On thinking through the iterative process of deconstruction and reconstruction

I am feeling a bit of paralysis as I think through my data. What I have found is that as I sit with it, I cannot help but agonize over the ways in which my own talk, and that of the participants, serves to constantly reify discourses about technology and teaching that are problematic for today. What I have come to understand this paralysis might indicate is that I am working through a Foucauldian sense of my data, an examination of what has become true in this space, and as such what has become possible for us as subjects within this discourse community to construct objects around us. I am leaving some quotes from the Jorgensen & Phillips text on Foucault and also from some course notes I have from Y613. As I think through these, they make sense. I am beginning to outline what is possible for the teachers I work with as they think through issues of technology and teaching. I am understanding the edges of these spaces in a very initial way, and I am so concerned about what I see. What I am beginning to see are teachers who understand themselves as subject to discourses of their own identities as outside or other to technology use. I am beginning to see that their lives are mediated by texts as technologies that determine a very specific future for their classroom environments - their talk about their classroom environments and lives as teachers. That in some ways, their own abilities to act within these structures is to respond in foot stomping. I am early in my analysis, and this is also based very much on my ethnographic work - the larger sense I have from spending time with the teachers in my study. They have been told to integrate technology by a new principal, a man, and all of the professional development, tools, district policies, and new best practices that stand behind him. What becomes possible for them in such spaces but to consider not just what their present-day classrooms might be like, but also what they know of past professional development and classroom initiatives? What else can they do but become stymied by their conceptions of a future in which they have trouble seeing themselves?

This is a deconstructive cycle that feels at once very comfortable for me - these discussion groups become a text as if I were sitting with a book. I can look for their limits and shape out patterns, even identifying outlying ideas or instances, such as the teacher who does unit/project-based learning or the teacher who steps out of her comfort zone and tearfully asks for my help. But I am trying very hard to remind myself that what is not there is not all that is there; these omnipresent discourses that only show flashes of themselves in teacher talk, laughs, or subject changing. What is there is also important, and I believe I am now in the beginning stages of also thinking through what is being constructed, or perhaps I am reconstructing?, what might be happening in terms of what is possible and where discourses can change or create action. Specifically, what I am noticing when teachers nudge toward what seems to terrify them - these very shaky futures that they can't quite see, or what they do see scares them - may also offer a way forward. Talking in this way, a way that accounts for the past, situates themselves in the present, and nods toward a potentially terrifying future, can also be understood as a sense of futurism. This is what science fiction writers have done for quite a long time now. To re-situate themselves, to reconstruct themselves as actors in a brave new world of technology, do teachers first have to work through their own conceptions of scary dystopias in their futures? They aren't voicing fears that their students will become automatons or that they won't have jobs necessarily, but they do voice these concerns that speak to what they know - a concern about time (where does it come from?), a concern about their bodies (how can I be in so many places?), a concern about knowledge and identity (am I capable of mastering such skills?). Upon initial analysis perhaps these delimit what teachers can talk about, but could it also be possible that working through these potential futures allows them the space to create discourses about pitfalls of their own personal classroom dystopias? These potential futures are not set in stone, and given what I already know from interviews and later discussion groups, they can be changed. Fears shift after we avert disaster. Averting disaster gives us strength to work again through iterative processes. What I want to know as the researcher, is are these teachers actually futurists? In what ways might their discourse construct such identities? And do futurists need to be aware of their own identities as such? Does it still count if they would just identify their discourse as venting?

I think this type of work would need to be longitudinal. I would need to understand what changes for teachers and their talk over time, but I wonder, could this be a way of thinking about what is possible, and perhaps how teachers are not just within power structures but constructing their own discourses?

Some quotes from Foucault to keep thinking about...

Archaeology: different regimes of knowledge determine what is true and false (Jorgensen & Phillips, p. 12), what is true, is discourse.

Genealogy: From Jorgensen & Phillips (p. 13), "What makes power hold good, what makes it accepted, is simply the fact that it does not only weigh on us as a force that says no, but that it traverses and produces things, it induces pleasure, forms knowledge, produces discourse. It needs to be considered as a productive network which runs through the whole social body, much more than as a negative instance whose function is repression. (Foucault 1980: 119)".  Power lets us consider what is possible, as in what is delimited by power and what is produced by power: what are the effects of the truths, of the discourse.

From Y613 class notes:

"If what is meant by thought is the act that posits a subject and an object, along with their possible relations, a critical history of thought would be an analysis of the conditions under which certain relations of subject to object are formed or modified, insofar as those relations constitute a possible knowledge (savor)…The problem is to determine what the subject must be, to what condition he is subject, what status he must have, what position he must occupy in reality or in the imaginary, in order to become a legitimate subject of this or that type of knowledge (connaissance)".

"But it is also and at the same time a question of determining under what conditions something can become an object for a possible knowledge (connaissance), how it may have been problematized as an object to be known, to what selective procedure it may have been subjected, the part of it that is regarded as pertinent" - in other words, the mode of its objectivation.