Decentering Discourses in Teacher Education: Or, The Unleashing of Unpopular Things

Abstract

There is something fundamentally scary about pedagogy because pedagogy references unknown. Despite our best authorial intentions, no guarantees mediate our private lesson plans or public effects of pedagogical encounter. More often than not, things do not go according to plan: objectives reappear as too simple, too complicated, or get lost; concepts become glossed over, require long detours, or go awry; and evaluation rarely delivers on its promise of closure. In fact, what seems most certain is that after pedagogical encounter we must return to our plans, rethink our expectations, and theorize tensions of multiple performances that compete for our attention. In short, pedagogy is filled with surprises, involuntary returns, and unanticipated twists. For this reason, we can conclude that pedagogy ushers in an intangibility that we can identify as the uncanny. Enlightenment may well be our destination but journey is fraught with creepy detours. Critical and feminist pedagogies can help us return to these tangles in ways that move beyond impulse to manage techniques, discipline bodies, and control outcomes. Such pedagogies are meant to interpellate, or beacon, teachers and students with new discursive practices and new identities. The intent is to decenter obvious and create semiotic space for cultural critique. Given such uncharted terrains, those who advocate, construct, and practice these newer traditions are obligated to analyze discursive moments that mark these pedagogies as both different and desirable. We are also required to grapple with unfinished, puzzling, and awkward. For when powers shift, hierarchies invert, and certainty crumbles, and when boundaries are transgressed in voluntary and involuntary ways, new dilemmas, tensions, and contradictions must be accounted. My purpose is to explore feminist pedagogical experiments of a team of student teachers in a lOth-grade literature class and attend to some of engendered tensions that emerge when decentering pedagogies work to