Provocations

The Editors: Judith P. Robertson is Professor of Education at the University of Ottawa. Her published work extends and deepens the methods of analysis brought to literary pedagogy. She received her Ph.D. in education from the University of Toronto (OISE). Along with questions of ethical practice, Robertson utilizes psychoanalytic theory to address culture, its symbolic expression in literature, and the response of readers to their experience and their rediscovery of it in texts. Her work on children’s literature, literatures of historical trauma, and screenplay pedagogy appears in leading international journals in the fields of education, cultural studies, and literary pedagogy.Cathryn McConaghy is Associate Professor of Education at the University of New England, Australia. She received her Ph.D. in Indigenous education from The University of Queensland. Her research in the social psychoanalytics of education in difficult contexts has appeared in leading international journals. Her previous book, Rethinking Indigenous Education (2000), presents a groundbreaking postcolonial/feminist reading of the legitimating conditions of colonial education.

«Sylvia Ashton-Warner is one of the most challenging and provocative educators of the past century and, although a great deal has been written about her work, none I have read renders her work for justice more directly and powerfully than this volume. At a time when so many educators feel, as the authors put it, ‘trapped in an educational script we did not write,’ ‘Provocations’ demands that we produce a different play. In an artful and persuasive animation of Ashton-Warner’s contributions as well as her contradictions, this volume draws on the richly subversive writings of Sylvia Ashton-Warner to provoke and to excite the inner critical theorist in all of us.» (Joel Westheimer, Professor, University Research Chair in Democracy and Education, University of Ottawa)«Appearing twenty years after Sylvia Ashton-Warner’s death, this collection is a splendid work – a timely, critical examination of Ashton-Warner’s unsettling life and how we may think about it today. Most significant is the authors’ theorization of working from the life of a subject to create insight into the life of educational theory. Readers will encounter an array of forces into Ashton-Warner’s radical disturbances, while at the same time implicating us as addressees in new editions of old pedagogical conflicts. We are invited to read afresh – through a diversity of perspectives – Ashton-Warner’s provocations.» (Deborah P. Britzman, Professor, Faculty of Education, York University, Toronto)

• Contents: Selma Wassermann: Preface: Dearest, Something Good Will Come of This… – Cathryn McConaghy/Judith P. Robertson: Sylvia Ashton-Warner: Reading Provocatively from Subject to Theory – Alison Jones: Sex, Fear, and Pedagogy: Sylvia Ashton-Warner’s Infant Room – Sue Middleton: «I My Own Professor»: Ashton-Warner as New Zealand Educational Theorist 1949-60 – Cathryn McConaghy: Teaching’s Intimacies – Tess Moeke-Maxwell (Ngati Pukeko/Ngai Tai-Umupuia): InSide/OutSide Cultural Hybridity: Greenstone as Narrative Provocateur – Judit Giblin James/Nancy S. Thompson: Imagination on the Edge of Eruption: Sylvia Ashton-Warner’s Volcanic Creativity – Anne-Louise Brookes: Who Is Sylvia?: (Re)reading, Con/structing, & (Re)constructing Textual Truth & Violence – Kathleen Connor/Linda Radford with Judith P. Robertson: Reading in(to) Sylvia: Interviews on Ashton-Warner’s Influence – Judith P. Robertson: Recovering Education as Provocation: Keeping Countenance with Sylvia Ashton-Warner.