Thinking With Perplexities in the Context of Social Inclusion,Refugees,and Schools: Methodological Learnings

Abstract

In this article, we explore the ideas of thinking with perplexity. We draw on Addams (1902) understanding of perplexity that is interwoven with ethics. Through turning toward a research study alongside teachers who engage with refugee students in a Canadian kindergarten classroom, we make visible how a turn toward perplexity disrupts our taken for granted knowing and holds open the possibilities for growth. Drawing on field texts, conversations, and reflective notes, we compose story fragments to unpack our understandings of perplexities.

Introduction

Little is known about the experiences of Canadian elementary school teachers who teach children who arrived in Canada as refugees. Understanding teachers’ experiences as their lives intersect with the lives of refugee students is critical to creating school places in which refugee students experience social inclusion and belonging. While our focus is on the experiences of teachers, in this article we take a methodological turn by using Jane Addams’ ideas of perplexity. Her ideas of perplexity enhance our work as narrative inquirers by allowing us to stay open to uncertainty throughout our study. Drawing on our work alongside teachers in a kindergarten classroom, we show the ways Addams’ ideas of perplexity, interwoven as they are with relational ethics, challenged us as researchers to stay open to uncertainty.

Turning to Our Study

This article is situated within a large research study exploring experiences of Syrian families with preschool children as they sought refuge in Canada and experiences of kindergarten teachers who interact with them. In this narrative inquiry (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000), we first engaged over several years with 11 families. Working alongside the families, we learned of their experiences as they bumped against dominant narratives in schools and other institutions (Vigneau et al., under review; Caine et al., 2022). We did not spend extensive time in schools with the children and their teachers. We did, however, spend several months talking with the administrator and teachers in one school where one family attended. Three research team members (Dodd, Lessard, and Caine) spent time in the kindergarten classroom for one half day per week over 4 months and kept field notes on their experiences in the classroom. However, their time in the classroom was unexpectedly shortened by the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the abrupt closure of the school, and subsequent months of online instruction and the loss of contact with the primary teacher.

The Context of the Research

Crises around the world have forced millions of people to flee their homes and communities to seek asylum in other nations. There are an estimated 26 million refugees worldwide, almost half of whom are children below the age of 18 years (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees [UNHCR], 2021). Exposure to armed conflict, threats to personal safety, separation from loved ones, food insecurity, and interrupted schooling pose significant challenges for child refugees. Children with refugee backgrounds tend to experience higher rates of psychological trauma and face cultural disorientation, isolation, poverty, language limitations, racism, and discrimination in their host countries (Hadfield et al., 2017; Stewart, 2014; Yau, 1995). As the number of child refugees rises (UNHCR, 2019), there is an urgent need for governments and partners to pay close attention to childrens’ social and educational needs (Stewart, 2014). Given that Canada welcomes refugee families with young children, increasing numbers of children with refugee experiences are entering into Canada’s public education system (Levi, 2019; Tweedie et al., 2017). In increasingly diverse Canadian classrooms, teachers are pushed to compose socially inclusive spaces within their schools and classrooms (Dodd et al., 2021; Tweedie et al., 2017). The limited available research suggests that Canadian teachers often feel overwhelmed and unprepared to address the complex needs of a growing population of refugee students (Hadfield et al., 2017; Walker & Zuberi, 2020; Yohani et al., 2019).

Situating Ourselves Within the Research

Who we each are in the inquiry is important as we begin to co-compose stories of ourselves, children, teachers, and others in classrooms (Clandinin, 2013). Jean, a former teacher and counselor, experienced school as an outsider, a rural child bussed to an urban classroom. Drawing on her experiences of schooling and working in schools, her attention is caught by children who often do not fit within dominant stories of schooling. Jennifer, a registered nurse and provisional psychologist working alongside Canadian war veterans, experienced school as a threshold place. As she moved from school to school, she frequently told herself, and was storied by others, as a newcomer. She longed to belong at school, yet the stories she lived and told about who she was within, and outside, of classrooms, and the stories composed about her by teachers and other students, left her feeling like an outsider.

Kathy grew up in rural New Brunswick loving school and finding places to excel. Kathy is a teacher and worked as a principal and a district consultant. She worked to support students with diverse learning needs and, over time, came to prefer working with students who needed more differentiation and personal support to succeed. While working for the ministry of education, she became aware of systemic barriers and ways to support newcomer students. As a young child, Sean recalls watching his older sisters make their way down the rural country lane to meet the yellow school bus. He wished he could join them in school. Later, in school, he felt at ease alongside other students and wanted to impress his teachers. He found comfort in the library and on the playground at recess where he played sports with friends. Years later, he stories himself as an advocate, an ally, an educator of, and for, youth on the margins. He helped design systems that lift up stories of students in schools and pushes back on deficit constructions of children, youth, and families who don’t quite “fit” within the current dominant narratives that structure systems. As a person of Indigenous ancestry, he has learned to negotiate within social and institutional structures.

Vera experienced schooling in Germany, where children are streamed into different school systems based on their perceived abilities at an early age as problematic. Streaming children created exclusionary spaces in school, spaces that did not value diversity and inclusion. This shaped her stories of schools as places of oppression. She rarely saw teachers pushing back against structures and systems that created or reinforced this oppression, and thus storied them as complicit in establishing a system that was unjust.

Within the context of this article, these brief biographical pieces allow us to acknowledge ourselves “as beings who have memories, habits, beliefs, and values, . . .[who] bring already established moral judgments to moral inquiries, but they function as resources only” (Seigfried, 2002, p. xxii). In composing this article and in initially framing our move from field texts to research texts (Clandinin, 2013), we read and reread field texts and recounted our memories of the time spent in the classroom. Given our unexpected departure from the classroom, we filled in the gaps in our field texts about unfolding events in the classroom by composing stories that allowed us to create narrative coherence (Carr, 1986). Rather than remaining wakeful to the uncertainty that lives within lives at school, we composed familiar stories of teachers: stories with plot lines about teachers having inadequate knowledge of refugee children, new teachers who were in their stressful first years of teaching, teachers who did not know how to engage in trauma-informed teaching or culturally informed teaching, children as searching for belonging places, children who did not see their teachers as creating socially just places, and so on. However, this way of creating narrative coherence was unsettling to us—we were out of relation with the children and teachers in the classroom. When we did not understand what was happening, our remembered stories of our own experiences as children, teachers, nurses, principals, and youth advocates began to shape the stories we told of what we had seen in the classroom. With stories and explanations from our taken for granted knowing, we were imposing our own stories on classroom events.

Situating Our Reading of the Field Texts amid Addams’ Notion of Perplexity

Turning away from creating narrative coherence for ourselves, we shifted what we were seeing in the classroom by turning to Addams’ ideas of perplexity and what it meant for us to think with perplexities. For Addams, a perplexity “refers to someone’s personal involvement in a situation that baffles and confuses her, because her usual understanding and responses are inadequate to explain or transform a troubling situation” (as cited in Seigfried, 2002, p. xxvi). With the field notes and transcripts of conversations, and unable to return for further conversations and time alongside children and teachers, we turned to Addams (1902) work and to Seigfried’s (2002) comments on perplexity in Addam’s work. This was an important methodological move prompted by our attempts to understand our uneasiness in filling in gaps and silences that enabled us to compose familiar stories from our taken for granted knowing. A perplexity can reveal “a rupture with conventional attitudes, beliefs, and practices. The perplexity cannot be resolved without developing a new understanding of the situation and calling into question received values” (Seigfried, 2002, p. xxii). For Addams, perplexity entails an ethical approach. It is Addams who “show[s] social sympathy can be aroused and developed through the perplexities we feel in the normal course of everyday life, specifically those caused by the clashes of beliefs, habits, and interests inevitable in highly diversified societies” (Seigfried, 2002, pp. xxii-xxiii).

Both Addams (1902) and Dewey (1938) “refer [. . .] to the feeling of perplexity as the critical initial stage of inquiry, inquiry being the pragmatic method used to resolve both morally and intellectually problematic situations” (Seigfried, 2002, p. xxiv). Both noted the importance of perplexity grounded in emotional involvement. While we identified perplexities we felt, we also tried to imagine the perplexities the children and teachers felt in the classroom. Without being able to engage in further time with the children and families, imagination became an important resource.

In this article, we used remembered story fragments, field notes, and conversation transcripts to help us stay with our perplexities and the imagined perplexities of the children and teachers. This helped us move beyond “purely intellectual puzzlement” (Seigfried, 2002, p. xxiv) and allowed us

to bring out existential conditions. She [Addams] gives a nuanced account of the interplay of personal feeling and objective conditions; of the difficulties involved in responding to other classes, races, and cultures; and of the choice involved in the ways one responds to challenges to accepted beliefs and familiar values. (Seigfried, 2002, p. xxvi)

In the process of writing, reading, rereading, and engaging in conversations with each other in our research group, we identified perplexities. At times these perplexities lived within our field notes; at other times they were called forth by the silences we experienced while engaged in the field work and as we remembered them as we met as a team.

Story Fragment 1: Excitement and Joy

It was a late March evening, one of those evenings when the deep snow was quickly melting and huge puddles covered sidewalks, roads and driveways. Vera and I [Jean] had picked up supper to share with Azima and her family as Azima was not able to walk with her broken foot. Vera and the girl children set up the supper table, as I sat with Masoud, the youngest boy. Together, we looked at one of my son’s well-loved childhood books.

After we ate, we asked Azima if we could take the children, including the baby, for a walk. The children wanted to show us the new house they would be moving into within a few weeks. We lost Ibrahim early on in our walk, as a friend invited him for a bike ride. We headed off with the baby in the carriage. When we passed Masoud’s school, his body filled with excitement and he called out to me “look Jean, here is my school. Come, come with me, you can see in the window. That is my classroom, those windows there.” “I love my school. I love my teacher.” While declining to walk through the melting snowdrifts, I responded by saying “Is that your kindergarten classroom?” Masoud was filled with joy and helped me understand that “No, my Grade 1 classroom. My dad is in Grade 2 English now and I am in Grade 1.”

Thinking with perplexities in story fragment 1

As Jean walked alongside Masoud and noticed his joy, the joy he wanted to share with her by showing her the classroom, Jean does not come alongside him, assuming she knows that children often find joy in the early years of school. By not opening herself up to follow Masoud to look at his classroom through his eyes, she misses an opportunity to understand part of his life. Thinking with Addams’ (1902) ideas of perplexity, we can see that Jean forgoes the possibility to be perplexed. She does not go with him when he calls to Come, come with me, you can see in the window and, only as she writes the story, does she begin to be perplexed by what Masoud, a child just new to Canada and to school, would find so joyful in the classroom. She does not begin to name what is happening. She acts by not acting.

As Jean recounts this experience as we gathered in the research group, Vera remembers the sounds of Masoud laughing—his whole body smiling mischievously. His joy of living was always present. Sitting together, we wondered what made Masoud so excited about school. Is the excitement about school also excitement about learning? Or does the excitement about school signify something else? As Vera listens to Jean, she takes a turn toward her own childhood stories of school, and tries to call forth moments when she was excited about school, where she wanted to share with others important classroom places. She has trouble recalling those times. Her inability to recall moments of excitement, calls forth perplexity for Vera about the ideas of joy and happiness in schools. Vera’s perplexity reveals a bumping up place, a place where her own lived and told stories of school bump up against Masoud’s stories. We feel this bump as Vera attempts to reconcile the idea that Masoud experiences school as a joyful place—I love my school. I love my teacher—rather than a place of injustice and oppression. As Seigfried (2002) writes,

She can either continue to hold on to her assumptions or begin to call them into question. But to resolve the problematic situation in fact and not subjectively, she must first undergo a painful process of rethinking her presuppositions and values. (pp. xxv–xxvi)

We begin to see that for Vera, perplexity calls her to reconsider her understanding of school.

Story Fragment 2: What We See First

I [Sean] recall arriving at the school for the first time, a school in the city’s far end, in a neighborhood with which I was mostly unfamiliar. As an experienced teacher, I prepared myself for the protocols I knew I would meet: the introduction and sign-in, perhaps a quick check with the school administration before heading down to the Kindergarten class for the afternoon.

I noticed first the busyness in the classroom and the teacher’s ease as she moved around the classroom; she seemed steeped in a familiar routine. After she welcomed me, I sat alongside the children in the classroom. The teacher assistant flipped the Smart Board onto a YouTube channel each day and practiced a song with letters from English nursery rhymes with a distinct female British accent. We watched the videos of farms, animals, little girls, and little boys dressed in their Sunday best, singing to the sound of the letter. I watched the video each week and even started to recognize the songs. I began to sing with them. A bit later each day, I was alongside two boys at a table with the teacher assistant; it was the reading intervention table for students who struggled with printing and sounding out words. I learned quickly how important it was to keep between the lines and to trace carefully, as we prepared for the lesson about letters and the sounds they make. In later visits, I recognized the routine as I started to understand the various steps that were part of the carefully laid out classroom cadence.

I looked forward to my visits every other week. I got to know some of the children in the classroom, during transition to music and physical education classes, and at outside recess. I helped children get ready for recess, found mitts and toques for those who didn’t have any before we went outside. I thought about these small transitions from one classroom to other classrooms and to the outside playground. The transitions included snack time and I noticed how the children looked at each other and how the various foods they each brought from home told a story, offering me imagined insight into where they were from and what they faced. I thought about my own elementary-age children and their lunches and routines and wondered if their teachers also told their imagined stories about their lives.

I took photographs of the walls as a way to keep me focused on what stories were shaping, and being shaped, within the classroom. This first school experience, this first Kindergarten experience, was important for each of them. They were getting ready for, and beginning to experience, their lives in school. But as I sat in the classroom, I wondered about how their lives in school might be in sharp contrast to their everyday lives at home and within the worlds they knew from other places.

Thinking with perplexities in story fragment 2

As we listened to Sean’s memories of the kindergarten classroom, we were caught into Sean’s tensions and wondered how to respond to his uneasiness as he described his experience of the spaces being shaped for the children. We began to wonder about how the children felt in the classroom. Did they see their lives as different from the ones they were seeing on the video? Did they see themselves as unaccustomed to coloring and tracing letters in careful structured ways? We remembered Masoud’s excitement about school, yet Sean did not describe the same excitement about school from the children in the classroom.

Sean’s observations raised perplexities for all of us, perplexities that lived within the everyday rhythms of the classroom, and perplexities that arose as we imagined the children bumping up against the pedagogies of reading intervention, and of watching videos of farms, animals, little girls, and little boys dressed in their Sunday best, singing to the sound of the letter. Sean first named the tensions he felt as he wrote his field notes. Perhaps it was coming to know some of the children that helped him to name his tensions, or perhaps it was his experiences as an Indigenous man, teacher, and advocate for youth living life on the margins. Sean’s story helped us begin to name what perplexed us about the classroom spaces. As Sean puzzled about the sharp divide that may have lived between the children’s lives at home and their lives in school, our perplexities lead us to wonders about negotiating curriculum spaces that attended to the storied lives of teachers and children from diverse backgrounds. Remaining open to perplexities is paramount “because it pushes us out of our ruts and reflexive thinking patterns and habits, and puts us in a better position to address structural wrongs, which our inherited moral views are poorly equipped to address” (deCruz, 2021, p. 211). We came slowly to naming the perplexities as we focused not only on what Sean was observing in the classroom, but also on what puzzled all of us about his observations.

Story Fragment 3: Sharing a Space at the Table

I (Jennifer) remember the restlessness of the children as they squirmed in their chairs at their assigned tables. The voices of twenty-five children echoed inside the kindergarten classroom, and inside my head, making it difficult to hear the teacher’s instructions for the “alphabet rainbow write” activity. After spending several Tuesday afternoons in the classroom, I became acquainted with the rhythms of the space: the daily activities, the cacophony of sounds, and the children’s energy. One December afternoon, I noticed Munna sitting alone at his table. I walked over and asked if I could sit down. He looked up at me in surprise, and nodded politely. I sat down beside him in the tiny chair, and began to write my name at the top of my worksheet using a bright orange pencil crayon. Munna watched me as I traced the letter “V” on my sheet, but he did not participate in the activity himself. Several minutes had gone by when an educational assistant approached our table and announced that Munna was capable of writing his own name but “most of the time he doesn’t try because he just doesn’t feel like it.” I felt the sting of her words, and wondered how Munna perceived her comments. Did her words pierce him in the way they did me? My early school memories flood back as I recall my first day of grade four at a new school. I remember the anxiety and sadness, tears flowing freely. I was sent to the principal’s office that morning, and many mornings. My teacher, I suspect, grew weary of my sorrow, and became frustrated by my silence. Had she too assumed that my lack of participation was an act of defiance?

With gentle encouragement, Munna slowly and carefully began to print the letters of his first name, and traced the lines of the letter “V” on his worksheet. He became animated as I cheered him on. “Great job Munna!” I said, “I knew you could do it.” Once he completed the assigned activity, I drew a green-colored heart on the top of his worksheet. He stared at the page for a brief moment, leaned in closer, and kissed the green heart. The recess bell rang and Munna disappeared down the hallway to go outside and play.

Thinking with perplexities in story fragment 3

Within this story fragment, we see Jennifer come alongside Munna as she asks what should be done in a concrete way. Jennifer felt compelled to act, to help Munna manage the discomfort she thought he was experiencing. She imagined he felt dis/ease as she had known dis/ease as a child in school when she had longed to be seen, to have her loneliness noticed. Perhaps her visceral sense of dis/ease, grounded in her stories of being alone in a new place, motivated her to create space for Munna to be otherwise. At that moment, Jennifer wanted to disrupt the educational assistant’s narrative of who Munna was, that is, a child who did not try to do the school tasks. However, as she acted to engage Munna, she composed a familiar story of Munna as a child in need of rescue; perhaps she could act in ways that she had wanted someone to respond to her all those years ago when she was a child in Grade 4. And she sees, as Munna kisses the green heart drawn on his page, that Munna experiences being rescued, being seen.

Thinking with perplexity, rather than composing a familiar story about Munna and the educational assistant, offered Jennifer the possibility to think about who she was/is as a researcher. The idea of thinking with perplexity opens space for Jennifer to think about how her stories of school have been shaped, and continue to shape, the ways in which she composes stories of herself, of children, and of teachers and teacher assistants inside the classroom. Seigfried (2002) characterized Addams use of the term “perplexity” as referring “to someone’s personal involvement in a situation that baffles and confuses her, because her usual understanding and responses are inadequate to explain or transform a troubling situation” (pp. xv–xxvi). Initially, Jennifer perceives the teaching assistant as not understanding Munna, and she acts. In her actions, she offers a construction of Munna as needing to be rescued from uncaring teachers, as she had so wished for herself. Jennifer holds open her perplexity as she considers the limitations of understandings that emerge only from our own compositions of classroom events and of people within those events.

Thinking With Perplexity Throughout Narrative Inquiry

In the preceding three story fragments and in our naming of the perplexities, we see ourselves in the midst of an ethical space between the personal and the social (Addams, 1902). We follow Addams’ (1902) thinking that ethics is social and situated amid life. As narrative inquirers, we usually frame our inquiries as research puzzles working from a notion of uncertainty. However, faced with uncertainty about how to proceed when the schools were closed as a result of the COVID pandemic, we were startled into wide awakeness by the ways that falling out of relation with our study participants had shifted us back to a more certain taken for granted way of understanding what we had experienced in the classroom. We turned to Addams’ concept of perplexities as a way forward as it allowed us to link the (Dewey, 1938) concept of uncertainty with social ethics. In this article, we named perplexities as a starting point to our inquiries.

As we articulated earlier, when we were present in the classroom alongside the children and teachers, we were called to hold open our perplexities. “As an epistemic emotion, perplexity does not motivate us to engage in any clear actions but to pause and to reflect” (deCruz, 2021, p. 220). Within our actions in the classroom, we did not hold open perplexities and, as we acted, we did not live amid what Addams (1902) described as situations that do not “become moral until we are confronted with the question of what shall be done in a concrete case, and are obliged to act upon our theory” (p. 273).

However, it was when we were abruptly unable to continue working alongside the children and teachers in the classroom, because of pandemic school closures, we turned our attention to naming and thinking with perplexities. Faced with only field notes, transcripts, and memory fragments, we needed to attend more slowly and carefully to our experiences. Initially we composed our experiences with story lines that allowed us, as researchers, to have narrative coherence. Without the possibility of further conversations with participants, we recognized that we needed to interrupt ourselves and begin to think with perplexity. Perhaps caught into our imposition of the need for narrative coherence, deCruz’s (2021) words are helpful:

[T]here are situations where our everyday routines break down, where, as John Dewey (1939, p. 33) put it “there is something the matter”; this is a situation where “there is something lacking, wanting, in the existing situation as it stands, an absence which produces conflict in the elements that do exist.” When things run smoothly, we are not motivated to rethink our routines. When it is no longer possible to continue as we are, we have to take the time to pause, reflect, and be philosophically creative. Perplexity, precisely because it alienates us from our habits and surroundings, allows us to achieve a cognitive distance from our philosophical assumptions. (pp. 214-215)

It is here that we understand that “perplexity is an epistemic emotion that serves as a catalyst for philosophical transformation and deep social change” (deCruz, 2021, p. 214).

Conclusion

For perplexity to become a catalyst for social change, we need to slow down, to look carefully at who we are and are becoming as researchers. As we slow ourselves, we need to be comfortable with being at dis/ease with who we are and are becoming, opening ourselves to perplexity. The impetus for slowing down in this situation was the unexpected exclusion from the classroom and school and the relationships with the children and teacher. What made this situation so perplexing, what broke down for us, was the impossibility of staying in relation with the teacher and children until we could find ways of giving an account that lead to further growth and continued to disrupt the ways in which we seek narrative coherence and disrupt our taken for granted ways of knowing. In this way if we embrace the perplexities we experience, it can lead to further growth (Seigfried, 2002) and challenge our moral deliberations.