SJE1971H
This course is about identity and its relationship to education. We all have beliefs about identity – our own, and others' as well – but when we start to investigate these beliefs, many questions arise. What is essential to one's identity? How much could you change about yourself and still be the same person? Were you born with an identity? How do children develop their identities? Where are the lines between individual identity and group identity?
These questions have major implications for education. On one level, we may assume implicitly that education should accord in some way with one's identity. One should not be educated to have an identity that is vastly different from one's own family or culture, or worse, to alienate one from these identities. Many types of schooling are explicitly concerned with instilling or nurturing certain identities in children - most commonly religious, ethnic, or national – so that they grow up with a sense of heritage and belonging. Yet we also think of education as liberating, as feeding the autonomy that allows individuals to "come into their own" identities, whatever these may be. Sometimes these purposes may seem to be at odds.
Teachers have identities, too, and who a teacher is affects how she will teach, and consequently what the students may come to understand of their own identities. Teachers can subtly reinforce or subvert dominant narratives about individual and group identities, shaping the way in which students come to see themselves in an educational setting and beyond. Teacher identities, student identities, and the identities of the wider community in which they learn are all very much entangled.
The readings in this course are drawn from philosophy and other disciplines. We will consider some of the contributions made to our understanding of identity by Western liberal thought, psychoanalysis, feminist and queer theory, anti-racist education, and more. Film and other source materials will also be used.