What if rationalists wore sombreros? Some transformative possibilities for teacher education

Abstract

In his poem ‘Six significant landscapes’ Wallace Stevens invites us to contemplate the possibilities of transformation when we move beyond the perceptual and conceptual constraints of a particular world-view and ‘identity’. The notion of identity as fluid not fixed is supported in the works of cultural theorists (Said, 2003) and critical pedagogues (Gee, 2001). Teacher education holds potential as a site for social and individual transformation, a process that necessarily involves interrogation of the self and identity/identities. Such transformation may be manifested in all participants in the education transaction, students and teachers. In this paper we will draw on our experiences of co-teaching a module in a pre-service teacher education course that aimed to introduce students to key concepts in gender education and the construction of identity. The combination of disciplines that we brought to this venture (educators and researchers in music and arts curriculum and generalist curriculum and pedagogics) and the subsequent negotiations, reflective dialogue, professional interchange, interpretations, constructions and re-constructions that we encountered in this process provided a forum for the interrogation of our beliefs and understandings about self, as teacher, teacher-educator, and colleague. We suggest that the playing out of our negotiations with and for students provided rich possibilities for social and personal transformation for the students enrolled in the module. The paper will provide a context for the interrogation of the nature of collaborative teaching and the potential transformative possibilities offered through inter-disciplinary collaborative teaching for both students and academic staff. This will be achieved through drawing on reflexive narrative, description and analysis of teaching and learning strategies, and student commentary