Sick at School: Teachers' Memories and the Challenges That Bodies Present to Constructions of Childhood Innocence, Normalcy, and Ignorance

• In Event: Curriculum, Bodies, and Space in Educational Contexts

Abstract

This paper draws from a larger study of 116 written childhood memories from prospective teachers and practitioners enrolled across four universities in Canada and the US and focuses on 12 memories that reference childhood experiences with death or illness. Within the overlaps of affect studies and psychoanalysis, our examination surfaces three repeating motifs: 1)the management of the normal body in school; 2)the construction of children’s bodies as abject obstacles to the business of learning; and 3)the appeal to childhood innocence as a refusal of affective experience. A study of these tropes can open more critical and socially just ways to think about the relationship between illness, childhood, and education as the grounds to reimagine post-pandemic schooling.

Authors

• Debbie Sonu, City University of New York (CUNY)

• Lisa Farley, York University

• Sandra Chang-Kredl, Concordia University

• Julie C. Garlen, Carleton University