Ink on Paper: Figurations of the Subject English

• In Event: Roundtable Session 21

Session Type: Roundtable Session

Abstract

This symposium will examine, interrogate, and challenge dominant Enlightenment-based assumptions about what has been typically identified as the “Subject English” within constructions of subject-matter conceived as curriculum in the United States (e.g. Applebee, 1974; Burroughs & Smagorinsky, 2009). From varying historical, philosophical, and theoretical positionings, the papers trouble received narratives of educational innovation and rational progress to account for deleterious --static, normalizing-- effects of modernist assumptions and practices that continue to influence conceptualizations of English curriculum and pedagogy and the ways in which youth have been constituted as subjects and objects of educational research and educational interventions from the late 19th century to present.

Sub Unit

• Division B - Curriculum Studies / Section 5: Historical, Philosophical, and Disciplinary Knowledges

Chair

• Brian Casemore, The George Washington University

Papers

• English and the Educationalization of Social Problems, 1898-1917 - Jory J. Brass, Arizona State University

• Considering the Place(s) of/in Technologies in English - Karen A. LaBonte, Teachers College, Columbia University

• Moving Toward an Intensive Way of Reading - Bessie Dernikos, Teachers College, Columbia University

• Unguessed Gestures in Effective Institutions: Threats of Poetry to Urban Schooling - Maya R. Pindyck, Teachers College, Columbia University

• Backward English: Dangerous Books, Unruly Teens, and Ugly Feelings - Alyssa D. Niccolini, Teachers College, Columbia University