Re-membering and Re-directing the Self : An Educational Journey

This paper draws on the notion of “productive remembering” (Huyssen, 2003) which foregrounds how working with our memories of the past assist in the construction, interpretation and understandings of our present and our future trajectories. Instead of the use of literary texts, spaces and artifacts of our lived world, this paper draws on how personal experiences of persons, places and moments conjure up our “personal educational philosophy” within broader changing macro-landscapes. The paper explores specifically how educational philosophies, values and principles come to infuse themselves from our memories into our lived practices as teachers and researchers. The paper uses a self-reflective narrative inquiry methodology, now popularised as a strategy for teacher professional and personal development. It points to how the researcher drew from the influences of home, family, community, schooling and the wider society to activate a personal philosophy of education as a form of professional growth and as an educational responsibility. The paper explores the encounter with the Turkish Hizmet philosophy and draws comparisons with other movements of service to humanity, for example, Ubuntu and the deliberative action of nation building. The paper argues for an expanding agenda of self, as part the self in dialogue with many other selves. The educated self is not limited to a private, internalised, independent and cognitivist remembering, but an intersection of our personal biographical and contextual social past and present experiences intermingling in who we are and become in the future.This paper was first presented at the launch of Rainbow Institute at the Horizon Education Trust Conference, Lusaka, Zambia, 29 May 2014. It was subsequently presented emphasising the journey of developing philosophy of education at the Memory in Africa, 2nd Memory Studies Conference, College of Humanities, University of KwaZulu-Natal. 14-15 November 2014