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Marrow-Bone Thoughts and Lasting Songs?
Making sense of educational change and transformation
Chris Breen
God guard me from those thoughts men think
In the mind alone;
He that sings a lasting song
Thinks in a marrow-bone...
W.B. Yeats: "A Prayer for Old Age"
In 1990, I was privileged to be included in a group of four "ANC-approved" South African university mathematics educators who traveled to London to participate in the first legitimately attended international conference. At this time the African National Congress' academic boycott, which attempted to further isolate the apartheid regime by blocking contact with the outside world, was still very much in place. The conference was called The Political Dimensions of Mathematics Education. It was an extremely daunting experience in many ways, because all four of us had obviously respected the academic boycott and had not attended any international conferences for almost a decade. However, as the conference progressed, we realized that what we did bring to the discussion was a deeply lived experiential knowledge of the dynamics of change. Living through the struggle against apartheid had meant that for us change was not a theory - it was something that lived in our marrow-bones.
In this article, I have attempted to begin the task of making sense of the 14-year-long journey I have undertaken since then, by trying to match this lived experience of change with my theoretical understanding of the process of educational and personal transformation. I have decided to try to capture the vibrancy of the path and, at the same time, to tease out the theory by focusing on four separate stories. These stories represent a selection of critical moments and attempt to capture major shifts in my teaching approach over the past 20 years.
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Marrow-Bone Thoughts and Lasting Songs?