Sick at school: Teachers’ memories and the affective challenges that bodies present to constructions of childhood innocence, normalcy, and ignorance

Abstract

Longstanding impressions of children as innocent to human frailty, alongside the emphasis on efficiency and management in schools, play undeniable roles in the way teachers engage with children experiencing death and illness. This paper draws from a larger study of 116 written childhood memories from prospective teachers and practitioners enrolled across four universities in Canada and the United States and focuses on the 12 memories that specifically reference childhood experiences with death or illness. Bearing witness to death evoked a range of participant responses, including guilt and shame, a sense of childhood immaturity, or the need to “grow up” in the face of mortality. In contrast, memories of illness almost always occurred in school, featuring a neglectful teacher or adult figure with anxiety about disrupting normalcy and order. Drawing on affect studies and psychoanalysis, our examination surfaces three repeating motifs: 1) the management of the bodily ‘normal’ in school, 2) the appeal to childhood innocence as a refusal of affective experience, and 3) the abjection of illness as an opening to thinking about vulnerability in education. Although these memories account for a small portion of the overall collection, they linger in our minds as significant, made even more so by the current context of COVID-19. For educators, the challenge may be how to engage with children as they attempt to make sense of the turmoil they are living, all of which may require teachers to support a wide range of childhood experiences unburdened by the ideal of innocence. A study of these tropes demonstrate the affective challenges that bodies pose to education, and open critical ways to think about the relationship between illness, childhood, and education as the ethical ground to reimagine post-pandemic schooling.

Keywords:

• Teacher memories
• Teacher Education
• childhood
• affect
• illness

Ethical approval

Ethics approval was obtained from the Human Participants Review Committee at York University (#e-2018-264).

Notes

1 As part of our method, we asked participants to describe themselves as children, both from their own perspectives and how others might have described them. We did not explicitly ask participants, but we did suggest that their descriptions “may include discussion of your personal traits, physical appearance, and social identity (gender, race, sexuality, class).” Yet in their responses, most participants chose language to represent interiority, such as being shy, introverted, misunderstood, outgoing, and so on. However, it is notable that social identity did surface within the written memories themselves, most often when participants recalled moments of exclusion, bullying, and mistreatment (Chang-Kredl et al., 2021; Farley et al., 2020; Sonu et al., 2020). In terms of our own social locations, our research team is comprised of one Asian American, one white American recently immigrated to Canada, one Chinese Canadian, and one white Canadian. We are all cisgender women of varying sexualities and have grown up with different histories of social class. Across this diversity, we share a commitment to a critical understanding of childhood across multiple entry points of inequity, including race, class, gender, and sexuality. We also acknowledge that we arrive to these commitments from different places and that this plays a role in the ways that we read and relate to the collected memories.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by an Insight Development Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Grant/Award Number: 430- 2018-0689.

Notes on contributors

Debbie Sonu

Debbie Sonu is an Associate Professor in Curriculum and Teaching at Hunter College and doctoral faculty in the Urban Education Program at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Her research interests include curriculum theory as it relates to urban education, politically-oriented teaching in public schools, and critical childhood studies. Currently, she is studying the teaching of social class and racio-economics to young children.

Lisa Farley

Lisa Farley is an Associate Professor and Associate Dean of Research in the Faculty of Education at York University. Her research examines how psychoanalytic theory can reframe normative conceptualizations of child development by surfacing the conflicted qualities of growth, belonging, and education. She is the author of Childhood Beyond Pathology: A Psychoanalytic Study of Development and Diagnosis (SUNY Press, 2018) and has published numerous articles on psychoanalysis and childhood in: Curriculum Inquiry, The Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies, Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society, Pedagogy, Culture, and Society, Psychoanalysis and History, and American Imago.

Sandra Chang-Kredl

Sandra Chang-Kredl is an Associate Professor in the Early Childhood and Elementary Education program at Concordia University, in Montreal, Québec. Her research program intersects the areas of teacher education, curriculum studies, media literacy, children’s popular culture, and early childhood education. Her professional experience as a certified teacher and administrator in early years education informs her research, teaching and pre-service field supervision in the `department.

Julie C. Garlen

Julie C. Garlen is an Associate Professor of Childhood and Youth Studies at Carleton University, where she serves as the Co-Director of the Institute of Interdisciplinary Studies. Previously, she worked in the U.S. South as an elementary school teacher and an early childhood teacher educator.