Self-Knowledge as reclaiming difficult knowledge
By Inès Palaz
email: inespalaz@gmail.com
According to Britzman (2000), itis essential to ask what is the ethical obligation of teachers and teacher education and how does this relate to self-knowledge? How does self-knowledge, in turn, relate to experience?
In my earlier essay, I tried to identify the different types of knowledge that are required from a teacher. When considering what a teacher needs to know, I described four key areas of knowledge; content knowledge that allows teachers to explain their subject and make it accessible as well as engaging for the students, cross-curricular and “world” knowledge that enables teachers to make connections between their content and other areas, pedagogical knowledge that guides teachers on how to deliver their content to students to enhance their learning experience, and finally, “context knowledge” that allows teachers to know the context in which they are working, the diversity of learners they have in their classroom and their needs to plan and use their other knowledge adequately. These types of knowledge can be related to Shulman’s content knowledge, pedagogical content knowledge and curricular knowledge (Shulman, 2013, p. 6-7) in the sense that they focus essentially on the definition of knowledge used and applied in teachers’ daily practice. I did not consider deeper issues about the foundation of these types of knowledge and their ethical implication in my previous assignment, so when I read Deborah Britzman’s article, entitled “Teacher Education in the Confusion of our Time” (2000), I was inspired by her arguments and her use of psychoanalysis to highlight the role of self-knowledge.
According to the author, there is a tendency to simplify and externalize knowledge in education, because teachers and institutions aspire to create a uniform non-controversial curriculum, to which educators have to comply under the banner of “professionalism”. In Britzman’s opinion, this approach holds education back. She quotes Theodor Adorno to make the distinction between “specialized technicians” and “intellectuals” (Britzman, 2000, p.202). Teachers should not be the former, on the contrary, they should contribute to the making of our world, and in order to do that, it is their obligation “to respond ethically to others, to learn something from people [they] will never meet and to be affected by histories that [they] may never live” (Britzman, 2000, p.202). One way to understand these implications is to look at how we, as humans and teachers, process what Britzman calls “difficult knowledge”. She defines this as “nations buried pasts of human devastation and genocide” (Britzman, 2000, p.201). Educators have the ethical obligation to reclaim the difficult knowledge of our past in order to reconstruct because “if we can bear to learn from history, all that we know about history requires reconstruction, not just of texts and contexts, but also of intimate identity and what might be included under the name ‘potential’” (Britzman, 2000, p.201).
Now how do we reclaim difficult knowledge in order to start the process of reconstruction? Britzman argues that we should first interrogate our personal relationship to knowledge as it is not just something to be externalized and applied to others but something that affects “our own capacities to believe and be touched by knowledge” (Britzman, 2000, p.201). This is what the author calls “self-knowledge”, in other words, an awareness of “what the world might symbolize and represent for the self” (Britzman, 2000, p.202) and an understanding of what knowledge does to us. It is important to point out that Britzman’s definition of the term “knowledge” in this context does not seem to be clearly distinct from “belief”. For teachers, acquiring self-knowledge is the first essential step to take to be able to use knowledge for self-making and world making, and thus fulfill their ethical obligations. To develop self-knowledge, we must first doubt what we think we know and then reflect on our experiences.
What does this imply for teachers and education? As Britzman puts it: “to implicate oneself in one’s own narratives of learning and teaching means turning habituated knowledge back on itself, and examining its most unflattering—for many, its most devastating—features. It also means exploring how even this most unflattering moment may offer insight into making significance” (Britzman, 2000, p.201). Teachers should not view knowledge just as something external to be applied but as part of themselves, and understand how it affects them in order to engage with it.
I thought that this was a promising and eye-opening perspective, especially in our Canadian context where teacher education now puts emphasis on the reconciliation process with First Nations. I will attempt to doubt my knowledge and use my experience to acquire self-knowledge as a way to reclaim this difficult past and reconstruct from it. In my opinion, it would be a first step in the right direction to acknowledge my beliefs, bias and lack of knowledge on this issue before initiating a pedagogical project of reconciliation and reconstruction in my classrooms. I believe that Britzman’s article was a good complement to our discussions on the decolonization of knowledge.
Bibliography:
Britzman, D. (2000). Teacher education in the confusion of our times. Journal of Teacher Educa-
tion, 52(3), 200-205.
Shulman, L. S. (2013). Those who understand: Knowledge growth in teaching. Journal of Educa-
tion, 193(3), 1-11.