‘Why is Anne Frank always so durn happy?’ Happy objects and bad encounters in teacher education

Abstract

ABSTRACT This three-year, living inquiry into how preservice English Education students composed and analyzed visual-verbal journals (VVJs) in relation to Anne Frank’s Diary is grounded in Ahmed’s concepts of happy objects, bad encounters, and good encounters. After theorizing and complicating Ahmed’s concepts, we explore the way that the Diary has been positioned in the social fields of U.S. popular culture and schools. Across the three years, we found that participants overwhelmingly produced Anne Frank as a happy object, in ways that valorized her and emphasized the saving power of individual moral conduct rather than the brutal sides of her life and death. Through communal analysis of the VVJs and pedagogical changes across the years, participants became less likely to produce solely optimistic compositions of Frank. We argue for teacher education courses that do not focus upon single responses to complex issues and histories; instead, we explain how the conjunction ‘and’ can multiply the complexity of our engagements with texts and unravel binaries that have long had a hold on teacher education.