Karen A. Krasny

Hermeneutics, aesthetics, and the quest for answerability: a dialogic possibility for reconceptualizing the interpretive process in curriculum studies

This study reviews six traditional approaches to hermeneutics and presents a dialogic understanding of hermeneutics. It concludes with specific applications of hermeneutics to curriculum development practices in schools with a focus on inter‐subjectivity. While 20th‐century access to post‐structural notions of subjectivity through aesthetic experience began to engender a language of possibility rather than a language of certitude for hermeneutic inquiry in curriculum studies, it nevertheless did not fully account for interpretation as a productive and collaborative act in the inter‐subjective sense of being for the other. This study explores the dialogic emergence of this language of possibility through a review of historical and contemporary approaches to hermeneutics, and subsequently proposes an alternative understanding of hermeneutics and aesthetics to offer a reconceptualized vision of the interpretive process for curriculum studies.

Prophetic Voices: Three Books to Encourage Us to Listen Beyond Historical Silence

An essay review of Places of Learning: Media, Architecture, Pedagogy, Elizabeth Ellsworth, New York: Routledge, 2005; Ethics and the Foundations of Education: Teaching Convictions in a Postmodern World, Patrick Slattery and Dana Rapp, New York: Allyn & Bacon, 2003; and Che Guevara, Paulo Freire, and the Pedagogy of Revolution, Peter McLaren, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000.

Toward an embodied account of double-voiced discourse: The critical role of imagery and affect in Bakhtin’s dialogic imagination

Abstract Drawing from Paivio’s (1986, Mental representations: A dual coding approach. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991, Images in mind: The evolution of a theory. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 2007, Mind and its evolution: A dual coding theoretical approach. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum) dual-coding theory, I argue that an understanding of the structure and function of mental imagery and affect can lead to an embodied and more comprehensive account of the addressivity that characterizes Bakhtin’s double-voiced discourse. A dialogic exchange between characters in Orhan Pamuk’s (2004, Snow. New York: Vintage) Snow provides a literary example of an intersubjective encounter to demonstrate that crafting consciousness in the novel and sustaining Bakhtin’s double-voiced discourse relies on the cognitive capacity to access both verbal and non-verbal imagery. I position Bakhtinian dialogism within a historical overview of the nature of mind and mental imagery in western philosophy to elucidate the tenuous relation between Bakhtin’s dialogic existence and the principles of empiricism as expressed in Dewey (1987 [1934], Art as experience. In Jo Ann Boydston (ed.), The later works of John Dewey, 1925–1953, vol. 10. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1980 [1916], Democracy and education. In Jo Ann Boydston (ed.), The middle works of John Dewey, 1899–1924, vol. 9. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press) and Mead (1934, Mind, self, and society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964, The objective reality of perspectives. In A. Reck (ed.) Selected writings, 312–314. Chicago: University of Chicago Press). With reference to Damasio’s (1999, The feeling of what happens: Body and emotion in the making of consciousness. New York: Harcourt) neurobiological account of consciousness, Langer’s (1957, Philosophy in a new key: A study in the symbolism of reason, rite, and art. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press) evolutionary account of language, and Thompson’s (2007, Mind in life: Biology, phenomenology and the sciences of mind. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press) phenomenological account of empathy, I outline how Bakhtin’s dialogism differs from embodied theories of mind and consciousness in several fundamental ways to preclude a full appreciation of the other’s empathetic experience of oneself in authoring a socially shared existence.

Into a New Light: Re-Envisioning Educational Possibilities for Biography

The role of biography in education has been challenged in recent years on two interrelated fronts. The first relates to the epistemological question of how knowledge is constructed through biographical inquiry. The second concerns the ontological problem of redefining biography to include for example, all life-writing and the democratizing impulse to value the ordinary as much as the extraordinary. In this article, I address the epistemological and ontological concerns that challenge concretized notions of the role of biography in education, by shedding light upon recent theoretical perspectives that illuminate the biographer’s critical stance, deconstruct the socially and historically situated biographer, subject, and reader, and evaluate the various methods employed in the process of reconstructing life histories for the consummation of others.

Love and Evil as a Complicated Kindness: Moral Ambiguity and the Novel

In Nomi Nickel, Toews (2004) carefully crafts a feisty teenage misfit who negotiates a narrow path between hope and despair. Nomi’s cry of exasperation in Toews’s bestselling novel of growing up in a small Mennonite town in western Canada easily rivals the adolescent angst of Salinger’s Holden Caulfield. Readers quickly empathize with Nomi who is left alone with her father to decipher the fragments of her family’s past and discover the truth about her mother and sister’s disappearances. But A Complicated Kindness is as much an indictment of religious fundamentalism as it is a story of coming of age. Toews paints a convincing portrait of how contemporary Mennonite youth cope with the moral confines imposed by the teachings of a 16 century religious reformer and constantly reinforced by community sanctions. The book zeros in on the haphazardness of moral dictates.