Reverberating chords: implications of storied nostalgia for borderland discourses in pre-service teacher identity

Abstract

The research that is the subject of this paper set out to interrogate pre-service teachers’ responses to issues of national identity, ideology, and representation in contemporary multicultural Canadian picture books. While the research focused on whether and how the literature could serve to inform and broaden pre-service teachers’ conceptualizations of diversity, we retrospectively decided to re-visit the focus group and interview data to know which of the 70 picture books had most engaged the teachers and why. We critically consider the implications of teachers’ attachments for social justice education and teachers’ cultivation of a critical, ‘borderlands’ discourse aware of self and open to others. The research suggests that a significant source of teacher knowledge and thinking is lodged in teachers’ personal memories of childhood texts, called touchstones. Touchstones were a place from which teachers implicitly began; certain stories struck particular chords, chords largely attributable to childhood memories. Most intertextual connections were personal, with some tangential to the text. While touchstones performed different functions depending on the subject position of the pre-service teachers, they pointed to the existence of an underlying position of teacher as nostalgic subject. Given the importance of this subject position for teachers’ responses to picture books, we explore critical reconceptualizations of nostalgia that can support the development of borderland discourses. We suggest that pre-service teachers need to be invited to individually and collectively examine their responses to both old and new touchstone stories. More nuanced research also needs to be conducted on the role of nostalgia in teacher formation, how it influences teacher practice, and how to best design teacher education courses to foster ‘borderland discourses’ related to the storying of teacher identity, especially with respect to popular ‘collectibles’ and core teaching texts like picture books.

Keywords:

• nostalgia
• multicultural literature
• pre-service teachers
• teacher thinking
• picture books
• social justice

Acknowledgments

We are grateful for the support of SSHRC (Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council) funding, which has made this research possible.

Notes

1. Permission has been obtained from the author, Sara Israel, to quote from her unpublished work.

2. In the larger study, surveys were administered to university classes of pre-service teachers ranging from 40 to 100 students, depending on the university; the surveys were one component of a workshop that engaged pre-service teachers with the Canadian literature. The researchers taught 2–3 ELA-related course sections over the course of the two-year project. At each site, between 80 and 200 surveys were collected while the number of pre-service teachers who participated in follow-up focus groups or interviews also varied by site. Numbers of participants for focus groups were: 55 (BC); 25 (Newfoundland); 32 (Ontario); 12 (Quebec), and for interviews: 4 (BC); 16 (Newfoundland); 4 (Quebec).

3. As mentioned, the survey data mainly collected demographic information and teachers’ attitudes towards, and prior experiences with, multiculturalism in Canada, especially in university courses. Only two questions invited their general responses to the workshop picture books. ‘Thicker’ narrative data were instead to be found in the focus groups and interviews.

4. Researchers (faculty; graduate student) across the seven sites read and re-read their data, the McGill site assembled that data and those interpretations, leading on this paper. The paper was read and re-read by all of the authors, and feedback offered.

5. Across the various research sites, the majority of the pre-service teachers self-identified as of European-Canadian heritage, with a minority from Indigenous and other cultures.

6. Ivana grew up in Toronto but was living in Quebec.