Following writing around: encountering ethical responsibilities in pre-service teachers' reflective journals in Inidgenous education

Abstract

The setting: A university course for pre-service teachers entitled “Indigenous Knowledge and Education”. The course is a semester long compulsory unit in a metropolitan sandstone university, where the classroom is seen as a location of possibility for education as the practice of freedom (hooks, 1994). In the course, students are introduced to a mixture of theoretical concepts such as the Cultural Interface (Nakata, 2007) and Critical Race Theory (Ladson-Billings, 1998) as well as practice-based pedagogies (e.g. Yunkaporta’s (2009) 8 Aboriginal Ways of Learning framework). The course’s compulsory status is in response to a state and national setting that has begun mandating the inclusion of Indigenous perspectives into school classrooms. At a state level, teachers are being asked to Embed Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Perspectives in Schools, using a framework that aims to build meaningful relationships with Indigenous peoples, support Indigenous students, and give all students an understanding of Indigenous histories and cultures (Department of Education and Training [DET], 2011); yet the uptake of such frameworks is slow (DET, 2012).The characters: 17 pre-service Bachelor of Education (Primary) teachers who are mostly in their third year of a four-year program. These teachers are asked to reflect on who they are, who they will teach, and what they will teach in their future work as teachers, using reflective learning journals as a tool to know their/our worlds. For many of these becoming-teachers, this course is the first time that they have explicitly learnt about and been asked to reflect upon the roles that Indigenous histories, cultures, perspectives and knowledges will play in their classrooms. I, as teacher-researcher-narrator, will meet Indigenous, feminist and decolonial writers, as well as a French-Jewish-Lithuanian philosopher. More than just extras, these characters (Nakata, Moreton-Robinson, Haraway, Richardson, Barad, and Levinas, to name but a few) will irrevocably change the path that this story takes, reminding us that research “outcomes” are not inscribed in stone, but rather always partial representations (Richardson & St Pierre, 2005). By folding the writings of these writers into each other, little differences in the story that is told here become apparent.The plot: From my own first days at the university where the story begins, through two years of data “collection”, to some indeterminable point in the future where our protagonists will one day teach and learn in their own classrooms, this story folds the pre-service teachers’ reflective learning journal writings into my constructions and representations of the teaching and learning activities in the Indigenous Knowledge and Education course. Whilst a fixed and knowable endpoint evades me/us, the story searches for “effects of connection, of embodiment, and of responsibility for an imagined elsewhere that we may yet learn to see and build here” (Haraway, 1992, p. 296). In using writing as a method of inquiry (Richardson & St Pierre, 2005) and “following words around” (Ahmed, 2017), I and the students write changes in ourselves; little differences that might matter. I follow both the pre-service teachers’ and my own “wants” around, to consider the shifts that occur over the course of a semester. As one of many possible frameworks that could be used to write about these changes, I use Levinas’ work as a way of making sense of the words I encounter. Levinas writes that to act as if we were alone in the world—as if our actions had no consequences—is the greatest violence, and that instead we have an ethical responsibility to respond to those whom we encounter. Levinas cautions however, that to claim that we could ever know the other is to also enact violence, denying the other’s subjectivity by drawing them into our totality and understanding the other only through their difference to our own selves. By writing with Levinas’ ideas of violence and responsibility, I seek to move in the direction of decoloniality.The climax: By paying close attention to words, wants, and writing, is it possible to entangle connections, commitments and responsibility into our becoming-selves? What might pedagogies of remembrance, possessive logics, practicum encounters, and responsibilities to the present teach us (as teachers and learners) about working within the Indigenous education landscape?The (not) ending: How might we reimagine our work as educators as we learn to build a more embodied, connected, and ethical “elsewhere” here?