The mirror theatre of reading: Explorations of the teacher's apprentice and juvenile historical fiction

This thesis is a cultural study of how pre-service teachers respond to representations of traumatic histories and how this work emerges as being intimately tied to their own self-identifications as teachers in training. In studying reading practices, I examine identity performances through the interpretation of literary response in relation to the making of the self as a teacher of adolescents. The thesis asks, first, how do teachers read juvenile historical fiction, and, second, why does reading reading like this matter to education? Incorporating mixed methods qualitative research including ethnography, psycho-stylistic analysis and genre analysis, this inquiry includes 12 students becoming teachers. Responses to their readings of two juvenile historical fictions, There Will Be Wolves (Karleen Bradford, 1992) and The Midwife's Apprentice (1995), are gathered through interviews, a focus group discussion, and methods and insights derived from psychoanalytic accounts of identity performances through reading practices. The participants' readings are understood to be of individuals attaching themselves to the identity of teacher and the collective identity of English/Language Arts teaching in Ontario, Canada. This study also inquires into my own identificatory processes as researcher, reader and teacher. Methodologically, I rely on tracing the significance of rhetorical frequencies that repeat through the individual and collective responses. These frequencies signal the affects that specific reading or response moments within the research dynamic are having on the reader and reveal movements of desire through language and experience. Factored into the analysis is a consideration of the specific modes of address of melodramatic form in juvenile historical fiction. What characterizes the literary formation is a fantasy dynamic of rescue, as the participants wish the world well through their teaching of literature. I argue that this impulse to rescue functions in the larger social logic of both aesthetic form and the emancipatory vision of education. This thesis points to how pedagogical dynamics and literary narratives have the capacity to evoke psychological struggle for beginning teachers. Through this study's investigation, I present the significance of creating the time and space in teacher education to engage analytically in this struggle with fiction written for adolescents that English teachers use to teach others to learn