Dr. Petra Hendry | Louisiana State University
Friday, April 22 | 12:30-2:00 p.m. | Scarfe Room 310
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Abstract
The project articulated in this paper takes up the work of Henri Lefebvre and Michel de Certeau to envision history as a spatialized practice of ethical engagement with alterity. Specifically, I explore three spaces in which ethics produce and are produced by space. The first is the space of a “transatlantic, creole pedagogical circuit” through which I read the “commons” produced in the common school movement, the normative trope of curriculum history in the United States, specifically in relation to reverberations of the Haitian Revolution. The second, is the space of “public rights,” as articulated in the 1868 Louisiana Constitution, produced within what I call a “transatlantic protest tradition,” as distinct from Habermas’ public sphere. The third is the space created in New Orleans streets as walked by Homer Plessy and Paul Trévigne as a “wandering of the semantic.” These multilayered spaces make visible the the conscripts of modernity (the nation state, citizenship, education), unleashing curriculum history from the tropes of monumental history. A Rogue curriculum, as a spatial practice, invokes historical imagination in order to embrace historical inquiry as a dynamic engagement of ethical relationships.
Short Bio
Petra Munro Hendry is the St. Bernard Chapter of the LSU Alumni Association Endowed Professor in the School of Education at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, USA, where she teaches courses in Curriculum Theory, Curriculum History, Oral History Methodology and Gender Studies. She is the co-director of the Curriculum Theory Project (CTP), an interdisciplinary research initiative which endeavors to understand education practice and reform within a broad social, political and cultural framework. Her scholarship examines the role of narrative in the construction of curriculum history, educational research and teachers’ life histories. She is the author of five books, including Engendering Curriculum History, (2011) Routledge and Pedagogies of Resistance: Women Educator Activists, 1880-1960 (1999) Teachers College Press. Her scholarship has been published in History of Education, Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, Qualitative Inquiry, International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education and American Journal of Education. In 2016 she received the American Educational Research Association, Division B, Lifetime Achievement Award.