Memory and Pedagogy

Claudia Mitchell, Teresa Strong-Wilson, Kathleen Pithouse, Susann Allnutt, Claudia Mitchell, Teresa Strong-Wilson, Kathleen Pithouse, Susann Allnutt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781136857485
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Memory work – the conscious remembering and study of individual and shared memories – is increasingly being acknowledged as a key pedagogical tool in working with children. Giving students opportunities and support to remember and study their selves as individuals and as communities allows them to see their future as something that belongs to them, and that they can influence in some way for the better. This edited volume brings together essays from scholars who are studying the interconnections between pedagogy and memory in the context of social themes and social inquiry within educational research. The book provides a range of perspectives on the social and pedagogical relevance of memory studies to the educational arena in relation to the themes of memory and method, revisiting childhood, memory and place, addressing political conflict, sexuality and embodiment, and inter-generational studies.

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Introducing Memory and Pedagogy

Claudia Mitchell, Teresa Strong-Wilson, Kathleen Pithouse, and Susann Allnutt

Desmond Tutu, the chairperson of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, reminds us that we must be prepared to “[look] the beast of the past in the eye … in order not to allow it to imprison us” (Tutu, 1998, p. 22). We, too, must be prepared to look ourselves in the eye. Enter the pedagogy of memory and the idea of how memory and the past can be a productive learning space for the present and the future.

Although memory has been explored in cognitive psychology as well as in literary studies, the interdisciplinary field of memory studies draws together other important research such as Huyssen’s (2003) work on productive remembering in museum studies, Pinar’s (2004) elaboration of currere within curriculum theory, Susannah Radstone (2000) and Annette Kuhn’s (1995) work on feminist research and cultural memory, and Roger Simon’s (2005) discussion on creating public spaces for remembrance. Central to this research are questions of method and the various uses of memory work, collective memory work, deliberate remembering, feminist nostalgia, storied formation, and literary anthropology, as well as questions around the purpose of such memory work and the ways in which critical personal and social issues are being addressed.

Memory and Pedagogy aims to contribute to this body of research. Our own interest in this book’s subject matter emerges out of a range of previous work in which we (as authors) have explored memory as both phenomenon and method in the study of childhood and in educational practice and research. For example, Claudia Mitchell (with Sandra Weber) in Reinventing Ourselves as Teachers: Beyond Nostalgia (1999) considers the ways in which the past influences our teaching and how memory can itself be a tool for the ongoing ‘reinvention’ we need to do as teachers and teacher educators. Much of this work on memory as a tool for change also informs two collected works: Just Who Do We Think We Are: Methodologies for Autobiography and Self-Study in Teaching (Mitchell, Weber, & O’Reilly Scanlon, 2005) and Not Just Any Dress: Narratives of Memory, Body, and Identity (Weber & Mitchell, 2004). In Researching Children’s Popular Culture: The Cultural Spaces of Childhood, Mitchell and Reid-Walsh (2002) study the ways in which the ‘afterlife’ of children’s popular culture can be studied through memory. Teresa Strong-Wilson’s (2008) book Bringing Memory Forward: Storied Remembrance in Social Justice Education With Teachers uses tools of autobiography and storied memory in exploring the difficulty white teachers have in acknowledging race and privilege as central aspects of identity formation and perceptions. As a key part of her doctoral study, Kathleen Pithouse (2007) explores the use of memory and story as pedagogic tools to facilitate intellectual and emotional engagement and self-reflexivity in teacher education in South Africa. Susann Allnutt (2009), in her doctoral dissertation, works with family photographs and memory as central components of studying place. And the interdisciplinary edited volume Making Connections: Self-Study & Social Action (Pithouse, Mitchell, & Moletsane, 2009) offers a series of essays that explore connections between and among self-study, social action, and memory work, within and in response to a range of sociocultural contexts.

Drawing on our shared interests in memory, we developed and submitted a proposal to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada to host an international workshop on memory titled “Back to the Future: Productive Remembering in Changing Times”, which took place at McGill University in October 2008. The participants came from various parts of Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, South Africa, and Lesotho to address a range of methodological issues in engaging with memory and the past as well as a variety of very specific areas of concern: from the genocides of Armenia and Rwanda and the recent political conflicts in Northern Ireland and South Africa to HIV&AIDS and sexuality education in various contexts. Memory and Pedagogy is an outcome of our shared interests in memory, drawing on co-teaching a graduate course on memory and method at McGill University in 2008 and, of course, the “Back to the Future” workshop, where many of the chapters in this book were first presented as papers.

OVERVIEW OF MEMORY AND PEDAGOGY

Located within the broad areas of memory work and memory studies, this book brings together chapters from leading and new scholars who are interested in the interconnections between pedagogy and memory in the context of social themes, social inquiry, and social change in educational research. As the various authors explore many different themes, it is clear that remembering can be a highly generative space, reminding us of William Faulkner’s observation that “the past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Taken as a whole, the chapters in Memory and Pedagogy address one central pressing question: How can we bring the past and memory forward so as to inform the future? Although it is not a new question, it remains a pressing one as the chapters across the five parts of the book attest. Each part explores a critical pedagogical space for remembering: (1) Memory and Place, (2) Revisiting Childhood, (3) Legacies of Political Conflict, (4) Memory and Embodiment, and (5) Intergenerationality and Looking to the Future. What is useful, we propose, is to think of each of these remembering spaces as having significance both as phenomenon and as method. Although we have organized the book according to these separate areas, they are closely interrelated. In the part on place, for example, authors often revisit childhood. And many of the chapters in the part on legacies of political conflict clearly take the authors back to place and childhood. In essence, any of the five areas of the book could be the main organizing feature. At the same time, in attempting to show these divisions, we hope that readers will see some of the ways that five broad areas of study can be enriched through the study of memory and the use of a variety of approaches to memory.

PART I: MEMORY AND PLACE

“No one lives in the world in general” (Geertz, 1996, p. 262). We are always emplaced; there is no body without its place in the world, no matter what that place is. Situating our subjectivities means acknowledging our placed identities and the fact that the spaces we move through are not neutral. Spatial organizing deeply reflects the social. Place acts on the body, and the body retains that memory. The places in which we find ourselves train that bodily memory over and over again. Place thus becomes an anchor to our memories. Place can also serve as an interruption to the usual chronological and narratological organizing principles that we often bring to the recounting of our life stories. As a result, place functioning as a ‘hook’ for a memory story, whether autobiographical or fictional, can allow for a different kind of narrative, a different thrust into memory—more evoked than constructed and therefore quite resonant. We cannot ignore the embodied centre from which we feel, touch, hear, and look out. That centre is placed.

Although place runs like a thread through this entire volume, particular consideration of the ‘placedness’ of our identities is reflected in the four chapters in the first part on ‘Memory and Place’. Each chapter seeks to render visible in some way the storied influence of place, the imprint of childhood and adult landscapes. Stories of childhood segueing into the present through the visual (Allnutt), stories of indigenous teachers meeting and informing the stories of non-indigenous preservice teachers (Tanaka), fiction stories of secret childhood spaces (Goodenough), or the painful move from rural childhood to urban adulthood in an educational institution (Kelly) all contribute to enriching our ideas of what pedagogy can look like when it turns to place memory as a grounding principle. These chapters also explore views and perceptions of the nature of childhood itself. Through them, we understand that “conceptions of childhood are spatially as well as temporally specific” (Holloway & Valentine, 2000, p. 10) and that place attachment is a vital key to issues such as sustainability, understanding difference, and public space planning, among others.

In her chapter “Making Place”, Susann Allnutt looks to photography as a device of memory in her exploration of a childhood place. She uses the concept of ‘autotopography’ (writing the self in and through place). Through her (re)photographic explorations of a space of personal meaning, Allnutt demonstrates methods for excavating memory of/through place and photography.

Carrying forward the idea of places of personal meaning, Elizabeth Goodenough, in her chapter “Secrets of Play: Child-Centered Spaces and the Literary Imagination”, addresses the use of fiction in understanding the importance of children’s use of space in the creation of identity. She suggests that a sense of place marks itself on those growing up so that the physical world is written upon by each generation. This chapter examines the interdependence of childhood and landscape in literary representations. Goodenough explores the shift in the places of children and suggests that historical and contemporary children’s books are a rich resource for understanding the societal forces of each generation.

Continuing the theme of using fiction as the focus to bringing memory forward, Tony Kelly, in his chapter “The Case of the Imaginary Frozen Fish and the Mean Boy”, examines Lynn Coady’s (2006) novel Mean Boy against a background of autobiographical memory and experience of “growing up rural”. Situating his case within a framework drawn from Bakhtin, Kelly offers a particular reading of Coady’s novel and uses it to juxtapose and recount personal memories and life stories. His personal and fictional exposition of the dilemmas of an “ambivalent” intellectual grappling with “language thick with the intentions of others” is simultaneously a cautionary tale and an oblique pedagogical tool.

Finally, moving us more directly into pedagogy, in her chapter “Formative Touchstones: Finding Place as a Teacher Through an Indigenous Learning Experience”, Michele Tanaka demonstrates the use of place as a pedagogical tool to assist dominant culture teachers in North America who struggle to facilitate full and effective learning across, between, and within cultures. This chapter highlights the pedagogical changes for non-aboriginal student teachers enrolled in an immersive course on indigenous ways of teaching and learning. Tanaka discusses how student teachers formed new and significant touchstones of understanding around cultural elements of pedagogy, deepening their awareness of indigenous ways and shifting their teaching disposition towards an acceptance of indigenous cultures.

PART II: REVISITING CHILDHOOD

What holds the three ‘Revisiting Childhood’ chapters together is method; each chapter develops a way of accessing memory, of constructing it, of playing with it and/or remaking it in the interests of greater understanding of self and social change. Childhood memory is identified as an important site for working with the past, with the acknowledgment that childhood is what we make of it and that its meanings are constructed largely by adults and in relation to adulthood.

“Do you think there is an age when we become completely adult, Mrs Wellwood, with no child left in us?” Herbert Methley asks Olive Wellwood in A. S. Byatt’s (2009) The Children’s Book (p. 183). All three chapters take up questions about the boundaries separating childhood from adulthood and, thus, the complications of the relationships between story/popular culture and identity. Margaret Mackey recounts memories of a favourite childhood storybook called Margaret Field-Mouse that she thought of as her bedtime story; Tammy Iftody and Dennis Sumara read childhood through popular culture, specifically reality TV and fan fiction; and Lisa Taylor explores work with teachers who must learn to live with, and confront, ghosts in the stories they read and loved, and the stories they never encountered but that play on the borders of their imagination.

For Iftody and Sumara in their chapter “‘She’s a Beauty Queen, Deal With It!’: Online Fan Communities as Sites for Disruptive Pedagogies”, childhood is a construction; it is the “cultural other” of adulthood. Children are “competent and contextually embedded social actors in their own right (as both beings and becomings)”. They can critically reflect on the texts created about them (e.g., by the producers of the reality TV show Kid Nation, who are “implicitly drawing on their own memories of childhood”) while also inventing new subjects and subjectivities for “reading” and performing childhood. In so doing, the young people arrive at more ethically oriented engagements with life’s situations.

Likewise, Lisa Taylor in her chapter “Learning to Live With Ghosts: Multimodal Archaeologies of Storied Formation as Palimpsestal Inquiry” argues for a “prying open” of the sealed doors of childhood and childhood story that “shore up frontiers of identity and community”. “Iconic memories” need to be critically engaged with, as in a “critical, recursive reader response” that would entail a “narrative and visual archaeology” of those textual and popular culture texts that become “touchstones” (Strong-Wilson, 2008). “Affective attachments” keep us in a past uncomplicated by social injustice, defending “coherence” of self-image. A “literature of historical witness”, which engages “difficult knowledge” (Britzman, 1998), is needed to examine one’s “passionate ignorances” (Felman, 1987). This is an ethical enterprise, argues Taylor, who draws on Roger Simon’s work in trauma theory. It is especially important work for...