Whilst my research methods were rooted in constructivist, interpretive approaches, my reading was opening up new ways of thinking suggesting a rather different landscape to the one I had first envisaged. Continuing in this metaphorical frame, Kaplan (1996:144) comments that:
… increasingly, as part of an effort to avoid the abstract aestheticization of theoretical practices, the terms of cultural criticism have drawn from spatial as well as temporal concepts. Maps and borders are provocative metaphors, signalling a heightened awareness of the political and economic structures that demarcate zones of inclusion and exclusion as well as the interstitial spaces of indeterminacy.
I was interested in the idea of boundaries and limits to subject and the role played by personal epistemologies in forming such boundaries. I began to consider the spaces created by boundaries: within and without. How were these spaces formed? Were they imposed externally or created internally or a mixture of both? Were they visible or invisible spaces, designated or indeterminate? I began to consider how this idea of space and, in particular, indeterminacy might provide a lens through which to explore the PGCE training year and student teachers’ experiences of that year regarding their developing personal epistemologies of subject.
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However, when I looked back at what I had written about my early ideas regarding subject boundaries and the spaces emerging, it was interesting to see that I had begun to characterise these spaces in terms of polarities: visible or invisible; designated or indeterminate. Johnson (1981:viii) in her introduction to Dissemination by Jacques Derrida, explores Derrida’s critique of Western philosophy which:
… has always been structured in terms of dichotomies or polarities: good vs. evil, being vs. nothingness, presence vs. absence, truth vs. error, identity vs. difference … These polar opposites do not, however, stand as independent and equal entities. The second term in each pair is considered the negative, corrupt, undesirable version of the first, a fall away from it. Hence, absence is the lack of presence, evil is the fall from good, error is a distortion of truth, etc. In other words, the two terms are not simply opposed in their meanings, but are arranged in a hierarchical order which gives the first term priority, in both the temporal and the qualitative sense of the word.
It seems that it is the tension between polarities that has the potential to be productive and generative because if something has been favoured and given prominence then something else must have been suppressed and overlooked, so ‘we should try to glimpse the ‘trace’ of what has been silenced or ‘othered’’ (MacLure, 2005:286). MacLure (Ibid.) notes that, for Derrida, this is ‘an ethical stance of responsibility to the ‘other’: that is to whatever remains silent, unthought or ‘untruthed’ so that presence can come into being’. If I applied this ethical stance to an examination of the development of student teachers’ personal epistemologies then it would seem that it is the ‘invisible’ or hidden discourses which influence and shape thinking which need to be explored through this productive tension. What had been privileged in the experiences of these student teachers and what had been silenced? How far did the PGCE confound or confirm expectations of what it means to be an English teacher?
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Derrida described this way of looking at text as ‘différance’ (Derrida, 1982). This thinking invited me to consider ideas of presence and absence, where meaning is constantly shifting, changing and deferred. MacLure (2005:285-286) comments that ‘différance’ is sometimes referred to as ‘spacing’ and is:
The irreducible gap that allows meaning, reality, identity, to come to definition in contrast to their opposites (words, representation, otherness). But the spacing is always uncanny – a matter of opening a space between things that cannot, yet must have, existed prior to the movement of opening.
I was struck by this philosophical construct of competing discourses, either acknowledged or unacknowledged, and the potential for confusion or indeterminacy that these discourses may create. This seems particularly relevant to the current state of education and, in particular, the much-contested subject of English. Reeves (2007:60) explores this idea with regard to the creation of Chartered Teacher Status in Scotland and conflicting paradigms of professionalism:
One way of representing what is occurring is to envisage Chartered Teacher status as entering a space between competing discourses of teacher professionalism … where sites that entail sensemaking, such as enacting what it is to be a Chartered Teacher, may surface the tensions and fractures that this contestation creates.
The difficulty for beginning teachers who are trying to navigate their way through such competing discourses of professional identity and practice is that in the confusion, the ‘visible’ and prominent outcome may seem like all that matters. However, Mahony, Hextall, Gewirtz and Cribb (2006:4) comment on Reeves’ (2005) recognition of the agency that such tensions might create:
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The tensions between these competing discourses, Reeves argued, create a potential ‘space of indeterminacy’ which teachers can try to use to forge a revitalised, extended form of teacher professionalism.
It is interesting that Reeves, too, sees this as a ‘productive tension’ and one that enables agency and movement or development.