ABSTRACT
This chapter contributes to my development of a research agenda that addresses persistent dilemmas in the use of literature in social justice education.1 In both elementary/secondary schools and in teacher education, the habitual ways learners apprehend and ‘use’ stories prove slippery and deeply conservative, shoring up frontiers of identity and community. Recognizing the resilience of entrenched narrative forms of knowing and not-knowing (Britzman, 1998; Felman, 1987), I have been conducting an ongoing narrative practitioner study (Taylor, 2007, 2008) of frameworks for critical response-based pedagogies that use memory work (Davis, 1996; Grumet, 1981; Simon, 2005a; Simon, Rosenberg, & Eppert, 2000; Strong-Wilson, 2008) and insights from psychoanalytic theories of education (Britzman, 1998; Pitt & Britzman, 2003) with literature circles of preservice teachers in the small, liberal arts university where I teach. Specifi cally, I elaborate following a framework for integrating multimodality and visual methodologies with affective, critical, and ethical response-based practices of reading ‘diffi cult’ children’s and young adult literature, examining the case of one preservice teacher. ‘Diffi cult literature’ is an increasingly important genre, one that grapples with the experiences and legacies of mass systemic violence and calls for pedagogies of remembrance (Simon et al., 2000).
