ABSTRACT
This article examines how five teacher candidates conceptualized meanings of teaching and childhood through discussions of childhood objects within a focus group. Drawing on psychosocial methods, we show how teachers used their objects to work through tensions between professional roles as educators and the return of personal memory. We highlight the ways in which meanings of teaching and childhood were affected by the shifting dynamics of compliance, anxiety, and conflict within the group. Through our analysis, we illustrate the value of using objects to support emerging teachers’ engagements in complicated conversations within a divergent community to represent conflictive meanings of childhood and education.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. This research was approved by York University’s Human Participants Research Review Committee.
2. Earlier findings examined the pedagogical significance of childhood memories of nuisance-making leading to school surveillance (Farley et al., Citation2020), the colonial construct of innocence (Garlen, Chang-Kredl, Farley & Sonu, Citation2021), the relationship between memories of parental care and empathy (Chang-Kredl et al., Citation2021), and childhood memories of injustice and illness as catalysts for teachers’ dreams for just futures and pedagogical practice (Sonu et al., Citation2020, Citation2022). The second phase of research surfaced the role of nostalgia in teachers’ understandings of childhood under Covid-19 (Farley et al., Citation2022) and the meaning of childhood agency in oppressive contexts of schooling (Garlen et al., Citation2022).
3. Webkinz are a stuffed animal franchise with interactive online counterparts (GANZ, Citation2012).
Farley, L., Sonu, D., Garlen, J., & Chang-Kredl, S. (2020). Childhood memories of playful antics and punishable acts: Risking an imperfect future of teaching and learning. The New Educator, 16(2), 106–121. https://doi.org/10.1080/1547688X.2020.1731036 Garlen, J., Chang-Kredl, S., Farley, L., & Sonu, D. (2021). Childhood innocence and experience: Memory, discourse, practice. Children & Society, 35(5), 648–662. https://doi.org/10.1111/chso.12428 Chang-Kredl, S., Sonu, D., Garlen, J., & Farley, L. (2021). Models of possible selves: Prospective teachers’ reflections on their childhood memories of parents. Teaching Education, 33(4), 372–386. https://doi.org/10.1080/10476210.2021.1948989 Sonu, D., Farley, L., Chang-Kredl, S., & Garlen, J. (2020). The dreamwork of childhood memory: The futures teachers make from the schooling past. Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, 35(4), 15–27. Sonu, D., Farley, L., Chang-Kredl, S., & Garlen, J. (2022). Sick at school: Teachers’ memories and the affective challenges that bodies present to constructions of childhood innocence, normalcy, and ignorance. Review of Education, Pedagogy, & Cultural Studies, 44(2), 147–165. https://doi.org/10.1080/10714413.2022.2031693 Farley, L., Garlen, J. C., Chang-Kredl, S., & Sonu, D. (2022). The critical work of memory and the nostalgic return of innocence: How emergent teachers represent childhood. Pedagogy Culture & Society, 1–21. Online first. https://doi.org/10.1080/14681366.2022.2063930 Garlen, J., Sonu, D., Farley, L., & Chang-Kredl, S. (2022). Agency as assemblage: Using childhood artefacts and memories to examine children’s relations with schooling. Journal of Childhood, Education & Society, 3(2), 122–138. https://doi.org/10.37291/2717638X.202232170 Additional information
Funding
This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.
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