The Ghosts in the Teachers’ Lounge: Conjuring the Event in Schools

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Sunday 9:50 am Four Seasons Ballroom 1
  In Roundtable Session: From Subservience to Strength: Discourse, Resistance, and the Future of Teacher Education (Table 3)

Abstract

Theorizing the educational scene as haunted by the event to-come, this paper positions the specter of the event as a generative concept for (social studies) teacher education. Using Gordon’s haunting and Caputo’s theorization of the event as a specter of everyday life in schools as theoretical frames, we offer a hauntological reading of the film The Teachers’ Lounge to de-sediment and trouble present conceptions of “teacher” as a controlling, omniscient master. We position Lounge as a provocative, generative text for teacher educators and teacher candidates to view and deconstruct with one another, and we demonstrate how a hauntological reading of classroom scenes (e.g., in the film, in teacher education classrooms) can position teacher candidates as conjurers of the event.

Authors

• Peter M Nelson, University of British Columbia

• Scott Durham, Kent State University