We don't line up for recess: the autoethnography of a first grade teacher

Abstract

This dissertation, written as a series of autoethnographic stories and reflections, represents my effort to understand the subjectivities that shaped my experience as an Asian American, male, first grade teacher at a public charter school in Hawaiʻi, during the end of the twentieth century. Upon admitting to myself that success as a teacher depended upon an acceptance of educational banking models and the maintenance of an authoritarian classroom structure, I decided to explore my complicity with the values represented by Hawaiʻi's public school system with the children in my classroom, and through a series of critical literacy projects, examined the discourse of schooling as a social text. It was during this inquiry that I discovered that the most potent colonizing force in my classroom was not the institution itself, but the authority that my personal history held upon my capacity to imagine new forms of teaching from within a culture of schooling that I helped to maintain. As such, I attempted to develop other subjectivities for teaching through the writing of an autoethnography that promoted the formation of a third space in which the physicality of my educational environment, the rememoration of my childhood, my adult anxieties, the constructions of children in my imagination, my conversations with first graders, and my new life as a teacher educator, could commingle and clash. This self-reflexive methodology becomes a medium for the expression of personal agency, layered reflection, and a critique of particular elements of schooling through a narrative that draws upon aspects of postmodernism, critical pedagogy, postcolonial studies, and personal loss. The pleasure and restlessness that accompanies autoethnography as a genre of arts-based research aids my imagination, and I hope that what is described in this dissertation can invite the reader to perform their own reflection and glimpse a curriculum in which children and teachers might co/author a world, before the ellipses of our inadequate language cause us to slip once again into familiar educational tropes and binaries.