The Frailties of Remembering School: Social Justice Teaching as Difficult Knowledge

• In Event: Roundtable Session 54
  In Roundtable Session: Remembering, (Re)living, and Reflecting: Curricular and Cultural History

Abstract

This paper is about memory, the elusive process of remembering, of an encounter between a researcher and participant who reunited again five years later to remember. The remembered object is a tenth grade social action project during which Sadie and her classmates tackled the misconduct of security guards at their Brooklyn high school. In drawing from Pitt and Britzman's work on "difficult knowledge," What do young adults remember about their social justice high school experience? Three things were learned from this study: the context under which memories of justice teaching are conjured; the inadequacy of language and memory to fully reflect experience; the role of study as poiesis versus praxis.

Author

• Debbie Sonu, Hunter College - CUNY