Papers by Aparna Mishra Tarc
Curriculum and Pedagogical Inquiry, 2020
This essay engages the border-crossing poetics of transnational migration through an engagement w... more This essay engages the border-crossing poetics of transnational migration through an engagement with Valeria Luiselli's fictional depictions of migrant children in her novel Lost Children Archive. Engaging the migrating and intertextual forum of children's witness and memory in the novel, I follow Luiselli's moving depiction of child migrants as wholly undocumented and lost people outside the adult world of articulation. I argue that Luiselli's novel documentation conjures up historical, contemporary, and autobiographical memories of migrant and displaced children comprising the colonial story of modernism. I consider children's articulations, construction and witness of migration through my readings of the stories of migrating childhood delivered by Luiselli's fictional depiction. I find, Luiselli's moving rendition of children's migration presents new challenges to educational and popular discourses of childhood, migration, and the responsibilities of the adult communities. Human migration is autobiographical as Hannah Arendt (1943) depicts in her sole autobiographical essay, We Refugees. We lost our home, which means the familiarity of daily life. We lost our occupation, which means the confidence that we are of some use in this world. We lost our language, which means the naturalness of reactions, the simplicity of gestures, the unaffected expression of feelings. We left our relatives in Polish ghettos and our best friends have been killed in concentration camps, and that means the rupture of our private lives. (pp. 264-265) Although the circumstances that force one to move off one's land differ, as Arendt (1943) shows, each of us migrants have a story to tell in and of every domain of human existence. The facts of exile become the fabric of our lives. Feelings of irreparable loss invade our insides. Stories of displacement are the textures of living we give ourselves and children to survive the ordinary and the unimaginable. Every people, even those who claim original status to a place, are affected by local and global waves of migration. To express the disorienting effects of migration, we tell stories of who we were, we are, and we are becoming in real time and place. Children affected by migration begin to formulate these stories from before, during, and after their parents' flights from home and lands (Mishra Tarc, 2015). My family was the first in centuries, on both my paternal and maternal side, to be uprooted from their ancestral lands and traditions in West Bengal, India. The stories of my displacement preceded my birth. As children, my siblings and I pieced together the story of my
Pedagogy, Culture, and Society, 2021
Open access here: https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/ACU7PGSCBXJGWYYJZAEP/full?target=10.1080/146... more Open access here: https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/ACU7PGSCBXJGWYYJZAEP/full?target=10.1080/14681366.2021.1884121
This paper introduces researchers and scholars to psychosocial qualitative methods when researching affective aspects of classroom pedagogy. It theorises affect as felt processes that defy representation circulating in teaching and learning. Turning to the psychoanalytic field of infant observation, the author outlines the immense potential of deeply qualifying the relational dynamics of pedagogy for the field of education. The paper offers a case of a child’s literacy to generate insight into the critical importance of documenting pedagogical interactions when teaching young children. The author finds that in-depth qualification of and on pedagogical encounter can instantiate a new course in pedagogical research, one that takes seriously what is unknown about learning taking place inside and between learners and teachers. Studying pedagogical encounters contributes new knowledge of the significance of the teaching relation in supporting children and students to learn.
Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Education, 2020
The field of transnational childhood and education emerges under intensifying mobilities. These g... more The field of transnational childhood and education emerges under intensifying mobilities. These global conditions disrupt universalist educational treatments of childhood as a fixed developmental stage of human being. Transnationality shows childhood to be a psychosocially constructed experience that takes myriad form across diverse cultural, historical, educational, and political contexts. The lives of actual children are caught in colonial and national constructions of childhood and subject to its discourses, politics, and normative enactments through public schooling. The emerging field of transnational childhood and education represents a potentially critical intervention in colonial and national enactments of childhood worldwide.
Despite interdisciplinary efforts to reconceptualize childhood, Western educational institutions continue to hold to and reproduce hegemonic and colonial understandings of childhood as monocultural, heteronormative, familial, innocent, and protected. Mass global flows of people, culture, and ideas compel policy-makers and educational experts worldwide to consider transnational childhood as the dominant situation of children in and across multicultural nations. The fluidity of malleable childhood experience is poised to generate new educational arrangements and innovations. Transnational lives of children de-stable normative categorizations and fixed situations placed upon children in and through the mechanisms of early childhood education and national schooling.
Researchers of transnational childhood and education engage a range of educational experiences and arrangements of children moving within, across, and outside of formal and national schooling institutions. Increasingly children and families are caught in experiences produced by global, geo-political conditions including: war, forcible migration, detainment on borders, internal colonization, and environmental catastrophe. To respond to the times, families and communities seek out and/or are forced to provide opportunities and alternatives for children outside of school. Increasingly children use emergent digital and other forms of remote and inventive means of education. As research in this area is new, transdisciplinary, and ground-breaking, the study of transnational childhoods and education has the potential to radically innovate and deepen the meanings and possibilities of both childhood and education in a rapidly globalizing, uncertain, and changing world.
Conversation Canada, 2020
Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, 2020
In the dark times Will there also be singing? Yes, there will also be singing About the dark time... more In the dark times Will there also be singing? Yes, there will also be singing About the dark times. Bertolt Brecht, motto to "Svendborg Poems," 1939 AM HEARTENED TO JOIN THE EDITORIAL TEAM of Journal of Curriculum Theorizing in this time of great uncertainty and promise for the field and, indeed, education writ large. I imagine our time is not unlike those confronting the original team of the Journal led by William Pinar. JCT, as it is now called, was created in what Pinar (1999) called "a period of breakdown," and "crisis" of the field and the times. We have entered another such time in which it seems necessary to review and renew significance of our work in the post-truth, post-reality world. The foundation of Western knowledge initiated by European colonialism is duly shaken. The stakes over the generation of knowledge and curriculum that matters in our lives have never been higher, even while the activities of knowledge-free enquiry, study, reading, researching and pedagogy-are significantly weakened by the devaluing of the humanities in public and higher education in democratic nations. As such we are put upon to get ahead of the times to dream up an education that can sustain the recent onslaught to the life of the mind and higher education. The culture/knowledge wars, and its soldiers, identarian politics viciously resurge as this regressive movement seems bound and determined to turn us on each other in this moment of global political upheaval. Onto-epistemological wars are not new and are endemic to academic scholarship-gate-keeping after all is to secure an enclosure for one's kind. But what is new is that these powerful intellectual and textual rhetorics are mistakenly cited, seized by strong men who acquire the full force of their populist rancor to sew division and resentment in the real world. If colleagues are right to point out the ways in which the field is Eurocentric and upholding whiteness and, as such, parochial, we also cannot let politics come between our search for regenerating knowledges in all forms that I
Textual Practice, 2019
E-print link here: https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/FBAHDIVVUKXD8BTDH2G9/full?target=10.1080%2F... more E-print link here: https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/FBAHDIVVUKXD8BTDH2G9/full?target=10.1080%2F0950236X.2019.1652676&fbclid=IwAR1M3FDgvy6t57b2ajJ4PLjAndYgu7OATh6qYlH1gfckJnFs4UIHl5KoqrE
A novel can alter a change in readers over a lifetime. This paper examines the dynamics of transference animated by novels that affect us. In her reading of Thomas Ogden’s The Parts Left Out, the author follows the novel’s aesthetic and formal operation as it animates transference to one’s own childhood in readers. The conceptualisation of transference in reading advanced in this paper leans on Melanie Klein’s version of the workings of unconscious phantasy in the infant’s first felt reading of the (m)other. The content of novels that profoundly affect us, the author argues, aesthetically and formally operate via self-other and/or author-reader transference in the event of reading.
The Conversation Canada, 2019
April 15, 2019 4.44pm EDT Fatima's dream is recalled in a single sentence: "Once I dreamed I fell... more April 15, 2019 4.44pm EDT Fatima's dream is recalled in a single sentence: "Once I dreamed I fell from a ship and then I woke up… and was afraid." Fatima's dream attests to a haunting reality that leaves her sleepless and afraid in waking life. In the short documentary and animated film Fatima's Drawings, award-winning photojournalist Magnus Wennman unravels Fatima's story, attesting to her experience of war in Syria. The film featuring Fatima's dream and drawings, and my full story about it, is found online at Museum of Dreams. The site is curated by Sharon Sliwinski, associate professor in Western University's Faculty of Information and Media Studies. It provides a forum for what the late education researcher Roger Simon called "pedagogies of witnessing." Fatima's story is an example of this-of learning or being taught by what we feel, see and hear in testimony.
Curriculum Inquiry, 2019
Free imprints of article at: https://tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/03626784.2018.1552418
PES Yearbook, 2016
Professor Kline's compelling and critical response to Mishra Tarc.
How to Do things with Dreams. Ed. Sharon Sliwinski, 2018
This is Fatima's memory of a dream of a horrific act of war. The paper shows how children's memo... more This is Fatima's memory of a dream of a horrific act of war. The paper shows how children's memories of war draw a version of history that indicts the adult community in the unthinkable genocidal violence a child is made to suffer. The child's nightmares of the traumatic experience of war generate a viable social and political means for children's to testify to their witness of crimes of war waged by adults.
A multimodal essay on the significance of a child's nightmare and memory of traumatic flight from... more A multimodal essay on the significance of a child's nightmare and memory of traumatic flight from war-torn Syria. Housed in the Museum of Dreams Project. Curated by Dr. Sharon Sliwinski. Can be found at: https://www.museumofdreams.org/a-child-is-dreaming
Entry for Encyclopedia of Educational Philosophy and Theory
Editor: Michael Peters
PES Yearbook, 2016
This paper revives Arendt’s critical ideas on the necessity of authority in education despite a c... more This paper revives Arendt’s critical ideas on the necessity of authority in education despite a crisis in political authority in public spheres. Now more than ever, pre-political authority requires serious educational consideration as young people find themselves in a world destabilized by postcolonial war and the abstract forces and flows of capital, knowledge, people and ideas. Adult authority is at a crossroads, with existential meaning at an all-time low in the market-driven education of the child. I turn to the case of a film and the authority of a fictional teacher to model what is meant by authorship in teacher authority.
Letras & Letras, Jan 1, 2011
The intensification of cultural global flows and contacts has precipitated the acknowledgment, an... more The intensification of cultural global flows and contacts has precipitated the acknowledgment, and to some degree the acceptance, of hybridity as a social fact. Acknowledging hybridity's possibilities for new social and cultural formations we insert our analysis in the potentially destructive psychosocial process of becoming hybrid constitutive of cultural productions and human relations. Turning to Hanif Kureishi's "My Son the Fanatic", we read the inner conflicts confronting diasporic communities struggling to negotiate hybrid identities. The insights arising from our micro literary analysis are set upon the present global social scene where we suggest that literature and practices of close reading can possibly support various collectives coming to terms with the unspoken and potentially excessive violence producing hybridity.
The elite international school is a rich site for sociological inquiry in global times. In this p... more The elite international school is a rich site for sociological inquiry in global times. In this paper, we conceptualize the international school as a transnational space of agonist social class-making given the dynamic positioning of the complement of international school actors. We position international schoolteachers in the middle of these interactions and suggest that the middle position gives much-needed insight into the complex and relational qualities of class-making. To qualify our theorization of middling and social class-making in elite schools, we draw from interviews with Canadian teachers working in international schools in the Global South.
(with Dr. Lisa Farley)
Countertransference plays an often neglected role in witnessing children... more (with Dr. Lisa Farley)
Countertransference plays an often neglected role in witnessing children’s testimony of war and trauma. A dual notion of countertransference, based on the work of Winnicott and Klein, is offered that involves both internal conflict related to early life experience and socially mediated
notions of childhood, war, and trauma circulating in a given time and place. A drawing by a thirteen-year-old boy living in the refugee camps in Darfur is used to show how countertransference affects our interpretation
of the image, even while its symbolization in language establishes the conditions for a potentially therapeutic response. It is argued that a psychoanalytic reading can supplement the “legal-conscious terminology”
in which the Darfur archive has been predominantly framed
(Felman 2002, p. 5). This expanded view of witnessing involves reading the child’s testimony both for the history of violence it conveys and for the social and emotional histories it calls up in the witness as the ground and possibility of justice.
Journal of Early Childhood Literacy, Dec 2013
My paper situates literacy in the pre-symbolic implications of the maternal relation. Turning to ... more My paper situates literacy in the pre-symbolic implications of the maternal relation. Turning to child psychoanalysis, particularly Melanie Klein's theories of infancy and symbolization, my paper discusses the role the child's inner life plays in her engagements with literacy. Citing cases of second language learning, I pose literacy as an emotional situation. I insist that educators begin to acknowledge and attend to the inner life of children in their practices of literacy. Reorienting literacy toward its emotional, relational, and maternal wellspring might develop within us new orientations to literacy as psychosocial experience and practice.
Canadian and International Education, 2012
"This multi-voiced paper explores the micro-level dimensions of human learning and becoming from ... more "This multi-voiced paper explores the micro-level dimensions of human learning and becoming from transcultural encounters, lessons and/or curriculum under heightened transnationalism. It posits that mainstream approaches to conceptualizing the ‘education’ of international education lack sufficient theorization of difference, sociality, history and learning in trans-local spaces and suggests that there are expanding networks of transcultural engagements to be examined under the umbrella of international education. To explore this reconceived pedagogical landscape of international education three specific cases are presented: an auto-ethnographic reflection on coming into and making sense of one’s international experience, a conceptual framing of internationalizing preservice education curriculum and a qualitative analysis of the pedagogical impacts of undergraduates’ international internships. Each case illustrates the complexities, possibilities and challenges of (framing) learning and becoming in sites of transcultural engagement.
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Pedagogy, culture and society, Feb 2013
Student engagements with difficult knowledge can produce strange effects. When learning from trau... more Student engagements with difficult knowledge can produce strange effects. When learning from traumatic human histories students can become personally confronted by unthinkable knowledge of the other’s existence. My inquiry situates itself in the emotional space of student disclosure that references particular conflicts with learning from representations of the other’s unthinkable lived experience used in my classroom. I discuss the pedagogical and ethical problems and challenges faced by lecturers such as myself who engage students’ personal disclosures as a resource for learning. I find that psychoanalytic constructs, with its accompanying practices of interpretation, can support teachers to produce from and with their students’ personal disclosures profound insights for learning and new knowledge for pedagogical theory and practice.
QSE. International journal of qualitative studies., May 2013
My paper theorizes the possibilities of a qualitative method that engages with promiscuous aspect... more My paper theorizes the possibilities of a qualitative method that engages with promiscuous aspects of human existence and difference foreclosed by established research methods and representations. I locate the not known of knowledge in the unconscious time of the maternal relation where the infant is put upon to wildly and without symbolic resources make sense of others and the world around her. Engaging with the “wild” aspects of interpretation can provide us with an analytical space to forge a sustained inquiry into suppressed desires producing dominant representations of human existence. I look to J.M. Coetzee’s short story, “The Humanities in Africa,” as a text that might support feminist researchers’ unorthodox efforts to commune with the less rational processes of thinking and being driving representation. Reflexive to what remains unthought in our representations of knowledge, we might develop new modes of analysis that are open to unconventional and unorthodox research orientations and methods.
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Papers by Aparna Mishra Tarc
This paper introduces researchers and scholars to psychosocial qualitative methods when researching affective aspects of classroom pedagogy. It theorises affect as felt processes that defy representation circulating in teaching and learning. Turning to the psychoanalytic field of infant observation, the author outlines the immense potential of deeply qualifying the relational dynamics of pedagogy for the field of education. The paper offers a case of a child’s literacy to generate insight into the critical importance of documenting pedagogical interactions when teaching young children. The author finds that in-depth qualification of and on pedagogical encounter can instantiate a new course in pedagogical research, one that takes seriously what is unknown about learning taking place inside and between learners and teachers. Studying pedagogical encounters contributes new knowledge of the significance of the teaching relation in supporting children and students to learn.
Despite interdisciplinary efforts to reconceptualize childhood, Western educational institutions continue to hold to and reproduce hegemonic and colonial understandings of childhood as monocultural, heteronormative, familial, innocent, and protected. Mass global flows of people, culture, and ideas compel policy-makers and educational experts worldwide to consider transnational childhood as the dominant situation of children in and across multicultural nations. The fluidity of malleable childhood experience is poised to generate new educational arrangements and innovations. Transnational lives of children de-stable normative categorizations and fixed situations placed upon children in and through the mechanisms of early childhood education and national schooling.
Researchers of transnational childhood and education engage a range of educational experiences and arrangements of children moving within, across, and outside of formal and national schooling institutions. Increasingly children and families are caught in experiences produced by global, geo-political conditions including: war, forcible migration, detainment on borders, internal colonization, and environmental catastrophe. To respond to the times, families and communities seek out and/or are forced to provide opportunities and alternatives for children outside of school. Increasingly children use emergent digital and other forms of remote and inventive means of education. As research in this area is new, transdisciplinary, and ground-breaking, the study of transnational childhoods and education has the potential to radically innovate and deepen the meanings and possibilities of both childhood and education in a rapidly globalizing, uncertain, and changing world.
A novel can alter a change in readers over a lifetime. This paper examines the dynamics of transference animated by novels that affect us. In her reading of Thomas Ogden’s The Parts Left Out, the author follows the novel’s aesthetic and formal operation as it animates transference to one’s own childhood in readers. The conceptualisation of transference in reading advanced in this paper leans on Melanie Klein’s version of the workings of unconscious phantasy in the infant’s first felt reading of the (m)other. The content of novels that profoundly affect us, the author argues, aesthetically and formally operate via self-other and/or author-reader transference in the event of reading.
Countertransference plays an often neglected role in witnessing children’s testimony of war and trauma. A dual notion of countertransference, based on the work of Winnicott and Klein, is offered that involves both internal conflict related to early life experience and socially mediated
notions of childhood, war, and trauma circulating in a given time and place. A drawing by a thirteen-year-old boy living in the refugee camps in Darfur is used to show how countertransference affects our interpretation
of the image, even while its symbolization in language establishes the conditions for a potentially therapeutic response. It is argued that a psychoanalytic reading can supplement the “legal-conscious terminology”
in which the Darfur archive has been predominantly framed
(Felman 2002, p. 5). This expanded view of witnessing involves reading the child’s testimony both for the history of violence it conveys and for the social and emotional histories it calls up in the witness as the ground and possibility of justice.
"
This paper introduces researchers and scholars to psychosocial qualitative methods when researching affective aspects of classroom pedagogy. It theorises affect as felt processes that defy representation circulating in teaching and learning. Turning to the psychoanalytic field of infant observation, the author outlines the immense potential of deeply qualifying the relational dynamics of pedagogy for the field of education. The paper offers a case of a child’s literacy to generate insight into the critical importance of documenting pedagogical interactions when teaching young children. The author finds that in-depth qualification of and on pedagogical encounter can instantiate a new course in pedagogical research, one that takes seriously what is unknown about learning taking place inside and between learners and teachers. Studying pedagogical encounters contributes new knowledge of the significance of the teaching relation in supporting children and students to learn.
Despite interdisciplinary efforts to reconceptualize childhood, Western educational institutions continue to hold to and reproduce hegemonic and colonial understandings of childhood as monocultural, heteronormative, familial, innocent, and protected. Mass global flows of people, culture, and ideas compel policy-makers and educational experts worldwide to consider transnational childhood as the dominant situation of children in and across multicultural nations. The fluidity of malleable childhood experience is poised to generate new educational arrangements and innovations. Transnational lives of children de-stable normative categorizations and fixed situations placed upon children in and through the mechanisms of early childhood education and national schooling.
Researchers of transnational childhood and education engage a range of educational experiences and arrangements of children moving within, across, and outside of formal and national schooling institutions. Increasingly children and families are caught in experiences produced by global, geo-political conditions including: war, forcible migration, detainment on borders, internal colonization, and environmental catastrophe. To respond to the times, families and communities seek out and/or are forced to provide opportunities and alternatives for children outside of school. Increasingly children use emergent digital and other forms of remote and inventive means of education. As research in this area is new, transdisciplinary, and ground-breaking, the study of transnational childhoods and education has the potential to radically innovate and deepen the meanings and possibilities of both childhood and education in a rapidly globalizing, uncertain, and changing world.
A novel can alter a change in readers over a lifetime. This paper examines the dynamics of transference animated by novels that affect us. In her reading of Thomas Ogden’s The Parts Left Out, the author follows the novel’s aesthetic and formal operation as it animates transference to one’s own childhood in readers. The conceptualisation of transference in reading advanced in this paper leans on Melanie Klein’s version of the workings of unconscious phantasy in the infant’s first felt reading of the (m)other. The content of novels that profoundly affect us, the author argues, aesthetically and formally operate via self-other and/or author-reader transference in the event of reading.
Countertransference plays an often neglected role in witnessing children’s testimony of war and trauma. A dual notion of countertransference, based on the work of Winnicott and Klein, is offered that involves both internal conflict related to early life experience and socially mediated
notions of childhood, war, and trauma circulating in a given time and place. A drawing by a thirteen-year-old boy living in the refugee camps in Darfur is used to show how countertransference affects our interpretation
of the image, even while its symbolization in language establishes the conditions for a potentially therapeutic response. It is argued that a psychoanalytic reading can supplement the “legal-conscious terminology”
in which the Darfur archive has been predominantly framed
(Felman 2002, p. 5). This expanded view of witnessing involves reading the child’s testimony both for the history of violence it conveys and for the social and emotional histories it calls up in the witness as the ground and possibility of justice.
"
Bood description
Critically analyzing the representation of pedagogy in the novels of J.M. Coetzee, this insightful text illustrates the author’s profound conception of learning and personal development as something which takes place well beyond formal education.
Bringing together critical and educational theory, Pedagogy in the Novels of J.M. Coetzee examines depictions of pedagogy in novels including Age of Iron, Elizabeth Costello, Disgrace, and Childhood of Jesus. Engaging with Coetzee’s varied literary use of pedagogical themes such as motherhood, maternal love, and the importance of childhood interactions, reading, and experiences, chapters demonstrate how Coetzee foregrounds pedagogy as intrinsic to the formation of human actors, society, and civilization. The text thereby aptly explores and broadens our understanding of education - what it is, what it achieves, and how it can affect and shape human existence.
This text will be of great interest to graduate and postgraduate students, academics, researchers and professionals in the fields of pedagogy, postcolonial studies, educational theory and philosophy, and English literature.
Literacy of the Other stages a bold psychoanalytic investigation into the existential significance of literacy. Featuring a dazzling array of novel artifacts and events, the book situates literacy in the internal fictive worlds of the self and other. This approach is designed to encourage teachers of language and literature to sustain reflexive thought in their practices of reading and writing as a means to gain insight into the psychical processes of literacy. With lucid and compelling prose, Aparna Mishra Tarc reminds us of the importance of fostering a meaningful practice of literacy in the construction of real and fictive stories by which to live well throughout our lives. Renarrating many versions of a shared humanity might develop in us all a sympathetic regard for the storied lives of others.
qualitative analysis of the pedagogical impacts of undergraduates’ international internships. Each case illustrates the complexities, possibilities and challenges of (framing) learning and becoming in sites of transcultural engagement.