The elite international school is a rich site for sociological inquiry in global times. In this paper, we conceptualize the international school as a transnational space of agonist social class-making given the dynamic positioning of the complement of international school actors. We position international schoolteachers in the middle of these interactions and suggest that the middle position gives much-needed insight into the complex and relational qualities of class-making. To qualify our theorization of middling and social class-making in elite schools, we draw from interviews with Canadian teachers working in international schools in the Global South.

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Supporting learners' public engagement with traumatic histories of mass human violence can develop and sustain reparative relations across and between strained social collectives. In this article I theorize the intrapersonal and inter-political dynamics of psychical and social reparation through a classroom case of reparative learning. I analyze the emotional responses of beginning teachers engaging with traumatic Aboriginal history as depicted in Robert Arthur Alexie's novel Porcupines and China Dolls. My analysis of students' trouble with the novel offers insight into the psychical production of reparative curriculum as it is raggedly pieced together in the learner's capacity to feel for the unimaginable lives and worlds of others.This happened: ist geschehen It must be said.-Sarah Kofman, Shoah (or Dis-grace)

Ethics penetrates every aspect of Western education. Many of its dominant narratives — education as salvation, as progress, as panacea, and as liberation, for example — are infused with the ethical. Educators are compelled by ethical callings; in fact, education as the call of the ethical informs the singular and collective identities of educators. In this essay, Aparna Mishra Tarc troubles the role of the ethics in Western education using Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s deconstruction of the ethical in philosophy. Spivak’s deconstruction reveals how an ethics based in one’s idea of what the Other is and should be violates the uniqueness of Others. Spivak challenges educators to examine vigilantly the ethico‐political assumptions and discourses underlying ethical acts in the classroom. Drawing on the writings of Emmanuel Levinas, mediated by the thinking of Jacques Derrida, Spivak re‐imagines ethics apart from — and as a part of — its metaphysical heritage. Tarc discusses aspects of Spivak’s vision for an education borne out of ethical singularity as hearing and responding to the Other’s call. Finally, she explores its implications for how one might begin to respond justly to the conditions of others within and alongside of one’s own intellectual and pedagogical engagements.

My paper situates literacy in the pre-symbolic implications of the maternal relation. Turning to child psychoanalysis, particularly Melanie Klein's theories of infancy and symbolization, my paper discusses the role the child's inner life plays in her engagements with literacy. Citing cases of second language learning, I pose literacy as an emotional situation. I insist that educators begin to acknowledge and attend to the inner life of children in their practices of literacy. Reorienting literacy toward its emotional, relational, and maternal wellspring might develop within us new orientations to literacy as psychosocial experience and practice.