Abbreviated use of Memory-Work with Preservice Teachers
From 1998 to 2005, I used memory-work in a 6-credit hour undergraduate course for preservice teachers. I found that my students regarded “their personal experiences as a valid source of knowledge in coming to theorize about socialization and schooling, and they develop[ed] fairly sophisticated analyses based on experience, theory and popular culture.” (Kaufman, 2008) I have not used memory-work with pre-service teachers since 2005, because I felt that I did not have enough time to use it in my usual 3-credit-hour courses. However, I was eager to experiment with pedagogical uses of memory-work using an abbreviated method.
I used memory-work in the fall of 2019 with graduate students in a course on multicultural perspectives on early childhood development. I introduced memory-work and gave students a chapter describing my earlier use of memory-work (Kaufman, 2008). I asked them to write their “earliest memories of school.” They practiced doing analysis twice in small groups before submitting initial and final drafts of their analyses. Their resulting memories were quite different from each other, making it difficult to generalize from the memories. This was most likely because I did not initially provide them with a specific cue. They also had difficulty making connections between their own memories and concepts of development, because I believe that I did not provide enough background in memory-work or practice in analysis.
Still eager to incorporate memory-work, this semester I am incorporating it in a graduate course on methods of assessment, but with some changes in approach. First, we will spend more time on theoretical background, research on popular cultural conceptions of testing, and more time on analysis. Second, I’ve asked them to generate initial memories cued by the word “test.” They will write two drafts of their analysis based on small-group discussions.