My presentation at the conference: Professional Writing in Many Voices: Exploring My Learning from a Bakhtinian Perspective

This morning I want to write about my own conference presentation for the 6th International Conference on Teacher Education: Changing Reality through Education. I feel that for me, this conference was about taking risks. I decided to send in an abstract at the very last minute and sat down to write it the day the call for papers closed. I thus had no time to consult with others or to receive feedback on my writing. In time, I was notified that my abstract had been accepted.

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As usual with my writing, I decided on a topic which needed a lot of reading, writing and thinking, a topic which is connected to my PhD and that the preparation for the presentation would directly contribute to my doctoral work. I decided to write about the ways in which I am beginning to explore my own professional writing from a Bakhtinian perspective. This was the first time that I was attempting to publicly articulate my knowledge and understandings of the complex materials I have been reading. I knew it was time to start verbalizing those understandings but was extremely wary of the task. There were similarities between this paper and my last: “Academic Blogging as a Dialogic Process” at the 2012 “Academic Writing and Beyond” conference.

Diving in again to the writings of Bakhtin and those that provide commentary on his theories, I began to extend my understandings. Each engagement with those complex materials is challenging and leaves me with a sense of uncertainty.

My “way in”, as usual, was to try to relate the concepts to events, conversations, thoughts or practice. In order to prepare the conference paper I thought about my major aims and directions in the talk and then returned to my own writing. I reread my own blog posts from the past few years and my freewriting in my research journal. I was searching for snippets of text in which Bakhtinian concepts afforded me an additional understandings or allowed me to see myself and my work differently from the way a first reading portrays. I found many sections of writing which were suitable.

The next stage was to return to Paul Sullivan (2012) and to reread the chapter:  “Using Dialogue to Explore Subjectivity” a number of times and then to return to the sections of text I had chosen and to start articulating the connections I found. Sullivan’s book is very clear but the task of making sense of my own identity and practice in light of the theories presented was not easy.

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I did not know how familiar my audience would be with Bakhtin so I need to add some introductory comments.

The 15 minute time limit on my paper made the work “doable”, and I do believe the audience received a taste of the kinds of textual work I am doing. I believe I showed how dialogue and other Bakhtinian concepts can indeed be useful in text interpretation.

 The session I was placed in was titled “Writings and Narratives in Self-Development” and was chaired by Dr Orna Schatz-Oppenheimer. Orna has written a great deal on the role of narrative in teacher learning and has worked with teacher stories in particular. In addition, she was my pedagogical teacher 20+ years ago when I was a dip Ed student and I have fond memories of her work with me. The papers were all interesting and relevant to my own work but I particularly enjoyed the paper by Gili Talmor from the Branco Weiss Institute who talked about their project called “Writing based disciplinary pedagogy”. I will indeed look further into this projects which involves teacher writing and student writing in the disciplines as a school culture. Another interesting paper was presented by Etti Gordon Ginzburg. She discussed letter writing in the learning of new immigrants training to be teachers in Israel.

My major excitement for the day was when I discovered that Professor Michael Connelly was present in our session. Orna had invited him to take part. Connelly remarked that he was impressed by what he had heard in the papers and told me that Dr Julian Kitchen (who I mentioned in my paper) had been a student of his. I feel honored that an academic of Connelly’s status, a respected writer who I have read and reread, heard my paper on this occasion.

 Following this positive learning experience, it is time to continue on and to utilize this knowledge in my close reading of the interview transcripts I have collected so far. The conference paper gave me confidence in my growing understandings and paved the way for my next steps.