The Book: Kindle-ing for the Mind

2010 CACS Presidential Addres

Curriculum as Renewal

Journal for the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies Editorial for Volume 7 Number 2 200

Canadian Curriculum Studies: Ethics, Aesthetics, and Affect

Editoria

Visceral Beginnings

Editorial introduction for JCACS Volume 9, Number 1

Attending to Particularity, Refusing the "Central Story"

This is the Editorial essay for Volume 9, Number 2

Between art and testimony: Transforming oral histories of Holocaust survivors into young adult fiction and creative non-fiction.

Works of historical fiction and creative non-fiction written about the Holocaust continue to occupy an important place in both the literary and history curricula in K to 12 schools. In discussion with author Kathy Kacer, I describe the particular challenges of transforming oral testimonies of Holocaust survivors into young adult (YA) narratives including the ways in which these narratives are mitigated by the adult desire to educate and protect and by the undeniable influence of the publication of the diary of Anne Frank. By taking up the problem of bearing literary witness as a mode of pedagogical address through Spargo’s notion of vigilant memory and his reformulation of Levinasian ethics into terms of mourning, I demonstrate how oral histories directly or indirectly embedded in YA Holocaust narratives, might address the epistemological consequences of the Holocaust, specifically for invoking an ethical and social responsibility for the other through a resistance to consolation as a conventional form of commemoration

Imagery, affect, and the embodied mind: implications for reading and responding to literature

Since Plato first banished poets from his Republic, the relationship between the aesthetic and moral value of literature has been subject to philosophical, critical, and pedagogical debate. In this philosophical investigation, I sought to explain how the evocation of the senses during literary transactions shapes the phenomenal experience of the reader. Recent developments in neuroscience (Damasio, 1999, 2003; Edelman, 1992) provide strong evidence in support of embodied theories of cognition in which imagery and affect play a central role. The purposes of this philosophical investigation were to describe the structure and function of imagery and affect in the cognitive act of reading, to provide a detailed account of how we exercise our capacity for imaginative thought in order to achieve literal, inferential, and critical comprehension, and to explore the implications of an embodied mind for reading and responding to literary texts. The investigation yielded a critical review of contemporary theories of reading (Kintsch, 1998; Rumelhart, 1977; Sadoski & Paivio, 2001) to examine their ability to explain the phenomena associated with the literary experience. Dual coding theory (Sadoski & Paivio, 2001) which maintains an empirical and embodied view of the mind was shown to have considerable theoretical advantages over rationalist computational theories of cognition in explaining phenomena associated with reading and responding to literary texts. A neurobiological account of consciousness provides support for the idea that literature can engage readers imaginatively in the process moral deliberation (Dewey, 1932/1985). In addition, I concluded that considerable evidence exists to suggest that somatic and visceral changes experienced as a result of undergoing the text can potentially incite individual and social change

Claiming New Spaces for Curriculum Studies: Working to “unconceal what is hidden”

The editorial for volume 10, number 1, 2012