TEACHER UNDONE by KRISTI BRUCE AMATUCCI (Under the Direction of Elizabeth A. St. Pierre) ABSTRACT A post-qualitative dissertation, this self-study follows the five-year career of a new teacher as she balances competing stresses in, around, and outside the classroom. She transacts with students, fellow teachers, administrators, governmental mandates, prescribed curricula, standardized tests, public scrutiny, the criminal justice system, parents and families of her students, her own family and friends, as well as her desires, histories, and memories. Teaching is not what she thought it was; it overwhelms her. In an attempt to escape the rigors of life as high school teacher and to examine teaching in America today, she returns to the university to pursue her doctoral degree in education, only to find that her questions about teaching multiply, becoming more complex and muddled than she ever imagined. She finds no answers, only a cascade of conundrums. The theoretical framework of this study is post-structuralism, and the author relies primarily on the work of Michel Foucault, Helene Cixous, Judith Butler, and Jacques Derrida, among others, to frame her approach. The methodology of this work is a strategy called writing to know, as outlined by Laurel Richardson and Elizabeth St. Pierre. The author writes in an attempt to untangle her multiple teaching selves; yet as she writes, she finds herself becoming more and more enmeshed, confused, confident, eager, and surprised as she follows the words that pour unbridled out of her. The work does not lend itself to neat conclusions or prescriptions for future teacher education programs. Instead, it opens spaces in which the enterprise of teaching becomes a problematic, not to be solved but to be interrogated. The dissertation—part autobiography, part fiction, part empirical study—pushes the boundaries of what sort of research is possible after we relinquish the qualitative quest for meaning. INDEX WORDS: post-qualitative research; post-structuralism; writing to know; teacher education; teacher subjectivity; performance. TEACHER UNDONE by KRISTI BRUCE AMATUCCI BA, University of Georgia, 1996 MEd, University of Georgia, 2000 A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of The University of Georgia in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY ATHENS, GEORGIA 2010 © 2010 Kristi Bruce Amatucci All Rights Reserved TEACHER UNDONE by KRISTI BRUCE AMATUCCI Major Professor: Elizabeth A. St. Pierre Committee: Mark A. Faust James D. Marshall Electronic Version Approved: Maureen Grasso Dean of the Graduate School The University of Georgia August 2010 iv DEDICATION To my grandmothers: in memory of Fannie Stowers Crowe, 1905-1995, who taught me to read, and in honor of Lelia Vaughters Bruce, b. 1917, who taught me to tell stories. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Page CHAPTERS 1 THE HOW AND THE WHY ………………………………………………..1 Why post-?………………………………………………………......1 Why fiction? ………………………………………………………...8 Why teaching? ……………………………………………………..16 2 PRISONS……………………………………………………………………25 3 CLASSROOMS……………………………………………………………..91 4 COMING UNDONE………………………………………………………157 REFERENCES…………………………………………………………………………235 1 Chapter One The How and the Why Why post-? We feel an affinity with a certain thinker because we agree with him; or because he shows us what we were already thinking; or because he shows us in a more articulate form what we were already thinking; or because he shows us what we were on the point of thinking; or what we would sooner or later have thought; or what we would have thought much later if we hadn’t read it now; or what we would have been likely to think but never would have thought if we hadn’t read it now; or what we would have liked to think but never would have thought if we hadn’t read it now. (Davis, 2009, p. 310) Producing myself as a splintered subject in a world dominated by humanist definitions of identity is the work of this work. The conditions that enable and reproduce humanist personhood encircle and conscribe me through discursive formations and through culture in all their manifestations: movies, novels, news programs, music, church, family, school, to name only the obvious. These conditions, reifying the discrete, essential self as they do, hound me, demand of me strenuous maintenance—I am produced/produce myself as human. Implicit in that production is a promise of irresistible allure—the chance to be a part of it all. For humanism tells me that I must and do fit in; I play the part as it has been written for centuries, since the Enlightenment, at least. 2 But the responsibilities of maintaining consciousness, stability, unity, rationality, coherence, autonomy, and knowledge—hallmarks of the humanist individual (St. Pierre, 2000)—tire me out with their requirements of continual upkeep. Still, I do what they insist: I fight hard to hide the cracks in the humanist façade, in the “me” I am told I am, mostly by ignoring them. These everyday responsibilities tug my shoulders ever closer to my ears, my chest tight and closed in on itself. My yoga teacher, Ruby, always reminds me: pull your shoulder blades down your back, shoulders away from your ears, open your chest so you can finally breathe. I lived the first 30 years of my life hewing blindly to the humanist ideal of personhood, bothered sometimes by renditions of me that didn’t seem to fit, but unaware of alternative epistemologies, body clenched tight, every seam on guard against rupture, every pore afraid of release. Five years later, I still produce myself that way most of the time, even though I now know otherwise. My strange encounters with poststructural, postmodern, postfoundational, postcolonial, post-whatever thought invite me to excavate the cracks I work so hard to hide or ignore, to imagine myself as something other than the rugged individual of humanism, to produce myself as someone other, an alterity, to perform a speaking subject, with surprising abandon, a foreigner to the humanist me, who usually, still, remains quiet, docile, suitable. 3 During the past five years, I have inexorably collapsed into post-1 thought. Beginning with the first course of my doctoral program, I voraciously consumed Derrida (1966/1978; 1967/1974; 1967/1992; 1979; 1989; 1989/1992; 1992; 2001), Foucault (1972/1977; 1975/1977; 1976; 1983/1991; 1978/1990; 1977/1980; 1983/1991;1984/1990), Spivak (1974;1993), Deleuze and Guattari (1980/1987), Baudrillard (1981/1988), Butler (1990; 1993; 1995), St. Pierre (1991; 1997; 2001), and others. I found myself willing to abandon precepts I considered immutable, eager for the next new idea, in an unbounded rhizomatic quest. I devoured bibliographies, leading me hither and yon, and back again. I was hungry, and the feast I stumbled upon was satisfying. In post- theory I found multiple means for redescribing what I came to see as my multiple selves and the worlds I both inhabit and construct. I learned that humanism only seems normal because it is ubiquitous, hegemonic, the “scene” I am accustomed to seeing. But with post- thought, I began to note other things—lines of flight, sites of rupture, openings, however tiny, exit strategies, ways out, redefinitions of self. And I began to practice a strategy Deleuze and Guattari (1980/1987) suggested: “To reach not the point where one no longer says I, but the point where it is no longer of any importance whether one says I” (p. 3). I am no longer myself. I am a fragmented subject ensnared in the rapture of post- theory. 1 I use the terms “post- theory” and “post- thought” to indicate the impossibility of delineating between thinkers who use or refuse the labels poststructural, postmodern, post-colonial, post-foundational, post- everything to categorize their work. Since one of the most salient features of post- theory is a healthy suspicion of categorization, definitive definitions, underlying structures, and solid foundations, I use the term post- (with a space following the hyphen) in order to unhinge the taken-for-granted articulation between the concept of post-and whatever term may come after. In my usage, post- indicates a distrust of the tenets of humanist, modernist, positivist, interpretive, and emancipatory modes of thinking. That single empty space is yours to fill. 4 But falling in love, in this case with post- theory, is always dangerous, for the enamored overlooks the inadequacies of her beloved, as Davis implied in the quotation that opens this chapter. Or, as Butler (1995) explained: [T]he question of whether or not a position is right, coherent, or interesting, is … less informative than why it is we come to occupy and defend the territory we do, what it promises us, from what it promises to protect us. (pp. 127-128) Operating from a post- orientation promises freedom, vitality, movement, imagination, dynamism, as it also offers protection from the tyranny of the ordinary. Post- theory protects me from engagements I’d rather not keep, with those whose worldviews are steeped in humanism. I find myself possessing a sense of superiority, of having seen behind the normative and hegemonic formations of humanism, of being privy to secrets unavailable to the uninitiated. I teeter dangerously close to elitism. But I must remember, hard as it is to do, that post- thought is not a successor regime, nor does it correct the failings of humanism. And I must heed Butler’s caution in what I write: this work obligates me to address why and how I feel alive here in the post-, in the fracture, rather than there in the insipid routines perpetrated by that graying, lingering, insistent humanism. Most welcoming, I finally discover, is that post- theories furnish me a way to perform aliveness, color; they provide me an alternate means of writing the world(s) and the subject positions available within it/them.