| Drawing on my climb of Mount Rainier to frame my inquiry, I meander through the circuitous and strenuous terrain of my personal history in education to clarify my identification with transformative learning and my constantly evolving pedagogical temperament. I start with the premise that each student is thrown into an elusive world of inherited stories and expectations. I presume that she embodies her own rhythms of change and metamorphosis, her own specific ways of expanding and contracting in response to what she is engaging and learning, and that this shapes and is shaped by where she comes from and her consciousness of the world in which she dwells (Abram, 2009, p. 19). Reflecting my presumption, I take my reader on a journey through a series of movements wherein I discover the cognitive topology of my inquiry into exposure and presence.;Grounding this interpretive study philosophically in Somerville's (2007, 2008) postmodern emergence, I employ Krall's (1988) personal history research heuristic to guide my poetic exploration of thrownness (Heidegger, 1962) in education. Writing against the backdrop of "the mountain," I uncover and highlight significant moments with exposure and presence to explicate how I have negotiated complicated relationships with teachers, students, and my thrown self, and navigated various theoretical and concrete pathways that have presented themselves as provocative and heartening guides along the way.;As my reader will discover, I believe that if we seek to avail ourselves of and transcend the inherited stories and expectations we have learned to live out in the classroom, then we are compelled to consider that our venture will require of us a great deal of curiosity, compassion, courage and creativity. With this in mind, I have become convinced while traversing the landscape of my educational past that an important aspect of my role as a teacher is to expose and be present to students in a way that supports and honors their specific ways of responding to what they are engaging and learning, and awakens them to possibilities not yet discovered regarding their being-and-becoming-whole-in-education . |
