H. James Garrett

Re)Considerations of Ignorance and Resistance in Teacher Education

This article questions the status of two recurring concepts in teacher preparation: resistance and ignorance. Both of these terms have significant presence within the teacher education literature. Because both of these terms often occur in relation to a particular topic, that of race and multicultural education, we also utilize race as the discourse that frames our consideration of these two important issues. To reframe and reorient our attention to the processes of ignorance and resistance, we turn to psychoanalytic considerations of those terms and consider what such a turn can offer teacher educators as they engage teacher candidates with issues of race.

Reconstituting Pessimistic Discourses

Abstract The story of South Africas struggles and present achievements is highlighted in its national museums. An examination of the discourses constructed by and the pedagogies utilised in these museums shares narratives of progress, memorial and optimism. On a continent whose stories are typically told as tales of pessimism and doom, these narratives produce a new and different discourse surrounding South Africa. Ultimately, this article finds that these ‘new’, optimistic discourses exist with a framework of global pessimism placed upon Africa by a neoliberal world dependent upon an underdeveloped Africa.

“This is the Kind of Hard That Knows”: Past, Presence, and Pedagogy in Toni Morrison's Beloved

This article is derived from my practice as a teacher educator working with social studies teachers. In it, I write in tentative steps to think pedagogically about the ways that encountering a particular text, Toni Morrisons novel Beloved, can illustrate the ways in which knowledge is reformed or recognized in the pedagogical scene. Drawing from psychoanalytic inquiries within education research, I turn to how the Lacanian notion of “full speech” might bring a kind of focus to new, forward reaching ways of knowing in relation to the past for those involved in the work of pedagogy.

Before, after, in and beyond teacher education

The author uses a trip to a Holocaust museum to explain and illustrate psychoanalytic concepts from Freud to Lacan in order to re-imagine persistent dilemmas in teacher education. The author suggests that psychoanalytic vocabularies provide an additional and productive lens to conceptualize productive possibilities in teacher education.

Theorizing the Use of Aesthetic Texts in Social Studies Education

Abstract The researching and practicing of social studies education is often infused with poetry, art, literature, film, photography, and music. Engagements with and production of these aesthetic texts can promote critical thinking, foster empathetic thinking, and aid historical analysis. This article provides 3 potential theoretical explorations for why this might be so. The authors theorize aesthetic encounters in social studies education by deploying the terms of aesthetic experience, aesthetic conflict, and relational aesthetics. Each of those theoretical terms aids in the exploration of why aesthetic texts are so compelling and crucially important for social studies education. Further, these theoretical terms have potential to frame future research within social studies education. The complicated aesthetic dimension to powerful social studies pedagogy, research, and practice is described herein.

Rethinking the Spaces of Supervision

A common finding in the research on teacher education is that teacher candidates place a high value on their student teaching experiences. Most regard their clinical experiences as an influential—if not the single most influential—factor in their professional learning and development as pre-service teachers (Knowles & Cole, 1996; Smith & Lev-Ari, 2005; Wilson, Floden, & Ferrini-Mundy, 2001).

Containing Pedagogical Complexity Through the Assignment of Photography: Two Case Presentations

Abstract This article investigates the use of photography as a narrative approach to learning in the context of postsecondary education. Two cases are presented: a social studies methods course in a teacher education program in the South of the United States; and a senior undergraduate seminar on global violence at a university in southern Ontario, Canada. With each case presentation we explore how the assignment of photography both instantiates and cultivates the students ability to tolerate, represent, and interpret encounters with pedagogical complexity. A term of learning that apprehends the pedagogical encounter as made from the tensions between knowing and uncertainty, pedagogical complexity is discussed with regard to the psychoanalytic concept of containment. Using a case presentation approach, the authors explore the possibilities and limits of the assignment of photography in relation to the pedagogical work of containment. Engaging a cross‐case analysis of the research data, the authors conclude by discussing the potential for photographic practices to contain the dynamics of pedagogical complexity.

Photography as Reflective Practice: Containing Pedagogical Complexity in the Learning Encounter

This chapter investigates the use of photography as a narrative approach to learning in the context of postsecondary education. Two case presentations are discussed: a social studies methods course in a teacher education program in the South of the USA and a senior undergraduate seminar on global violence at a university in southern Ontario, Canada. With each case, we explore how the assignment of photography contains and works through the complexities of learning out of crisis, frustration, and anxiety. Learning to witness narratives of global violence and learning to teach social studies—while significantly different in many ways—are similar encounters in that they both contain dilemmas of representation, both are mitigated by larger sociopolitical discourses, and both call upon deep affective attachments to the world.

The Meanings of a Holocaust Museum

In this chapter I consider a particular Holocaust memorial as a site where the problems of the symbolic field meet the non-linear chronology of psychic time. It is based upon part of a larger study in which six pre and in-service social studies teachers participated regarding the stakes of teaching and learning about the traumatic past.