Montage on Autobiography
Derek Michael Bunyard
King Alfred's College, Winchester
Paper presented at the European Conference on Educational Research, Edinburgh, 20–23 September 2000
Summary
This paper describes a pedagogic intervention conducted with first year undergraduates in which montage was used as a representational device for exploring autobiographical work. In the analysis that follows, the location of students within the dominant ethos of their programmes of study is used as the starting point for commentary. Three origins are s/cited: a pre-E.R.A. initial teacher training course, its post-E.R.A. equivalent, and a combined honours programme in Education Studies in which the montage work was developed.
Part I
Pedagogy and Institution
If one likens all pedagogic operations to the establishment of lawful systems, then each pedagogic form becomes both the site of an institution and its citation. Two of these are of particular significance to the interventions described here. The context for the first was a B.A. in Education with Subject Study - a course designed to confer qualified teacher status (Q.T.S.) after four years of study, while the second was a B.A. in Education Studies - a non-Q.T.S. course within a combined Honours programme (1). In both cases, the interventions took place within the first semester of the first year of the course and had, as their focus, biographical and autobiographical content.
Within the large and successful four year course students were provided with a generalised introduction to their vocation through an initial study of what was called ‘primary practice’. As an aid to introducing themes that would be developed later through formal lectures, the section guide for tutors suggested that the study should be initiated by requests for students to reminisce about their own schooling. These personal experiences were to be supplemented by directed reading of relevant autobiographical texts, such as Lark Rise, or Kes, and would be followed by a series of formal lectures on teaching style and school organisation (2). Finally, students would be set an assignment which demanded that they ‘reflect upon the wider educational significance of their personal experience’. The planned trajectory of tutor intervention involved, therefore, a move away from what was personal and familiar to students so that the real focus of the section could be developed: an abstract typology of pedagogic relations predicated upon a vocationally driven ideal of practice.
It was generally conceded that these review activities were not very productive of educational insight, and it was also recognised that on rare occasions a student might misunderstand the tacit rules of speaking out and reveal more of themselves than was required. Yet these disadvantages were not deemed to be significant enough to warrant a change to the section plan. Over many years the view held by successive Primary Practice co-ordinators was that it offered a less abrasive start to the course as a whole than one immediately launching students into a series of formal lectures. Supporting this perspective was that fact that most students accepted this process without complaint; they returned assignments in which their own experiences were re-presented as illustrations of the typology they had been taught. Low marks were generated either by a failure to apply an appropriate typological component, or by mounting observations so banal as to unwittingly trivialise the typology itself. There were only three instances of direct opposition to the process during some seven years - each occurring at the point of assessment. They were expressed in personal, non-theoretic terms - and in every case resulted in questions being raised about the student’s vocational suitability (3).
This reconciliation of the majority with a process of self-loss is remarkable, and attests both to the strength of the rhetoric of vocational sacrifice within the institution and to the majority of students readiness to accept this. The citation of their own experiences had been co-opted by tutors to serve as the pretext for generic treatments of pedagogic normality, and more profoundly, as material that could be re-sited within the institution of a pedagogic symptomatics. The work of the tutors was to lead the students through a process in which they first isolated and then enframed their experiences so as to re-present them as the figural contents of a pedagogic tableau; to this would be appended their reading of the ‘symptoms’. The sensual, emotive, and even dramatic trappings displayed by some of these tableau were largely ignored - conceived as inevitable residues of the process leading towards proficiency in abstract pedagogic discourse. This was essentially an initiation into the work of vocational self-objectification - a process leading eventually to recognition of self as pedagogue - as a teacher (4).
All this took place before the impact of the Educational Reform Act (1988) had significantly changed the parameters within which these courses were authorised by central government. One of the first casualties of the re-organisation when it came was the induction through autobiography; few tutors regretted its passing. What remained was the rhetoric for which it had once served as the first building block - the notion of the teacher as a ‘reflective practitioner’ (5). During the last years of the pre-E.R.A. course this had been presented to fourth year students as a refinement of the ideal of vocationalism. With most students now near to fulfilment of their vocational goal, it had posed little threat to the more abstract constructions promoted by earlier parts of the course. Tentative re-inscriptions of the particularities of self within what had become accepted norms of conduct began. If evaluations are to be believed, the sense of vocational self-expansion and extension that followed provided some of the best educational experiences of the course (6).
The post-E.R.A. planning took several iterations before tutors felt that they had achieved a sufficient degree of compliance to meet the challenges of OFSTED inspections (Office for Standards in Education). Much more time was now spent in presenting prescribed or semi-prescribed content and in order to meet additional requirements for work in schools, the time allocation for college-based teaching was reduced. The effects were destructive of the previous notion of vocationalism and how it should best be fostered. Rather than students being granted time for self-confirmation within this ideal - through seminar and discussion work - they were now immediately confronted with curriculum instruction that would be directly applicable to their first teaching practice. Diagnostic typologies were discarded in favour of an increasingly atomised list of curriculum and pedagogic skills that had to be acquired and then demonstrated in school settings. Had personal reminiscence been retained as an initial feature of ‘primary practice’, the degree of self-abnegation required would probably have become intolerable (7).
The reconfiguration of self as professional object moved away from an ideal of competence backed by a polite sense of personal integrity and goodwill towards fellow professionals and children, towards a more schizoid state of affairs. Heightened pragmatism entailed that a unitary conception of 'the ideal teacher' - reflective or otherwise - was hard to sustain within the course process. Students now had to find mental 'space' for an image of self as the source of a multiple pedagogic agency - one continually broken into smaller fragments under the pressure to refine competency and the quality of outcomes. The time previously spent at the end of the course on reflective practice had now to be spent on ‘top up’ courses detailing the latest evolutions of government policy (8). Students had to reconcile themselves - if they had not already done so - to a conception of their role that was not only defined outside of the institution, but was also shifting, almost menu-like in its representation of the teacher's role.
This vocationalism, and its subsequent replacement by a competency based teacher model, lacked an equivalent within the non-Q.T.A. course - at least initially. Conceived originally as a bolt-hole for the educational theory being driven out of the vocational programme, the course in Education Studies had been constructed around the assumption that the theoretical treatment of education was most appropriately conducted through a study of those disciplines thought to offer relevant insight into educational processes: history, sociology, psychology, ‘child development’, and - for good measure - philosophy. To quote from the 1992 validation document:
The study of education does not comprise a single distinctive form of knowledge, but rather draws heavily on the social sciences, philosophy and history.
However, with the experience of teaching the programme, it became clear that these assumptions had to be challenged, and the course team opted for an early re-validation in 1994. In the intervening two years tutors had gained an understanding of the curious nature of student (and tutor) experience on modular Combined Honours programmes. Depending on each tutor’s own self-definition, there were two principal sources of dissatisfaction. For those retaining allegiance to the larger teacher education programmes, discourse about the ‘disciplines’ was now sited outside of the central focus provided by work in schools. For tutors not so encumbered there was the frustration of knowing that the study of pedagogy could and should amount to more than the application of theories generated in other fields of study. The students themselves had other problems. For those transferring from the vocational course there was the painful task of learning how to over-look that which was now absent - a life for them within schools (9). For all students there was the atomised experience of modular programmes. Like post-E.R.A. courses in teaching these denied students sight of an easily achievable self unity at the end of the course, but although much less pressured, they were the more confusing for their lack of an equivalent to the classteacher as model.
What had to be offered through the 1994 re-validation was, therefore, a new ‘home’ and a new sense of agency - a body of practices and principals in which both the students’ and tutors’ experience of education could became central to their study of education in general. Led by Dr. Nigel Tubbs, the course team put forward a version of the entire Field which, in its revised structure and content, mounted a radical critique of the central position previously assumed for the ‘disciplines’. Student (and tutor) progression was now to be conducted through the analysis of educational experience, through an engagement with theory (not simply that deemed to be ‘educational’), and through the mounting of educational critique: content-led design was eschewed. But although the new design was successfully revalidated the new discourse structure was immediately brought into question by the first module taught after re-validation; one that featured the analysis of educational autobiography. What students were prepared to cite, and where tutors wished them to site themselves, was in conflict.
Part II
Autobiography and Representation
The dimensions of the problem were easily stated. Perhaps as many as a third of students never lost a preconception that the module’s content was to be a descriptive review of school types. This expectation located their own descriptions of the schools they had attended within a trajectory of progressive generalisation similar to that actively encouraged on the pre-E.R.A. teacher education course. However, since this hoped for outcome never materialised, there was irritation with tutors who persisted in approaching this subject matter so obtusely. And, even for students with no such preconceptions, there was incredulity at attempts by tutors to direct their attention away from obvious ‘educational’ content towards an analysis of the experiences they had encountered in these settings (10). To this rebuttal by student groups should be added a third factor: individual tutors felt varying degrees of competence in contesting these expectations and, more importantly, replacing them by viable alternatives that were in line with the new aspirations of the course.
It was decided that each tutor should be allowed the freedom to develop an individual response to autobiography in relation to the group of students they worked with and the course aims for the first year: the analysis of experience. This resulted in diverse plans being developed, tested and, subsequently, a group decision to break up of the unit into a set of ‘mini-modules’, each of three weeks duration. This pedagogic structure offered both students and tutors a means to distance themselves from the intensity of autobiographical study should they so wish. The theme was now used to explore the reading and writing of academic texts related to autobiography, the presentation of personal experience to an audience, the involvement of educational concepts within fictional and non-fictional biographical accounts (using, for example, Orwell’s 1984), and what was to became the construction of autobiographical montages (11).
The identification of montage as an appropriate technique for working with autobiographical material and the analysis of this experience began with informal thinking about the place of representation and narrative later in the course. Initially, it was simply assumed that autobiography would be essentially a process of self-narrativisation - a domestication and institutionalisation of each student’s sense of self agency. The problem of re/construction relative to an audience was left out of this assumption, but this simplification did not remove all obstacles. As many as half the students in any one group lacked familiarity with literary genres, and so a self-reflexive approach to the structuring and selection of content could not be taken for granted (12). Equally, even where there was such familiarity, the complexity of causation associated with autobiography made the use of linear plotting questionable, even to students intent on writing ‘for themselves’. If simplistic accounts of personal agency were to be avoided, probably some non-literary technique was required in order that students might more easily achieve representations that allowed them to problematise their own location and citing within the educational processes they experienced.
Despite the simplifications involved in this view, and the lack of any identifiable technique, it was already apparent that this new autobiographical work would explore the appropriateness of single meaning, would question the ‘framing’ of states of affairs described by students and the closure of possibility inherent in them - would be, in other words, both critical and educational. However, there was clearly a danger that leaving matters at this point would result in simply substituting one crass pedagogic move for another. Brow-beating students into a re-examination of cherished beliefs about themselves and their previous experience would not be conducive either to personal insight or to engendering a capacity for sustained self-questioning - in fact, rather the reverse. Unless this work could be controlled and directed by the students themselves one would be offering students little more than the experience of student teachers on the pre-E.R.A. course.
This evaluation led to a revision: self-narrativisation - writing the self - entailed a form of spectatorship of the self - a form of self-objectification - what followed? Perhaps at the very least a recognition that the ‘feel’ of individual experience would tend to contradict the loss of possibility inherent in adopting a single viewpoint upon a past self. This would always offer, therefore, the temptation of a unified form of subjective experience. How was this to be countered by the students themselves? Which ever technique was adopted (assuming that a technique could achieve this much) had to confer on students both the satisfaction of representing the closures involved in self-construction and the possibility of alternative self-educations. This suggested a more exact prescription of students’ autobiographical work within the setting of the Education Studies course. Rather than acting like puppets within a tutor’s educational Punch-and-Judy show, or taking on the role of self-confessing noviciates, students might be better engaged if their own productive capacity was foregrounded; their autobiographical studies would become a study of their personal dealings with representation - their styles of interpretation, production, and maintenance. But there were again dangers with this essentially hermeneutic approach.
It therefore seemed appropriate to make pedagogic attitude and assumption the new focus for analysis - by turning students into tutors of and about the self, not only would a sense of audience be introduced but also an ethical dimension. In relation to the production of autobiographical representations intended for others, this seemed the essential - yet previously missing - final component. A direct interrogation of the processes involved in creating the frames/limits that their representations relied upon was now required of the students. Rather than seeing their representations as somehow existing prior to - or apart from - the experience of education, students would now be taught to see cultural/educational work as a signifying process in its own right. Their own material practices in relation to autobiographical representation would be recognised as supporting and moving forward a burden of representation that belonged to them alone in the first instance.