Teaching to the Golem: A Pedagogical Intra-Action

Abstract

This article considers the pedagogical nature of an intra-action involving the author, his high school student’s final project in an English class (a golem), and his school administrators. The author relies on narrative scholarship to both tell and interpret a story of his experience as a high school English and drama teacher, to illustrate the process, the product, and the result of an intra-action that emerged from his nontraditional literacy teaching practices concerning the plays Hamlet, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, and No Exit. Ultimately, he argues that educators—both teachers and administrators—should be more receptive of emergent, improvisational literacy teaching and learning, and careful in their participation with co-constituted intra-actions that come from such approaches to literacy pedagogy.

Storying the Pedagogical Intra-Action

Pedagogy often happens in unexpected ways. Certainly, this is the case in the narratives included here, stories that concern the surprising, complex results of nontraditional literacy teaching and learning that emerged out of my high school English classroom. I draw on diverse theory, using concepts from (a) Deleuze and Guattari, (b) recent posthumanism scholarship, and (c) critical Whiteness studies to interpret a complex experience from my teaching career. I especially rely on the notion of intra-action—a concept that is described in more detail below—to unpack how bodies, materials, and environments were co-constituted in the story that follows.

This article is cued by Anders, Yaden, Iddings, Katz, and Rogers’s (2016) recent introduction to a special issue of the Journal of Literacy Research that examined how “things and discourses are spatially and materially entangled” to better understand literacy practices (p. 255). Ultimately, Anders, Yaden, Iddings, Katz, and Rogers (2016) noted a turn in the field of literacy that afforded the potential for “valuing inter-subjectivities, entanglements, and possibilities in our work” (p. 256). This work extends Anders et al.’s affordances to a consideration of my nontraditional literacy pedagogy that embraced the improvisational, and the subsequent entanglements that emerged. I use methods of storytelling and story interpretation to argue that professionals in schools—both teachers and administrators—need to be careful in responding to disruptive results of literacy pedagogy that welcomes the unexpected, facilitates the emergent, and asks students to experiment with form and content in literacy classrooms.

Storytelling and Story Interpretation

Narrative research is a qualitative approach in which stories are shared and interpreted to make sense of experience (see examples of narrative inquiry such as Barone, 2000; Connelly & Clandinin, 1990; Jacobs, 2005; Moen, 2006, and especially Lensmire et al., 2013, for models of my approach to narrative scholarship). Anne Turvey (2012) argued that narrative scholarship renders visible “the messy and wonderfully productive complexity of classrooms” (p. 57). This article extends Turvey’s claim and uses storytelling to present the complexity of how an object from my classroom became entangled with a larger context.

Scholars of color have used storytelling in critical race theory (CRT), as Ladson-Billings and Tate (1995) have described it, as an “exchange of stories from teller to listener that can help overcome ethnocentrism and the disconscious conviction of viewing the world in one way” (p. 57). I am not explicitly drawing on CRT, but it certainly informs my approach to telling stories and should be considered especially as my material became racialized.

Storytelling is a particularly appropriate method to theorize the material here, because it accounts for experience. According to John Dewey, theory or knowledge in the absence of experience is rendered incoherent. Indeed, Dewey (1916/2011) wrote,

An ounce of experience is better than a ton of theory simply because it is only in experience that any theory has vital and verifiable significance. An experience, a very humble experience, is capable of generating and carrying any amount of theory (or intellectual content), but a theory apart from an experience cannot be definitely grasped even as theory. (p. 169)

This passage by Dewey—written over a century ago—names the generative possibility of weaving theory with experience. Clandinin and Connelly (2000) also argued that narrative inquiry was a useful way to understand education. They wrote that “education and educational studies are a form of experience” and “narrative is the best way of representing and understanding experience” (p. 18). The narrative method in this article challenged me to draw on my knowledge of Deleuze and Guattari, posthumanism, and critical Whiteness studies to more carefully theorize a strange experience I had as an English teacher. Specifically, the storying work I do below—work that attempts to weave theory and experience—grew out of ethnographic field notes I was keeping for a different research project.

In January of 2012, I began collecting data on a teacher-researcher, critical ethnographic study of antiracist, second-wave critical Whiteness pedagogy. This work occurred with students at a large, suburban high school where I taught English and drama. The Whiteness Project used youth participatory action research (YPAR) in concert with play building to engage the mostly White students involved with the Primville Area High School (PAHS) ¹ theater program in an investigation of Whiteness (see Beach, Johnston, & Thein, 2015, and Tanner, 2015, 2016, for more about this project).

I was a White teacher, and had learned to seriously examine my own Whiteness during my first teaching job in a racially diverse high school. I came to feel solidarity with my mostly Black students, before accepting a position with the predominantly White school described in this report. Because of this, I became frustrated by how difficult it was to engage my White students at PAHS in open discussions of race. I designed the Whiteness Project as a way for them to both openly talk about Whiteness and potentially conceive of antiracist action.

This article does not report on the Whiteness Project. Still, I mention this other research here for two important reasons.

First, the ethnographic methods I used allowed me to capture the stories I theorize in this article, even though these vignettes were (somewhat) unrelated to the Whiteness Project. My collection method was based on Erickson’s (1986) articulation of interpretive fieldwork, in which the researcher keeps detailed field notes, and then tests claims about that work against the data corpus.

Second, my interest as a White teacher in designing antiracist Whiteness pedagogy led me to what Jupp, Berry, and Lensmire (2016) have described as a second wave of critical Whiteness studies. For Jupp et al. (2016), a second-wave framework acknowledges “the multiple, intersecting, and (often) privileged race-evasive ways of conjugating white identities” but, importantly, does not “totalize, reduce, or essentialize white identities to these important, however partial, understandings” (p. 5). It will be important for the reader to consider (but not essentialize) my own positionality as a White man as they read the story below. Specifically, the privilege and complexity of my body (and my principal’s White, female body) inform the intra-action described below. Furthermore, everybody in the stories shared below is White. The racialized Other is only introduced because of my principal’s surprising reading of a student project from my high school English classroom. Critical Whiteness studies—especially work by scholars of color such as Toni Morrison (1992) and the Reverend Thandeka (1999)—helped inform my interpretation of the experience offered here, and will be discussed throughout this piece.

This article is an effort to weave theory with storytelling that captures how I lived and continue to theorize the stories below. Therefore, I expand on theoretical traditions mentioned at the outset only after having provided narrative vignettes. Still, before proceeding to those stories, I will introduce two ideas to provoke the reader’s consideration of my material. A discussion of (a) the concept of intra-action and (b) golems (animated, anthropomorphic beings found in Jewish folklore) in relation to recent posthumanism scholarship will help prepare the reader for the rest of this article.

Intra-Action

An intra-action, according to Barad (2012), “queers the familiar sense of causality” and “more generally unsettles the metaphysics of individualism” by assuming that individuals “do not preexist as such but rather materialize in intra-action” and that individuals “only exist within phenomena” through “iteratively intra-active reconfiguring” (p. 77). Garoian (2013) described Barad’s notion of intra-action as “the mutual constitution of entangled agencies” that “emerge through, their intra-action” and are “only distinct in relation to their mutual entanglement; they don’t exist as individual elements” (p. 33). Indeed, this article concerns an intra-action that emerged through entanglements among my student Brandon, ² his project for our high school English class, my school administrators, and me. Human and nonhuman materials came into (thereby producing) this complex encounter, and are used to consider the pedagogical nature of Brandon’s project.

Recently, Ehret, Hollett, and Jocius (2016) used what they called intra-action analysis to decipher how the “entanglement of agencies constantly produces and reproduces boundaries and exclusions” in how students produced digital texts in literacy classrooms (p. 348). For them, intra-action “refers to the dissolution of boundaries between bodies in moving activity, as opposed to inter action, which freezes activity before generating a constructivist gap between bodies, and between bodies and materials, to generate knowledge” (p. 348). Like Ehret et al. (2016), I approach my narratives below by “giving all matter its due as being real, vital, and vibrant” and accept that all matter “intra-act and affect each other in processes of making texts” (pp. 348-349). This is especially true of the surprising text that Brandon created as a final project in my English class—a golem.

Golem!

A golem is a being found in Jewish mythology. It is humanoid, composed of clay and water, and brought to life through the casting of spells. Namely, golems in the medieval tradition are animated when words—specifically the Hebrew word for truth, emeth—are inscribed on their foreheads. Golems, much like robots, are created from inanimate matter. They are brought to life through incantations with the purpose of following orders, doing work, and protecting their creator from enemies. According to Collins and Pinch (1998), the golem is “clumsy and dangerous” and has the potential to “destroy its masters with its flailing vigor” (p. 1). Indeed, Collins and Pinch cautioned about the potential danger of using golems by recollecting Collins’s grandmother’s warning: “It was good to know a golem if you wanted the garden dug up, but the children were advised to stay clear” (p. 1). The instability of the golem suggested by this cautionary advice is evocative of the discourse of monstrosity.

Monsters are erratic beings that exist in the imaginary at the blurry boundaries that separate human from almost human. According to Graham (2002), monsters are unstable because they are the “simultaneous demonstration and destabilization of the demarcations by which cultures have separated nature from artifice, human from non-human, normal from pathological” (p. 12). Graham extends this argument that monsters come to stand in for instability by writing that these “creatures (hybrids between humanity, machines, and nature) are ‘processes without a stable object’ (Braidotti, 1996, p. 150)” (p. 1). In other words, hybrid human and nonhuman beings—monsters such as the golem—exist in the imaginary as instability. They are located in liminal spaces between fixed demarcations of normal and abnormal.

Mapping the location of monstrosity helps illustrate how beings such as the golem can disturb the carefully separated categories of natural and unnatural—groupings that often serve particular agendas. According to Braidotti (2013), “cartography is a theoretically based and politically informed reading of the present” that aims “at epistemic and ethical accountability by unveiling the power locations which structure our subject-position” (p. 164). The golem’s liminal location in time and space resists singular figuration, thereby disturbing fixed power locations.

Monstrous beings such as the golem might provide embodied examples of what Braidotti (2013) described as conceptual “zigzagging,” or of space that is “in-between states,” defies “the established modes of theoretical representation,” and is “not linear and process-oriented, not concept-driven” (p. 164). For Braidotti, “zigzagging” is a building block of a nonlinear, posthuman critical theory where “critique and creation strike a new deal in actualizing the practice of conceptual personae or figuration as the active pursuit of affirmative alternatives to the dominant vision of the subject” (p. 164). With the notion of zigzagging as a productively critical act in mind, one that disrupts the status quo, it is reasonable to ask the following questions as a way of guiding this article:

• Could the instability created by Brandon’s creation of a golem in my English class have functioned as an affirmative figuration—created out of words and matter (the resources that are available to its master)—that created a disruption to norms in our school?

• How can professionals in educational contexts respond affirmatively to literacy pedagogy that facilitates disruption?

These questions cue the narrative vignette and subsequent interpretation below that considers the golem my high school student Brandon created to display his mastery of the Minnesota state standards in English language arts (ELA).

Storying Brandon’s Golem

Dramatic literature was an elective English offering for students at PAHS. I handed out the Minnesota state standards in ELA during the first week of class. I told students they would need to document their interactions with those standards at the end of our class. I did this to help students start thinking about my open-ended, improvisational final assessment. During the final 2 weeks, students were assigned to create artifacts that represented their experiences in the class, as well as reflected their interactions with the ELA standards. These projects were improvisational, because I had no predetermined expectations for what my students would create.

During the latter part of my 12 years as both an urban and suburban high school teacher, I structured all of my English classes so that they ended with a similar final project (see Beach, Haertling-Thein, & Webb, 2012, for a description of this nontraditional teaching project and how it facilitated improvisational student creativity within a standards-based ELA framework). Over the years, students created work such as poetry, books, music, video games, artwork, dance, and so on. I borrowed from practices of long-form theatrical improvisation and encouraged students by affirming their choices. A central rule for improvisers is to say “yes, and” to content created in scenes. I brought this practice to my literacy teaching. My teaching facilitated emergent, unexpected creativity.

“Is this okay, Mr. Tanner?” students always asked me as they began creating strange artifacts.

“Yes,” I disciplined myself to say. “It is great.”

Next, I would offer suggestions to make their project more directly connected to the material from my English classes, as well as the ELA standards.

Brandon, a 10th grader at PAHS, was enrolled in the section of dramatic literature I mentioned above. He—like the majority of the students at the school—was White. I mention Brandon’s race (as I mentioned my own earlier) because my White principal introduces race later in the story, and I want the reader to pay attention to our White bodies.

Brandon had a close relationship with me. He was a member of the extracurricular long-form improvisational theater troupe that I directed. Brandon was enrolled in a drama class I taught when he was a freshman. In that class, he helped write and produce a play that was based on Miyazaki’s film The Cat Returns. Brandon even played the role of the evil cat king in our production. Brandon was intelligent and critical, and he worked hard in my classes. Still, other teachers found Brandon to be disruptive and hard to work with. Many teachers complained about Brandon to me and asked for advice about how to engage him after they learned he was in my improv troupe. I found that if Brandon was engaged in a creative task, he was extremely productive. Over time, Brandon learned to trust that I would support his creativity at PAHS, even if it was disruptive.

After reading Hamlet by William Shakespeare, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead by Tom Stoppard, and No Exit by Jean-Paul Sartre, Brandon used his final project to explore—as the plays do—the nature of mortality. Hamlet ruminates on death throughout the Shakespeare play. Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is an absurdist remix of Hamlet that pokes fun at the inevitability of death for two minor characters from Hamlet. No Exit considers what the afterlife entails and is often remembered for the memorable line “Hell is other people.” I chose to include these texts in my curriculum because they (a) are respected canonical works, (b) deal with human nature in connected ways, and (c) lend themselves to critical interpretation. Students in dramatic literature read, watched, and critiqued these plays. They wrote about themes in the texts, acted out moments from the plays, and engaged the material in these works. Many of our classroom discussions dealt with students’ considerations of their own mortality. Dramatic literature resembled a traditional English or drama class, until I introduced the improvisational, open-ended final project described above.

Without intending to (or even realizing what he had done), Brandon used the final 2 weeks of class to create a being that was similar to a golem.

“What are you making?” I asked Brandon as he began assembling the project in my classroom.

“I think it’s going to be Rosencrantz, but I’m not sure.”

“Great,” I told him with a smile. “Make sure it reflects what you accomplished in this class.”

“It will,” he told me confidently.

Brandon used cloth and stuffing to stitch together a humanoid dummy. He costumed the figure in black, inscribed it with quotes from the three plays, and attached a noose to its neck. An essay was folded into the being’s pocket; the writing described the project as a representation of human mortality. The figure was nearly 5 feet tall.

Students shared their projects on the final day of class.

“Do you like my project?” Brandon asked as he showed me the final product.

“It is unique,” I admitted, somewhat unnerved by the presence of his creation. The figure captured something essential about death, and I was unused to such a dramatic, public expression of mortality in schools. I overcame my initial reaction, and appreciated the creative risk Brandon took with his work.

“I bet nobody has created anything like this in your classes before,” Brandon smiled. Brandon was similar to most of the students who participated in my open-ended final assessment—he was eager to create something unique.

“No,” I admitted. “This is a first.”

Brandon spoke proudly of his work when he presented to his peers. He described how the figure was meant to embody the inevitability of death. Other members of the class were impressed with the amount of work Brandon had put into his project. Brandon was not a hardworking student in the traditional sense. He struggled in most of his classes. Brandon attached the figure to fishing wire that hung above the stage in my classroom because the figure could not stand without support.

“You better leave this hanging here, Mr. Tanner,” Brandon told me after class. “It is awesome.”

I laughed warmly at Brandon’s statement. The pride Brandon displayed in his work pleased me. Students were often proud of their final projects in my English classes. This was one of the reasons I chose to assess them with the open-ended project rather than more traditional assessments.

I was the high school’s drama teacher, so my classroom was full of eclectic props, set pieces, and theatrical artifacts. Brandon’s project—a unique, embodied assemblage of materials from my dramatic literature class—would fit right in.

“Of course I will display this, Brandon.”

I left Brandon’s project hanging from my wall, and stopped thinking about it.

***

I attended a faculty meeting in the school’s auditorium 2 months later. After the meeting, the school’s principal made an announcement over the microphone.

“Could Mr. Tanner please come down to talk with me?”

I was surprised.

“Heading to the executioner’s block?” my friend—another English teacher—asked me.

I laughed darkly. “Probably.”

My friend knew my history with discipline at our high school.

Over the previous 2 years, I had received two 3-day suspensions and been threatened with termination twice by the school district. My offenses included showing episodes of The Office to illustrate comic timing to a drama class and openly discussing the sexual relationship between Hamlet and his mother in a previous dramatic literature class.

My principal routinely accused me of inappropriate behavior, without offering an explicit explanation of what those behaviors were. As was previously mentioned, I taught for 4 years at a different—predominantly Black—high school before taking a position at PAHS.

The first years in my new position at PAHS were difficult, mostly because of my confounding, punitive encounters with school administration. I came to understand some of my punishment in surprising, racial ways. I was explicitly told that my teaching may have been okay at my previous high school, but it was not appropriate at PAHS. My White English department chair even cautioned me about working with my White students.

“You’re not performing at the Apollo anymore,” she told me.

I was surprised by her reference to a historically Black theater. Was she accusing me of behaving like a Black person?

The punitive measures taken against me were confusing. I was voted most inspirational teacher twice at PAHS. Still, despite what I interpreted as my success as a teacher at the school, I continued to be disciplined. Over time, I concluded that—whether she understood why or not—I made my principal at PAHS uncomfortable. She was a former physical education teacher with little knowledge of my disciplines of English and drama. She was not supportive of unconventional teaching and learning.

I approached my principal after the faculty meeting mentioned above. She spoke to me as the other teachers made their way out of the auditorium, pretending not to listen to us talk.

“I need John here,” she told me with a frown. “He has to be part of our conversation.”

John was the assistant principal. In the past, my principal included him when formal disciplinary action was taken against me.

“Am I in trouble again?” I asked glumly.

“We’ll talk in my office.” Her face was stone.

John joined us in the hallway. I followed them to the principal’s office. Anxiety spread through my chest. My administrators were both silent as we walked through the school.

Upon entering the principal’s office, I noticed that the statue Brandon had created was hanging from her filing cabinet. The figure seemed out of place in her orderly, efficient office. It watched us as we sat down around a conference table.

“Sam,” the principal asked me forcefully. “What is this thing?”

John took notes on a legal pad as I explained the statue. I was unsure of their concern and could not figure out what they wanted me to say. I assumed my administrators were upset about the unconventional final assessment in my English classes. After explaining the design and rationale of my final project, I described how Brandon’s project fit with the content of the plays we read in class, as well as the Minnesota ELA standards.

“Brandon was really proud of this project,” I concluded. “It was inspired by the characters Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. I left it hanging in my room after he turned it in. I figured I could use it when I talked about Hamlet with future classes.” My principal listened to my explanation with a stern face. After I finished, she told me that the statue was incredibly inappropriate.

“Even sitting next to this thing makes me feel uncomfortable.” She backed away from the statue and pointed to one of the quotes inscribed on its sleeve. My principal read the text aloud. “Here, thou incestuous, murderous, damned Dane, drink off this potion.”

My principal appeared disgusted after she read the text. “What does this mean? How could you let something like this be displayed in your classroom?”

“It is a quote from Hamlet,” I told her, surprised at her revulsion. “This is what Hamlet says to Claudius at the end of the play.”

My principal ignored my response. Instead, she mentioned that she had noticed that the names “Rosencrantz” and “Guildenstern” were written on the figure.

“Are those Jewish names, Sam? Is this meant to be an anti-Semitic effigy?”

I reminded my principal, as I had done during my explanation of the object, that the names belonged to characters in Hamlet. Furthermore, I told her I was the son of Jewish immigrants who were chased out of Russia in 1917 because of pogroms.

“My great-grandmother was killed by Cossacks because she was Jewish,” I told her, offended by her accusation that I was displaying anti-Semitic imagery in my classroom. I was White, but I came from a family of Jewish immigrants.

“Is this supposed to be a Black person?” my principal continued. “Is it meant to be a lynching?”

My principal’s connection between the figure and race startled me, especially as I was researching Whiteness in preparation for my facilitation of the Whiteness Project.

Remember: All three of us in the room were White.

“No,” I told her. Again, I reminded her that the statue was inspired by content in the play Hamlet, and went on to express my commitment to antiracist teaching. “This is not supposed to be a Black person. I wouldn’t celebrate lynching in my classroom.”

“Well, it makes me really uncomfortable,” my principal concluded. “How could you think this was appropriate to display in your classroom?”

I did not know how to respond to my principal’s question.

John pointed out that the black sweater on the figure was adorned with the insignia of a rival high school. It was stitched into the side of the sweater, and hardly visible.

“Is this meant to be an effigy of a student from that school?” John asked.

“Honestly, I hadn’t noticed the insignia. I’m certain that Brandon wasn’t aware of it either. He chose a black sweater because it resembled the outfit Rosencrantz wore in a film we watched in class.”

My principal did not respond to my statement. Instead, she told me that students from the rival high school had been in my classroom the previous weekend. The rival high school was a private institution and, like PAHS, was predominantly White. Students at PAHS often made jokes about how the rival school was where the rich kids went. Students from the rival school had visited PAHS to attend a speech meet and saw the object in my classroom. A principal from their school contacted my principal to complain about the figure.

“I just don’t know how you could be so negligent, Sam,” my principal told me.

“Am I in trouble?”

“I need to report this to the superintendent’s office,” she told me coldly. “I’m sure action will be taken.”

Previously, I had been told that I would be fired if I were disciplined again by the school district.

“What do you want me to do?” I asked.

“Just wait for us to contact you,” she said.

“Am I going to be fired?”

“We’ll talk about it. I’ll be in touch after the weekend.”

It was a Friday.

“Do you want me to take the project back to my room?” I asked.

“No,” John barked. “We are confiscating it.”

Overwhelmed, I left the principal’s office. I stood in the hallway and began to cry. I did not know how to justify my teaching to my administrators, and I was worried that I would be fired.

***

I was shaken after my meeting in the principal’s office.

I wrote a lengthy explanation of both the teaching project and Brandon’s statue that weekend. I sent it to my administrators in an email. I tried to rationalize the project around the state standards, student engagement, and offering students creative freedom. Neither of the administrators responded to my message. My anxiety about being terminated made it difficult to fall asleep on Sunday night. My mind raced with scenarios. I was afraid of losing my job and did not fall asleep.

I saw my principal in a crowded hallway the next morning before school.

“Sam,” she called out. I moved through a group of students and approached her.

“I called the principal of the other school this morning. They want you to write a letter of apology and send it to the school’s speech coach. Just explain the project, the same way you explained it to John and me.”

My principal’s voice was friendly. I was confused.

“Am I in trouble?” I asked.

“No, we decided not to take this to the district office. Your letter should take care of the problem. If it doesn’t, you and I can drive over to the school and apologize together.”

My principal’s support unnerved me. What had happened over the weekend to change her perspective?

Brandon noticed his project was no longer in my classroom during our next improv rehearsal.

“Where is my project, Mr. Tanner?”

I explained to Brandon what had happened. Brandon was as confounded about the reaction to his golem as I was.

“That’s so bizarre,” Brandon told me. He was uncharacteristically earnest after I told him what had happened.

I knew Brandon very well and was convinced that he would not have created an effigy for a rival school. Furthermore, my principal’s comment about the race of Brandon’s golem deeply troubled me. The rival school was predominantly White, and there was little reason for her to accuse Brandon or me of creating a White supremacist artifact.

I taught high school under this same principal for the next 4 years, before taking a position as a professor of education. No more disciplinary action was taken against me during those 4 years. After countless threats, numerous punishments, and anxiety about losing my position, my interactions with administration after the incident with Brandon’s statue were innocuous. In fact, my principal became an ally. She helped me arrange my teaching schedule as I pursued my doctorate, invited me to lead professional development sessions in our school, and even implored me to stay when I told her I had been offered a position at a university.

I never saw Brandon’s project again.

Interpreting the Storied Intra-Action

The Pedagogical Golem

I will not claim that Brandon’s figure was an actual golem.

It would be absurd to suggest that Brandon’s project came to life, ran amuck in the school, almost led to my termination, battled my administrators on my behalf, and won some victory that protected me from further abuse at the hands of my school district. Still, the material presence of Brandon’s project at PAHS did have a dramatic influence on the trajectory of my teaching career.

I am curious about the pedagogical presence of the object. Specifically, I wonder what sort of teaching and learning happened through the intra-actions that emerged due to encounters between the texts in my dramatic literature class, the figure Brandon created, and the characters that appear in the vignette above—myself included. Did these intra-actions inspire an instability that functioned to perturb demarcations of normal and abnormal, ultimately teaching my principal something that changed the way she understood my presence in PAHS? Certainly, my teaching had seemed irregular to her, but it seemed to become more acceptable after her encounter with Brandon’s strange project.

Why?

Interpreting this narrative vignette in three ways—as I do below—prompted new pedagogic thinking for me, and illustrated the need to carefully contextualize and theorize nontraditional literacy pedagogy in schools. Indeed, scholarship such as Leander and Boldt (2013) has argued that writing and research are never representations of things that happened in the past but are always their own new events, producing new assemblages. I rely on concepts from Deleuze and Guattari, posthumanism, and critical Whiteness studies and approach my interpretation of this story in three ways. First, I will invite the reader into a consideration of the improvisational nature of the teaching project that allowed Brandon’s artifact to emerge, perhaps unframing the curriculum of my dramatic literature class. Next, I analyze the intra-action with the golem as a pedagogical event. Finally, I consider my principal’s racial reaction to the golem in terms of critical Whiteness studies.

It is important to note the silences in the following analysis. I am choosing not to interpret the vignette from a construct of privilege, although I readily admit that my male privilege played a salient role in this story. The institution of school is designed to serve me, as a White man (see Morton, Jackson, Frazier, & Fasching-Varner, 2017). While this reality is important to recognize, I situate my work, in part, in critical Whiteness studies.

Critical Whiteness scholars like Lensmire et al. (2013) have argued that McIntosh’s (1988) White privilege framework has become unhelpful because it over-essentializes White identity, creates limited binaries, and leads to confessional pedagogies that do not contribute to antiracist action. The second-wave critical Whiteness studies that I described in the introduction accept White privilege but also understand Whiteness as cultural phenomena, loss, pain, and even an absence of love (see Sullivan, 2012). To contribute to newer, more productive waves of research in Whiteness, I confess my privilege had much to do with my experience, but I do not use that lens as my primary mode of analysis.

Improvisational literacy pedagogy

In some ways, the figure Brandon created was a surprising result of improvisational literacy pedagogy. Scholarship such as Boldt, Lewis, and Leander (2015) and Leander and Boldt (2013) has begun to pay attention to teaching that facilitates improvisation. In other words, this work is interested in pedagogy that is not overly prescribed, determinate, or dismissive of difference. Relying on Deleuze and Guattari (1987), Leander and Boldt considered how learners become engaged when they are allowed to play with what they called “major resources” or “the familiar, the known, the expected, and dependable” without the teacher determining specific outcomes. They argued that open-ended explorations of major resources allow “in minor ways—unexpected, emergent, combinations” that can “take flight in to something new” (p. 43). They were quick to clarify that their observations did “not constitute a pedagogy,” but they did pose their contention about improvisation as “an opening” (p. 43). This led them to pose the following questions:

Can the teacher make space for fluidity and indeterminacy as the nature of things? Can he or she recognize difference, surprise, and unfolding that follow along paths that are not rational or linear or obviously critical or political? (p. 43)

The final assessment that Brandon participated in described above is, in some ways, a pedagogical response to those questions.

Brandon’s project emerged because of the curriculum (i.e., the plays we read in class and our subsequent interpretation of those texts) and the teacher’s pedagogical stance (i.e., my expectation for improvisational participation in the final project). These things entered into what Leander and Boldt (2013) described as “an assemblage with the materials, time, space, experiences, movement, play, emotion, and desires” (p. 43) that students (i.e., Brandon) bring with them to class. Brandon’s project was not prescribed. I challenged students to show encounters with the ELA standards. Still, I also gave students an opportunity to improvise a response to those standards. Students such as Brandon reacted to my expectation of fluidity by reconstituting the major resources of our class content, the ELA state standards, and their own participation in those materials.

In my years of assigning this final assessment in high school classrooms, I received a wide variety of projects: portfolios, scrapbooks, concept albums, video games, paintings, essays, cakes, and more. Brandon created something that I found bizarre and compelling, even before my administrators discovered the statue. His golem provoked immediate dissonance for me. Perhaps that was because it was monstrous; it existed in the liminal space between normal and abnormal. It was somewhat disconcerting to gaze upon the figure, and my first reaction upon seeing it was to recoil, because the being accurately captured death. Still, I was committed to student expression and improvisational expectations for difference in student work. I quickly overcame my aversion and honored his work.

Following this line of thinking, it is reasonable to understand Brandon’s figure or assemblage as a process that brought what Leander and Boldt (2013) articulated as “the materials” of our class “into a ‘composition of desire’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 399)” (pp. 43-44). This composition of desire, for Brandon, resulted in a golem whose influence extended beyond my classroom through its intra-action with my administrators.

The life of Brandon’s golem beyond the classroom—as described in the narrative above—evokes Powell and Serriere’s (2013) argument for the use of improvisational, open-ended pedagogy to inspire “the reconstitution of curriculum as embodied, experiential, and fluid, moving beyond a pre-planned syllabus or package of materials” (p. 21). Powell and Serriere described this improvisational approach to teaching and learning as the “unframing of curriculum” that might allow “a diverse group of people to participate more fully” (p. 21) in classrooms and public spaces. Indeed, they posited that in “such an unframing, ‘education’ is never complete. There is always more to uncover, more to expand and embrace” (p. 21). Perhaps the curriculum of my dramatic literature class became unframed by Brandon’s response to my final assessment. The class materials moved beyond the pages of text, were constituted in the body of Brandon’s golem, and traveled out into the school, eventually resting in my principal’s office.

Brandon’s golem demarcated standard texts in a high school English class (Hamlet, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, and No Exit) as well as a standard practice (a final assessment) and transformed those things into a being with surprisingly disruptive utility. Moreover, Brandon’s project contributed to a process that highlighted Powell and Serriere’s (2013) claim that “education is never complete” (p. 21), which is to say that all of the characters in the vignette above continued engaging in the pedagogical act as Brandon’s golem ran amuck, or, to reference Braidotti (2013) again, zigzagged.

My administrators encountered the materials from my class. They were forced to reckon with that material as well as my approach to teaching. I was forced to make sense of my place within the institution of PAHS. Ultimately, my teaching project may have forced all of the characters in this article to engage with what Powell and Serriere (2013) described as pedagogy that is “a process of re-imag(in)ing ideas about living, embracing ambiguity, noticing difference regularly,” and looking at the ordinary with new eyes “and with curious ones as well” (p. 22).

Certainly, all of us gazed on Brandon’s golem—a being that emerged from improvisational pedagogy and blurred the material world (i.e., fabric, cloth, text) with the human (i.e., my curriculum, Brandon, and my administrators)—with curious eyes.

The disruptive product of improvisational literacy pedagogy

My principal’s curious gaze, perhaps, constituted what Garoian (2015)—borrowing from Derrida (1994) and Deleuze—would describe as “chronological time-out-of joint; that is, time in the present as counterpoint between the social and historical specters of representation and what has yet to come in the future” (p. 490). Time-out-of-joint-ness is a particularly appropriate way to approach my principal’s intra-action with Brandon’s project, because the term references material that was reconstituted in Brandon’s golem—the play Hamlet.

Hamlet enters an unstable situation after the ghost of his father calls for Hamlet to revenge its unjust death at the hands of Hamlet’s uncle Claudius. Hamlet bemoans his ambivalence when he says, “The time is out of joint; O cursed spite! / That ever I was born to set it right!” (Shakespeare, 1599-1601, 1.5.935-945). Garoian (2015) synthesized Deleuze’s (1994) reading of time-out-of-joint by suggesting that it “constitutes a ‘caesura,’ [an interruption] at which beginning and end [of chronological time] no longer coincide” (p. 89). Instead of the sequential and circular unfolding of time’s historical content, it is time per se that oscillates, unfolds, comes undone” (p. 490). Certainly, Brandon’s golem interrupted my principal and created a sort of dissonance that disrupted chronological time. This was true both in a literal and a figurative sense.

My principal’s institutional routine was interrupted by a complaint from our rival high school, and her understanding of my presence as a teacher at her school seemed to be disrupted by Brandon’s project as well. Furthermore, like Hamlet lamenting after the visit from his father’s ghost, my principal appeared truly distressed or “undone” during our encounter in her office. I also experienced this time-out-of-joint-ness, as I spent an anxious weekend trying to reconcile my principal’s encounter with Brandon’s project. It certainly felt to me, and apparently my principal shared this sentiment, that things—our understanding of what was normal and abnormal—were coming undone.

One way to read this time-out-of-joint-ness is pedagogical, because the intra-action forced us to reconstitute our understandings of normal to make sense of each other and the object. Indeed, this intra-action facilitated what Garoian (2015) described as a “multiplicity of accidental encounters and alliances, milieus, and rhythms of association and conceptualization to emerge” (p. 490). The intra-action brought about change (my principal changed the way she behaved toward me, I became wearier of the institution, and Brandon saw how powerful his work in my classroom was). Therefore, this intra-action might have been pedagogical because it, borrowing from Garoian’s word again, “turned time upon itself thus initiating a return of difference, the yet-to-come, and not the return of the same” (p. 490).

Time-out-of-joint-ness was resolved, but the situation was not the same: I was in my principal’s good graces and, somehow, I seemed to have gained her respect. She may have learned to respect pedagogy that facilitated difference because of my defense of the project.

The racialized response to improvisational literacy pedagogy

Another way—and it seems negligent for me to gloss over this point as I consider the narrative—to interpret my principal’s intra-action with the figure is to pay attention to her comments regarding race. Recall, all of the characters in my principal’s office—me, John, and my principal—were White. My principal was made deeply uncomfortable by this object (as was I when I first saw it), and her first impulse was to ask me if the figure was Jewish. Next, she asked if it was Black.

Mostly, as mentioned earlier, I found her racial comments in reaction to Brandon’s golem surprising, and somewhat offensive. The fact that she did not realize that I was Jewish, and would accuse me of anti-Semitic teaching, showed how little attention my principal paid to who I was, even as her punishments threatened to end my career. My Whiteness may have served me in the stories above. White male privilege is real, and I wonder whether a teacher of color or a woman would have been fired in the intra-action described above. In another way, my Whiteness may actually have harmed me in this intra-action, because my principal did what Jupp et al. (2016) cautioned against—she essentialized my White identity. Could I have expected my principal to know my racial background? No. Still, it seemed reactive for her to accuse me of celebrating a White supremacist artifact in my classroom without doing more work to contextualize the events in the story above.

Ultimately, the comments in her office both puzzled and disturbed me at the time. It seemed that my principal’s comments were more about her than they were about Brandon’s project—or, as Toni Morrison (1992) has argued, race is a social construct with powerful utility. Morrison argued that race is often more about the dreamer than the dream, and this is especially telling about the White psyche in the United States. I am not interested in simply denouncing my principal as racist or confessing my White privilege. Indeed, Jupp et al. (2016) and Lensmire et al. (2013) have argued that these are not productive moves for critical Whiteness scholars in education. Instead, I turn to scholarship from writers of color who examined the White imagination to theorize my principal’s reaction to Brandon’s golem.

The golem exists in the same place that race, a social construction, does—in the imaginary. In the racial imaginary, Whiteness is formed and shaped by a relationship with what both Toni Morrison and the Reverend Thandeka have described as non-Whiteness. The boundaries between the two might be important in thinking through my principal’s response to Brandon’s work. The location of the monstrous figure of the golem in liminal space—recall our discussion of the golem earlier—might have disrupted, for my White principal, what Thandeka (1999) described as a White person’s “internal reference for the nonwhite zone in Euro-American life” that lives in the “self’s own proscribed feelings” (p. 18). In other words, Euro-Americans demarcate Whiteness and non-Whiteness by internalizing these two racial categories as distinctly separate.

Thandeka (1999) described this internal policing as a system built on the “lockstep discipline” that accompanies inductions into Whiteness (p. 84). These fixed boundaries fortify and uphold racial mythologies of Whiteness and non-Whiteness and, according to Thandeka, “the nonwhite zone must be vigilantly patrolled, then, for along its border lies the terrain of race-mixing” (p. 26). Perhaps the mere presence of Brandon’s monstrous golem so confounded my principal’s categories of normal and abnormal that she read the monstrous artifact as being non-White (i.e., Jewish or Black) because it did not fit into her expectation of what was appropriate in schools. Weilbacher (2012) has argued that due to historical and institutional White supremacy, Whiteness is standardized as the norm in schools in the United States. Non-Whiteness is not welcome in schools. Brandon’s golem may have disrupted those norms for my principal, and therefore she read the artifact as being Black.

Thandeka’s theorization of Whiteness in relation to non-Whiteness shares much in common with Toni Morrison’s (1992) thinking in Playing in the Dark. In that work, Morrison named imaginary non-Whiteness as “Africanism” and described it as a “disabling virus” in the White imagination that becomes a way of “talking about and policing” (p. 7) everything from class and sex to repression, power, and ethics. For Morrison, non-Whiteness provides a way for White people to contemplate “chaos and civilization, desire and fear, and a mechanism for testing the problems and blessings of freedom” (p. 7). Perhaps my principal, in contemplating Brandon’s golem, found herself contemplating (and simultaneously policing) her understanding of what was appropriate or not appropriate in teaching and learning.

My principal may have been trying to negotiate—as was discussed earlier—the time-out-of-joint-ness produced by her disruptive intra-action with Brandon’s project. Recall, my principal confiscated Brandon’s project and considered firing me. She was prepared to “police” both me and the product of my teaching as a way to uphold “civilization” over “chaos” and solidify demarcations of “normal” instead of “abnormal” through her actions. Surprisingly, my principal did not report me, though she certainly worked to erase the presence of Brandon’s golem from our school.

Teaching to the Golem

I have interpreted the narrative in this article in three different, conceptually rigorous ways. I did this only because—in weaving theory with experience—I want to share with the reader the ways that I both lived and understood the events above. To recap, I framed a narrative vignette by discussing the concept of intra-action and golems. After telling a story, I relied on the notion of intra-action to interpret my story in three ways by examining (a) improvisational teaching and learning, (b) the intra-active event of Brandon’s golem, and (c) my principal’s racial reaction to Brandon’s golem. My interpretations are diverse only because the experience in question was complicated.

Certainly, this article might be more straightforward if I only chose to interpret the vignettes in one way, but that would not have accurately reported my method, experience, or subsequent sense making of the events described here. Ultimately, in accounting for the material above, it seems that the nontraditional, improvisational pedagogy I used in my English classroom led to a student project—an experiment with form and content—that affirmatively disrupted demarcations of normal and abnormal at PAHS. This was true in terms of expected literacy pedagogy in a high school classroom and even extended to issues of race.

I use the term “affirmatively” above because Brandon’s project—despite how it was received—did not actually intend harm to others and, it should not be forgotten, resulted from his attempt to creatively respond to the Minnesota state standards in ELA. Still, Brandon’s golem was read as disruptive by my administrators, perhaps because it existed as an intra-action of bodies and materials with those that encountered the being. This led to my principal’s extreme discomfort, and may have even elicited her racialized reading of Brandon’s work.

Was I actively teaching to the golem, as the title of this article suggests? Not really. I was teaching toward the improvisational instead of the standardized and, therefore, I allowed for a golem to emerge from the materials and resources in my classroom. I use the phrase “teaching to the golem” as a somewhat tongue-in-cheek title to suggest that for literacy teachers, there might be generative benefit in allowing for unexpected student discovery that might come from improvisational literacy pedagogy. Brandon’s project certainly facilitated intense, surprising engagement with the materials in my dramatic literature course. Furthermore, he saw the power in creating something meaningful in a high school classroom.

Teaching toward the unexpected might open new possibilities for literacy teachers to resist acquiescing to standardized teaching and learning that does not challenge the status quo. Of course, as my stories illustrate, this improvisational teaching does not come without risk. To respond affirmatively to the product of improvisational teaching and learning in literacy, professionals in education—both teachers and administrators—need to more carefully respond when something unexpected emerges from the classroom.

My principal (and the principal at the rival school) could have been less eager to censor the project and more careful to learn about the bodies and materials that resulted in Brandon’s golem. If the demarcations of normal and abnormal were perturbed by the people in the story—myself included—perhaps they (we) could have paid more attention to theorizing that disruption, rather than reacting contentiously with each other. My principal could have refrained from a punitive response. For my part, I could have done a better job of contextualizing Brandon’s surprising work for my principal, and more carefully articulated the benefit in allowing Brandon to reconstitute the text and material from my classroom in the form of a golem. Finally, it is reasonable to wonder how my White, male body ultimately served me in surviving this incident from my career.

Toward Affirmative Disruptions in Improvisational Literacy Pedagogy

The events described in this article were deeply troubling to me at the time, mostly because my livelihood (and passion) was at stake. In retrospect, it seems to me that this story suggests my accidental participation (with people and objects in my school) in a tense example of what Garoian (2015) wrote of as ongoing intra-activity “with each other, with the objects and materials of their experiments, with the larger context of school, and of living in the world where discourse can either constrain or enable what is being said and done” (p. 492). A series of things happened—involving all sorts of forces—none of which intended the outcome, and perhaps this is the point that can be gleaned from the story I share here. Approaching this story as an intra-action moves away from rationality, causality, and a belief in the individual’s intention as the proper point of analysis. What was constrained and enabled in my story (i.e., conceptions of appropriate behavior by teachers in schools) may have been called into question—somehow—and both my principal and I entered what Garoian articulated as an “in-between space” in which our agencies became entangled and resolved themselves in new ways (p. 492).

Garoian credited those spaces as having the “prosthetic potentialities” to create a “sonorous refrain where every relation is a relation to difference” (p. 492, emphasis in original). Certainly, it seemed that my story was a cacophony of reactions to the relationships of differences, but the emergent sonorous refrain led to something of a transformation: (a) My standing with my principal changed, (b) my principal seemed to respect me more after the intra-action, and (c) Brandon saw the power in reconstituting words and matter to evoke canonical literature such as Hamlet.

With these transformations in mind, it seems reasonable to consider both the potentialities and pitfalls of teaching to the unexpected, rather than teaching to the test. The disruptive, improvisational educator might be served by considering the story I share here. My improvisational literacy pedagogy led to Brandon’s surprising creation, and that creation—a golem—might have had utility as a transformative agent. Indeed, it may have contributed to an intra-action that brought about real change. Specifically, it led to the end of my harassment by the administration at PAHS. Of course, a golem cannot be trusted to produce a happy ending. Golems remind us of the potentially destructive unpredictability of the happenstance nature of life and relationships. That golem also nearly cost me my job.

I end this article with two questions: How might literacy teachers imagine improvisational teaching and learning that facilitates the unexpected? How might professionals in schools respond affirmatively to the emergence of difference in classrooms? Certainly, there are real risks involved in creating answers to this question. There is destructive possibility in pedagogy that perturbs the status quo, as is clear in my story. Still, transformative pedagogy is often risky, and literacy educators might be served by considering the surprising utility of Brandon’s golem as they approach the implicit danger of disruptive teaching and learning.