Raising the House of Rousseau: Historical Consciousness in the Contemporary ECE Teacher Education Classroom

Authors

  • Carolyn Bjartveit University of Calgary
  • Euthalia Lisa Panayotidis University of Calgary

Keywords:

Early childhood education, curriculum, historical thinking, Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Abstract

In an on-line graduate class, Current Issues in Early Childhood Education, we raised the specter of Enlightenment philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) as a way to re-image criticalhistorical and socio-cultural notions of childhood and child care in westerncurricular traditions and inheritances. Inviting Rousseau to discuss his treatise Emile or On Education (1979) within atechnological platform complicated the origins of modern child discourses andshowed how such concepts are not fixed and eternal but rather located, interpreted, contingent, and always partial (Caputo, 1987). Raising Rousseau allowed students to reflect on the significance of historical consciousness andinquiry as an approach to the interpretive study of curriculum while critiquing western traditional ideas on early childhood education. Against the backgroundof contemporary concerns around curriculum and praxis we envision are-awakening and stronger focus on the history of childhood and early childhood education both theoretically and pedagogically.

Author Biographies

Carolyn Bjartveit, University of Calgary

Carolyn Bjartveit is a PhD Candidate in Educational Studies in Curriculum and Learning and a sessional instructor at the Werklund School of Education, University of Calgary, Canada. Her doctoral research focuses on the topics of teaching and learning and the complex intersections between the self (of students and educators) and the curriculum in culturally diverse earlychildhood education classrooms.

Euthalia Lisa Panayotidis, University of Calgary

E. Lisa Panayotidis is professor and chair of Educational Studies in Curriculum and Learning at the Werklund School of Education, University of Calgary, Canada. She has written extensively on fine arts teacher education, historical thinking and consciousness, and curriculum theory and imagination. She is co-author of Provokingconversations on inquiry in teacher education (2012, Peter Lang). Most recently, her research has appeared in the Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies, Media: Culture: Pedagogy, and History of Education Review.

Published

2014-05-02