Apprenticing Teachers Reading: The Cultural Significance of Juvenile Melodrama

Authors

  • Linda Anne Radford University of Ottawa

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.25071/1916-4467.23376

Keywords:

curriculum studies, beginning teachers, melodrama, juvenile historical fiction, aesthetics, psychoanalysis, cultural studies

Abstract

This article presents a study that reveals the educational significance of melodrama as a moral aesthetic, specifically in relation to work with literacies around identity in the teacher education classroom. Using methods of Lacanian discourse analysis and genre analysis, it unmasks the way two-award winning juvenile historical fictions depend on melodrama to instigate their narrative appeal. It unravels the skein of melodrama’s particularity and complicated affective potential for teachers who want to work in liberating ways with youth fiction in the classroom.

Author Biography

Linda Anne Radford, University of Ottawa

Linda Radford works in the fields of curriculum and language arts/English education. She is currently teaching part-time at the Faculty of Education at the University of Ottawa and is continuing her research on melodrama in relation to adolescent imagination. Additionally, she is researching social networking, blogging and video production in the English classroom as part of a culturally responsive media studies program.

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Published

03-11-2009

How to Cite

Radford, L. A. (2009). Apprenticing Teachers Reading: The Cultural Significance of Juvenile Melodrama. Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies, 7(1), 58–84. https://doi.org/10.25071/1916-4467.23376

Issue

Vol. 7 No. 1 (2009)

Section

Articles

License

Creative Commons License
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