University of Massachusetts Amherst ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst Doctoral Dissertations Dissertations and Theses August 2015 Performing Critical Consciousness in Teaching: Entanglements of Knowing, Feeling and Relating Kathleen A. McDonough University of Massachusetts Amherst Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_2 Part of the Bilingual, Multilingual, and Multicultural Education Commons, Critical and Cultural Studies Commons, Elementary Education and Teaching Commons, Junior High, Intermediate, Middle School Education and Teaching Commons, and the Race and Ethnicity Commons Recommended Citation McDonough, Kathleen A., "Performing Critical Consciousness in Teaching: Entanglements of Knowing, Feeling and Relating" (2015). Doctoral Dissertations. 383. https://doi.org/10.7275/6939423.0 https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_2/383 This Open Access Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Dissertations and Theses at ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. It has been accepted for inclusion in Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. For more information, please contact [email protected]. PERFORMING CRITICAL CONSCIOUSNESS IN TEACHING: ENTANGLEMENTS OF KNOWING, FEELING AND RELATING A Dissertation Presented by KATHLEEN A. MCDONOUGH Submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Massachusetts Amherst in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF EDUCATION May 2015 College of Education Language, Literacy and Culture © Copyright by Kathleen A. McDonough 2015 All Rights Reserved PERFORMING CRITICAL CONSCIOUSNESS IN TEACHING: ENTANGLEMENTS OF KNOWING, FEELING AND RELATING A Dissertation Presented by KATHLEEN A. MCDONOUGH Approved as to style and content by: ________________________________________________________ Maria José Botelho, Chair ________________________________________________________ K.C. Nat Turner, Member ________________________________________________________ Claudio Moreira, Member _______________________________________________________ Christine B. McCormick, Dean College of Education DEDICATION To my parents, my brother and John for their love and support. To my students past, present, and future. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I owe a great deal to Maria José Botelho, chair of my committee, mentor, and now friend. Her guidance, support, and insightful questions helped me design a research project and write a dissertation that brought me joy. Our conversations about teaching, love, aesthetics, and critical literacies were synergistic. Our ideas evolved and intertwined. It is hard to say where the “ownership” of one idea ends and the other begins. I appreciate Maria José’s support and trust as I stretched the boundaries of a traditional dissertation in what follows. I will always be grateful for her loving ways and welcoming me into her family during my long-distance commuting across the state as I juggled both job and role as student. Thank you Maria José. I wish to thank Claudio Moreira not only for being on my committee but for introducing me to performance ethnography – which I am still trying to get a handle on. His kind heart, commitment to students, and to social change are what I try to emulate with my own students. Claudio’s invitation to our class to the Qualitative Inquiry Congress is part of the impetus for the structure and methodology of this work. Thanks also goes to K.C. Nat Turner for joining my committee long ago. I appreciate Nat’s continued support and encouragement as it took me many years to finish. Of course, this study would not have been possible without the generosity of the participating teachers, principals, and teacher educators. In one of my first interviews I introduced my vision of this study as a hopeful project. And it was. The participants’ incredible teaching and their commitment to social change brought me hope each time I visited schools or engaged in conversations with these amazing educators. v It is hard to pinpoint what exactly lead me to begin graduate studies as it was from a convergence of experiences. But I do know the love and support of Nelda Barrón, Paula Elliott, and Courtney Williams had much to do with my decision to pursue a doctoral degree. My thanks. I also know that the generous hearts and loving support from my parents, Jack and Aileen McDonough and my brother Kevin also guided me to and along this journey. I will be ever grateful for the life-long friendships that have developed out of this program, from sharing classes and laughs with Gloria Barragan to long conversations and glorious trips with Cinzia Pica. My long-distance writing group with Patty Bode and Vera Stenhouse offered immeasurable support. My local writing group with Elizabeth Robinson and Elsa Wiehe not only aided my writing, but sustained my will to finish. It has been a joy to watch their families grow, to travel together, and plan future projects together at local coffee shops. I appreciate Elizabeth’s kind spirit and ability to help me reframe my thinking. I learned much from Elsa as we sat at the Sierra Grill until closing after each Wednesday night class continuing to talk about ideas and possibility. I will always be grateful for Elsa’s faith in me, her sense of humor, and her thoughtful and loving ways. I look forward to what the future holds for us. I have heard it said that writing a dissertation is lonely work. At times it certainly was – with long stretches at my desk or in the library. Other times I was happy in the company of my imaginary gatherings with Norman Denzin, Elizabeth St Pierre, and Paulo Freire, scholars whose work was guiding me, as I wrote in conversation with them. Or my research was the central focus for conversations with my advisor, writing groups, and conference presentations. I think what must be more lonely than writing the vi dissertation is being the partner of a dissertation writer as I spent more hours away from home, more hours in my own thoughts, and fewer hours together. My husband John gets immeasurable thanks for years of immeasurable support. I appreciate the space you made in our shared life for me to pursue this work. I have been grateful for your patience, love, and listening. What better way to close this chapter by realizing “my” new friendships have now become “our” friendships. Onward. vii ABSTRACT PERFORMING CRITICAL CONSCIOUSNESS IN TEACHING: ENTANGLEMENTS OF KNOWING, FEELING AND RELATING MAY 2015 KATHLEEN MCDONOUGH, B.S., UNIVERSITY OF VERMONT M.ED, LESLEY UNIVERSITY Ed.D, UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST Directed by: Dr. Maria José Botelho At a time when education reform is guided by neoliberalism, accountability and standardization have reshaped teaching as highly technocratic and threatened the democratic possibilities of public education. Even so, many teacher education programs have taken up the call to prepare teachers to teach for social justice, whether framed as multicultural education, critical literacy, or critical pedagogy. A construct that ties these pedagogical approaches together is critical consciousness, with the aim of some teacher education efforts to evoke critical consciousness among preservice teachers. This study focuses on exploring how nine educators from elementary grades to higher education experience and enact critical consciousness in their own work of teaching and leading schools. Using ethnographic methods for data collection, I spent a year visiting the classrooms and schools of elementary teachers, high school teachers, an art teacher, two principals and two teacher educators to learn how they thought about criticality and viii taught critically. I engaged with and analyzed the data through reading and writing as methods of analysis and in dialogue with theory to create a layered text (Ellingson, 2011). In the teacher education literature critical consciousness is mainly situated as a cognitive experience that individuals have or acquire. This research expands the construct of critical consciousness from a modernist view of criticality to a poststructural exploration of the production of critical consciousness. It challenges notions of critical consciousness as an individual attribute that is attained and which then functions as the source of criticality. Instead it reconstructs critical consciousness as a performed social relation and embodied experience that re/produces variations of criticality from moment to moment and across contexts. I highlight critical consciousness as intersubjective and an entanglement among rational knowing, feeling, and doing as a result of engagement with others. This study has implications for teacher education including the need to think differently about relationship-building, understanding education as political, developing critical literacy through multiple ways of knowing, and “reading” our teaching and our lives. ix TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...................................................................................................v ABSTRACT..................................................................................................................... viii LIST OF TABLES............................................................................................................ xii LIST OF FIGURES…………………………………………………………………………………………….xiv CHAPTER 1. BEGINNINGS.................................................................................................................1 Introduction..............................................................................................................1