Lynne Wiltse

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.

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.

Mirrors and Windows: Teaching and Research Reflections on Canadian Aboriginal Children’s Literature

In this reflective paper, an expanded version of my LLRC pre-conference paper, I draw on thirty or so years of teaching and research experience, augmented by the occasional foray into my childhood, to consider issues of resonance and representation in children’s literature. In doing so, I draw on Patsy Aldana’s speech, Books that are Windows. Books that are Mirrors. How Can we Make Sure that Children see Themselves in Their Books? Aldana, then President of the Canadian Coalition for School Libraries, delivered her speech to the IBBY (International Board on Books for Young People) Congress in Malaysia, 2008. [i] As a teacher and now as a teacher educator, I am reminded by Aldana’s speech to pay close attention to the children and youth who cannot take for granted, as I was able to, “hear(ing) one’s own words, see(ing) one’s own face…in a book” (Aldana, 2008). [i] In her speech, Aldana uses this metaphor as presented by Elisa Bonilla, former director of educational materials at the Mexican Ministry of Education (SEP) of Mexico, in her address to the IBBY congress in Macau, 2006.

“The In-between Crowd”: Contrasting Representations of Minority Language Students

This paper examines contrasting representations of minority language students in a linguistically diverse junior high classroom in an urban area of Western Canada. The majority of the research participants was of Asian heritage, and spoke English as a second language. Drawing on the construct of learner identity, I explore how these minority language learners‘ identities affected their experience in school. The study points to hybrid language practices, with particular attention to academic discourse, as a solution to developing English literacy in schools with students from multilingual backgrounds. “The In-between Crowd”: Contrasting Representations of Minority Language Students