Teaching with the trouble: ambiguity and uncertainty in the picturebook My Life at the Bottom in literary education

Beskrivning

This presentation takes its starting point in the ambiguity of Linda Bondestam’s picturebook My Life at the Bottom: The Story of a Lonesome Axolotl (2020/2022), in which human consumerism causes an apocalypse but the axolotl survives and thrives, as well as in previous research on undecidability and unpredictability in literature education. Thinking with (Jackson & Mazzei, 2022) Donna Haraway’s (2016) staying with the trouble, the aim is to explore ways of handling ambiguity and uncertainty in literature education. The analysis is performed with Clementine Beauvais’ (2015) concept of didactic gaps, exploring the ambiguity between the moral message of the picturebook and the interest in undecidability in literature education. The analysis shows that the complexity of My Life at the Bottom makes some of the didactic gaps unstable and thus open to interpretation. This makes the didactic discourse ambiguous—even though there are possibilities for interpretation, the message of the picturebook is clear and the reader is forced to face a possible apocalypse. Thinking with Haraway, this requires sympoiesis, collective thinking. Thinking with Haraway, it matters what thoughts think thoughts, thus, which texts we chose to teach with. The complexity of a picturebook such as My Life at the Bottom enables the reader to stay with the trouble in relation to both the picturebook and the environmental troubles we are facing. Hence, in the presentation I discuss Haraway’s staying with the trouble as a way of dealing with ethically ambiguous matters in literary education, of teaching with the trouble.

Period	20 sep. 2023
Evenemangstitel	Literary Development Reconsidered: Perceiving Literature Education in an Ethical Frame
Typ av evenemang	Seminarium
Plats	Berlin, TysklandVisa på karta
Omfattning	Internationell