Embodied Becoming – Student Teachers’ Reflections on Their Filmed Teaching

This study examines student teachers’ reflections on recordings of their teaching during a period of internship related to a subject didactic course in Swedish. Bodily expressions, not as frequently explored as verbal ones, are in focus. Data consists of video papers, multimedia documents, combining clips of video recordings and reflective texts on the clips. The purpose is to gain knowledge about student teachers’ reflections on and learning of bodily expressions in teaching, using video papers. The analysis of the video papers is descriptive phenomenological, searching for the meanings of the phenomenon. The findings indicate that video papers contribute to student teachers’ reflections and learning about bodily expressions in terms of how they move in front of students, what impressions their bodies convey, how they manage to make contact and how they use their voices. Video papers complement the memory image and through recordings, bodily expressions get attention and are verbalized.

‘Photography’ (Kracauer 1927)

This chapter is a close analysis of Kracauer’s 1927 essay ‘Photography’. In this essay, Kracauer regards photography as contributing towards the pervasive alienation within modernity, and he contrasts the photographic image with the ‘memory image, which contains substantial value. Nevertheless, the alienating photographic image can also reveal the nature of alienation, so has a positive potential. Kracauer also argues that the film image is less alienating than the photographic image because it can preserve more of the memory image

Construction, Preservation, and the Presence of Self in Observer Memory

Observer memories involve a representation of the self in the memory image, which is presented from a detached or external point of view. That such an image is an obvious departure from how one initially experienced the event seems relatively straightforward. However, in my book on this type of imagery, I suggested that such memories can in fact, at least in some cases, accurately represent one’s past experience of an event. During these past events there is a sense in which we adopt an external perspective on ourselves. In the present paper, I respond to a critical notice of my book by Marina Trakas. Trakas argues that my account of observer memory unfolded against the background of a problematic preservationist account of episodic memory, and that I failed to adequately account for the presence of self in observer memory. I respond these worries here, and I try to clarify key points that were underdeveloped in the book.

Dream to Remember

This chapter explores how the process of creating a complex, visuospatial, associative image of a pattern in experience is mnemonic, i.e. it aids remembering. Clearly, unless we retained a dream memory image it couldn’t improve our chances of survival in wake. I compare associative dream images to the associative images people use in wake to help them remember. These associative images all derive from the Ancient Art of Memory, incorporating the Method of Loci. I argue the Method of Loci works as a memory technique because it mimics the daily tour in the home range. Equally, the associative images from the Ancient Art of Memory echo the dream images retained at landmark junctions in memory networks.