The Child in Question

The contributions of this book examine contemporary educational policy and practice, curriculum material, literary and visual representations, and teacher narratives to further probe how and why it matters that childhood, as a concept and experience, remains as multiple and elusive as ever.

Julie C. Garlen is an Associate Professor of Childhood and Youth Studies at Carleton University. Her work in cultural curriculum studies has explored how culture functions symbolically, institutionally, and pedagogically in the lives of children and youth. She is the co-editor of Teaching with Disney (Peter Lang, 2016) and Disney, Culture, and Curriculum (Routledge, 2016). Lisa Farley is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Education at York University in Toronto, Ontario. Her research considers the uses of psychoanalysis in conceptualizing dilemmas of historical representation, pedagogy and childhood. She is the author of Childhood beyond Pathology: A Psychoanalytic Study of Development and Diagnosis (SUNY Press, 2018).

Introduction: The child in question: Childhood texts, cultures, and curricula 1. The quasi-human child: How normative conceptions of childhood enabled neoliberal school reform in the United States 2. Teaching the Third World Girl: Girl Rising as a precarious curriculum of empathy 3. Fanon and the child: Pedagogies of subjectification and transformation 4. Comics and the structure of childhood feeling: Sublimation and the play of pretending in Gilbert Hernandez's Marble Season 5. What is it like to be a child? Childhood subjectivity and teacher memories as heterotopia 6. L'ecole Gulliver and La Borde: An ethnographic account of collectivist integration and institutional psychotherapy