Ingrid Johnston

Pushing Comfort Zones: Promoting Social Justice Through the Teaching of Aboriginal Canadian Literature

In this paper we highlight findings from a teacher inquiry group study designed to explore possibilities for teaching contemporary Canadian literature to promote issues of social justice in secondary classrooms. Drawing on Boler and Zembylas’s notion of a ‘pedagogy of discomfort’, our paper will focus on the experiences of two teachers in the group who, through the selection and teaching of two Aboriginal Canadian texts, moved away from well-established pedagogical practices. We explore the role of the inquiry group in supporting teachers in their attempts to problematize unquestioned assumptions and address the absences in their curricular practices and examine the potential of using Canadian literature to enhance students’ understanding of historical marginalizations and structural inequalities. In conclusion, we discuss the implications of our research for pre-service and in-service educators who face the challenges of teaching in increasingly diverse schools.

Cultural Encounters in the Liminal Spaces of Canadian Picture Books

In literary texts, there is always a convergence between the textual and extratextual, and these literary representations may function as spaces of imagination and possibility. As Marino Tuzi (1996) suggests, ‘Literary works, especially minority texts which are infused with references to historical and social realities, continue to perform as acts of imaginative representation’ (p. 88). Contemporary Canadian picture books offer new ways of considering identity and otherness through a negotiation of the liminal spaces between the text and illustrations. They illuminate cultural encounters in a modern, multicultural nation as ‘no longer a problem of “other” people’ but ‘a question of the otherness of the people-as-one’ (Bhabha, 1990, p. 301). Nationhood has long been associated with ethnicity and ‘authenticity’. Even Canada, with its policy of official multiculturalism, has relied on the mythology of ‘two founding nations’, England and France, as the means of focalizing its relationships with its visible minority citizens. Officially, Canada is a multicultural country with the rights and privileges of its diverse population entrenched in law. However, for those citizens outside the white mainstream, Canada remains a country in which much of the power rests in the hands of those of European descent. The ‘mantra of multiculturalism’ (Giroux, 2000, p. 98) suggests that Canada’s meta-narrative of national progress is one of inclusion and acceptance of difference, but the earlier national mythology of two European founding nations functions as a strongly embedded aspect of the country’s historical memory. Such a meta-narrative of nation authorizes stories that consciously or unconsciously work towards a single voice and thereby repress knowledge of difference. This kind of narrative works to develop unity through emphasizing symbolic differences between ‘ourselves’ and ‘others’, subsuming significant individual differences by perceived distinctions of race, ethnicity and language that isolate one group from others. Apart from its aboriginal peoples, Canada has always been a land of immigrants, and, prior to the 1970s, the majority of these immigrants came from European countries. Over the past 30 years, the demographics of Canada have changed dramatically, with increasing numbers of immigrants from South East Asia, China, the Philippines, Africa, the Middle East and South America. In 1988, through the Canadian Multiculturalism Act, the government sought to ‘preserve and enhance’ the country’s multicultural nature by promoting the acceptance of Canada’s ethnocultural diversity. This act declared ethnic pluralism as a positive feature of Canadian society worthy of preservation and development and encouraged a mosaic approach to cultural heritage, whereby immigrant Canadians retain their cultural traditions as well as embracing a so-called ‘Canadian’ culture.

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.

Migrancy: Rites of Passage and Cultural Translation in Literature for Children and Young Adults

This chapter addresses the complexities of migrancy through reviewing literary texts for children and young adults that speak to rites of passage and experiences of cultural translation for migrants coming to the west. In particular, the chapter focuses on texts that problematize Canadas official policies of multiculturalism through imaginative and diverse stories of immigration.

Spaces of Impact

“The Management of Grief,” a short story by Bharati Mukherjee (1988), was published as part of the collection The Middleman and Other Stories. These stories epitomize North America’s new “middlemen,” the “not-quites” who must negotiate “between two modes of knowledge” (p. 189). The story we are discussing here concerns the effects of the 1985 Air India bombing by Sikh terrorists on Toronto’s Indian community and specifically on the central character and narrator, Mrs. Shaila Bhave, who loses her husband and two sons in the crash.

Outside the Comfort Zone

This chapter offers a reflection on two collaborative research studies in which preservice and practicing teachers developed frames of reference for critically analyzing multicultural and postcolonial rhetoric, curricula, texts and activities and attempted to bring these new understandings to their classroom practice. We focus on the tensions that emerged between these teachers’ professed beliefs about teaching diverse literatures and their classroom practices, and ways in which these tensions offered possibilities for developing new reading and teaching practices.

National Identity and the Ideology of Canadian Multicultural Picture Books

Since texts written for children and young adults both mediate cultural attitudes and play a part in acculturating young readers, we decided to explore the extent to which contemporary multicultural Canadian picture books may act as postcolonial reading sites for interrogating shifting understandings of nationhood and identity. We pursued our investigation by means of a study involving students in the Faculty of Education at the University of Alberta.

Telling Too Much

In this chapter we discuss how high school students in a predominantly white middle-class Canadian school responded to reading the first chapters of three African novels: A Girl Named Disaster (1996) by American author, Nancy Farmer; The Bride Price (1976), by Ibo writer, Buchi Emecheta; and Buckingham Palace, District Six (1986) by South African writer Richard Rive.