‘Why is Anne Frank always so durn happy?’ Happy objects and bad encounters in teacher education

ABSTRACT

This three-year, living inquiry into how preservice English Education students composed and analyzed visual-verbal journals (VVJs) in relation to Anne Frank’s Diary is grounded in Ahmed’s concepts of happy objects, bad encounters, and good encounters. After theorizing and complicating Ahmed’s concepts, we explore the way that the Diary has been positioned in the social fields of U.S. popular culture and schools. Across the three years, we found that participants overwhelmingly produced Anne Frank as a happy object, in ways that valorized her and emphasized the saving power of individual moral conduct rather than the brutal sides of her life and death. Through communal analysis of the VVJs and pedagogical changes across the years, participants became less likely to produce solely optimistic compositions of Frank. We argue for teacher education courses that do not focus upon single responses to complex issues and histories; instead, we explain how the conjunction ‘and’ can multiply the complexity of our engagements with texts and unravel binaries that have long had a hold on teacher education.

KEYWORDS:

• visual verbal journals
• progress
• literature
• meaning-making
• happy objects
• bad encounters
• Anne Frank

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

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Notes on contributors

Karen Spector

Karen Spector is an Associate Professor of English Education and Literacy at the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, and is co-editor with Candace Kuby and Jaye Johnson Thiel of Posthumanism and Literacy Research: Knowing/Becoming/ Doing Literacies with Routledge’s Expanding Literacies Series. She inquires with middle school through college students about arts-informed, justice-oriented, literary meaning-making. Her scholarship has been published in journals, such as Research in the Teaching of English, Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, Changing English,Language Arts, and Teachers College Record, as well as in numerous edited collections.

Elizabeth Anne Murray

Elizabeth Anne Murray is a Postdoctoral Research and Clinical Fellow with Baylor University’s Department of Curriculum and Instruction. As a fellow, she shares joint responsibilities working as a writing coordinator for students in the Learning and Organizational Change (LOC) doctorate and assisting with the LOC’s program evaluation. Her research interests include difficult conversations in the ELA classroom and disruptive encounters with literature.