Historical Thinking, Ghosts and Hauntings: Imagination and the Poetics of On-Line Learning

Abstract

This innovative collaborative research project and practice began with a critical pedagogical and curricular concern about how to incorporate “historical thinking” and knowledge into an on-line graduate course, Current Issues in Early Childhood Education. Drawing on the work of interpretive scholars who wrote about “living” ghosts, phantoms, and memory we strove to offer different insights into the context of teaching and learning in post-secondary programs of study. We invited Enlightenment philosopher and early childhood advocate Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) to class as a way to re-image critical historical and socio-cultural notions of childhood, and child care in Western curricular traditions and inheritances.