While, we often associate history writing with efforts to discover and present the past ‘as it was’, in this chapter, I explore the past as a hauntological phenomenon. I am curious about how pasts can speak to concerns that are muted today or at risk of being forgotten. I am searching for ways of telling history in a genre of haunting, producing encounters with the past not simply as something that was, but as something that holds a capacity to challenge present orderings and maybe even animate alternative futures of work in education.

The previous chapters and the scenes of inheritance between them constitute a web of moments, events, and forces that can be read through routes other than chronological time. I have already anticipated a hauntological reading through the non- linear structure of the chapters and scenes of inheritance, which constitutes abrupt time travels between contemporary settings and pedagogical experiments and events in the 1920s and 1960s. However, in this chapter, I push even further towards a way of telling history in a hauntological register by staging encounters between moments from different times and places to experiment with the performative effect of such encounters. More specifically, I evoke from these encounters what I term ghostly figures. Ghostly figures are analytical constructions produced by the staging of new constellations of moments and events. Ghostly figures might be made to speak about not a past that has ended, but the unexhausted potential of different moments to challenge the present and set in motion alternative futures.