Staying with the trouble: Students engaging with existential matters in literary education

Beskrivning

In this presentation, we discuss a study in which upper secondary students engage with the picturebook Furan by Lisen Adbåge (2021). This August Prize nominated work is described as a bold story that comments on the climate crisis and on social climate. The point of departure for the study is the research interest in undecidability and unpredictability in literary education. For example, researchers in the Nordic countries have recently advocated for upholding undecidabilities (Johansen, 2019) and emphasised the impossibility of literature teaching that seeks to predetermine students’ encounters with literature (Harstad, 2020). The study was planned and executed as an intra-vention study (Taylor, 2018) in cooperation with teachers. In the analysis, we use a thinking with theory approach (Jackson & Mazzei, 2022), which refers to putting theories to work in empirical data. Drawing on video recordings of the students’ engagement with the picturebook, the aim of the study is to think with Donna Haraway’s (2016) staying with the trouble and explore what it can bring to literary education. Staying with the trouble is a philosophical approach to the world, a way of becoming response-able in troubled times. As a way to stay with the trouble, Haraway suggests string figures as a theoretical trope: "Playing games of string figures is about giving and receiving patterns, dropping threads and failing but sometimes finding something that works, something consequential and maybe even beautiful, that wasn't there before…” (Haraway, 2016, p. 10). Haraway suggests that whether we like it or not, we have a pattern in our hands that we need to make something of. Preliminary findings point to the importance of cultivating response-ability in literary education, encouraging us to further explore instances in which the students engage with existential matters. Thus, thinking with Haraway brings forward the question of Bildung in literary eduation.

Period	9 maj 2023
Evenemangstitel	NoFa9 – The 9th Nordic Conference on Subject Education: NoFa9
Typ av evenemang	Konferens
Plats	Vasa, FinlandVisa på karta
Omfattning	Internationell