The Crystallizing Teacher: A Performative and Critical Autoethnography of Conscientization Revealing Whiteness in Australian Schools

Abstract

I am compelled to write this thesis, called by a professional and moral obligation. This thesis is an act of love bearing witness to dominance in Australian schools where dominance is embedded and normalised in epistemologies of racism and neoliberalism. This thesis emerges from my doctoral study which began with noticing two critical incidents in my teaching career. Working autoethnographically, both critical incidents expose whiteness in my own experiences in Australian schools and neoliberalism’s stifling impact on my agency as a progressive teacher. This thesis reports on research that is underpinned by Paulo Freire’s conscientization and is performative and critical autoethnographic research. Through conscientization I recognise my integrated duality of teacher-as-researcher; I am object and subject. As teacher I submit myself to questioning, as researcher I notice and take cognizance of things, and as both teacher and researcher I intervene in praxis. I apply conscientization and aim to decolonise praxis in the field of education, enliven radical hope, and engage in acts of self, other and world transformation. Whiteness is revealed as I ask questions about my personal identity, my identity formation, and the impact of my identity on my praxis. Working outward from my praxis, I ask questions about school education in Australia that make visible the forces of dominant whiteness and neoliberalism on school pedagogy, curriculum, initial teacher education and teacher professional development. This thesis identifies an array of models of reflective practice in the field of education and I categorise these models as technical reflection, practical reflection, or critical reflection. I suggest teacher employers prefer technical models of reflection which align with purpose and procedures of neoliberalism and which typically strip both teacher voice and contextual details from data sets. Such models of reflective practice stifle the qualities of the progressive teacher that Freire lists as, inter alia, courage, humility, tolerance, and engaging in performances of armed love. I suggest technical models of reflective practice would have failed to bear witness to dominance in Australian schools, and that my doctoral research required the development of a model of critical reflective practice. This thesis reports on the model of critical reflective practice I developed which is underpinned by the purpose and methods of Freire’s conscientization, Tricia Kress’ critical praxis research, and Gillie Bolton’s through-the-mirror-writing. My application of five stages of through-the-mirror-writing generates mystories in a process involving emic and etic work. Throughout my study I was emic as I submitted myself to questioning and worked with insider knowledge of my experiences to develop performative representations of these experiences. I was etic as I returned to the performative representations, further questioning, and analysing them to develop critical understandings of dominance and resistance in schools. I performatively represent my experiences in Australian schools through mystories. The mystories crystallize deep and complex understandings of dominance and resistance. These understandings function like dendritic crystals, branching from the two critical incidents that I noticed in my teaching career and, like the process of conscientization, will contribute to a lifelong odyssey of learning. Taken singularly or as a series of texts, each mystory of dendritic crystal constructs knowledge in a non-linear, iterative, and improvisational process by rubbing against/with/through each other. This process attracts and repels, yields, and resists knowledge claims through performative representations of multiple texts written in multiple genres.