Some murmurings on entry…
This rendering
is inspired and excerpted from my doctoral research in
schooling communities in post-apartheid South Africa (Swanson,
2004)[i], offering a textual performance that
begins to attend with poetic voice to the critical, the
human, the storied, the ecological, and the political,
in search of a soulful disposition towards the world. Embodied
and spirited in ideals of democracy, reconciliation and
justice, this disposition is not an attitude to the world
that projects onto it such ideals and values, but seeks
to consciously and purposefully live out their possibilities
with a contentedness of the discomfort of their improbability,
while residing in a world with a hopefulness of a world
that could be. It is the advocacy of a poetic disposition
that offers a humanity of presence and conscious commitment
to conscience as a guiding principle of a living (in) inquiry.
And in this sense, I embrace poetic inquiry as a way to
offer a voice of resistance to the Form, the Structures,
the Knowing that render the shadows ‘real’. A poetic disposition
of inquiry offers a way of attending to the world that
lifts the heart back into its abiding place.
Silence.
Like echoes
of phantom murmurings…
faint and
yet deafening, lie its many articulations.
Silence.
Gurgling
and spluttering through the medium of voice, it is the
message we seek,
or avoid,
as we search to create our representations of interpretive
realities,
and the beyondness
of thought…
It is the
sacrifice given for the unheard, the unthinkable, the unjust,
it is our
unconquerable nightmare of virtual possibilities, never
to be grasped or realized, and it is, simultaneously, our
only reach of Hope…
Voices…
Voices of research. Voices of (the)
people. Voices of a pedagogic journey. Collisions, ruptures,
intersections, subjugations, disjunctions, mergers. Voices
of hegemony. Voices of silence. And I am the connection
between them. The symbolic mediation lying within a single
text, which I construct, sculpture, shape, paint with vivid
words, like an artist on a canvas. And like an artist,
I try to bring out the texture of the materials with which
I work, so that their ‘natural’ constituents will show
up: the voices of the people, heard from the ground, heard
with sincerity and carrying the context of their lived
experiences. This is the challenge of the narrator, the
poet: to draw the characters, the people, “up into life,
up out of the ground.” Yet, I know that these voices are
modulated, muffled through the funneling space of research
– even elliptical research, which tries to weave rhizomatic
paths, back… back to the ground….
The utterances, taken away from
the contexts of production, are now fragmented performances
of language, recontextualised in a new textu(r)al place,
so that the effects of mimesis are compounded. The intertextual,
intratextual, and interdiscursive merge, as abutments are
constructed between utterances borne from divergent contexts,
where threads and wisps of fabric of the place, its ambiance
and taste, of the different sources are carried with the
phonate. Bakhtin (1981) reminds me that words carry the
competing historical and social meanings of the places
from which they have been borrowed and in which they have
lived before. And I am the arch that anchors the abutted
utterances as if they naturally lie contiguously, in a
new temporal and spatial continuum, rooted to a new ‘real’….
But, this is not so. I have, instead, in my research and
through poetic engagement, abutted them not to show continuity
and confound meanings, but, in Derridean (2002) terms to
“sign post” their disjunctions, make visible the ruptures,
make conscious the paradoxes and ambiguities produced,
and highlight the ideologically irreconcilable in inherent
contradictions between incommensurate contexts.
And so, brought together into uncomfortable
space, in poetic space, in the spaces of research, the
voices speak ……
Poetic murmurings
of rootedness…
Dark roots,
Like fleshy
limbs,
Pushing into
yielding soil,
Like a snake
into its hole.
Roots,
Seeking solace
beneath the earth,
Away from light,
Turning from
“the gaze.”
“Weeds! These
do not belong here!
They’re a problem.
They must go.”
I pull and
yank the thick tenacious twines,
They resist!
I apply more
force,
With two hands
now… pulling upwards,
Towards the
light...
They yield!
As they slip
from their life source,
Their belonging
place,
I see that…
They are not
alone!
Delicately
intertwined,
Are the roots
of others,
Others I thought worthy of life,
Threaded together
in mutual co-existence.
I had not seen
them,
Hidden beneath
the earth,
Their role
and relevance…
So deeply embedded.
I judged on
what I could not see,
I severed the
coherence. I broke the web,
Flaying disembodied
limbs of roots, unearthed…
Lost!
On poetic inquiry…
Poetic inquiry is the performative expression of those
experiences in the act of creating identity and defining,
or attempting to define, what it means to be human, and
what it means to know. Further, it gives dignity and value
to poetic experiences through their expression, making
them sacred, while transcending the material and transforming
it onto the imaginative realm without separation from its
material and (inter)textual rootedness.
A poetry of resistance ignites the word
in search of a lived seeing, a spiritedness of being that
dares the dark recidivism of oppression. Filigrees of fine
hope are woven with words towards a poetic justice,
giving presence to the absences within the absent. Dangerously
seeking to overcome the intransigent, the immutable, the
unconquerable, it exudes a boastful defiance, posturing
as playful to provoke political possibility.
Poetic
inquiry in contemporary academia represents the symbolic
and political act of resistance to the decontextualized,
abstract, dispassionate modes of discourse embraced and
reified by scientific rationalism and the movement which
produced positivist methodologies of academic research.
Nevertheless, within some postmodern writings, contention
still exists around the ‘validity’ of academic representation
outside of prescribed norms. Poetic inquiry offers the
possibility of flagrantly resisting formulation, and
concerns itself with the human condition as lived and
(re)imagined as its
primary focus. It embraces creative textural forms that
produce pluralized meanings and it breathes life and
feeling into storied and poetic human experiences. Potentially,
it desists from serving the interests of both positivist/
modernist and some post-modern orientations that would
concern themselves with empiricist tenets of justification,
‘truth’ and form, above evocation, empathy, illumination,
self-understanding, resonance, and the revisioning of
ways of being and living in the world.
More
specifically, poetic perspectives within arts-based research
are productive ways of engaging in and representing qualitative
research using creative expression. Poetic practice helps
one reimagine ways of understanding the familiar so that
new ways of expressing themes commonplace to poets -
themes about love, death, social justice, home, offer
new ways of seeing, feeling and understanding. For Cahnmann
(2003), this way of seeing requires the practice of noticing.
By drawing on the unanticipated, the unfamiliar, the
nuanced, the uncommon, and “assuming and exploiting a
common frame of reference” (Gioia, 1999, p. 31), “poets
achieve a concise ability to give language to the unsayable”
(Cahnman, 2003, p. 32).
Thus
saying, an important aspect of arts-based research, and
one that is readily compatible with narrative, is poetry
as a form of inquiry. I have used poetry in my own research
representation to bridge other styles of literary engagement,
to provide another gaze on research issues that purposefully
complicate meanings rather reduce or simplify them through
mainstream language use, and to express meanings in different,
sensitive and creative ways that are both provocative
and evocative. Poetic form has permitted me to provide
a vivid, lyrical, perspectival, and engaging expression
of research concerns that appeal to the emotional, sensual,
intuitive, visceral and philosophical, and that enhance
meanings of critical issues, maintain their complexity,
and raise them to a more insightful, spiritual, heart-felt
and embodied dimension of human engagement.
In this
sense, poetic inquiry, offering its own voice of resistance
to the Form, the Structures, the Knowing, that renders
the shadows ‘real’, lifts the heart back into its abiding
place.
Poetic
inquiry is the lived expression of tacit ways of knowing,
perceiving and understanding. For Dewey (1934), the poetic,
aesthetic and expressive, as distinct from the prosaic,
scientific or stated, achieves more than just that which
leads to an experience. It constitutes it. In the same
way poetic inquiry does not lead to understandings and
experiences. It lives them.
Murmurings
in the silence…
Silence
haunts us…
Shrouded
in secrets and false promises,
it immortalizes
our mortality, so that we are but a wraith of our own
potential.
Like
ignis fatuus,
it ignites the dark with spectral light, illusory and
illusive;
hovering
and flitting over the marshy ground of our consciousness,
playing
tricks with our consciences,
misleading
those who travel by the moon.
Murmurings
of the moon…
There is a moon
within a half circle of light.
Many choose not
to see it.
They look upon
the soft smooth arc,
the perfect
curve,
and see its boldness.
But there are
shadows between us,
and a moon behind
the arc we fear to see,
for we have not
yet learned the paths beyond the spaces we create,
the contours
of the unimagined.
We look upon
a mercuric sea,
and lose the
essence of the sky mapped on it,
one for the
other,
one and the
same,
the watery image
in whose face the sky is painted.
And the moon,
with its dappled light,
splashed in gyroscopic
patterns
in rhythm to
the motion of the sea,
alluring, deep-spirited,
it calls us to
the dance.
And what is our dance -
this dance of
our identity?
A calling from
without and within;
our many other
spirits play the music of our ancestry,
and we follow
searchingly for roots along our route.
Let’s listen
to the music of our history,
and let it flow
to the rhythm of the dance!
Let’s not map it in unitary space,
close its meaning
in the language of our time!
Listen to the
calling!
Feel the motion
of the dance!
Find its essence
in the web of life,
moving between,
moving beyond,
in the shadowy
fullness of a new moon.
Listen to the
calling…
Dark
roots of research…
I
remember standing uncomfortably at the back of a grade
10 classroom in a school in the Cape Province of post-apartheid
South Africa - a school that had been classified ‘dysfunctional’
by the education department because of its high failure
rate, school drop out rate, and ‘socio-economic problems.’
The school is in a historic fishing village of mixed-race
people bordering on a shanty-town or township. Having no
place to sit, I remember standing uncomfortably in the
heat at the back of this classroom, while the teacher teaches
a congested class full of students.
As
before, at this school, the students are expected to fail
mathematics. The lesson is procedural and unengaging. The
students sit and listen in quiet. The teacher turns to
look for a large green checkered chalkboard that could
be attached to the main chalkboard, to assist in teaching
graphs. Yes, he has forgotten that it has disappeared.
He’s already mentioned its disappearance in another class.
He laughs jokingly and turns to the class, addressing them
in Afrikaans: “So, those of you who see my chalkboard somewhere
in the township one day, maybe it is a nice door by now,
maybe it is someone’s roof, but you can ask them please
it would be nice to have it back. Mr. Steenburg needs it
to teach graphs. I know they might need it very much, but
teaching graphs is not the same without it.” The class
responds with laughter, and it lightens the air from the
heavy stench of rotten fish emanating from the harbour
and the smell of too many bodies in the room…… The classroom
is stark and there are no posters or colourful charts on
any of the pitted and marked walls. There isn’t even any
graffiti. There is one sole poster pinned up on a metal
cabinet by the teacher’s desk. On it is printed the words
of Mandela’s final statement from his Rivonia trial of
1963. Despite the twenty seven years of imprisonment that
succeeded these words, the hope rings out in them as it
reads:
During
my lifetime I have dedicated myself to this struggle of
the African people. I have fought against white domination,
and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished
the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all
persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities.
It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve.
But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared
to die.
Roots
of hope…
The moon is waning, but we can light a
torch to see in the dark. If we look within ourselves,
we may find some transcendent light within our hearts and
souls to guide us. We encounter obstacles along the way,
we stumble, we may even fall…. But we can and must raise
ourselves …. and continue, poetically, with dignity, humility,
and a soulful luminosity!
For in the poetic and political words
of Nelson R Mandela (1994):
I
have discovered the secret that after climbing a great
hill, one only finds that there are many more hills to
climb. I have taken a moment here to rest, to steal a
view of the glorious vista that surrounds me, to look
back on the distance I have come. But I can rest only
for a moment, for with freedom comes responsibilities,
and I dare not linger, for my long walk is not yet ended.
On returning
poetically…
And so I
return to a conversation about poetic justice, giving voice
to living (in) inquiry. I assert that this poetic being
in the world offers a disposition towards it that attends
to the soulful and hopeful. Embodied and spirited in ideals
of democracy, reconciliation and justice, this disposition
is not an attitude to the world that projects onto it such
ideals and values, but seeks to consciously and purposefully
live out their possibilities with a contentedness in discomfort.
This is the discomfort of the rupture between what is possible
and not possible, of the real and the imagined, the past
and future, of what is already set and what can be different.
It is an assertion/insertion of hope that stands against
the leaching of possibility by the mundane realism of improbability.
It is a way of residing in a world with a hopefulness of
a world that might be (other)wise. In this way, it is the
advocacy of a poetic disposition that offers a humanity
of presence and conscious commitment to conscience as a
guiding principle of a living (in) inquiry. Poetic inquiry
is a way to offer a voice of resistance to the Form, the
Structures, the Knowing that render the shadows ‘real’.
In this sense, a poetic disposition of inquiry offers a
way of attending to the world that lifts the heart back
into its abiding place.
[i] DISSERTATION
SUMMARY:
VOICES
IN THE SILENCE:
Narratives
of disadvantage, social context and school mathematics
in
post-apartheid South Africa
Dr.
Dalene M. Swanson
Voices in the Silence is
a critical exploration of the construction of disadvantage
in school mathematics in social context. It provides
a reflexive, narrative account of a pedagogic journey
towards understanding the pedagogizing of
difference in mathematics
classrooms and its realizations as pedagogized
disadvantage in and across diverse socio-political, economic, cultural,
and pedagogic contexts.
Fieldwork occurred within the Cape Province of South
Africa, in schooling communities with socio-economic,
cultural and historical differences. Research took
the form of interviews, discussions, narrative-sharing,
and participant observation, in a recent post-apartheid
context.
In resistance to perpetuating hierarchized,
linear or scientistic approaches to research within traditional
social sciences and mathematics education, I embrace
an arts-based methodology. Through narrative and poetry,
I engage with the socio-political, cultural and pedagogic
implications of the social construction of disadvantage
in school mathematics practice. The dissertation, therefore,
offers interdisciplinary approaches to critical concerns
of inequity and access, calling on the emotive, spiritual,
embodied, and personal domains of experience in problematizing
the (re)production of disadvantage.
The concept of silence is
introduced to interrogate the interstitial/intertextu(r)al
places of ‘lack’ and ‘deficit’, and competing ideological
positions and discourses of power that inform the lived
realities of “disadvantage” in mathematics classrooms
within different contexts. Moments of articulation within fieldwork define utterances and somatic performances
embedded within narrative contexts, and instigate an
analysis of the multiple ways in which disadvantage
takes root/route. These signpost where ‘voices in the silence’, in discourse, context,
and the subjectivities they (re)produce, may be recognized,
problematized, and rearticulated through narrative.
Consequently, I broaden the scope
of interpretive possibilities to encompass interrogation
of dominant discourses and universalizing ideologies
within the social domain, which colonize meanings. These
include globalization, neo-liberalism, neo-colonialism,
and aspects of progressivism and pedagogic constructivism,
in the way in which they compete for hegemony within
mathematics classroom contexts as sites of struggle for
meaning, informing discursive positions of disadvantage,
delimiting practice and disempowering students constructed
in terms of social difference discourses such as ethnicity,
gender, class, race, poverty, and ability, amongst other
positions. The incommensurability of certain social domain
discourses produce disjunctions, paradoxes, contradictions
and dilemmas, experienced as a lived curriculum of pedagogic
disadvantage in the
lives of students and teachers within contexts of constructed
disadvantage.
This dissertation offers an original
contribution to curriculum studies and mathematics education
internationally in its methodology, theoretical engagement,
and focus. It contributes to the field through a strong
emphasis on local, situated and marginalized contexts,
such as ones of ‘poverty’, and examines the way in which
hegemonic social domain discourses are reconfigured in
pedagogic practice in these locations. Narrative and
arts-based approaches to mathematics education issues
are rare, and the dissertation makes an important contribution
in this respect and in its integration of interdisciplinary
perspectives. While research took place in diverse South
African schooling contexts during a period of unprecedented
socio-political change, this helps to reveal certain
oppressive pedagogies and practices that often are obscured
by a veneer of overall greater socio-economic ‘wellbeing’
and ‘stability’ in other contexts. The implications for
international contexts are made explicit, and have particular
relevance for marginalized, multicultural, and aboriginal
schooling contexts. Nevertheless, the dissertation emphasizes resolution over
the traditional research objectives of proposing solutions.
The major contribution this dissertation
makes is to open up spaces for dialogue with(in) silence
through a reflexive narratizing. Ultimately, Voices
in the Silence is
an invitation to a dialogical pedagogic journey that
seeks to provide roots/routes of engagement with the
ideals of social justice and an egalitarian society.
It attempts to find narrative moments within the difficult
terrain of research work and lived experience where constructed
and pedagogized disadvantage can be re-imagined and transformed
into transcendent pedagogies of empowerment and hope.
ABOUT
THE DISSERTATION
This doctoral dissertation and research,
completed in 2004 at The University of British Columbia,
has been honoured with four major international and Canadian
awards in Curriculum Studies and Qualitative Research.
These awards honour the lives and shared narratives of
the research participants, community members and all
those, including friends and family that made this research
possible. The research was funded by a doctoral fellowship
award from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research
Council of Canada, for which I thank this federal agency
gratefully. I dedicate this journal contribution to the
research participants, my family, and all my students
across the years and across two continents.
References
Bakhtin, M.M. (1981). In M. Holquist,
(Ed.), & C. Emerson & M. Holquist, (Trans.), The
Dialogic Imagination. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Cahnmann, M. (2003). The craft, practice, and possibility of poetry in
educational research. Educational Researcher, 32(3), 29-36.
Derrida, J. (2002). Positions, 2nd ed., London: Continuum.
Dewey, J. (1934). Art
as experience. New
York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons.
Gioia, D. (1999). The poet in an age
of prose. In A. Finch (Ed.), After new formalism: Poets
on form, narrative, and tradition (31-41). Ashland, OR: Story Line Press.
Mandela, N. R. (1994). Long Walk to
Freedom: The autobiography of Nelson Mandela. Randburg,
South Africa: Macdonald Purneli.
Nussbaum, M. (1997). Poetic Justice: The literary imagination and public
life. Boston, USA:
Beacon Press.
Prendergast, M. (in press). “Poem is
what?” Poetic Inquiry in Qualitative Social Science Research. International
Review of Qualitative Research.
Swanson, D.M. (2005). Voices in the Silence: Narratives of disadvantage,
social context and school mathematics in post-apartheid
South Africa. Unpublished
Ph.D. dissertation, The University of British Columbia,
Vancouver, Canada. [To be published by Cambria Press
in 2009].
