Women and Difficult Experiences in Teaching: Agency, Resistance, and Implications for Teacher Education

Author(s):

Susan Casey Walsh

Conference:

ECER 2008

Network:

10. Teacher Education Research

Format:

Paper

Session Information

10 SES 08C, Research on Development of Professional Identity

Paper Session

Time:

2008-09-12

08:30-10:00

Room:

A1 336

Chair:

Peter Gray

Contribution

In this paper/presentation, I explore agency and resistance in the context of an arts-informed research study with a group of women who explored their difficult experiences in teaching. The study took place in an urban Atlantic Canadian centre and is informed by my previous research in Western Canada (see Walsh, 2003, 2004, 2006). Drawing on a feminist poststructuralist theoretical framework, I explore too relevant implications for teacher education. This paper/presentation will include a slide show of artwork culled from the research as well as excerpts from the women’s stories and responses. The feminist poststructuralist framework is informed by writers such as Davies (2000), St. Pierre (2000), and Weedon (1997). The following three main questions will structure the presentation. First, what might “resistance” and “agency” mean from a feminist poststructuralist perspective? How does a feminist poststruturalist perspective offer alternatives to humanist views of resistance, agency, and power as identifiable, stable, coherent, and localized within the individual? Second, in what ways does the arts-informed research process itself work to provide a space for the (re)production, negotiation, and contestation of resistance and agency? (I have previously examined the research process--writing, talking, and creating artwork together--as a means of ‘resymbolizing’ and thus rereading experience. Please see Walsh, 2003, 2004, 2006). Third, what are some implications for teacher education? How, for example, might an arts-informed research process inform a critical pedagogy for teacher education inasmuch as it provides possibilities for rereading experience? And, how might feminist poststructural readings of resistance, agency, and power inform our understanding of female teachers and how they are positioned as subjects within discourses of teaching and education?

Method

The arts-informed research took place over the course of nine months. I was a participant/researcher in a process whereby a small group of female teachers met and shared difficult experiences in teaching through writing, talk, and visual art responses. After a brief period of brainstorming and discussion at the beginning of each session, we wrote individually. One woman would then share her story/writing, and we responded to it using various arts media such as paints, pastels, blocks, and fabric. The responses shaped further discussion. Artifacts emerging from the research include transcripts from the group meetings as well as the writing and visual responses created by participants. I have been developing this arts-informed research approach over the past ten years in various studies involving female teachers (see Brigham & Walsh, in press; Walsh, 2003,2004, 2006; Walsh & Brigham, 2007).

Expected Outcomes

Female teachers’ stories and artwork about difficult experiences in teaching include resistance and agency, both of which are multi-faceted, complex, and sometimes contradictory. Specific stories from the transcripts, from the women’s writing, and images from their artwork will serve to illustrate such complexity. Some forms of (what might be construed as) resistance and/or agency that emerged in the study include: being angry, sick, and silent, withdrawing, “fighting,” becoming depressed and also problem-solving at times. How can these experiences be read from a feminist poststructural perspective? The experiences of one woman, for example, who was forced to attend a seemingly irrelevant professional development session can be read as multi-faceted and complex in that she resists a faceless ‘them’ that requires her attendance at the same time as she blames herself for being “narrow-minded, immature, and childish.” Resistance and agency were not complete and uncontested positions that she could take up in straightforward and coherent ways. Teacher education requires a critical approach that problematizes teacher—and student—subjectivity. This research informs teacher education in that it interrupts cultural myths of the teacher (see Britzman, 1986, 1992, 2003) as a stable and ungendered subject.

References

Brigham, S., Walsh, S. (in press). Internationally educated teachers in Nova Scotia: Artistic representations of “immigrant women.” In E. Tastsoglou and P. Jaya, Immigrant women in Atlantic Canada: Feminist perspectives. Toronto: Women’s Press. Britzman, D. P. (1986). Cultural myths in the making of a teacher: Biography and social structure in teacher education. Harvard Educational Review, 56(4), 442-456. Britzman, D. P. (1992). The terrible problem of knowing thyself: Toward a poststructural account of teacher identity. JCT: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Curriculum Studies, 9(3), 23-46. Britzman, D. P. (2003). Practice makes practice: A critical study of learning to teach. Albany: State University of New York Press. Davies, B. (2000). A body of writing 1990-1999. Lanham MD: AltaMira Press. St. Pierre, E. (2000). Poststructural feminism in education: An overview. Qualitative Studies in Education, 13 (5), 477-515. Walsh, S. (2003). Experiences of fear and pain in teaching: A collaborative arts-based inquiry. In A. Clarke, G. Erickson (Eds.), Teacher inquiry: Living the research in everyday practice (pp. 164-178). London: RoutledgeFalmer. Walsh, S. (2004). Being homeless: Female subjectivity and difference. Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies, 2 (1), 113-143. [Available: http://www.csse.ca/CACS/JCACS/V2N1/essays.html ] Walsh, S. (2006). An Irigarayan framework and resymbolization in an arts-informed research process. Qualitative Inquiry, 12 (5), 976-993. Walsh, S., Brigham, S. (2007). Internationally educated female teachers who have immigrated to Nova Scotia: A research/performance text. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 6 (3), 1-28. Available at http://ejournals.library.ualberta.ca/index.php/IJQM Weedon, C. (1997). Feminist practice and poststructuralist theory (2nd ed.). Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell.

Author Information

Susan Casey Walsh

Mount Saint Vincent University

Faculty of Education

Halifax

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