Difficult Childhoods: Adult Memories of Innocence, Displacement, and Loss

Session Type: Symposium

Abstract

This session seeks to contribute to the necessary wisdom, commitment, and capacity for meeting the challenges of early childhood education by exploring how adult memories and nostalgia work to influence our beliefs as educators about socially just childhoods. We work toward untangling how aspects of childhood, especially difficult childhoods, can only be understood in a post hoc manner, through the adult’s perspectives. We are interested in the emotional impact of social and political memories as well as the work of the inner world to make meaning from inherited legacies. We seek to illustrate how concepts of childhood are themselves “difficult,” or not without conflict, as they are embedded through our adult ways of remembering and forgetting.

Sub Unit

• SIG-Critical Perspectives on Early Childhood Education

Chair

• Lisa Farley, York University

Papers

• Childhood Memories of the Emigrant Experience: Filling in the Gaps - Sandra Chang-Kredl, Concordia University

• Mourning, Melancholia, and the Replacement Child: On the Memorial Pedagogy of Loss - Lisa Farley, York University

• (Re)Membering Childhood: Memory, Crisis, and the Myth of Childhood Innocence - Julie C. Garlen, Georgia Southern University