Resisting Knowing as Consolation in Global Justice Teacher Education: A Critical Examination of the Affective Work of Ethical Learning

• In Event: Roundtable Session 96
  In Roundtable Session: Postcolonialism and Multiculturalism: Implications for Pedagogy

Abstract

This paper considers the nexus of affective engagement, critical analysis of inequality, and reflexive self-implication in education committed to social change. I ask how our inherited models of learning/teaching for social change curb our vigilance when libidinal dynamics organize our curriculum as affective wish and our pedagogy as affective defence. I focus on the ‘difficult qualities’ (Britzman) of global justice education (GJE)—the project’s ethical and political stakes, theories of learning and discourses of moral development—that render learning, teaching, and learning to teach affectively and ethically fraught. A qualitative case study, the paper analyzes student writing samples from a mandatory preservice GJE course to examine the ethical implications when curriculum stages student encounters with injustice within an anti-oppression agenda.

Author

• Lisa K. Taylor, Bishop's University