Palimpsests for reading politics and reconfiguring power within and beyond learning spaces

Just after logging into the online meeting room, each of us—still joining from the comforts of our home office spaces following the shift there due to the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020—quickly moved past pleasantries. Ahead of diving into the task of threading together the four articles that constitute this issue, we shared reflections on the array of contemporary headlines and happenings that filled our social media feeds, blared across mainstream media, and occupied our thoughts on the first day of November 2022. From then-looming decisions from the Supreme Court of the United States about affirmative action to the just-announced decision for nearly all Ontario public schools to close amidst a breakdown in labour negotiations between education workers and Ontario’s Conservative government, we did not need to look far to see politics and power intersecting with education.

Within regressive educational spaces, protest signs, picket lines, and human rights discussions are increasingly considered far “too political” for everyday classroom happenings, under the fallacy that schooling and curricula can and should remain “neutral” so as not to cause a further rupture in the fabric of society. Frequently framed as a protective measure, proponents of a cis-white-patriarchy and white supremacist settler-colonial status quo articulate their argument as one symbolic of maintaining a (nationalist) truth, particularly as related to identity and place.

Conversely, as we have learned from the political work of Black, Indigenous, and trans communities, as well as others targeted by racial capitalist social formations, we know an alternative view of education suggests we must take “an overtly political orientation to teaching and learning” (Luke, 2014, p. 21). We understand the urgency of reading politics in everyday actions and communications to cultivate fertile ground for reconfiguring power and, ultimately, societal change. The authors of the four articles in this issue offer readers reflective insights, critical perspectives, and potential pathways for doing just that.

Cumulatively, we read these four articles as emblematic of what Jon M. Wargo and colleagues in their article in this issue describe as “palimpsests for reading how power can be reconfigured for a more equitable social order and just future” (p. 566). Within each article, authors foreground and call for imagining “otherwise” as a necessity for educational and social justice, rather than simply a strategy for surviving the “narrow confines of schooling institutions” (Pham, this issue, p. 518). With progressives’ efforts increasingly on the defensive against a surging radical right, it is easy to confuse a battle for status with actual work in service of just futures. The authors in this issue help us push past this stagnant political skirmish, toward imagining liberatory and just other-worlds, and just other-wordliness.

Foregrounding the experiences of girls of colour, in our opening piece, titled “‘I Never Really had the Right Words’: Critical Literacies and the Collective Knowledge Building of Girls of Colour,” Tashal Brown illustrates how 27 focal adolescents grew through their engagement in a community-based organization in the Northeastern United States. Specifically, Brown articulates “how a curriculum that facilitates access to terminology focussed on systems of power and oppression helps them [the girls] to name, understand, and draw connections to their identities and lived experiences” (p. 496). Drawing on individual and collective conversations Brown had with her participants, she offers readers insights into how the girls’ perspectives evolved throughout the program. For instance, Brown highlights how the girls came to understand more about the institutionalized ways in which women of colour have been (and remain) systemically and perpetually marginalized across contexts like the workplace and their own homes due to the “normalcy” of “isms” within their communities.

Further, Brown outlines for readers instances wherein the girls’ programmatic learning facilitated new avenues for them to not only name but more fully understand the “adverse feelings” they harbored toward girls and women like themselves while simultaneously building their confidence to “question the treatment and expectations placed on girls and women” (p. 506). Ultimately, Brown’s detailing of the girls’ stories forwards the seemingly academically established (yet still socially debated) claim that “no educational environment will be a utopia utterly void of the ideological ills that plague the larger society” (p. 496).

It is particularly instructive that insights arising from Brown’s work, including critical analyzes of race in schools, emerged from non-classroom spaces, raising questions about the ways in which transgressing spatial and temporal educational boundaries can lead to radical possibilities and engagements with learning. Brown further highlights how learning in and toward coalition emerged in the participants’ learning and being, offering a further breach of schooling norms in terms of colonial and ableist notions of independent work, outcomes, and goals. Although critical scholarship sheds light on the oppressive and often hidden curricular elements of schooling broadly, Brown expands this gaze to consider the hidden politics of extracurricular space, contesting the disciplinary separations of school and non-school knowing and being.

Whereas Brown’s focus was on the role of extracurricular curricular space in cultivating a sense of critical consciousness, Josephine H. Pham analyzes the role of in-service teachers in her article “Racial Micropolitical Literacy: Examining the Sociopolitical Realities of Teachers of Color Co-Constructing Student Transformational Resistance.” Pham puts forward the concept of “racial micropolitical literacy” which highlights how “teachers identify context-specific reproductions of whiteness and interlocking systems of oppression while learning to politically confront, navigate, and transform race and power through daily, embodied, and interactional practices” (p. 518).

Written in response to the tendency of educational scholarship to focus on macropolitics in the US, Pham draws on findings from a year-long participatory ethnographic research project with justice-oriented educators and centers the quotidian fabric of everyday life in schools. Zeroing in on one Asian American middle school teacher amidst a national school walk-out over gun control, Pham considers how explicit and implicit reflection on teacher identity and oppression can create critical paths for youth’s sociopolitical learning, agency, and resistance to domination in and by schools.

Pham unpacks for readers how resistance relies on shared constructions of agency by the teacher and students. She also highlights strategic risk taking by the teacher and emphasizes the influence of the interplay between students as well as the formal strictures of neoliberal white supremacist schooling. Pham also illustrates how critical reflection on experiences of racism by teachers of colour can create an invitational space of refusal in which students of colour can safely challenge injustice and teachers of colour can counter their own dehumanization within the carceral logics of status quo schooling in the US.

This careful, loving, and at times painful place is largely invisible to the dominant discursive whiteness of schooling in the US. Emerging from the creation of (and reflection on) this space of transgression are “daily, embodied, and interactional practices” and what Pham terms racial micropolitical literacy (p. 518). Ultimately, Pham’s analytical offering highlights how weaving hidden threads between students and teachers of colour can undermine white supremacist logics while creating concrete moments of reflexive resistance—moments in which an unravelling of domination comes into discursive and emotional view.

Powerfully, in Pham’s exploration of “walking out” of schooling as part of productive rupture, we noted a political continuity between student and teacher justice commitments and the discontinuity required and caused by walking out of the classroom. Our third article by Jon M. Wargo, Melita Morales, and Alex Corbitt offers a similar rupture of the borders separating art as pedagogical object and tool, art as process and product, and art as disciplined curricular silo. In their article titled “Fabricating Response: Prospective Elementary Teachers Remediating Response to The Circuit through 3D Printing and Design,” the authors highlight how the productive tangling creates space for a multidirectional breach of white logics, colonial norms in schooling in broad perspective, and the confines of proscribed and prescribed educator practice.

Specifically, Wargo, Morales, and Corbitt engage questions of meaning, making, multimodality, literacy, and mediation in their exploration of a teacher education course called “Teaching Social Sciences Through the Arts.” In an attempt to reshape the increasingly confined makerspace that is standard(ized) curriculum and teacher preparation, the authors conceptualize the arts and arts integration in education beyond the institutional boundaries of prescribed practice and curriculum and toward a critical recognition of traditional practices as constitutive of white world-making. Operationalizing a critical and multidimensional notion of the arts, of text, and of the teacher in relation to arts (in) education, the authors reflect on prospective teachers’ engagement with a three-dimensional (3D) printing and design project.

As co-instructors of the course, Wargo and Morales assigned Francisco Jiménez’s (1997), The Circuit: Stories from the Life of a Migrant Child, a young adult collection of 12 partially autobiographical stories of a family’s migration as they are pushed and pulled by opportunities for work in the US. Unflinchingly told through the experiences of its child protagonist who navigates work camps, constant migration, and various hardships within his own family, the book contests the spiky racial capitalist mythology of the American Dream. As part of the assigned work for the course, prospective teachers were asked to respond to this work through 3D printing and design.

Wargo and colleagues showcase how students used 3D design and printing as text, as object, and as the weaving of a resistant discursive fabric. In doing so, they detail how Wargo and Morales intentionally sought to build student comfort and inclination to try unfamiliar pedagogical approaches while calling attention to issues of power, race, migration, and white supremacy. With powerful parallels to what Pham identified as developing transformative resistance with students, Wargo and colleagues’ intention to engage the unfamiliar and the potentially transgressive highlights critical pedagogical practices for refusing status quo pedagogy.

In this issue’s final article, titled “Professional Ruptures in Pre-Service ECEC: Maddening Early Childhood Education and Care” and written by Adam Davies, readers are challenged to consider not only the possibility for, but also the criticality of “maddening” early childhood education and care (ECEC). Drawing on mad studies, Davies describes maddening as “an affective, embodied form of resistance to hierarchies, classification, and positivist ideas of assessment and measurement that have historically subjugated diverse populations through interconnected ideas of racialization, madness, and abnormality” (pp. 577–578). Importantly, and as Davies notes, the reclaiming of madness as an identity (and the associated act of “maddening”) is a rather recent phenomenon; prior to the new millennium, madness was primarily a label used by others to pathologize individuals deemed abnormal.

Davies’s call is grounded in two “maddening moments” whereby they describe their first-hand experiences “with a focus on affect, feelings, and emotions, particularly those that are deemed potentially irrational or nonsensical” (p. 579). In the first of these retellings, Davies narrates an instance from their teaching wherein they suddenly became visibly upset as they interrogated a problematic passage written in an “approved” university textbook with students in their introductory ECEC course. Davies uses this story to problematize “typical” development as inherently deficit oriented while also illuminating how maddening cannot be contained. Additionally, Davies argues it is imperative that educators and policymakers alike understand the political and affective nature of teaching and suggests that discounting the embodied, emotional experiences of students and teachers only continues to pathologize individuals deemed different.

In the latter narrative, Davies refers to another course session wherein they presented their ECEC class with the case of Steven. After students collectively contemplated how they might assist Steven, Davies revealed that the case study child presented was, in fact, themself. Here, Davies notes that their intention was to facilitate an alternative picture of mad persons while also clarifying for students that Davies’s presence in their university classroom was not because of Davies’s ability to “overcome” their madness, but rather to embrace madness as a part of their identity. Nevertheless, as Davies shares, the prevalence of sanism within the dominant discourse is cultivated in Davies’s conflicting desires. Davies stated they wished to have their students think critically about how they might respond to a mad child, and yet they also felt pressure to perform normalcy in their role as the ECEC course instructor, particularly since “self-control, capability, rationality, and mastery are the ideal” in such settings (p. 585). Still, Davies contends, this maddening pedagogical approach provides an alternative pathway for ECECs and university educators to contemplate how “sanism in ECEC haunts educators with experiences of psychiatrization and mental illness due to their madness being marked through pathology and illness” (p. 572). Ultimately, through these autoethnographic narratives, Davies showcases for readers the necessity of disrupting normativities that regulate the bodies that facilitate young children’s learning as well as the standardized and developmentalist principles that guide how early learners are taught and measured.

Together, the four articles in this issue foment a need to imagine otherwise. Individually, each piece articulates a limitation of contemporary curricular understandings and pedagogical practices, both in and beyond common learning spaces. Moreover, the stories of youth shared by Brown, of teachers shared by Pham, of prospective educators shared by Wargo and his colleagues, and of university teacher educators shared by Davies are true palimpsests insofar as each story encourages not only a recognition of the politics at play in education, but each also emphasizes particular possibilities for reconfiguring power on a local (and global) scale. This issue aims to offer invitational space for engaging radical doing and undoing, becoming and unbecoming, and being and unbeing toward educational justice.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.