Abstract
Posthumanist and antiracist thinkers contend that justice, as articulated by Karen Barad, demands response-ability to ghosts of the past and those yet to come. Normative conceptions of the child do not account for these ghostly engagements. When such normative conceptions direct a teachers’ gaze, the child speaking with ghosts may feel they too are not welcome. Without kinship and support grappling with the challenging, even painful, topics that the ghosts raise, they may become discouraged from the larger project of taking response-ability for ghosts in pursuit of justice. In response, the author first repositions the child as rich in potential and a knower who engages with ghosts. Using “travel-hopping” as a methodology, she re-turns to an experience as a teacher who pursued a Master’s in Elementary Education as a conversation between her child self, ancestral ghosts, children she worked with, and ghosts those children spoke with. In sharing this experience, the author puts forth travel-hopping through experiences as a valuable method in teacher education. As teachers travel-hop, they can expand their sense of the “child” as capable and powerful in engagements with the more-than-human (broadly defined but focused on ancestral ghosts).
Introduction
What makes us human is not our alleged distinctiveness from—the nonhuman, the inhuman, the subhuman, the more-than-human, those who do not matter—but rather our relationship with and responsibility to the dead, to the ghosts of the past and the future. (Barad, 2017a: 86)
Visiting me after school, three students in fourth grade ask whether the building sits on a civil war battleground and query whether dead soldiers haunt the basement that houses the cafeteria, gym, and storage space. 1 They show disinterest in my assurance that it was not a battleground and my reassurance that there are no ghosts in the school. Their query instead seems to be an invitation to join them in discussion. I take up the invitation and ask them to tell me more, and they do.
Another ghost story: I am a young child, running down the flat sidewalks of a quiet, tree-lined street in New York. My grandmother admonishes, “Careful. You must be careful.” I slow, sensing danger and a presence I do not see. Years later, I am an adolescent sitting in the back seat of a sun-filled car in Florida when my grandmother abruptly and unprompted speaks of running with her brother, fleeing the Nazis. She describes her brother's hand slipping out of hers. She keeps going, blending into a crowd and never sees him again. When I ask questions, my grandfather gently stops me and, turning to my grandmother, consoles, “You shouldn't agitate yourself, Marie.” We sit in silence as I stare through the palm trees at my young grandmother and her brother running. Ghosts were my constant childhood companions and I, unlike my students, did not discuss them in school.
A guiding question for this special issue is “How can posthumanist research make a difference to childhood (in the broadest, worldly sense)?” and, specifically, “How can we keep/make child studies political?” By way of a response, I take up what Barad (2017b: 49) refers to as an “ethics of entanglement,” maintaining first that entanglement with ghosts is part of childhood, and offering hospitality to children, like those in my anecdotes, demands that we welcome sharing about ghosts (Dutro, 2019; Newfield and Bozalek, 2019). Second, I assert that, as response-ability to ghosts is necessary for justice, and encounters often begin in childhood and influence the contours of engagements going forward (Menakem, 2017; Osgood, forthcoming), teaching for justice involves including and supporting children's ghostly entanglement (Barad, 2017b; Menakem, 2017). In other words, to pursue worldly justice (Haraway, 2016), one must recognize and encourage a posthuman child who concurrently lives in the present, past, and future among the living and ghosts.
With the neologism “intra-action,” Barad (2007) speaks to how matter is always entangled with meaning, constantly shifting based on who is present. As ghosts are not widely welcomed in schools, in this article, I focus on what, in the words of Newfield and Bozalek (2019: 47) propelled forward the intra-action about civil war ghosts in the basement and “created conducive hauntological conditions. It mattered that, among other elements, the conversation was after school, I was not the children's teacher of record, the often quiet basement hallway was full of nooks and crannies, we lived in a city that sent soldiers into the civil war but did not see combat, and I sensed something in the comments that compelled me to ask more. As a teacher educator who studies how teachers attend to children, I address that last question—namely, amidst the myriad comments in a day, what about the students’ questions in that moment caught my attention, leading me to respond with more questions and to really listen, to tune in and be open to surprises that taking child seriously can make possible?
Osgood (forthcoming) writes: Childhood research does not start and stop down on the ground in the nursery, it begins in our own childhoods, in our bones and sinews, and continues throughout the ebb and flow of our lives. The material self configures differently and intensifies as bodies are shaped, and in turn shape the world and its hauntings as we seek to make it a better place, through our research and everyday living.
Particular moments offer a gravitational pull around which perception orients (Barad, 2017b; Osgood, forthcoming). Bringing together my first anecdote with my second, I argue that feeling in my “bones and sinews” the importance of entangling with ghosts influenced the kind of teacher I became and how I attuned to the children that day.
Bringing together quantum physics and a novella about a survivor of Hiroshima, Barad (2017b: 61) “weave[s] them into the entangled tale.” Referred to as “diffracted reading,” ideas cascade in ripples that, when overlapping, lead to shifts in being (Barad, 2007). Drawing on diffracted reading as a methodology to unpack gravitational pulls on teacher attunement, I diffract the opening encounter through normative conceptions of (the) child, calling for a capacity-oriented view of childhood that encompasses entanglement with ghosts. Rereading personal statements, poetry, a picture book, and entries from my teaching journal, I showcase how my coursework during my Master’s in Elementary Education rippled through my re-membering of the Holocaust. I depict how, from this education, to quote Osgood (forthcoming) again, my “bod[y]” was “shaped, and in turn shaped the world,” priming me to attend when my students spoke of ghosts. I conclude by illustrating how my entanglement with ghosts as a graduate student lives in my current work with pre-service teachers.
Welcoming ghosts into figurations of the child
In asking what “propelled forward” and “created conducive hauntological conditions” (Newfield and Bozalek, 2019: 47), I begin with discouragement. The “child” is a material-discursively constructed being, marked apart from others based on years on earth and associated with particular behaviors described as “childlike” (Lindgren, 2020; Murris, 2016). Three “figurations” (Murris, 2016) of the child—propped by developmental theory—serve as the particular foil through which I diffract. First, early childhood has long been understood as a time of fantasy, with children known for blurring the boundaries between the real and the imaginary (Gopnik, 2010). For children under five, an imaginary universe is generally deemed “appropriate,” often labeled cute and/or attributed to the wondrous but fundamentally different nature of the child's thinking (Murris, 2016: 116). Read through the lens of “ignorance” (Murris, 2016: 115), older children, like those in my anecdote, who commune with ghosts might be perceived as ignorant about how things actually are and labeled immature. Adolescents and adults who dwell with ghosts risk being labeled crazy. Within normative understandings of childhood, when asked about basement ghosts, the common adult response is the corrective assurance I offered—that visions are unreal.2
Second, and interrelated, young children are associated with innocence and perceived as “fragile” (Murris, 2016: 117). Through this lens, the child asking about ghosts might need shielding (Bentley, 2015 ; Cooper, 2021; Murris, 2016; Silin, 1995). Where the common western conception is that children age into the capacity to discuss topics such as death, loss, illness, and violence, a steady stream of early childhood educators maintain a counternarrative that there is no grace period from these topics, nor should there be (Bentley, 2015; Cooper, 2021; Furman, 2020; Silin, 1995).
Both of these figurations emphasize deficits. Portrayed as an unformed adult with deviations from pre-established norms needing correction, the child's capacity as a knower and actor is undermined (Murris, 2016). Resisting this classification, I take a posthuman view of the child as “rich” (Murris, 2016: 119) in capacity, complexity, and entanglements.
This leads to the third and overarching figuration I counter—namely, that the child is bounded and autonomous, fixed in spacetime. In contrast, Murris (2016: 93) uses the neologism “iii” to signify a “being” “‘amongst’ other beings” “with ‘fluid’ boundaries—a body that is part of the world and not ‘in’ space or time, but always emerges ‘in’ relation.”
Specifically, in this article, I challenge the predominating figuration of development that we outgrow and/or should avoid ghost talk and are bounded beings. Barad (2017b: 74) writes that “hauntings are not immaterial, and they are not mere recollections or reverberations of what was. Hauntings are an integral part of existing material conditions.” As such, the children in my opening anecdote fit what Barad refers to as a “diffracted self”: dually living among the daily demands and physical bodies of those around them and engaging with ghosts. I, as the teacher, welcomed this diffracted self in my students and, in doing so, learned to recognize it in myself. In contrast, I felt pressured as a child to conform to and ultimately reinforce norms that shunned ghostly engagement.
This is an ethical concern (Barad, 2017a). Comparing the racism of the USA to an old house, Wilkerson (2020) argues that old cracks and repairs will influence the present livability of the space. We carry our ancestors and descendants, and must engage with ghosts in a visceral manner if we are to reckon with, work through, and, ultimately, heal (Barad, 2017a; Haraway, 2016; Menakem, 2017; Saad, 2020). As Barad (2017b: 56) writes: “No justice … seems possible or thinkable without the principle of some responsibility, beyond all living present, within that which disjoins the living present, before the ghosts of those who are not yet born or who are already dead.” In addition to the justice of ensuring that children's expansive selves feel welcome, response-ability to ghosts is necessary for justice broadly, and racial justice in particular.
Forged in fire: travel-hopping through teacher education
Distinguishing between history and “re-member-ing,” Barad (2017b: 49) emphasizes that, in re-member-ing, we are responsible, “in debt to those who are already dead and those yet born.” Where history is, in Barad’s (2017b: 47) conception, removed and fixed, memory is “threaded through this moment.” Describing memory, Barad (2017a: 68) writes: “a diffraction pattern can be accounted for by taking account of all possible histories (configurings of spacetime), understanding that each such possibility coexists with all others.” As with a constellation, different spacetimematterings form a figuration in which points across multiple spaces and times are viewed alongside each other (Barad, 2017a). Walking down a sidewalk, I am joined by the child running with her grandmother and even my grandmother running with her brother.
To describe visiting these various moments, Barad (2017a) lifts the concept of “travel-hopping” from Kyoko Hayashi’s (2010) novella From Trinity to Trinity, in which the protagonist visits and revisits moments such as the bombing of Hiroshima and the testing of the first atomic bomb in New Mexico, and the site of that test (Hayashi, 2010). These forays engage with the past and its traumas not through voyeuristic chronicling but as visceral, risky, and self-changing recursive acts, in which the past lives in and informs the present and the future.
Trying to cultivate a teacher who is more attuned to the nuances of children's identity in the service of justice, assignments that push confrontation with personal history are popular (Goodwin and Genor, 2008; Lensmire et al., 2013). Where these assignments seek re-member-ing, students often respond superficially, if not resistantly (Cohen, 2007; Jones, 2012; Lensmire et al., 2013). In contrast, I pursued a Master’s in Elementary Education as, in Barad’s (2017a) titular phrase, a “[r]e-turning, re-membering, and facing the incalculable.” Like the children in my opening anecdote, I travel-hopped from the official world of school to visits with ghosts. Here, I share my journey, “threading” (Barad, 2017b: 47) pivotal moments through my growing conception of the child.
Moment 1: some trauma refuses to end
For Hayashi's eponymous protagonist, “having lived through an event [the bombing of Hiroshima] that refuses to end, that decays with time but will forever continue to happen, Hayashi sought to unpack the infinite density of one particular spacetime point” (Barad, 2017a: 69). Serving as a pivotal reference point in the constellation that is one's self, some trauma “refuses to end” even as it “decays with time”—it is lived and relived often (Caruth, 1996; Felman and Laub, 1991; Menakem, 2017; Miller, 2011). My grandparents’ experience as Polish Jews in the Holocaust served as a star in our family constellation that “refuse[d] to end” and I, as well as my grandparents, father, and uncles, followed a circular and obsessive trajectory in which we, differently, “unpack[ed] the infinite density” of this “particular spacetime point.”
Although nearly never spoken of, I felt the Holocaust as a chasm right below the surface that could be triggered to engulf us by seemingly banal everyday occurrences, such as my grandmother seeing a German Shepherd, the sole photograph of my grandfather's parents and the empty wall left by missing photographs of everyone else, any discussion of war or “the war,” and my grandmother's always aching feet elevated on the couch. My grandparents’ narrative, too, was marked by a dangerous chasm of the not-to-be-discussed between the before (childhood in Poland) and the after (adulthood in New York).
Barad (2017b: 48) describes the ancient Jewish exodus from Egypt relived through the Passover Seder as a “stopping of time, to take in the fact that Israel is both oppressed and oppressor.” Organizing around our family spacetime chasm, I saw teaching as a daily “re-dedication to work for justice for all people's all beings” (Barad, 2017b: 48). Embracing my Master’s program centered on equity and justice, I wrote in one assignment: Since childhood, I have been aware that I was born into privilege in a world that does not favor all people equally. For as long as I remember, I have been fighting to defend other people's rights of equality. My understanding of justice is constantly evolving as well as my conception of how injustice should be fought.
Yet my initial response to readings on race and class took a distance that Barad (2017a) associates with the historical approach: “I finished these books excited and feeling ready to bring some new ideas into my classroom. Yet, by and large they mostly confirmed conclusions I had already reached.”
Barad (2017b: 69) characterizes Hayashi's travel-hopping as being on a spiritual-political pilgrimage, a journey of re-turning to a land she had never before visited but knew better than the geography of her own body, a wounded land whose history of violation radiates inside her bones.
In a response paper early in the term, I wrote: I just came back from a two-week trip to Poland and Germany in a program that focused on dialogue about the Holocaust between Germans, Jews, and Poles. We discussed our identities constantly, from many different frames. Everything came back to the Holocaust. The first three days were so intense I forgot I had a life at home. I saw a girl on the street who looked like my roommate and remembered that I had a roommate back in New York, I lived in New York, and I studied education. The thoughts came and were pushed out by the Holocaust. At times the obsession drove me mad … Once, in the train station, I walked away from the group and sat amongst the commuters and pretended to be just another person waiting for a train. Another time, in Krakow, we sat in a café, late at night, drinking hot chocolate and listening to the accordion player, talking about activities we’d done in college. Short refuges, but the Holocaust always slipped back in. This environment, while useful, was also stifling.
As my peers and I “discussed our identities constantly, from many different frames” and visited haunted grounds such as concentration camps, Krakow, and Berlin, the Holocaust's magnetic pull kept us orbiting. Entangled with these lands, the camps, and a group of peers wanting to talk about the Holocaust, “iii” emerged engulfed in the Holocaust.
When surrounded by ghosts of the Holocaust as a child, I had felt danger—afraid of their violent account and that others would shun me because they did not want to hear from them. Assuming that “normal” was a person in coffee shops and waiting for trains who did not engage with ghosts, I experienced entanglement with ghosts as being driven “mad.” A sense of divided self manifested when I “pretended to be just another person waiting for a train.” Within a normative and restrictive framework, I could not occupy a diffractive self as someone waiting for a train grappling with ghosts. Feeling polarized and dichotomous on my trip and experiencing the constant orbiting around the Holocaust as “stifling,” my coursework back home supported a diffracted self who lived amongst ghosts in the present. It is to that work that I now turn.
Moment 2: beware the green spaces
Murris (2016: 62) asks: “what do the materials permit or prevent? Do they invite, exclude, regulate participation in certain material and socio-cultural practices?” and “do the materials help construct particular emotions, concepts, ideas or knowledge?” By changing the subject, ignoring certain comments, and telling me not to discuss topics deemed painful, as a child, my grandparents, school assignments, teachers, and peers “helped construct” an “iii” who pushed aside ghosts. Here, I discuss how the graduate school curriculum and faculty welcomed and supported a transindividual me.
Assignments, activities, and reading led to new ripples in how I perceived. This helped me, in Haraway’s (2016) phrasing, “stay with the trouble”—letting the Holocaust serve as a magnetic and ultimately fruitful force around which nearly all of my thinking gravitated. As I wrote in a response paper on the poet Richard Hugo (1992) for a teaching-poetry course: Just as Hugo (1992) says that every poem based on a triggering town is actually “always in your hometown” (12), now back in New York, every road I turn down leads me to the Holocaust. My student, Tanisha, insists on showing me, again and again, a picture of Martin Luther King, saying, “See that, that Martin Luther King. He dead.” And I write about this in my student teaching journal and find it's a poem about the Holocaust. In class, I’m asked to make a clay figure to represent why I teach. I make a blue person with pink ears, orange eyes, green arms, and a light blue mouth. I explain, “It's all about agency. I teach so my students will be the kind of people who hear, look, listen, speak up, act.” I teach so there will not be another Holocaust. I’m obsessed and it's embarrassing. And yet, it feels organic. As Hugo (9) says, a good poem is not started to be about something but “what the poem is saying, just begins to show at the end but is nonetheless evident.” At the end of a thought, I find myself at the Holocaust and, because it was not forced, it seems to be the only conclusion.
None of the assigned readings or activities focused on the Holocaust. Instead, using the word “organic,” I wrote: “At the end of a thought, I find myself at the Holocaust and, because it was not forced, it seems to be the only conclusion.” Dutro (2019) argues that testimony provokes further testimony. The provocation need not be the same type of experience but somehow, perhaps in its emotional tone, akin. Hugo (1992: 15) testifies that “most Poets Write the Same Poem Over.” and that inspiration for this repeated poem is a “triggering town,” which is, in turn, “always in your hometown.” Hugo's testimony provoked my claim that “back in New York, every road I turn down leads me to the Holocaust.”
The Holocaust threaded through intra-actions in the classroom. One of the only family stories shared about the war years was that my grandmother lived in hiding under an assumed name until a neighbor turned her in to the Nazis. In transport to a concentration camp, a guard forged Christian identity papers and she was interred as a non-Jewish prisoner. In the camp, fellow inmates held her back when Jews were called forward and subsequently shot. After the war, my grandmother defended the guard who had protected her. This narrative “flashed up” (Barad, 2017a) constantly in my sense of “iii.” The familial rip of the Holocaust re-member-ed as the risk that at any moment the quotidian can be swallowed in a chasm of cruelty and, on the other hand, every moment demands and benefits from brave acts of kindness. This led to a rededication, as described above, to teach so that “students will be the kind of people who hear, look, listen, speak up, act.” My entanglement with ghosts pushed me to conceptualize children as not only capable but also powerful, response-able to anyone in need, including ghosts.
Another example of the curricular confluence of memory and other material (Newfield and Bozalek, 2019) is when, during a walking tour of Berlin, a guide cautioned: “Take note of the green spaces. These used to be Jewish properties.” Cobblestones and other memorials marking Jewish lives and the ever-present green revealed a city haunted amidst its vibrancy. The intra-action between this memory, a writing prompt to explore the symbolic meaning of colors, and O’Hara's (n.d.) line “I can't even enjoy a blade of grass” led to me writing the following (excerpted) poem:
The poem closes:
Reflecting on the intra-action, I wrote: “Not only did this exercise get me writing with relative ease but it also got me to look differently at an issue, the Holocaust, that I’ve thought much about.” Through this intra-active curriculum, I became aware of how palpably I felt hauntings in Germany and Poland. Capturing my alarm, I repeated the word “trust” three times and made the following syllogism: as green is everywhere and cannot be trusted, everywhere I walked demanded response-ability. The child-me who was admonished to run with care in the suburbs had felt this chasm. As an adult, when I “tread on” “gray cobbles” walking into a concentration camp, I found myself speaking with and consoling my young grandmother as she walked that same road.
From talking to ghosts and reflecting on this conversation in coursework, I was more deeply attuned to how spaces in the USA were painfully haunted with the ghosts of my students’ ancestors, demanding response-able care for both the ghosts themselves and the living who engaged with them—another revision to my conception of the child. Now, I more consistently pictured a diffracted being engaging with ghosts and inhabiting multiple temporalities.
Moment 3: making kin with the dead to support the living
What does it mean to live amongst ghosts? In the section of my autobiography titled “Bearing Burdens,” I begin: After my trip, I told a friend that I felt torn about raising a child to bear the burdens of the Jewish identity. She responded, “Everyone has burdens. People from the dominant culture have the luxury of ignoring them while those in the minority must carry them.” Hearing this comment, I concluded that everyone should be aware of their familiar and cultural history, as well as the history of others.
My desire to raise a child without the burdens of a painful past aligns with the “fragile” conception of the child (Murris, 2016). Far from innocuous, this denial is often wielded as a form of racism, silencing testimony of violent injustice (Cherry, 2021). My peer's insights pushed me to see that the past belongs to everyone and grappling with it must be shouldered by all (McGhee, 2021). This was another reconception: children face painful pasts and are strong enough to do so.
As noted in the previous section, “making kin” with ghosts (Haraway, 2016) in Europe attuned me to the ghosts that dwell in the USA. This came to a head when Tanisha, who identified as Black, picked up her classmate's book and commented, “That Martin Luther King; he dead there,” asked whether a White man shot him, and then requested that we “go visit him.” My first reaction was to read Tanisha's repetition that he was dead through concerns for her “fragility” (Murris, 2016) and respond with platitudes—highlighting, as the book itself did, King's messages of unity and trying to steer her talk away from death. Reading her desire to “visit him” as “ignorant” (Murris, 2016) of the knowledge that we cannot visit the dead, I wanted to correct her but refrained. In other words, perceiving Tanisha through the normative conception of the child, I did not join her with her ghosts but, as had happened to me as a child, tried to silence them. Tanisha, however, was unwilling to shun ghosts and her persistence created space for them. Later, I wrote: I went home that day and thought a great deal about the conversation, feeling discontented. Initially, my reaction was to question Tanisha's focus on King's murder and death. I felt this view hindered the important interracial work that King did. Then, I started to write about our conversation in my journal. I found myself soon writing about my own recent trip to Berlin, where I saw countless sites where synagogues were built and burned, golden cobblestones that marked where Jews disappeared under the Nazis, heavily guarded synagogues. I remembered how terrible I had felt and how tired of being Jewish … Suddenly, it occurred to me that perhaps Tanisha's story, right now, is about a Black man being senselessly murdered. The interracial story, presently, is mine. Both have truth in them but Tanisha's is rarely heard and perhaps, due to her interest, should be the story focused on first. I am glad that the day ended with Tanisha insisting on her version, and, in hearing her interpretation, I have a new idea about how I intend to teach King.
Importantly, responsibility to my ghosts gave me a window into Tanisha's but not a mirror image. Through a diffracted reading of Tanisha's story alongside my embodied sense of the fear and pain of daily entangling with ghosts in Europe, “[s]uddenly, it occurred to me that perhaps Tanisha's story, right now, is about a Black man being senselessly murdered.” Hearing Tanisha's ghost story rippled across my own. Diffractions do not replace (Barad, 2007). Instead, adding to my interest in King's ideas, I now heard an important ghost story about a Black person killed. While, in hindsight, this insight feels basic, it was an important step in my evolution.
As a person who frequently spoke with ghosts myself, I displaced my initial view of Tanisha's ghost talk as childish chatter and instead heard meaningful communication. My reconception of the child further solidified around perceiving the child as a knower and someone who engaged with ghosts. As illustrated in the opening anecdote, this led me to be a teacher who is able to appreciate and attune to ghosts in the classroom and converse with children about them (Furman, 2020).
Teacher education as seance 3
My experiences travel-hopping through family history, Auschwitz, and the ghostly cobbles and green throughout Berlin, and talking with peers and teachers who also saw ghosts or were open to their presence, intra-acted with graduate school assignments and readings to help me reconceive my conception of the child as a powerful and competent knower broadly and engager with ghosts specifically. This helped me listen more deeply to Tanisha and has shifted how I understand “child” to include having the capacities to engage with ghosts.
While faculty welcomed my “[r]e-turning, re-membering, and facing the incalculable” (Barad, 2017a) as curricular engagement, my peers generally did not, in my understanding, show a similar commitment to travel-hopping in the service of better teaching practice. Positing teacher attunement to ghosts as valuable for justice education, the question becomes: “What might teacher education programs do to support it?” In closing, I offer a few practices that I have found helpful as a teacher educator.
First, testimony often invites testimony (Dutro, 2019). Reading about injustice, I felt ghosts were finally welcomed. This hospitality could have been expanded on further with a more conscious introduction of testimony through readings, faculty sharing how they conversed with ghosts, and more direct encouragement of talk with and about ghosts in the classroom (see Dutro, 2019; Felman and Laub, 1991; Jones, 2012). Teachers can also engage with and analyze children's literature with a focus on how the past and ghosts are conceived (Furman, 2020).
Second, it matters that my Holocaust exploration was organic, stemming from personal obsessions and re-membering. As noted, teacher education programs often emphasize excavating a particular history with race. This can be forced or inauthentic, and is sometimes perceived as needlessly intrusive (Cohen, 2007; Lensmire et al., 2013; Tatum, 2017). Stories need not cover the same topic to invite other stories (Dutro, 2019). Believing that we circle around our own, in Hugo’s (1992) words, “triggering towns,” I encourage the pre-service teachers I work with to reflect on the themes and experiences that guide them—what I call their “secret curriculum.” These include, but are not restricted to, loss of a family member or pet, grappling with illness, relationships with the land, and a being who inspires them. Importantly, where I grappled with the ghosts of human ancestors, students often engage with more-than-human ghosts such as the closed-down factory where families used to work, land on which a family has lived over many generations, and an item such as jewelry. As a secret curriculum informs what teachers, in Murris’s (2016: 134) phrasing, “listen out for,” taking responsibility includes intentional surfacing of the stories that drive us. As students and I share these stories, we expand the space for others to enter.
Third, simply having an experience does not mean that it will meaningfully inform one's teaching. Exploring the Holocaust in personal and fictional narrative, art, and poetry helped me to embrace a transindividual self. Creative mediums both pushed my thinking and gave me a veil of privacy as I worked through my travel-hopping. In Reggio Emilia, the phrase “100 languages” describes the myriad ways of knowing (Edwards et al., 1998). Invoking this concept, my students work across mediums throughout the semester. I put no parameters on the stories they might tell and I invite work over time and across a variety of mediums, including poetry, collage, and invitations to write stories for children. Often, their creations involve processing their secret curriculum and, as they share their creations, these stories emerge, inviting more stories.
Children are knowers who live amongst ghosts. In the epigraph, Barad (2017a: 86) places responsibility to our ghosts as central to “what makes us human.” Speaking with ghosts attuned me to the cruelty that could emerge at any moment and to justice demanding a constant vigilance to proceed with care. Engaging with these ghosts as a young child without human interlocutors and support was alienating and painful. Believing ghosts were not welcome in the classroom left me feeling like I was only welcome if cloaked in normative behaviors. I shared this message with Tanisha when, guided by normative conceptions of the child, I pushed away talk of ghosts. She thankfully resisted. As I travel-hopped through graduate school, my experiences rippled across each other, pushing on the hold of normative conceptions and leading to a reconception of the child as a powerful and aware engager with ghosts. In taking a posthumanist approach to explore what lives in their “bones and sinews” (Osgood, forthcoming), teachers can be response-able to children as they tangle with ghosts. In doing so, they can help children like those in the opening anecdote re-member and, in re-membering, take response-ability.
Footnotes
Acknowledgments
This article is dedicated to my students, peers, and teachers, who engaged with me with ghosts. Thank you to the guest editors of this special issue, who provoked this telling and guided this article.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
