Sentences I’ve heard/thought a lot about since I started at St. Andrew’s:
“I just need to know where we are as a school.”
“Where do we draw the line?”
“I’m so glad we are living into who we are.”
“I feel as though this school has taken several steps [in a particular direction] without me knowing.”
“This isn’t the place I thought it was.”
“This is exactly the place I thought it was!”
“Can we all just get on the same page?”
Identity is a slippery, slippery thing. I think recognizing that truth is the first step.
In our last blog blast, I wrote about educational philosophy as a mirror, window, and north star. I wrote about why it matters. I wrote about why the process (not the product) is most of the magic.
I believe that still. But I’ve been thinking a lot lately about our identity as a school in lots of directions, and I’ve been thinking about Dorothy Holland, a cultural anthropologist I loved in grad school, and her work on figured worlds. Basically her big move is to talk about the stories we make up in our minds; for example, the stories we tell ourselves about our own identities:
“People tell others who they are, but even more importantly, they tell themselves and then try to act as though they are who they say they are. These self understandings, especially for those with strong emotional resonance for the teller, are what we refer to as identities.” (Holland, 2001, p. 3)
This is complicated enough with individual identity work. But when the identity of a shared organization, institution, or social practice comes into question, pure madness ensues. Shared spaces like these are filled-to-the-brim with individuals with competing figured worlds at play. Likely these figured worlds are overly-simplified stories in our heads about the “what is”: what is this school, what is this classroom, what is this state, what is this church? We carry around these smaller-than-life and simpler-than-life constructions because we can only fit so much complexity into our head at once. For example:
- St. Andrew’s is a school for rich kids.
- St. Andrew’s is a school for smart kids.
- St. Andrew’s is really liberal/conservative compared to ________.
- St. Andrew’s is super progressive in teaching methods.
- St. Andrew’s is super conservative in teaching methods.
I argue that all of these are true. And I argue that none of these are true.
Holland points out that identities are “improvised- in the flow of activity within specific social situations- from the cultural resources at hand.” In other words, slippery. But more than a fun jazzy game, figured world development is serious business:
. . . Groups are caught in the tensions between past histories that have settled them in and the present discourses and images that attract them or somehow impinge upon them. In this continuous self-fashioning, identities are hard-won standpoints that, however dependent upon social support and however vulnerable to change make at least a modicum of self-direction possible. They are possibilities for mediating agency (p. 4).
I think in some ways we are all always caught up in these tensions. I think we can talk about and name these tensions, and that this honesty is productive, humble, and generative all at once. But I think a lot of the questions or statements at the top of this blog are the wrong questions or statements. Why? Because I don’t think there is one solid “truth about who we are” that we are sorting through to find. We don’t have a needle-in-a-haystack situation here. We aren’t looking for my car keys which are buried under a heap of unfolded laundry from last weekend. We are actively constructing who we are with every small and big decision we make as maintenance workers, teachers, parents, students, administrators. I trust who we will become because I trust the people who are living-working-being-making this figured world of St. Andrew’s.
I am, though, very grateful for the flying questions about who we are. Identities are, after all, “key means through which people care about and care for what is going on around them. They are important bases from which people create new activities, new worlds, and new ways of being.” (p. 5) Those of us asking these questions very clearly care very deeply about and care deeply for this place.
Let’s keep making this place what it is together. Let’s keep asking these questions.
Holland, D. (2001). Identity and agency in cultural worlds. Harvard University Press.
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