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Visual Interpretations, Cartoons, and Caricatures of Student and Youth Cultures in University Yearbooks, 1898–1930

Students have always been integral in the development of the university in Canada. Driven by personal, professional, and political agendas, student experiences, understandings, and narratives helped construct the academic and intellectual cultures of universities. In their relationships with professors, administrators, and the spaces they inhabit, students crucially contributed to the university as a historically vibrant idea and social institution. As cast by the students, the university was clearly expressed in variant and creative ways through the annual yearbook. In particular, within the yearbook, the practice of parody in cartoons and caricatures was powerful in depicting the imagined worlds of academe as seen through the students’ eyes, and importantly how the students saw themselves and their life on campus. Using yearbooks from three universities — Toronto, Alberta, and British Columbia – visual images are studied that reveal underlying intentions to comment, marginalize, ridicule, and esteem groups of students according to both ascribed and self-imposed socialized hierarchical structures and codes of expectations and behaviour. Among the universities, the visual satire was consistent in tone and image, exposing the historic place and activities of students in the early university and in society, the contingent formation of student identities, and the nature of the pursuit of academic knowledge and credentials by youth in early-twentieth Century Canada.Les étudiants ont toujours joué un rôle important dans l’histoire des universités au Canada. Lourds de leurs ambitions personnelles, professionnelles et politiques, l’expérience des étudiants, leurs connaissances et leurs récits ont tous contribué à la construction des cultures intellectuelles et académiques des universités. Par leurs relations avec leurs professeurs, les administrateurs et les espaces qu’ils occupaient, les étudiants ont profondément aidé à façonner l’université, à la fois comme idée vibrante et comme institution sociale. Les pages des albums de finissants recèlent plusieurs expressions des ces idées, exprimées dans des formes aussi diverses que créatives . En particulier, le recours à la parodie des bandes dessinées et des caricatures offrait un puissant outil d’illustration à la fois des imaginaires académiques, des façons dont les étudiants concevaient leur vie sur le campus et des façons dont ils se percevaient eux-mêmes. À l’aide de tels livres-souvenir, provenant de trois universités (Toronto, Alberta et Colombie-Britannique), nous étudions des représentations visuelles qui révèlent des intentions sous-jacentes de commenter, de marginaliser, de ridiculiser ou de mettre en valeur des groupes d’étudiants en fonction de structures hiérarchiques imposées ou autogènes, ou encore de codes d’attentes et de comportements. D’un établissement à l’autre, la satire visuelle est homogène au niveau du ton et de l’image, exposant à la fois le rôle historique des activités des étudiants dans la jeune université et dans la société, la formation concomitante d’identités étudiantes et la nature de la poursuite des connaissances et des diplômes chez les jeunes Canadiens du début du XXe siècle

Practicing Palimpsest: Layering Stories and Disrupting Dominant Western Narratives in Early Childhood Education

Interpreting and contextualizing the meanings of spoken, transcribed, visual and embodied languages, we explore how the life stories of immigrant educators evoke socio-cultural and diverse imaginaries. We incorporate the Greek practice of palimpsest - a layering of stories, voices, fragments, and traces - to understand forms of active becomings which provide possibilities for dissonance and transformation and treat the self as relational and inherently multiple. Critically reflecting on this stratum of narratives and cultural understandings, we draw on the insights of several theoreticians and scholars to consider how the language of immigration, trauma, and displacement emerge in educator’s thinking about the curriculum they are given. In transcribing stories - the participants and our own - we heard “layered voices†(Aoki, 2005) that pointed us to different understandings about the immigrant experience, the connections between the self and other and what it means for immigrant educators and students to live together in ECE settings.   Keywords: hermeneutics; early childhood education; narrative; identity; diversity; language  Â

Collaborative Writing as an Exercise of Poetic Resistance in Teacher Education

Over the last decade we have strived through a collaborative writing project to open a polyvocal and layered conversation on critical contemporary issues in teacher education, even as our program faced its demise. Our writing inquiries began as a critical thinking-through of the qualities of lived experiences as instructors within an innovative and now defunct teacher education program. The context for our work was a radically construed approach to teacher education that—in its language, form, and curriculum—challenged prevailing norms of practice. In our collaborative writing we confront the difficult work of teacher education, addressing specific challenges, complex demands, and forms of resistance that are prevalent in faculties of education everywhere. Such challenges include how we narrate alternative visions of teacher education, attend to issues of ethics and recognition, deal with the complexities of learning professional practice and take into account the larger, historical project of teacher education. As a provocative example of self-study research, our collaborative method of inquiry illustrates the richness and productivity of poetic, practice-based research, oriented to critical issues in teacher education. The intentional effort to make our work public and politically provocative is an attempt by the authors to reveal the importance of these critical conversations in advancing our work. Specifically, what makes such conversations important includes questions about how we should enact our responsibilities for teacher education and also how we give account for enacting those responsibilities. We intend our conversations and thinking-through about practices in teacher education to remain open-ended and responsive to a plurality of thought and experience. Collaborative writing serves for us as a kind of resistance, reclaiming, re-storying, and historical accounting through encounters with others

The Imagined Space of Academic Life: Leacock, Callaghan, and English-Canadian Campus Fiction in Canada, 1914-1948

ABSTRACTSince the earliest establishment of universities in Canada, campuses have been the backdrop against which students, professors, administrators, and staff negotiated an important part of their daily lives. Through interpretive and contextual historical understandings, members of the public and the university community visually and discursively constructed the campus but they were in turn also intensely shaped by it. This article examines two seminal fictional accounts that depict the historical Canadian university campus: chapter 3 of Stephen Leacock’s Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich (1914) and Morley Callaghan’s The Varsity Story (1948). As part of a broader genre of campus fiction, these works focus on the symbolic cultural meanings and experiences that were ascribed to the natural and built environment of the university. These books were narrated through fictional actors and imbue the geography and space of the campus and one’s lived experiences with moral significance, a tapestry on which historical academic and intellectual worlds unfolded.RÉSUMÉDepuis la création des universités au Canada, les campus ont fait l’objet de négociations par les étudiants, les professeurs, les administrateurs et le personnel administratif pour l’amélioration d’une partie importante de leurs conditions de vie au quotidien. À travers le temps et grâce à des ententes et à des échanges mutuels, la population en général et la communauté universitaire ont d’une manière régulière ou sporadique façonné les campus, mais en retour en ont été fortement influencées. Cet article analyse deux créations littéraires renommées qui ont décrit l’histoire des campus universitaires canadiens. La première se trouve dans le chapitre trois de l’œuvre de Stephen Leacock, Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich (1914) et l’autre provient du livre de Marley Callaghan intitulé The Varsity Story (1948). Ces textes font partie d’un genre plus vaste qui englobe les fictions universitaires et mettent l’accent sur les significations culturelles symboliques et les expériences attribuées à l’environnement naturel et construit de l’université. Des personnages fictifs relatent ces histoires dans le décor géographique et spatial des campus où ils vivent des expériences ayant une implication morale. Un tableau dans lequel se déploient les univers académiques et intellectuels