Difference as ethical encounter

This chapter works further into the notion of "difference" in pedagogical encounters by exploring two collective biography stories alongside a third text, an excerpt from the Australian Prime Minister's historic 2008 speech on the stolen generations. I argue that his speech can also be read as a pedagogical encounter with its own particular spatial, temporal and affective modalities and performances. Each of these texts draws attention to an ethics of encounter and responsibility and to notions of difference within pedagogical space. While one of the collective biography stories focuses on a young white teacher in a class of Aboriginal children, the other story traces the same teacher's experience some years later with international exchange students. Both of these stories are provocations to investigate ethical relations between pedagogies, bodies and space, but in their sense-making they invoke differences of skin, language, belief, taste and culture, class and privilege, or lack of it, that appear to separate the teacher and her students, and to separate students from each other.