In this exposure, Pauline Sameshima, Lara Okihiro and Aparna Mishra Tarc consider literature as a companionship for thought and for our engagements with education by creating a conversation between a poet, a children’s book author and a writer on the profound role of literary language in engaging childhood, knowledge, and worlds. Starting with the premise that literature and the arts can enable inventive practices that seek out alternative narratives in education, the panelists discuss how literary language and texts can serve as companions for thinking.

This exposure asks:
What kind of spaces does literature create? How might literature enrich and unsettle our ways of thinking and being in education? What creative forms might literature offer? How might literature events make us think? How might literature enable us to ask different questions about education and educational experiences? What sensitivities might literature offer us? By thinking with these questions, each panelist discusses their work with literary language in educational contexts and forums.

Panelist Bios:

Dr Aparna Mishra Tarc is an associate professor in the Faculty of Education at York University and the Director of the Graduate program. Dr Tarc studies the keynote of the literary arts and literature in the formation of subjectivities, relations, and worlds. Her current research project engages children’s “knowledge”: expression, dreamwork, lyrical lives and testimony as a profound and compelling form of social and political thought. She is author of over fifty articles and chapters and of two monographs: Literacy of the Other: Renarrating Humanity (SUNY Press) and Pedagogy in the Novels of J.M. Coetzee: The Affect of Literature (Routledge).

Dr Pauline Sameshima is a Professor and the Acting Chair of Graduate Studies and Research in Education at Lakehead University. Her professional interests include community-engaged, multi-modal, interdisciplinary research through the lenses of curriculum theory, reparative pedagogies, social justice, applied health sciences, and sustainability. Pauline served as the Canada Research Chair in Arts Integrated Studies from 2012 -2022. Pauline is the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies and Curator of the LAIR Galleries. She leads the Community Arts Integrated Research (CAIR) Program for the HIV Obstruction by Programmed Epigenetics (HOPE) research collaboratory (2021-2026). Her favourite pastimes include cooking with her children and arranging flowers from her garden. Website: http://www.solspire.com/

Dr. Lara Okihiro is a writer, researcher, and educator. Intrigued by the power and magic of stories, she earned a MA in English Studies from Goldsmiths, University of London (UK), and a PhD in English from University of Toronto (Canada). She has lectured and published internationally on literature, the Japanese Canadian internment, issues of racism and social justice, historical trauma, and education. Her book, Obaasan’s Boots, a children’s novel based on her family’s experience of state sanctioned removal and dispossession and co-written with her cousin, Janis Bridger, is forthcoming (Second Story Press, October 2023). She is currently completing another book, Lost Objects: Literature and the Dispossession of Incarcerated Nikkei (McGill-Queens University Press).