she doesn’t use the term.
What used to be called “practice teaching” and now goes under various names such as “student teaching,” “teaching apprenticeship,” and “classroom practicum” can become thought of differently, not quite as rehearsal for the real thing, but as the stage where aspects of the teacher’s work, world, paradoxes, and dilemmas become a resource. All this is possible, provided that the language of teacher education open itself to the conflicts and crisis that makes education ordinary. (14)
Like you those passages resonated and are marked in my copy and while I agree with your interpretation and emphasis I’d place mine elsewhere. For mime the pain is perhaps located in the moments in practice teaching when standing in front of the class than perhaps the theory in lectures – of course this is related to what we’ve come to call ‘pedagogical reasoning’(PR). I also thought of PR when reading the ideas in the second quote you use. This I feel is something the emerging research we can do would relate as we are looking at perceptions of teaching, theory and practice, and other influences on pre-service teachers emerging identity.
More so however I think I’m interested in the early years or even how this ‘pain’ evolves and is dealt with over a career and in relation to ‘places’. While I implicitly agree with Britzmans central thesis about how (pre-service) teachers bring expectations, familiarity, understanding with them into their career, I’m particularly interested in teasing out how ‘place’ influences these. I’m not sure that Britzman does this but what I am sure about is that she illuminates all the processes and issues related to teaching and identity, leaving only the necessity for someone to join it up with place theory and the spatial turn to have a productive theory.
The idea that Pre-service programs don’t prepare students for the reality of schools (pg11) is a growing avenue in the rural-ed community, however it’s not related to the ideas that Britzman talks about and remains simply instrumental, thus here we may have some of the theory that has been missing in the field. The idea of the pressure of proving oneself worth (pg 18) is another bit of theory that helps me in my rural work and possibly adds to what Britzman writes – in that I’d content there is a place dimension here and proving oneself worthy in the culture as it relates to place. This mediating the dilemma of voice is for me the central issue for rural teachers in adjusting to place and negotiating the tensions around ‘dominant’ knowledge forms and non-dominant knowledge forms.
The Ped R approach we’ve employed, the assignment research, and the idea of following up teachers over 1-3 years I think will give us a lot of material to explore the theory-practice nexus / praxis and emerging ‘teacher’ identities and their relationships to perspectives on the profession – all of course against the backdrop of public discourse. The idea of the tension between ‘progressive’ and ‘conservative’ views of teaching (pg5) related to experience is powerful for example to explain some of the ‘pain’ we receive from students at times.
I’m also excited about the coming discussion on narrative and voice as method that Britzman pre-empts. The pints in the introduction she makes about this, ethnographic hindsight and nagging thoughts all resonate personally and in the PR we’ve advocated. I’m looking forward to mining the book for theoretical and methodological ideas to use when we write about PR and in my own project where I’m employing a reflexive re-reading.
I’m wondering if the introduction to pmp is something we should have on the reading list for our preservice teachers in the seced course. It articulately outlines the root causes of a number of the issues we face in preservice teacher education, issues that we will be partially exploring in our seced research agenda and the new assignment 1. It is astonishing how from the first paragraph I found myself thinking: ‘exactly’ ‘yes’ ‘how interesting’. Britzman is so insightful. While it is a revised introduction and undoubtedly is influenced by her subsequent work (and vice versa one would assume) it Indeed achieves it stated objective of ‘filing a gap’ in pre-service teacher research and scholarship.
Against this though I can also imagine it may be a little confronting as an early reading for pre-service students and result in greater hostility and trench digging. Perhaps slightly dishonestly I also wonder if it would give away the research we have drafted and bias students work, or if we are really getting students to do what it discusses anyway through the provocations*. I imagine it would be useful later in the course and may be better placed there as something for reflection nearing the poster task. Regardless I guess a number of students will find the work as we have used quotes from it in the first assignment, and perhaps letting it be found is indeed the most authentic approach (but maybe we can subtly put it on e-reserve with the PedR stuff as well).
My only remaining reservation would be that as in the preceding ramble I’ve signaled research present and potential. This may be too honest for students who may be the subject of the research. Similary sharing ideas prior to publication, while I’d hope it is the basis of this existence, sometimes appears to be taboo for fear of loosing out in the competition of output rankings.




