Jim Garrett

Politically tumultuous times have created a problematic space for teachers who include the news in their classrooms. Few studies have explored perceptions of news credibility among secondary social studies teachers, the educators most likely to regularly incorporate news media into their classrooms. We investigated teachers’ operational definitions of credibility and the relationships between political ideology and assessments of news source credibility. Most teachers in this study used either static or dynamic definitions to describe news media sources’ credibility. Further, teachers’ conceptualizations of credibility and perceived ideological differences with news sources were associated with how credible teachers found each source. These results indicate potential inconsistencies in how news credibility is defined and possible political bias in which sources social studies teachers use as exemplars of credibility.

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.

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.

RAUMATIC EVENTS leave people speechless, without direction, jarred loose from the moorings of linguistic stability. They leave an individual, or group of individuals, in a state of incoherence and seeking solace in any vestige of comprehensibility (Zizek, 2002). The meaning that eventually comes to this event is deferred, and only comes after we develop some capacity to once again rejoin our experience with the bonding, cohering, and sociality of language. Trauma, in other words, finds its location in the “after” of an event (Lacan, ...

Abstract This article calls for greater attention to the role of emotion and affect in classroom discussions where theoretical models of discussion and deliberation tend to emphasize the rationalistic elements called for in such pedagogical strategies. Using two examples drawn from secondary classrooms, the authors highlight the role of emotion and affect in student exchanges about controversial public issues. Given the contemporary climate of national political discourse, being prepared for and accommodating these elements will be essential to taking up these strategies as a form of inquiry-oriented teaching and learning that seeks to address public issues with students across the curriculum.

In Brenda Trofanenko and Avner Segall (Eds):  Beyond Pedagogy: Reconsidering the Public Purpose of Museums

In this chapter I wonder about the degree to which we might conceptualize museums that attend to difficult knowledge as spaces that encourage us to stand in-between: to be at once confronted with our past experiences in ways that challenge our dominant narratives as well as create conditions that might be-ordered yet again.

I gave this paper at the Conference for the Journal of Curriculum Theorizing at the Bergamo Center in Dayton, OH.  It was part of the spotlight session organized by Karyn Sandlos called Complicating the Curriculum Conversation Through Contemporary Film.  In that session, Karyn invited each of us to read one film with one “curriculum text” in order to demonstrate and perform the complexities in/of curriculum theory.  The theme of this year’s conference, Continuing Complexities, maps onto terms like Pinar’s “Curriculum as Complicated Conversation” as well Sara Matthews and my recent formulation of the term “pedagogical complexity”.  I begin by asking about the status of complexity.

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).

Abstract: Social studies education is a field in which those involved--teachers and students--encounter what can be called" difficult knowledge". Difficult knowledge is a theoretical construct suggesting that when an individual encounters representations of social and historical trauma in a learning situation there exists a host of emotional and pedagogical complications. This dissertation investigates difficult knowledge, its complications and implications, within the field of social studies teacher education. When learning to teach, ...

Deborah Britzman's Novel Education: Psychoanalytic Studies of Learning and not Learning is the third in a series of works that mark a detour from the familiar terrain of teacher education and, as the titles of these books indicate, draw from psychoanalysis to aid readers in thinking and re-thinking about the educational endeavor. Two of her previous works, Lost Subjects, Contested Objects: Toward a Psychoanalytic Inquiry of Learning (1998) and After-Education: Anna Freud, Melanie Klein, and Psychoanalytic Histories of Learning (2003), ...