Collaging Women Into the Social Studies Curriculum

• In Event: Questioning in the Margins: Centering Qualitative Methodology and Methods in Historically Marginalized Traditions

Abstract

Theorizing with Braidotti’s (2017, 2019) Critical Posthuman framework, I aim to investigate gender and power in social studies education with pre-service teachers utilizing collage as data generation and analysis.

Critical Posthuman knowledge offers an affirmative ethics of being in relation, even when relation is messy or difficult (Braidotti, 2017, 2019). The framework “assist[s] us in the process of learning to think differently about ourselves, in response to the complexity of our times” (Braidotti, 2019, p. 34). Put differently, Critical Posthumanism attends to issues of power and assumes creativity as necessary in the context(s) of late-stage capitalism, patriarchy, climate change, globalization –and all the other “complexities” that may be at work and play.

Critical Posthumanism assumes the need for accountability and imagination (Braidotti, 2017, 2019). With that in mind, I utilized collage to attend to power with pre-service teachers. I was specifically attending to what the social studies pre-service teachers, in their becoming, believed mattered in social studies education in their state. Participants utilized magazines, construction paper, glue, staples, stickers, and a myriad of other materials to map their knowledge of social studies education in their southeastern state. As Hanawalt (2019) wrote, “Collage as a provocative practice became an attempt to dwell in the gaps created by the juxtapositions of material artifacts as relations-of-nonrelation” (p. 22). Participants created relations between their chosen materials. We then debriefed and discussed their collages. Based on transcription from the collaging with participants, alongside their creations, I used collage to analyze how gender was operating. I combed magazines, cut, slicing, and layering women back into the curriculum. Then I laid quotes from participants on the top of the collage of women, highlighting the present/absence of their bodies and stories in my participants’ experiences and understandings of social studies in Georgia.

Through the process of collaging and discussing the participant’s maps of social studies education in Georgia, it became obvious that women were not present in the curriculum, even as they were physically present in the classrooms. Collaging produced knowledge around the present/absence of women in social studies education in Georgia, offering space to discuss who and what bodies count and matter in social studies classrooms with the pre-service teachers that were about to be social studies teachers in their own classrooms. Furthermore, when I began to analyze with collage, I was able to juxtapose the embedded and embodied understandings of participants with some of the realities of their locations as pre-service teachers. Utilizing collage, which allows the reorientation and relation of materials offered participants, could be generative for both pre-service teachers and teacher educators, particularly when navigating power structures and discourses that are prevalent in social studies education. Collage may highlight the taken-for-granted power relations through material relation, creating possibilities for difference, an important implication within Critical Posthumanism, which attends to relation the potential of multiplicity (Braidotti, 2019). Guiding discussion question: How can collaging, working with matter and producing new material relations, help scholars and educators research and teach more affirmative futures?

Author

• Morgan P. Tate, University of Georgia
  Presenting Author