Rewriting Literacy Curricula as an Ethical Relation: The Lessons of Posthumanism

• In Event: Millennium Hotel Roundtable Session 4
  In Roundtable Session: Possibilities and Limits of Posthumanist Inquiry for Reimagining Literacy Education as the Practice of Justice

Abstract

Literacy curricula that can support ethical relations in classrooms have been explored (Author, in press), but little investigated is the role of the physical and non-human in the conceptualization and mediation of relations. Given the importance, especially in an era of multimodality and digital tools, of the corporality and materiality of people’s literacy practices, redressing this dearth of knowledge is pressing. This paper elucidates how posthumanist theories may help researchers identify the network constituents and movements that are required for the promotion of ethical literacy curricula.

Theories of the posthuman era have been critiqued as devoid of ethics; yet scholars such as MacCormack (2012) signal that it is exactly at this time that such theories demand an account of what constitutes being human and what is meant by ethics. Three interrelated ethnographic case studies of early literacy curricula (two cases in publically funded kindergarten and one case in an intergenerational child care program) undergird this paper in an attempt to question what makes for ethical literacy curricula and how syncretic theories of a posthumanist age might assist in their production and practice. The studies basted together understandings specific from the literacy and curriculum literature to identify what educators might hope to engender through literacy curricula together with actor-network theory to conceptualize curriculum as a network effect (Fenwick & Edwards, 2010) produced through traceable relationships between identifiable actors. More specifically, the studies understood ethics through the establishment of a nonviolative relation with the other (Cornell, 1992) which begs for a recognition of the face or being of the child and what s/he brings to the (pedagogic) encounter (Lévinas, 1981). Curricula that are open to children and families as informants (Harste, 2003) have been identified as key to redressing inequities between children whose knowledge has been minoritized (Shields, Bishop, & Mazawi, 2005) and the sanctioned majority literacy practices of schools. Opportunities to inform have been recognized as requiring at least an insistence on multimodality to afford all children, including those for whom language is not their preferred modality, the opportunity for expression (Clark & Moss, 2001) and careful observation by educators to hear and interpret these expressions (Atherton & Nutbrown, 2016). In the midst of the alterity of the other, particularly in the presence of asymmetries of power and social positioning, Andreotti (2016) reminds of the importance of “hyper-self-reflexivity, selfimplication, dissensus, and discomfort in [literacy] education” (p. 319) so as to move beyond the “limitations of modern imaginaries” (p. 319) and the dangers of conflating the other with one’s own imagination (Morrison, 1992). This paper presents the literacy curriculum networks of the three cases to illustrate the enablers and constraints to such ends and how they played out for educators and children.

Authors

• Rachel May Heydon, University of Western Ontario

• Daniel E. Ferguson, George Mason University