The child in question: Childhood texts, cultures, and curricula

What is a child? The concept of childhood is so familiar that we tend to assume its universality. As Davin (1999) notes, “We all ‘know’ what we mean by child and childhood. Yet its properties are multiple and elusive; its limits elastic” (p. 15). The lived experience of childhood is defined by the cultural and economic contexts in which it occurs, and thus, considering the vastly different experiences of children across the world and throughout history, it is impossible to imagine a universal definition. Indeed, the boundaries that differentiate children from adults shape the subjectivities of both. When we speak of the child, we are referring to the relationships, contexts and legacies through which the concept of childhood is mediated. Indeed, the meaning of childhood is always being negotiated not only by the imaginations of adults, but also by nations, markets, history and children themselves. Childhood is thus a discursive conflict zone upon which cultural, political and economic engagements are waged.

This special issue's unifying theme, “The child in question,” emerges, in part, from Davin's observation: that childhood has boundaries far more elastic than can be held by the familiar notion of the child as providing unmediated access to truth or innocence. The title pays homage to the work of sociologist, Gittins (1998), who explores the shifting meanings of children and childhood and how those meanings impact the lives of children. Contemporary laws, educational policies and social customs about and for children, such as those highlighted in this issue, reveal the ways that the properties of childhood remain as multiple and elusive as ever. Precisely because the concept of childhood is complex and constantly changing, it demands critical inquiry, for as elusive and elastic as they may be, social constructions of childhood have real material consequences for the children whose lives they shape. For Walkerdine (1993), the challenge is to look at the ways that social discourses “cut up and shape reality” as well as to account for “the real effects they produce” (p. 454). “Something real,” she argues, “is produced out of fiction” (p. 454). In turn, the embodied lives of children can impact the metaphors we use to describe them. Duane (2010) describes this affecting dynamic of language as “the material grounding of metaphorical thought” (p. 12).

The pages of this issue are filled with “question-children” who represent both the material and metaphorical qualities of childhood that complicate the fantasy of a certain truth. Indeed, for Britzman (2006), the question-child figure reminds us that uncertainty is the ground of research, including research about children. In her words, this child figure symbolizes “what trying to know feels like for the child and the parent, what it is like to wrest knowledge for the self from the other, and how our theories are made in relation to these encounters” (p. 115). We are all question-children when faced with the paradox of trying to “wrest knowledge” in relationship to the child, because there is no direct access to the child's world, or any world, so long as we take as axiomatic the interpretive quality of representation. Indeed, the question-child figure builds into the labor of research an image of the researcher as facing the very limits of intelligibility, putting into question what we think we can know for sure.

The notion that childhood ushers in the elusive qualities of knowledge and representation suggests also that the child is symbolic of ideas that exceed what we consciously understand and that it carries traces of the opposite – the wish not to know. It is this excessive quality of knowledge, including resistances to knowledge, that lies at the heart of the investigations of this issue. Together and in their own ways, the articles of this issue ask: what does the child represent and what is it to represent the child? What is wanted from particular representations of childhood and what forms of knowledge do such representations exclude? How might a study of the child face readers with the social, political and emotional conflicts of living in a given time and place?

The child figures that hasten across the pages of this issue offer clues about the preoccupations, anxieties, desires and disavowals of the specific social landscapes they traverse. Thus, as much as the question-child is figured by the social world, the articles of this issue remind us that the child is also an active, embodied, inquiring agent engaged in figuring a relationship with that inheritance. This active position stands in contrast to the restrictive discursive constructs of conventional notions of childhood development. As Pugh (2014) points out, scholars in the social studies of childhood have long advanced notions that children are “knowing cultural actors” even while they are also “profoundly shaped by contexts” (p. 73). Yet, too often we cling to the fantasy of childhood innocence, a fantasy that Morrison (2015) explores in her most recent novel, God Help the Child. The protagonist, Bride, looks to her unborn child as a new beginning, a new life, “immune to evil or illness, protected from kidnap, beatings, rape, racism, insult, hurt, self-loathing, abandonment. Error-free. All goodness” (p. 180). Bride's fantasy persists despite, or perhaps because of her own childhood experiences of neglect and abuse wrought by growing up in a racist world. Morrison's novel traces the emotional impact of racism as it migrates both internally and inter-generationally. Bride, whose dark skin bears little resemblance to her mother, is, from the beginning of her life, “treated like a stranger—more than that, an enemy” (p. 5). In Morrison's literary hands, it is not Bride's black skin alone that stokes her mother's hatred, but an internalized and inherited legacy of anti-black racist hatred that constructs the black child as a stranger and enemy from birth.

Such narratives of racism, however, seem to have little impact on the pervasive emblem of the innocent and empty child that abounds in psychological, sociological and educational research. This little figure is particularly pervasive in teacher education, traveling under the rubric of development. As O'Loughlin and Johnson (2010) argue: “Conceptions of ‘emotion,’ ‘cognition,’ and ‘social development,’ are still presented as discrete domains that are assumed to evolve in a linear fashion with age. Despite some nods to multicultural difference, the modal child is still a middle-class white Western child” (p. 2). These conventional theories of childhood development reinforce the notion that “children [are] ‘not adults’ and thus most interesting as proto-people, embodiments of ‘the future,’ objects who experience particular outcomes rather than shapers of their own environments or culture” (Pugh, 2014, p. 75).

And yet, this construction defends the adult's fantasy of his/her own autonomy. As Rose (1985) writes: “Children are no threat to our identity because they are, so to speak, ‘on their way’ (the journey metaphor is a recurrent one). Their difference stands purely as a sign of just how far we've come” (p. 13). “The issue is not,” as Walkerdine (1993) points out, “whether change and transformation happen throughout life” (p. 454). The issue is rather how narratives of transformation are “produced for very particular purposes within very specific historical, social and political conditions” (pp. 453--454). So long as the child is cast low and far on the rungs of development, the adult can secure fantasies of self-mastery while simultaneously keeping out of bounds the anxieties that pulsate on the other side of this illusion. The mapping and measurement of developmental stages does not so much describe as much as they invent the child that confirms an Enlightenment story of progress. And, the invention of “the developing child” sustains another narrative, what Steedman (1995) calls “a pedagogic epic” that features a teacher who heroically drags the child into rationality (p. 163).

However, development's journey metaphor has implications beyond the mapping of the individual child and adult. Indeed, it has the effect of bolstering hierarchies that secure humanity for particular subjects and simultaneously cast out of bounds the lives of those not thought to embody the requisite qualities of rationality and consciousness circumscribing the human. Expanding on this logic, Kennedy (2002) observes that, the child “might as well be a marker for any subspecies real or imagined by the white male Western academic philosopher – woman, primitive, insane, slave, poor, animal: the Other held at arm's length” (p. 155). Thinking with Walkerdine, the binary split that constructs “the Other” has very real effects, particularly when it comes to minoritized childhoods. King (2003) weighs in on the material effects of the discursive concept of race, too:

We see race. Never mind that race is a construct and an illusion. Never mind that it does not exist in either biology or theology, though both have, from time to time, been enlisted in the cause of racism. Never mind we can't hear it or smell it or taste it or feel it. The important thing is that we believe we can see it. (p. 44)

The stakes of discourse are high, for the same logic that cleaves off the “white male Western academic philosopher” renders the lives of “others” unworthy of recognition as human in very material and often hateful ways. In the context of the nation-state, Ramjewan and Gaztambide-Fernández (2015) argue that such divisions work to “criminalize citizens thought to undermine national sovereignty” and indeed, “cleanse the body politic of brown, black, and non-white ways of being in and embodying the world” (p. 336).

Turning to Butler (2009), the discursive construction of otherness carries also an ethical question about the precarious quality of human life, and within this fragile designation a question about which people are recognized as having the right to a livable life (p. 21). Indeed, as Butler argues, the question raised by the precarious quality of human life is not how to prevent or avoid the finitude of existence, but quite the contrary: it is to recognize the precarious quality of human life as the grounds of recognition that this life matters. After all, the very thought that a life can be lost presupposes a life that is loved. For Butler, the “conclusion” to this painful fact is not simply that we merely accept “that everything can die or is subject to destruction” (p. 23). Rather, the question is how to create conditions that make the precarious quality of life bearable and sustainable. To deny such conditions, Butler argues, is to deny the humanity of a person. To this, we add that the denial of such conditions denies also the humanity of the person who is a child.

We can think here of 15-year-old Tina Fontaine, one of the thousands of missing and murdered Aboriginal women and girls across Canada. Eight days after she was reported missing, Fontaine's lifeless body was pulled from the Red River in Winnipeg, Manitoba. The details of the case remain unclear, but it is more accurate to say that Fontaine was missed by the systems of welfare and education charged with her care. Indeed, these very institutions carry the legacy of Canada's cultural genocide of First Nations, Métis and Inuit Peoples. As written in Canada's Residential Schools: The Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (2015), “The child welfare system is the Residential School of our day” (p. 4).¹ The day Tina disappeared, she and a friend had stopped into Macdonald Youth Services shelter for something to eat and to use the washroom. The name of the shelter alone – which refers to a past police magistrate, Hugh John Madonald – marks the simultaneous surveillance and disregard of the child “Other” in the context of the nation-state. On August 8, at 3:00 am, the police made contact with Tina, who was by then reported missing, when they pulled over a vehicle in which she was riding as a passenger. The driver was impaired. As if to repeat the nation's legacy of blatant disregard, the police let her go. At 4:00 am that same morning, Fontaine was again found when she passed out in an alley and was taken to hospital. After her release, she was taken into custody by a Family and Youth Services worker, who left her unattended in the front seat of her car. Tina ran away and was never again seen alive.

In the United States, we can think of the case of Tamir Rice who, just months after Michael Brown's murder, was also fatally shot by police. On 22 November 2014, 12-year-old Tamir Rice was playing with a toy gun in Cudell Park in Cleveland, Ohio, when a 911 caller alerted authorities. White police officers Timothy Loehmann and Frank Garmback arrived on the scene and, within two seconds, opened fire on Tamir. Just days later, the Cleveland police released a grainy surveillance video of the killing, which was quickly circulated online. Tamir's black body was made into a media spectacle by the viral video, in which we see him falling to the ground the same instant that the police cruiser appears. Tamir's death confirms that, as Coates (2015) states, “In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body – it is heritage” (p. 103, emphasis in original). In a letter to his teenage son, Coates (2015) explains that black children have never been granted the fantasy that reads the future as promising. Coates describes a world that denies the precarious quality of black children's lives, a world that refuses to protect black children like Tamir. When it comes to the lives of black boys, we do not give warnings. We shoot first and ask questions later. Sharpe (2014) links these social conditions to the history of transatlantic slavery that, as she argues, “narratively condemns” black children to futures inevitably tied to early and brutal fatality (p. 64). This condemning narrative signals one side of a conflict that constitutes the racialized construction of childhood: on the one hand, the minoritized child is “adultified” and thus deserving of punishment and death (Ferguson, 2001, p. 83), and on the other hand, the minoritized adult is infantilized, returning to Kennedy (2002), “at arm's length” from the rational subject of Western philosophy (p. 155).

The articles in this special issue trace the emergence of such narratives that “condemn” children to particular futures in explicit and implicit ways. In that very effort, they also offer avenues that “narratively return” us to the child as a site of both ethical urgency and epistemological complexity. Each article operates on the premise that the child's “marginal” status offers a critical site of working through the very discursive terms by which “otherness” comes to be made. In this sense, they trace the emergence and persistence of narratives that appropriate the child figure to further inequities among and within intersections made from race, gender, class, ability, and sexuality. But if, as King (2003) teaches us, “the truth about stories is that's all we are,” the articles of this issue also examine the difficult question of what it can mean to be storytellers in the context of our interdependent existence (p. 2). They feature the conflictive and contested qualities of representing childhood. They introduce stories of power, cultural conflict, social (in)justice, and the unconscious to disrupt fantasies of the child's lockstep developmental march toward a finished future. Through the lens of poststructural, curricular and psychoanalytic theories, the authors of this issue invite readers to attend to the “unruly contours of growing” as marginal sites that open onto horizons of meaning that are both full and ever incomplete (Stockton, 2007, p. 13).

Debbie Sonu and Jeremy Benson, in their article titled, “The quasi-human child: How normative conceptions of childhood enabled neoliberal school reform in the United States,” offer the figure of the “quasi-human child” to examine the machine of neoliberalism silently but powerfully at work in the context of the school reducing the complex personhood to measurements and upholding social inequities. Sonu and Benson point to the ways that history repeats itself in practices that exploit the discourse of malleability to justify educational aims linked to the nation's economic, social and political ends. The quasi-human child featured in their foundational essay may well be the contemporary cousin to the historical figure that Prentice (1977) called the “infinitely malleable” child (p. 32). This child figure, like the quasi-figure, was central to the promotion and invention of compulsory schooling in North America in the mid-nineteenth century. Proponents of compulsory schooling exploited the idea of the malleable child, arguing that schools were needed to form good moral character and ward off aspects of existence that what were thought to be bad influences in rapidly changing times: idleness, promiscuity and general trouble. The malleable child was central not only to the alignment of schooling with social control, but with the invention of the “bad child” barred from the ladder of “civilization” upholding drastically unequal divisions of the colonial state.

In their article, Sonu and Benson give us good reason to think that this same colonial structure has not gone away, but gone elsewhere, in the fantasy of the quasi-human child who is, once again, labile in all the “right” ways. For these authors, the quasi-human child, an “adult yet-to-come” (p. 231), is a neoliberal invention, needed to justify oppressive measures in the name of progress and development through educational reform. Illustrating how childhood operates as a discursive conflict zone, Sonu and Benson unearth the ways in which the notion of the quasi-human child drives neoliberal educational policies and practices that work “on the child, rather than with the child” (p. 231). By exploring the relationship between contemporary curricular and pedagogical issues and neoliberal constructions of childhood, they seek to “denaturalize childhood as biologically given or institutionally determined and instead, to interrogate how certain understandings of and about the child are operationalized and used in the managing of society” (p. 231).

Karishma Desai, in her article titled, “Teaching the Third World Girl: Girl Rising as a precarious curriculum of empathy,” brings to light another way that certain understandings of the child are utilized to manage society. The Third World Girl depicted in the contemporary discourses of global economic development circulated by multinational corporations and international development agencies exists in her own quasi-human state. Though human, she is not fully developed, at least not by Western standards. As Desai explains, she “is cast in a stage of becoming. Therefore, the girl-child has become a more strategic target for the project of international development as she better captures and mobilizes hope amongst her consumers” (p. 252).

In her analysis of the film Girl Rising and its associated K-12 curriculum materials, designed by the Pearson Foundation (the now defunct nonprofit arm of the largest education publishing company in the world), Desai finds a compelling public pedagogy. Its curriculum cultivates empathy for the Third World Girl, the education of whom is constructed as a panacea for world health, overpopulation and economic underdevelopment. This curriculum of empathy operates to draw our attention away from “increasing global structural inequalities and transnational circuits of power at the individual and systemic level” (p. #). The differences that exist between the lives of Third World Girls and Western moralities are constructed as cultural deficits that threaten global economic development, particularly the interests of large corporations and development organizations. Thus, as Desai concludes, Third World girlhood becomes “a site upon which assumptions about difference, neo-imperialism, geopolitical forces that uphold unequal relationships between the Western core and global South, and neoliberal logics converge” (p. 260).

Implied in the quasi-human child is another child figure, intuited above in the cases of Tina Fontaine and Tamir Rice, who is positioned on the threatening side of her perceived inhumanity. This is a minoritized child whose not-yet-humanness is cast as a social threat and justification for repeated and relentless racial violence. That is, when the quasi-human child refers to a black child, the fantasy of promise granted to white childhoods becomes one of danger justifying unjust persecution and punishment. Erica Burman's essay unfolds yet another layer of the racialized construction of childhood in her analysis of the child figures circulating in the work of Frantz Fanon. As Burman notes in her article, “Fanon and the child: Pedagogies of subjectification and transformation,” these constructions are rooted in historical discourses of national development, the legacies of which continue to inform approaches to childhood and education and “therefore carry moral-political as well as economic meanings attaching not only to notions of ‘growing up’ but also of ‘catching up’” (p. 265). Proposing an approach she calls “child as method,” Burman analyzes Fanon's work to explore the intersections between childhood, culture, subjectivity and intersubjective relations. Burman's analysis highlights the ways that Fanon's depiction of the Imperial child resists normative notions of childhood innocence and conventional ideas about childhood development by positioning the child as already implicated in racist social structures, and an active participant with significant social subjectivity.

In his article, “Comics and the structure of childhood feeling: Sublimation and the play of pretending in Gilbert Hernandez's Marble Season,” David Lewkowich turns to the graphic novel to represent – albeit belatedly – the psychical experience of growing up in a context that already defines the child's social difference. Through the lens of psychoanalysis, he explores the processes by which the novel child infuses meaning into cultural objects on the way to carving out a meaningful existence in the world. Also implied in Lewkowich's account is an uneven story of development. From this vantage, the child does not simply spring forth into an unfettered future, but rather seeks to represent a relationship to the ineffable qualities of experience that also constitute growing up. To illustrate these dynamics, Lewkowich unearths the psychical dynamics of childhood at work in Gilbert Hernandez's Marble Season.

Focusing on the “gutter” of the text (the space between visual frames), which Marshall and Gilmore (2015) explain is “not a void, but rather a site of signification” (p. 97), Lewkowich examines the representation of the protagonist, Hugo, to articulate a “cultural approach to theories of childhood sublimation” (p. 287). Against a fantasy of seamless development, Lewkowich narrates a story of becoming that is immersed in conflict, where the conflict is, for Hugo, how to create a meaningful existence in relationship to a nation that excludes him and that, in Lewkowich's words, demands that he “become something other than who he is” as the ground of belonging (p. 300). In this story of development, the child bears the return of a history of racism that “comes back” to shape his future. At the same time, Lewkowich reads the graphic novel form as also illustrating the processes through which the child, and Hernandez himself, may rewrite what returns. In this view, the past is not a closed and condemning chapter, but a live text “that is still being written” by its heirs and its readers (p. 304).

History “comes back,” once again, in Sandra Chang-Kredl and Gala Wilkie's study of early educators’ childhood memories. In their article, “What is it like to be a child? Childhood subjectivity and teacher memories as heterotopia,” the authors argue that Michel Foucault's (1986/1998) concept of heterotopia offers insight into understanding teachers’ conceptualizations of childhood by connecting their remembered experiences of childhood with their present experiences with children in the classroom. By understanding adulthood as a space of otherness, a site in which the incompatible states of “child” and “adult” are juxtaposed by the simultaneous existence of our past and present selves, we disrupt the adult--child binary, making space for the coexistence of teachers’ remembered childhood selves, the conceptualized child they believe they are or will soon teach and their present teacher selves. By writing about childhood memories, the preservice teachers who participated in the study were able to bring these “incompatible time-spaces” together in their memory text.

Chang-Kredl and Wilkie challenge us to grapple with our “inner experiences of childhood in order to detect and perhaps interrupt unconscious links with our pasts” (p. 318). They find that attempting to untangle our own subjective memories of the experience of childhood from our assumptions about, and understandings of, children today can enrich our understandings of the work of early childhood teachers. Following Britzman (2014), such memory work need not refer simply to the teacher's “regression,” but rather, an invitation to critical thought about “the ways childhood looks different to those who are children-no-longer” (p. 125). The memories that Chang-Kredl and Wilkie document could change the way we think about childhood in teacher education, not simply as little “others” to socialize, but a reminder of the teacher's disavowed feelings of vulnerability, desire and uncertainty that unanalyzed nostalgia defends against.

To close this special issue, Gail Boldt and Joe Valenté add a discussion of disability as yet another factor impacting the construction of the quasi-human child. In “L’école Gulliver and La Borde: An ethnographic account of collectivist integration and institutional psychotherapy,” Boldt and Valenté argue that differently abled children continue to be cast as outsiders to their normatively abled counterparts, even within contemporary educational efforts of inclusion. Working against the limits of such outsider approaches to inclusion, the authors take as their example a Parisian school, L’école Gulliver. Through their analysis, they show how the “collectivist integration approach” of the school constructs a notion of childhood as complicated by the layered experiences and pressures of group life, even while these dynamics need not add up to the conformity of individual members in order to belong (p. 321). Boldt and Valenté mine teacher interviews and video footage to examine group life as rather opening students and teachers to their radical differences and ethical obligations to one another. “To be a group-subject,” Boldt and Valenté write, “is to participate in the life of the group such that one's singularity affects the character and actions of the group and is, in turn, re-formed by the group” (p. 322). Indeed, Boldt and Valenté ask what happens to our understandings of childhood in the context of pedagogical practices that facilitate the child's efforts to grow up and into group life in ways that refuse conformity. At Gulliver, the child is a fundamentally relational child, where diversity is not simply an individual trait cast in opposition to belonging, but a necessary condition for the renewal of the self and the social world.

Taken together, this collection of articles lends important insights into the ways that childhood subjectivities are shaped by discursive constructions of and about childhood, which emerge in the context of larger social and political histories. The “question-children” explored in this issue are transporters of difficult knowledge; they present us with questions without clear answers, questions that return us to our own culturally mediated “prescriptions and anxieties” (Britzman, 2006, p. 131). As Britzman (2006) further argues: “The question child tests the adult's reality by way of questioning the adult's knowledge and its proximity to phantasy” (p. 131). The question-children who emerge from the pages of this special issue challenge our realities by questioning our own understandings of childhood and complicating the fantasy of a singular truth. They ask us to think again about the unruly qualities of desire and the difficult inheritance of history that are fended off in fantasies of rescue and the wish to “turn the child into someone just like the teacher” (Britzman, 2014, p. 125). They ask us to consider our own investments in ideologies that make children into numbers on a spreadsheet or stages on a developmental chart, and to challenge our own complicity in discourses of economic development and security that place the responsibility for global “progress” on the shoulders of Third World girls. These question-children challenge us to confront the ways in which stories – both the stories we tell ourselves about the world and the stories we tell about ourselves – allow us to re-imagine, but sometimes forget, past difficulties in the name of the future.

This special issue calls into question precisely these stories of childhood that society uses to delimit concepts of futurity, personhood, otherness, belonging, normalcy, and development. Drawing on a variety of theoretical and methodological perspectives, the authors also challenge this inheritance by asking new questions about the power of theory and history to open the concept of childhood to unfamiliar and interpretive corridors of thought. By uniquely imagining childhood subjectivities in ways that expand traditional discursive boundaries, each article herein contributes to a collective illustration of the elusive qualities of discourse that render impossible, and undesirable, any singular answer to the question, “What is a child?”

Notes

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