Discovering creative solutions to presenting research: Unpacking and reconstructing life stories

There came a time in my life when I made the space to discover the meaning of my teaching beyond the personal and beyond the privacy of my own classrooms. What do teachers really do? How did it come to be this way? Who sanctioned what or how I taught? Who benefited? Is it possible to challenge the dominant view of teaching? The inconsistencies in the education system had concerned be for years but I had no idea how they had come about or what I could do about it. This paper is an attempt to share how I found a paradigm and a discourse up to the task of freeing me from the oppressive forces of the hegemony that had positioned me as powerless. In sharing this I hope to help others discover their own positions in the powerful struggle for ‘voice’ and ‘place’ in their workplaces and inspire them to be courageous and challenge the dominant and ‘taken for granted’ practices that are accepted but not productive. By highlighting the interconnectedness of past, present and future struggles, I hope to make more visible what the real debates for the individual are and increase their understanding of the contemporary politics of their interactions. To expose and understand what really happens in schools, who is privileged and why things came to be the way they are, I wrote my own her-story with the aim of deconstructing the text to refocus and reconstruct the critical moments that had framed my teaching life. By bringing a post-modern, post-structural, critical understanding to bare on my experiences I was able to show how the social organisation of our schools is rife with unequal power relations that operate to contain change and freedom. By focusing on consequences rather than intentions, on context rather than the personal, I hope to extend the ability of other teachers to recognise and interpret the politics of their work so that they too can challenge the hegemony and make a difference in both the lives of their students and the future of education. I hope to help them discover how to work for a future that is meaningful and just. We need to find a diversity of possibilities of what we might become by recovering and interpreting what we once were. (Kincheloe, 1993, p. 124)