Re-imagining difference in the pedagogical encounter

The pedagogical encounter has been a site of robust theorization in curriculum studies. For critical curriculum scholars, pedagogy is commonly understood as a site of individual and social transformation. The articles in this issue of Curriculum Inquiry question whether the pedagogical encounter is always a catalyst of desired change. Drawing from Gaztambide-Fernández and Arráiz Matute’s (2013) threefold theorization, we view pedagogy as always intentional, always relational, and moved by an ethical imperative. The four articles dive deeper into the ethical and relational dimensions of pedagogy by presenting us with new ways of thinking about “Self,” “Other,” and the politics of differentiating between “familiar and strange others” (Ahmed, 2000, p. 24). As Sara Ahmed (2000) argues, the self-other relationship is determined at the moment of the encounter and involves techniques for “seeing the difference.” Those techniques also operate to differentiate between “familiar and strange others” in ways that produce a “visual economy” (p. 24). The authors in this issue illustrate the multiple ways the visual economy operates within the pedagogical encounter(s); this economy, at times, conditions teachers and learners to “see difference” in oppressive ways. Collectively, these authors explore how the visual economy constrains or limits how we see, engage, and teach about difference, as well as how the pedagogical encounter produces others as strangers. At the same time, these authors also show us that once these techniques of differentiation are identified, deconstructed, and critiqued, new and liberatory ways of seeing and producing difference are made possible, and can, in fact, nurture more ethical relationalities.

In the first article of this issue, Sun Young Lee makes an important intervention into the taken-for-granted practices of observation in the context of teacher education. In her article titled “Seeing the Difference: Anticipatory Reasoning of Observation and its Double Gesture in Teacher Education,” Lee examines the way teachers learn to see and think about the development of children and teachers through the lens of difference. #). As a supposedly empirical or scientific practice, methods of observation and feedback are integral to teacher education programs (Copland, 2010). Yet, as Lee argues, practices of observation reflect social and cultural values and are embedded within particular historical contexts. Building on the work of Peter Galison (2014), Lee illustrates the role that the visual plays in the production of knowledge and constitution of difference. As Lee argues, we do not naturally see diversity; rather, the process of visualization produces categories of difference that reify racial hierarchies. As “trained” observers, teachers participate in this ordering through racially coded, data-driven reforms and policy directives.

For Lee, the visual as a cultural practice produces certain ways of seeing and thinking about difference through anticipatory reasoning that reflects Euro-centric, white supremacist perspectives. Observation practices frame how teachers see, think, and measure their students’ “development” or “progress.” Lee uses historical and contemporary examples to demonstrate that by leaving these observation practices unquestioned, the teacher-child pedagogical encounter risks reproducing normative and oppressive futures. First, Lee examines the historical archives from Worcester Normal School and the Wisconsin Child-Study Society in the United States to show how direct observation became part of teacher training in the 19th century. She argues that the observation criteria reflected the values of dominant groups, resulting in immigrant students and students of colour being labelled as problematic. Lee shows how these practices continue to take place through an analysis of contemporary documents on the Educative Teacher Performance Assessment (edTPA). Lee uses her analysis of discourses of “closing the achievement gap” to argue that edTPA does not prepare teachers to question whose eyes see students’ linguistic, cultural, and racial differences as foci of intervention, in the name of student success. By exploring the politics of the visual, Lee suggests that teachers learn to see differences in child development based on historical and cultural premises of what is considered valuable knowledge. In critiquing these “double gestures” of seeing the difference, Lee concludes with an invitation to re-think observation practices in teacher education, through a cultural and historical sensibility approach.

Stereotypes are another mechanism within the visual economy for (mis)recognizing others as strangers. In the article titled “Mammies, Brute Negroes, and White Femininity in Teacher Education,” Erin Miller and Timothy Lensmire explore how racist images and stereotypes – particularly the Mammy and the Brute Negro – function to construct white femininity in the United States. Drawing from Toni Morrison's (1992) approach to attending to the “Africanist presence,” Miller and Lensmire explore the presence of African American characters in two stories about white girls’ coming of age. Miller and Lensmire’s parallel analysis shows that the girls’ process of becoming white women requires their distancing from communities of colour and Black communities in particular.

The first story the authors analyze is a pre-service teacher’s autobiographical narrative of her educational experiences as a child and adolescent. Through their analysis of Danielle’s autobiography, Miller and Lensmire show how unnamed Black male high schoolers are marked as posing a threat to Danielle. Their analysis also shows how the association between Black male bodies and danger functions to regulate white femininity and define the contours of the white social space. As their analysis shows, the discourse of personal safety functions as a technique to differentiate between subjects: Danielle becomes the vulnerable body; her white boyfriend becomes the wise subject with both the knowledge and capital to distinguish between what is safe and what is dangerous; and the Black youth are produced as dangerous subjects. In this way, their analysis shows how encounters with strange others produce spatial and cultural boundaries and demarcate and legitimize who is included and excluded from the social space (Ahmed, 2000).

The second story in Miller and Lensmire’s analysis, The Secret Life of Bees (Kidd, 2002) tells the fictional story of Lily’s coming of age in the southern United States in the 1960s. In their reading of the novel, Miller and Lensmire focus primarily on the relationship between Lily and Rosaleen, her African American caregiver. In particular, they pay close attention to how the novel represents Rosaleen’s body during intimate encounters with Lily. Their careful and compelling analysis shows how the boundaries between Rosaleen’s body and the external world are constantly blurred in the novel and illustrates the way images and representations involve techniques of differentiation. For example, Miller and Lensmire discuss how “in addition to portraying Rosaleen as skilled in the kitchen and maternal, Kidd was relentless in portraying her as rough, as a consistently impolite and excessive black body” (pp. 409–410. Their observation exemplifies the way self-other encounters are embodied; “the containment of certain bodies in their skin (bodily space) is a mechanism for the containment of the social space” (Ahmed, 2000, p. 46). Like Ahmed’s work, their analysis shows how bodies are involved in the formation of spatial and social boundaries.

While the first two articles highlight the multiple ways techniques for seeing difference are employed within educational spaces, the following two articles show the pedagogical possibilities and challenges of teaching about difference outside of the classroom. In her article titled “Melanated Minds and Diasporic Bodies: Womanist Curricular Praxis as Radical Intervention in Study Abroad,” Kirsten Edwards examines a study abroad program designed by Black faculty with an explicit focus on the intersection of gender and diasporic Black identity. The theoretical frameworks underpinning this study abroad program and this research study both draw from Black Atlantic Consciousness and Womanism frameworks to highlight the significance of Black life and freedom within the confines of institutionalized white supremacy. Unlike traditional study abroad programs, which Edwards argues often foreground a white masculinist logic that commodifies the other, this culturally responsive study abroad program became an opportunity to nurture ethical relationalities among students. The program, which was created and led by Black women, gave Black students an opportunity to explore what it means to be Black locally and globally as part of the Black diaspora. The curricular and pedagogical praxes were carefully designed to integrate considerations of self- and communal-awareness through spiritually detoxing experiences, Afrocentric role-playing and storytelling/making, and the inclusion of counseling and emotional support resources. At the same time, Edwards documents the institutional roadblocks encountered by program designers. These roadblocks included anti-Black scrutiny associated with culturally relevant pedagogies in the context of a historically white institution such that certain discussions and practices related to Black identity and experience were considered to be too political. However, Edwards shows how the program designers drew from womanist marronage as part of their pedagogical and curricular praxes in line with a long tradition of Black political subversion.

Moving away from spaces of formal education, the last article of this issue focuses on the popular and controversial program for young children called Drag Queen Story Hour (DQSH). In “Drag Pedagogy: The Playful Practice of Queer Imagination in Early Childhood,” Harper Keenan and Lil Miss Hot Mess argue that drag pedagogy positions “queer and trans cultural forms as valuable components of early childhood education” in ways that “queer imagining in an early childhood context” (p. 440. They outline five interrelated elements of DQSH that bring queer ways of knowing and being into the education of young children: play as praxis; aesthetic transformation; strategic defiance; camp; and embodied kinship. In particular, Keenan and Lil Miss Hot Mess’s framework for drag pedagogy highlights how the visual economy operates as part of the drag performance to disrupt how we are taught to “see,” understand, and perform gender:

…the visual style of the queen serves as a provocation that invites inquiry into normative fashion and embodiment. Glitter, sequins, wigs, and heels all serve as pedagogical tools, inviting questions like why and how is drag made unusual in this environment? (p. 450

According to Keenan and Lil Miss Hot Mess, drag pedagogy is not simply about LGTBQ curricular inclusion but about “pushing against” the normative scripts of gender and sexuality (re)produced in formal and informal educational spaces (Gaztambide-Fernández & Arráiz Matute, 2013). These authors show how drag performers draw from many of the common elements in a classroom, for example, bright colors, play, and music, and engage with young children’s imaginations in ways that break with traditional gendered scripts. Through their performance, drag artists enable creative forms of world-making by breaking “boundaries between reality and fantasy” as they “take on new identities and social relationships in material form” (p. 449. They position drag pedagogy’s potential to help children see themselves differently and see difference, differently – and in ways that pave alternate futures that have not yet come.

The authors in this issue of Curriculum Inquiry urge us to question how we have learned to “see difference.” Their articles engage with difference in ways that deviate from prescribed cultural and historical frameworks and instead embrace pedagogies that open new ways of knowing, being, and relating to others – even if the outcomes and futures sought are not yet known. They suggest that the political projects and the ethical imperatives underpinning their pedagogies are too urgent for us to be tepid. Lee seeks to unsettle the taken-for-granted practices of observation in teacher education, for the imperative of racial justice. Similarly, Miller and Lensmire argue that this imperative of racial justice requires white women’s experiences of “becoming” to be pedagogically interrupted with diverse counter-stories that reorient how white women see and understand themselves as racialized beings. Edwards makes clear the imperative for diversity and epistemic justice in study abroad programs, arguing that it can open new possibilities for re-imagining liberatory forms of higher education that can actively commit to reconfiguring how Black students in the Global North and Black communities in the Global South can see and relate to each other. Finally, Keenan and Lil Miss Hot Mess position drag pedagogy as a means to engage in forms of world-making that are imperative in realizing liberatory futures. Across this issue, the authors emphasize that to safeguard future pedagogical encounters from becoming prescriptive, oppressive, or constrained, a careful attention to the relational dimension of pedagogy is required. Together these authors suggest the pedagogical encounter can be rewritten and reimagined in ways that disrupt the visual economy and the anticipation of normative futures; we can learn to “see difference,” differently.