Teachers’ Ethical Self-Encounters with Counter-Stories in the Classroom

Offering unique theoretical perspectives, autobiographical insights and narrative accounts from elementary and secondary educators, this monograph illustrates the need for teachers to engage critically with counter-stories as they teach to issues including colonization, war, and genocide. Juxtaposing Pinar’s concept of ethical self-encounters with theories of subjective reconstruction, multidirectional memory, and autobiographical narration, this rich volume considers teachers’ ethical responsibility to interrogate the curriculum via self-reflection and self-formation. Using cases from workshops and classrooms conducted over five years, Strong-Wilson traces teachers’ and students’ movement from "implicated subjects" to "concerned subjects." In doing so, she challenges the neoliberal dynamics which erode teacher agency.By working at the intersections of pedagogy, literary theory and memory studies, this book introduces timely arguments on subjectivity and ethical responsibility to the field of education in the Global North. It will prove to be an essential resource for post-graduate researchers, scholars and academics working with curriculum theory and pedagogical theory in contemporary education.

“Strong-Wilson insightfully wrestles with complexities of ethical subjectivity, remembrance, and witnessing in the context of teachers’ autobiographical and classroom encounters with Holocaust and post-colonial counter-stories. She originally interweaves these encounters with dialogic reflections on curriculum theorizing (particularly the work of W.F. Pinar), multidirectional memory work, hermeneutics, and the literature of W.G. Sebald. A compelling and enriching contribution to ‘complicated conversations’ in the fields of curriculum studies and English language arts education!”Claudia Eppert, Associate Professor, Faculty of EducationUniversity of Alberta“Vividly exemplifying the complicated conversation that is the curriculum, Teresa Strong-Wilson reads through one another the varied histories infusing the texts of classroom teachers, fiction and creative non-fiction writers, curriculum theorists, philosophers, and her own reflexive interrogations. Prioritizing study alongside teachers, Strong-Wilson deftly portrays ways that teaching with and to counter-stories might function to both inspire and support ethical self-encounters, wherein one can become conscious of one’s relations with, and responsibility toward, others. Emanating from her elongated and collaboratively enacted research, Strong-Wilson thus theorizes a notion of “concerned subjects,” who, although conscious of themselves as implicated, are able to respond to calls to act, to work toward repair. By threading aspects of currere, multidimensionality, and auto/biography, Teresa Strong-Wilson offers powerful and timely illustrations of ways that educators might fully examine relations among the subjects that we teach to, the stories we choose to invoke, and ourselves as teachers. In so doing, Strong-Wilson clearly embodies and enlivens curriculum as lived-experience, thus offering a compelling contribution to the field’s complicated conversation.”Janet L. Miller, Teachers CollegeColumbia University, New York City

Teresa Strong-Wilson is Associate Professor in the Department of Integrated Studies in Education at McGill University, Canada.