Learning Journal

I’m not sure how useful the early-morning session on aims and objectives was. I’m quite sure that all it did for me was highlight the use of obfuscatory language in official teaching documents that covers up the increasing distance between teachers and what they teach, and the students who come to them for learning. But maybe I’m just awkward.
This awkwardness will proceed apace throughout this week’s reflective proceedings, because I am going to reflect upon reflection - perhaps someone somewhere has called this meta-reflecting - and create one of those awful mirror-in-front-of-mirror scenarios in which you notice the ugliness of the back of your own head.

Anyway.

Teaching psychology at A-Level is requiring me to learn things that I hadn’t covered in my degree. Looking over books that I read at the first year of my university studies has been nostalgic, and in this case useful. One simplifies social constructionism, breaking it down into personal identity, power, and narrative.
Applying this to our reflective journaling is edifying. If we see the practice of keeping such a journal through social constructionist theory, it can be understood as a practice of constructing a personal identity through narrative. In this sense, we continually update our ‘teacher selves’ through the imposition of hindsight onto past events and our feelings of them at the time, evaluating and concluding in order to bring about a change in our future reaction to events, our current feelings (especially negative ones), and also in our ‘selves’, especially that bit which we use within teaching contexts.
All well and good - but it is never good practice for a critical (‘Foucauldian’) psychologist to examine use of discourse and leave out power. How might this enter into the mix?
As far as I can imagine, the sharing of journals with mentor and later with one’s STE group leads to a pressure to self-censor. One’s own history becomes a field of omission and recreation, where feelings on the past are reconstructed to be palatable to others. As an example, it might be hard for many to write “Jason was a little ‘melon-farmer’ in class yesterday,” knowing that one’s peers would be peering at it. Yet this statement might be used in, for example, a staffroom or in informal conversation. (And I’ll tell you more about the staffroom next week, Dear Journal.)
This is not the extent of the matter, however. The pressures are more than just anti-salacious, but also professional. In the interests of being seen to ‘develop’, it is needed to maintain a ‘constructive’ and perhaps ‘empathetic’ (mmm… pathetic) view. What if this is not how you feel? Then, perhaps, you lie. The pressure would certainly be there - to appear to keep to certain standards. In this sense latent power relations and normative influences are at work, which requires us to restructure and reconstruct one’s own past experience. If the self is ‘socially constructed’, this may then have effects in making one’s future thoughts meet these assumed targets of professionalism. Not that this would affect everyone, some will know exactly what they are doing and understand it as a language game of cynical lies to appear as an effective and reflective (re-eff(l)ective) teacher. It will affect some, however.
I’m quite sure that Dewey did not think that this would happen. Perhaps he imagined a less regulated form of education, where reflective practice would be a foundation for the sharing of experience and a site for collective wisdom. But in the modern setting of FE institutions the teacher’s ability to change situations seems to have diminished, and the reflective journal - seen in a critical light - could be a way of reconstructing the past to make it seem as if things can be done by the teacher about circumstances we really cannot change, and eventually reconstructing the teacherself to take on personal responsibility for social, cultural, and political problems.
My first observation went well. I still have some reservations about managing the class ‘effectively’, from what I recall of 6th form being coerced into working has the effect of making one look wearily busy for a little while. To me, it seems obvious that the student who comes into class might not be interested in learning for all sorts of reasons, reasons that may not be addressable within that space and time. Real ‘classroom management’ should actually happen in everywhere but there, a formative discovery process enacted in all people’s lives before they even step into a college. The answers to the question ‘why don’t they want to learn’ lie in a complex history of social and meaning interrelationships that extend far past the immediately graspable now. All I can do in the now is to tidy up the scraggy ends, cosmetic enhancements to hide the problems of education.