Talk, Texts and Trajectories: How the Blended Standpoint Helps Create and Sustain Shared Futures in K-12 Education


Rashmee Karnad-Jani, Public Scholar

In Texts, Facts and Femininity, Smith (1993) explicates there are two lines of inquiry that run parallel to one another and create an impression that they will never meet. The first leads into what it means to explore the social from women’s experience by beginning with an embodied subject who experiences what is going on. The second leads into the social organization of knowledge that is objectified and carries within it the constituents of ruling relations of contemporary capitalism. This paper begins at the intersection of these two lines of inquiry wherein the Blended Standpoint of Mother and Teacher examines the disjuncture between the textual promise of educational policy and the actual experiences of people in Ontario’s schooling spaces. It brings into view the mothering work undertaken by women who are Ontario Certified Teachers (OCTs) as practising educators in a variety of roles in the educational sector, and their counterparts who are not teachers – for the educational outcomes of their children. By sharing the data from two studies conducted as institutional ethnographies through multilingual in-depth interviews in 2013 and 2019, this paper highlights the social organization of knowledge and social relations of women as they engage with the mass education system in Ontario. This paper explicates how although largely unnamed, the K-12 educational landscape in Ontario, especially the family-school interaction is textually coordinated. Instead of considering textual materials merely as sources of information, the inertia of texts is questioned by taking up Smith’s explication of The Active Text to examine the social relations within mothering work for schooling. By taking up at least three key concepts from Smith’s scholarship in the field namely standpoint, the problematic and ruling relations, this paper brings into view the ways in which intentional partnerships between teachers and mothers of their students can becomes sites for social change to create and sustain shared futures for all children. This paper also builds from Smith’s notion of The Small Hero and explicates how everyday talk in schools enters institutional texts and determines the trajectories for students and their families through the interlocking of multiple factors that form part of the Standard North American Family as an ideological code pervasively present in social professional and educational spaces.

This paper will be presented at the following session: