In-Between Spaces

(in)between (M.A. Reilly, 2013)

I. 

Homi Bhabha (1994) writes:

What is theoretically innovative, and politically crucial, is the need to think beyond narratives of originary and initial subjectivities and to focus on those moments or processes that are produced in the articulation of cultural differences. These 'in-between' spaces provide the terrain for elaborating strategies of selfhood--singular or communal--that initiate new signs of identity, and innovative sites of collaboration, and contestation, in the act of defining the idea of society itself (p. 2)

And 
          I wonder 

          how his words might address 

the multiple understandings of          teacher         student         school 

                                                                     we intend when we compose and what we might learn if we too were to focus on those moments produced in the articulation of cultural differences?  What 'in-between' spaces might be present in the current discourse about education 'reform' especially as we consider such positioning from a variety of perspectives?  How might and do we locate, (re)name, share, dwell and contest such spaces?  

What it means to (un)learn and (un)know can be innovative sites of collaboration and contestation too.  It is both/and we need to seek, become comfortable with, embody.

II.

The Spaces Between (M.A. Reilly, 2011) 

And perhaps we need to turn

                                        to one 

                                        another        more

especially when the felt need to locate things as they are and are not seizes us and see what we make between us. 


It is this making that most (re)presents the spaces between.

III. 

Bakhtin (1984) tell us:

Truth is not born nor is it found inside the head of an individual person, it is born between people collectively searching for truth, in the process of their dialogic interaction (p. 110).

Meaning is made at points of utterance and cannot be sent ahead, regardless of how clever the packaging might be.  So it is not truth, but the searching for truth that is composed dialogically. There between us is a momentary certainty we reach that obscures like fog between trees a larger understanding of the shifting nature of personal and communal geographies.

Our differences are a definition and help us not to not gesture to some future, some point beyond, but 


                      to be rooted here. 

                        Now. 
                    Between.  


IV. 

What if we were to read the concerns and challenges presented via (non)public educational institutions not as things that need to be fixed, but rather as indicators of displacement and disjuncture. How might these in-between and partial spaces and ways of (re)naming challenge the way we understand learning? The ways we understand the 'current educational crisis'?  

Imagine the polyphony of voices we might hear.  Perhaps out of such partiality new communities of learning might emerge.

Absence  (M.A. Reilly, 2012)