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The Appearance of the Dead: Summoning Ghosts and Conjuring up the Past Through a Virtual Medium
Abstract
In this chapter, we discuss how in an online graduate course concerning current issues in Early Childhood Education (ECE), we invited the ghost of philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) to class, as a way to re-image critical historical and sociocultural notions of childhood in Western curricular traditions and inheritances. Rousseau spoke directly with the students and interrupted and expanded interdisciplinary ideas about childcare and early years learning with relative historical beliefs and pedagogic practices. Summoning Rousseau to discuss his controversial treatise Èmile or On Education (1979), and his Enlightenment ideas within a contemporary technological platform, complicated students’ understandings of the origins of modern developmental discourses and showed how such concepts were not fixed and eternal but rather located, interpreted, and contingent (Caputo, 1987). We argue that in preparing students for an unknown (and digital) world we need to develop their historical thinking and support them to address the diverse and often troubling and difficult knowledge from the storied past. Through this pedagogic encounter we observed how students raised their critical and dialogic historical awareness as they employed the past to reconceptualize contemporary issues around ECE.
... Although most duoethnographers are still traditional in this respect and present conversation-based studies, some have started to insert pertinent and important literature into their data. A unique example of such a project is Panayotidis and Bjartveit's (2016) study on the fluidity between the past and the present, with employment of the ideas of Jean Jacob Rousseau. In the study, a collective conversation took place between a class of Early Childhood Education graduate students (the present) and Rousseau (the past). ...
The significance of duoethnography as an alternative qualitative method for investigating research in the humanities and social sciences has considerably increased in the last decade or so. Yet, despite its increasing popularity and the growth of duoethnographic studies in second and foreign language learning and teaching, duoethnography is still unknown to many applied linguists. In order to partially redress this gap, the aim of this article is to present duoethnography as a promising qualitative method for applied linguistics studies. The text outlines the basic tenets of duoethnography, discusses the scope of its research on language learning and teaching at the present time and describes innovations that duoethnography introduces to data collection, writing, presenting and interpreting research. The article concludes with a call for more duoethnographic studies in applied linguistics as they provide a welcome move towards greater methodological diversity. This, in turn, may contribute to our better understanding of the experience of language learning and teaching, and the identity of language learners and teachers, as well as generate new themes for research.
... In the evocative research project described below, we critically examined conceptions of play and literary representations of narrative imagining in a virtual classroom. This study is part of our broader research program, aimed at understanding how ECE professionals play together and imagine in online environments (Bjartveit and Panayotidis, 2014a;Panayotidis and Bjartveit, 2016). ...
In an online graduate-level early childhood education course, the authors sought to playfully disrupt and transform educators’ conceptions of children’s “dark play,” as provoked by contemporary popular culture. Embracing the imaginative potential of darkness and liminality, the course participants problematized and expanded their thinking concerning what constitutes children’s play scripts focused on themes of fear, power, and violence. Cognizant that some educators are reluctant and even refuse to allow children opportunities to engage in play centered on troubling social issues, the educators co-authored a fantastical tale, inspired by the Disney animation film Frozen, and included course topics, classroom observations, and their own childhood memories of “dark play.” Vivian Paley’s ideas about the connections between storytelling and play provided a creative impetus to the fictional narrative-imagining exercise, as did Hans-Georg Gadamer’s notion of Spiel. Eliciting the literature of children’s play experiences through fictional story-writing, and “play” as a contemporary aspect of creative thinking, the educators entered imaginary worlds of their own making. Unlike a traditional online graduate course format that often incorporates textual readings, posts, and responses, the authors strived to foster a virtual space in which the educators buttressed theories about play and imagination in a deeply felt, experiential, and playful manner. In creating an imaginary story based on the film, the participants gained a different understanding of the nature of play, and came to recognize how popular-culture play themes can provoke and strengthen children’s imaginative and abstract thinking, problem-solving skills, and emotional development. Likewise, this narrative experience showed the potential and role of “dark play” in initiating new ways of thinking and talking with children about the complex issues of the modern world.
The Oxford Handbook of Qualitative Research, second edition, presents a comprehensive retrospective and prospective review of the field of qualitative research. Original, accessible chapters written by interdisciplinary leaders in the field make this a critical reference work. Filled with robust examples from real-world research; ample discussion of the historical, theoretical, and methodological foundations of the field; and coverage of key issues including data collection, interpretation, representation, assessment, and teaching, this handbook aims to be a valuable text for students, professors, and researchers. This newly revised and expanded edition features up-to-date examples and topics, including seven new chapters on duoethnography, team research, writing ethnographically, creative approaches to writing, writing for performance, writing for the public, and teaching qualitative research.
Using a critical discourse approach (Fairclough, 2003; Foucault, 1972; Luke, 1997, 2002; Rabinow, 1984; van Dijk, 1993; van Leeuwen, 2008) this paper examines the text and embedded
meaning conveyed in Jean Jacque Rousseau’s novella Émile. This treatise written in the 18th century includes Rousseau’s conceptualization of best practices and a set of educational
guidelines detailing habits to avoid and the necessary combination of
“natural” and “progressive” approaches recommended to raise children as moral citizens. In our analysis we discuss the ways Rousseau uses binary descriptions of girls-boys, mothers-fathers, and learners-tutors separately and in opposition. We go on to situate his novella as an early example of expert advice on parenting, where Rousseau positions himself as an educational expert by simultaneously defining the maternal role in early education and
the role of education in society. We contend that Rousseau’s works are founded on particular beliefs about the source of knowledge and construction of meaning that continues to constrain the formation of authentic partnerships among and between parents and early childhood educators. We argue that this discourse—and, importantly, the values, beliefs, and attitudes it conveys—lingers in Canadian early childhood education learning communities and that the vestiges of these early ideas truncate and unnaturally shape our ideas of parenting, teaching, and learning by socially positioning families and teachers in ways that make it difficult to engage in co-construction
of curriculum. We suggest that by better understanding and deconstructing this discourse we can move our thinking forward and authentically engage in coinquiry.
Literature, this paper argues, is a privileged language that can give form to those specters of existence that resist the traditional ontological boundaries of being and non-being, alive and dead. This I describe as the “hauntology” of literature. Literature, unlike our everyday, referential language, is not obliged to refer to a determinable reality, or to sustain meaning. It can therefore be viewed as a negation of the world of things and sensible phenomena. Yet it gives us access to vivid and sensory rich worlds. The status of this literary world, then, is strangely in-between; its ontology is not present and fixed, but rather quivering or ghostlike. The “I” that speaks in a literary text never coincides with the “I” of the writing subject, rather they haunt each other. This theoretical understanding is based on texts by Jacques Derrida and Maurice Blanchot. The paper also draws an analogy between this spectral dynamic of literature and an understanding of religious faith or belief. Belief relates to that which cannot be ontologically fixed or verified, be it God, angels, or spirits. Literature, because it releases and sustains this ontological quivering, can transmit the ineffable, the repressed and transcendent. With this starting point, I turn to Toni Morrison’s book Beloved (1987) and to Beloved’s strange, spectral monologue. By giving literary voice to the dead, Morrison releases literature’s hauntology to express the horror that history books cannot convey, and that our memory struggles to contain.
«Norm Friesen has written an exemplary book - well-crafted, diligent, and substantial. He makes his case through articulate and colorful descriptions of experiences with information technology. There is clearly a growing hunger for reality, for the commanding presence of the surprising, and for unfathomable things and events that Friesen describes so well. In this context, he shows impressively the ambivalent implications of virtualizing education.» (Albert Borgmann, Regents Professor of Philosophy, University of Montana)
«I heartily recommend this text to readers interested in the quality of the online student experience, human science methodology, and in the possibilities and also the limitations presented by online technologies for pedagogical contact.» (Max van Manen, Professor Emeritus, Faculty of Education, University of Alberta)
Child-centred pedagogy is both an enduring approach and a revered concept in Western-based teacher preparation. This article weaves together major critiques of child-centred pedagogy that draw on critical feminist, postmodernist and post-structural theories. These critiques have particular relevance for conceptualizing what it can mean to be, and what it takes to become, an early childhood professional. The construct of the female early childhood professional is particularly important with the current intensification of the teacher as a technician and the increasing numbers in the workforce from racialized groups who may face social inequities. The construction of the individualized child and its parallel denial of the influences of gender, ethnicity and class on who a child becomes are equally important. Drawing upon the work of reconceptualist scholars, some preliminary ways will be proposed in which we can theorize and reconstruct children and early childhood professionals at the centre of a pedagogy that is a democratic space for all.
Why do the dead return? Do they remain part of the world of the living? This book examines these questions as they emerge in areas as diverse as film, Holocaust testimony, and the works of Jacques Derrida, Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok. The book suggests it may be as difficult for the living to get rid of the dead as it is to live without them.
Our understanding of the past shapes our sense of the present and the future: this is historical consciousness. While academic history, public history, and the study of collective memory are thriving enterprises, there has been only sparse investigation of historical consciousness itself, in a way that relates it to the policy questions it raises in the present. With Theorizing Historical Consciousness, Peter Seixas has brought together a diverse group of international scholars to address the problem of historical consciousness from the disciplinary perspectives of history, historiography, philosophy, collective memory, psychology, and history education.Historical consciousness has serious implications for international relations, reparations claims, fiscal initiatives, immigration, and indeed, almost every contentious arena of public policy, collective identity, and personal experience. Current policy debates are laced with mutually incompatible historical analogies, and identity politics generate conflicting historical accounts. Never has the idea of a straightforward 'one history that fits all' been less workable. Theorizing Historical Consciousness sets various theoretical approaches to the study of historical consciousness side-by-side, enabling us to chart the future study of how people understand the past.
In this essay I propose that education be conceived as séance: a place where ghosts are summoned in order that we may come
to (speaking) terms with them. Against the backdrop of my own summoning of the ghosts haunting my childhood visits to a nearby
castle, I draw on the work of Jacques Derrida to provide a theoretical rationale for the importance of spirits and ghosts.
The concepts of inheritance and hospitality place a central role in understanding how to come to terms with ghosts. I conclude
with a reflection on the summoning of ghosts in education, and the role of the curriculum as medium in this séance.
After outlining the assumptions framing critical theoretical orientations, Ryan and Grieshaber examine some of the early childhood research using different kinds of theories. They conclude by exploring how teachers might approach their work with young children if they use critical theories in addition to knowledge of children's learning and development.
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