My first, and only job, here, is to welcome you. The complexities inherent in this predicament are worthy of some thought. As Derrida (2000) cautions, one must confront, ethically, the mixed-messages that are effected in the “Welcome,” with which we enthusiastically seduce the stranger into our midst, by means of hospitality that is well- intended. The stranger’s welcome is, as he points out, negotiated upon the threshold where thinly concealed hostility lurks within our mechanisms for controlling the stranger’s conditions of entry, location and actions. And so it goes. The paradoxes of fields like Education, populated by means of a well-meaning “Welcome!” that is, actually, inhospitable in its effects. As Jen Gilbert (2006) notes: Hospitality is a welcome, but one that resists idealization and risks ambivalence. Can education be hospitable? That is, can education welcome, with what the OED describes as “liberality and goodwill,” whatever and whoever turns up? (26)

Educating Educators: A brief narratalogical regression

In the summer of 1982, fresh out of Teacher Education, I drove from Toronto to New Orleans to take up my first teaching job at Le Jardin Montessori School on Canal Boulevard. I remember that drive as long and as punctuated by sleepless nights. I was almost paralyzed by a persistent fantasy about mutiny. In my anxious imaginings, the children would know all too well that their teacher had never taught before, and they would, therefore, seize control, and run out of the classroom to certain freedom. As a matter of fact, I quickly learned that collectively, we knew how to do school all too well, and no one was sure what form freedom might take.

Several months into my first year, I read Sylvia Ashton Warner’s Teacher. Fascinated by her commitment to a passionate and complex affection for her charges, and to culturallysituated literacy practices, I decided that it was critical to intervene in the space of the classroom to produce and sustain a different relation to writing and reading. I introduced into my classroom a wireless social networking technology – a rural mailbox. What was critical, pedagogically, about the mailbox was that none of us knew quite how it ought to be used on location. It served as an extraordinary hub for re-mediating (Bolter and Grusin, 1999) the articulation of the children’s writing, reading, and relationships. It was my first encounter, as a teacher, with what Sherry Turkle might have called, an Evocative Object.

Educating Educators: A brief analytical speculation

I find it interesting to notice that twenty-five years later, across my many years of educational research and teaching in a Faculty of Education, I have remained affixed to a persistent exploration of the sticky relations and idealized objects that fill the awkward interval that exists between our well-hewn ‘grammar of school’ (Tyack and Cuban, 1997) and our various attachments to emancipatory ideals.

Educational issues tend to be associated with vexatious questions that arouse extraordinary social anxiety – anxiety that is perhaps all the more disquieting because its specific parameters are elusive. Discussions of ‘Teacher Education and its discontents’ typically distribute silences as readily as they make visible only particular points of view and frequently are a lightening rod that catalyzes what might be called a “state of emergency”. This anxious state, Agamben (2005) has argued, has historically served as the rationale for the invocation of totalitarian realpolitik. I am very aware of a common problem these discussions raise – a problem that has been taken up by many who write about educational issues – perhaps most eloquently and substantively by Deborah Britzman (see, especially, Britzman 2003; 2006) – and that is the importance of not ceding too quickly to the often belligerently expressed demand that one provide some kind of solution, monolithic analysis, or way out – to provide relief for the immediate disorientation caused by the acknowledgment of our difficulties.

And so in concluding my brief introductory remarks, then, I want briefly to rehearse publicly my commitment to thinking carefully about what is our relation to these novel contributions to studies in Educating Educators. How shall we stage an encounter with these texts where we might be pleasantly surprised? Eve Sedgwick discusses the significance of queer reading practices that might engender a shift from “paranoid” to “reparative” readings, as follows:

To read from a reparative position is to surrender the knowing, anxious paranoid determination that no horror, however apparently unthinkable, shall ever take the reader by surprise: to a reparative reader, it can seem realistic and necessary to experience surprise. Because there can be terrible surprises, however, there can also be good ones. Hope, often a fracturing thing to experience, is among the energies by which the reparatively positioned reader tries to organize the fragments and part-objects she encounters or creates. Because she has room to realize that the future may be different from the present, it is also possible for her to entertain such profoundly painful, profoundly relieving, ethically crucial possibilities as that the past, in turn, could have happened differently from the way it actually did. (279)

Our task, as readers and writers, here, then, is, perhaps, to take up “a challenge to learn, and not to know” (Probyn, 2000, 54).

Mary Bryson
Director,
Centre for Cross-Faculty Inquiry in Education
University of British Columbia

References

Agamben, G. (2005). State of exception. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Bolter, J., and Grusin, R. (1999). Remediation: Understanding new media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Britzman, D. (2003). Practice makes practice: A critical study of learning to teach. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.

Britzman, D. (2006). Novel education: Psychoanalytic studies of learning and not learning. New York, NY: Peter Lang.

Derrida, J. (2000). Of hospitality. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Gilbert, J. (2006). “Let us say yes to who or what turns up”: Education as hospitality. Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies, 4(1), 25-34.

Probyn, E. (2000). Shaming theory, thinking dis-connections. In S. Ahmed (Ed.), Transformations: Thinking through feminism. London: Routledge.

Sedgwick, E.K. (1996). Introduction: Queerer than fiction. Studies in the Novel, Vol. 28(3), 277-281.

Turkle, S. (2007). Evocative objects: Things we think with. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Tyack, D., and Cuban, L. (1997). Tinkering toward utopia. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.