Learning from Virginia Woolf’s ‘A Room Of One’s Own’.
Submitted by:
Bella Illesca
Abstract:
This paper explores how Virginia Woolf’s (1929/1992) ‘A Room of One’s Own’ might speak to language and literature teachers who are committed to exploring the complexities of their professional practice and reflecting on the centrality of language to what they know and do. Its intention is to push back against reductive understandings of teaching and learning that have infused the profession and all the apparatus of training, accreditation and regulation of teachers.
Through the work of Virginia Woolf, I conceptualise storytelling as simultaneously standpoint, philosophy and methodology. From the standpoint of secondary language and literature teachers, and in alignment with the disciplinary origins of language teaching in the literary arts, in this paper I develop and sustain storytelling as a political and ethical praxis-oriented approach to the complexities of language and literature teachers’ work, one that re-orients our attention to the life of the classroom.
Entering into conversation with Woolf’s essay allows me to examine the complexities of teaching and learning through story fragments and small embodied scenes anchored in the everyday life of the classroom. I demonstrate how stories insist on complexity, indeterminacy and polyvocality. They are capacious, polyphonous, extensive and unresolvable, allowing me to probe many potential points of view and facilitate multiple returns from different angles and lines of sight that enable me to problematise evidence-based representations of what works in the classroom.
Woolf’s (1929/1992) work reminded me that the literary theoretical resources that were important to me when I was a student of literature provide an immensely valuable intellectual and spiritual resource that I can draw on to make sense of my work as a language and literature teacher. This is to affirm what language and literature teachers are good at – namely their capacity to nurture a heightened awareness of the way that language mediates experience and shapes identity.
The importance of standpoint and the potential of narrative as a form of inquiry is something that I explore in this essay by reading Virginia Woolf’s, 'A Room of One’s Own' to show the powerful ways that her words have spoken to me as an English teacher, a researcher and a woman.
Keywords: Storytelling, standpoint, language, literature, experience, professional learning, professional ethics, professional knowledge
Bakhtin, M. M. (1981). The Dialogical Imagination: Four Essays. (C. Emerson & M. Holquist,
Trans.). Austin: University of Texas Press.
Woolf, V (1929/1992). A Room Of One’s Own. Penguin.