Abstract
Interested in exploring how personal stories and aesthetic modes of representing experiences can nudge open academic and educational spaces, this article/collection of particles seeks to document our encounters of being affected and called to respond to things the other has written and represented. As a way of engaging with questions about what research and research data might be and become, our attention has been drawn to stories and images from our lives that we have not shaken off – and to how, as we have opened these to the other, making once private moments public, our hiddens have morphed tenderly into a shared knowing and being. As we have acted on the call we have felt to respond we have found ourselves entering spaces of collaboration, communion, contemplation, and conversation – spaces illuminated by what we have not been able to – and cannot – set aside. Using visual and poetic materials we explore heartfelt and heartbroken aspects of our educational worlds and lives, to be present with each other and our (re)emerging personal and professional meanings. We see the shared body (of work, of writing, of image) that develops from the taking of brave steps and the risky slipping off of academic masks and language, as a manifestation of the trusted and nurturing spaces that can be generated through collaborative opportunities to gather together. These steps towards unveiling hiddens are producing in us and of us a friendship, fluency, and fluidity as we write new ways of becoming. In turn, we hope the uncovering and revealing of our dialogue in the public gathering of this journal might supports readers’ telling of their own life stories through what calls them to respond.
Highlights
As we engage in our daily lives we encounter other people, we engage in interactions, we build relationships
As Ali looks over her education-related life history she senses she has been engaged in an ongoing grappling with the wearying and ‘deadening’ systems, beliefs and practices that can exist in education and academe
More recently she has found herself joining with others to explore the metaphor of ‘zombiedom’ as a way of recognising and challenging her experiences of the narrow and more-dead-than-alive political, cultural and pedagogical viewpoints, accountabilities and restrictions that seem to be increasingly threatening and infiltrating academic and educational worlds (Ryan, 2012; Whelan, Walker, & Moore, 2013)
Summary
As we engage in our daily lives we encounter other people, we engage in interactions, we build relationships. The cries of her ‘eighteen year old preservice teacher self’ struggling on prac while her mother lay dying echo in her memory, repeating the message that ‘becoming’ and ‘being’ are ongoing changing multifarious states linked to interactions, to feeling, to responding, to caring In her stories that scatter experiences of life, longing, change, grief, loss and joy, she finds personal and professional meanings that attach themselves to her, that jar, that challenge and that offer ways of negotiating her blurred identities as parent, woman, daughter, teacher, researcher, academic, other (Giorgio, 2009; Hurd, 2010; Rolling Jr & Brogden, 2009). Sarah, witnessing Ali’s struggles in the very spaces she desires for her own work identity, has found in conversational dialogue a counterpoint, an echo, a conscience, a nudge towards questions about ‘living meaningfully’ (a term Ali often ponders in her emails) This assemblage, coming together through crisscrossing emails and skype calls, has brought with it reflection and change in the ways we continue to be produced as friends by our interactions. Perhaps she hadn’t considered what a socially relevant and responsive early childhood curriculum might look like, or the opportunities afforded by the stories and difficult times in our lives (Noddings, 1992, 2012; Richardson, 2011)
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