Collective biography as pedagogical practice : being and becoming in relation to place

In this chapter we go back to the group of students we introduced in Chapter 7. This small group of seven students was enrolled in an alternative Professional Experience unit offered to secondary teacher education students at the University of Western Sydney (UWS). This alternative practicum, Professional Experience Three, or PE3, was designed to give students an experience of learning to be teachers outside the institutional and bureaucratic constraints of school classrooms. In Nancy’s terms, PE3 opened up a chance for the students to engage in world–making rather than globemaking (Nancy, 2007). Whereas globalisation, or globe-making, produces overregulated practices focussed on the production of generic, predictable individuals who are responsive to the forces of government, world-making begins with self-in-relation to the other. World-making requires openness to new directions and possibilities and is not mandated by governmental imperatives. It is emergent from the specificity of particular places in the world and it anticipates the eruption of the new. It has an unpredictable appearance, maintaining a crucial reference to the world as a space of relationality and as a space for the construction and negotiation of meaning. In our place pedagogies strand within PE3 we offered the students the chance to learn about and to put into practice an enabling pedagogy of place with world-making possibilities. We encouraged students to enrol in our strand and to work together to explore the ways in which they could develop a dynamic relation between the areas they would teach in and the philosophy and practice of enabling place pedagogies. The disciplinary areas they brought to our work together were English, Geography, Art and History. They had all completed a Bachelor of Arts and were enrolled in the Master of Teaching (Secondary) degree. We met with them for two days during the institutional break to teach them about place pedagogy. We discussed the readings on place we had gathered for themxxi, we undertook a collective biography with them, and we helped them plan the place pedagogy projects they would each carry out in their communities. It is the teaching of and through collective biography that we will explore in this chapter.