Reverberating chords: implications of storied nostalgia for borderland discourses in pre-service teacher identity

The research that is the subject of this paper set out to interrogate pre-service teachers’ responses to issues of national identity, ideology, and representation in contemporary multicultural Canadian picture books. While the research focused on whether and how the literature could serve to inform and broaden pre-service teachers’ conceptualizations of diversity, we retrospectively decided to re-visit the focus group and interview data to know which of the 70 picture books had most engaged the teachers and why. We critically consider the implications of teachers’ attachments for social justice education and teachers’ cultivation of a critical, ‘borderlands’ discourse aware of self and open to others. The research suggests that a significant source of teacher knowledge and thinking is lodged in teachers’ personal memories of childhood texts, called touchstones. Touchstones were a place from which teachers implicitly began; certain stories struck particular chords, chords largely attributable to childhood memories. Most intertextual connections were personal, with some tangential to the text. While touchstones performed different functions depending on the subject position of the pre-service teachers, they pointed to the existence of an underlying position of teacher as nostalgic subject. Given the importance of this subject position for teachers’ responses to picture books, we explore critical reconceptualizations of nostalgia that can support the development of borderland discourses. We suggest that pre-service teachers need to be invited to individually and collectively examine their responses to both old and new touchstone stories. More nuanced research also needs to be conducted on the role of nostalgia in teacher formation, how it influences teacher practice, and how to best design teacher education courses to foster ‘borderland discourses’ related to the storying of teacher identity, especially with respect to popular ‘collectibles’ and core teaching texts like picture books.     

Phantom traces: exploring a hermeneutical approach to autobiography in curriculum studies

Autobiography presently occupies a beleaguered place in education, not unlike teachers, whose lives have been diminished through the current emphasis on testing outcomes. This paper uses WG Sebald’s writings as a place from which to relook at the relationship between writing and a life lived. Sebald was a German writer born in the shadow of WWII who wrestled with his difficult inheritance. The paper considers the ‘phantom traces’ of the author in Sebald’s creative writing, using the example of the story he tells of Paul Bereyter, Sebald’s elementary teacher. Paul committed suicide by laying himself on the railroad tracks of the town that first denied him the opportunity to teach during WWII yet accepted him back to the classroom after the war. Apparent in the telling of Paul’s story is Sebald’s interest in an ‘invisible subject’—the prolonged effect of the past, especially traumatic events, on thinking, feeling human beings. The paper draws on Sebald’s particular way of writing about his subject ‘at a slant’ so as to argue for a hermeneutical approach to currere, or autobiography in education.     

Locked in and locked out: Covid-19 and teaching “remotely”

PROSPECTS - Covid-19 has rendered education “remote”, opening a chasm in space and time between teachers and students, between how teaching and learning was practiced before...     

Turtles All the Way: Simulacra and Resistance to Simulacra in Indigenous Teachers’ Discussion of Indigenous Children’s Literature

We are made up of stories: the stories we hear, the stories we tell. Intertextual connections form through repeatedly hearing stories, many of which stem back to childhood. This paper foregrounds a teachers-as-readers literature circle in which a group of Indigenous teachers in Canada discussed, among other titles, Rafé Martin’s The Rough Face Girl and Gerald McDermott’s Raven. Children’s stories are contested spaces because of the persistent presence in them of “simulacra” or imaginary representations of Indigenous peoples. The paper describes how the teachers drew on their storied formations as Indigenous readers to gloss the stories, as well as revised their interpretations through critical discussion with one another.     

Going Down the Rabbit-hole: Teachers’ Engagements with ‘Dialectical Images’ in Canadian Children’s Literature on Social Justice

This article explores the attraction of Canadian elementary teachers to children’s stories that narrate trauma, particularly the trauma associated with First Nations peoples’ experiences in Canadian residential schools as told by Indigenous authors. The teachers’ responses to these texts are conceived of as occurring within a ‘contact zone,’ situated between dominant white culture (the culture shared by the teachers) and the historically marginalized cultures represented in the stories. An interpretative lens of critical nostalgia is developed, placing the question of contact zones within the context of memory studies, trauma studies, curriculum theory and critical pedagogies related to remembrance. The paper identifies the need for developing critical nostalgia as a productive form of pedagogical remembrance, drawing on Roger Simon’s adaptation to an educational context of Walter Benjamin’s notion of the dialectical image.