Lost Subjects, Contested Objects: Toward a Psychoanalytic Study of Learning
This multiple case study examines how four pre-service social studies teachers (PSTs) planned and taught a lesson about Night, a seminal testimony and text in secondary Holocaust education. These cases illuminate how PSTs teach without specific preparation or instruction about how to teach texts from traumatic histories, including the Holocaust.
Facilitating discussions on topics perceived as contentious is associated with complex emotions that may disrupt curricular aims. Unsurprisingly, such discussions are generally absent from the classroom. Yet, discussions are one of the most effective pedagogies for deeper learning. Guided by the Dynamic Systems Model of Role Identity, we frame the dynamics involved when a teacher plans for, enacts, and reflects on a potentially contentious classroom discussion. This framework situates discussion facilitation in a teacher’s identity—the contextualized sense of who they are as a teacher that involves the interplay of their actions, beliefs, emotions, goals, and self-perceptions. We advance a view of discussion facilitation as centered in the teacher’s role and the strategic consideration of the fit between self-knowledge, beliefs about students, discussion content, context, curricular and personal goals, and pedagogical and emotion strategies. We provide strategies for preparing for classroom discussions and navigating emotions.
Traditionally, social issues such as death, poverty, and racism have been considered delicate and uncomfortable topics for interactions between children and adults. However, children often share their knowledge and experiences with these issues, which adults may feel challenged to address. The global COVID-19 pandemic has heightened our awareness of race and racism, and many children have observed, overheard, or experienced racism toward marginalized groups. Several recent hate crimes against Asians and Asian Americans have traumatized Asian American families. This chapter introduces a case study on what Asian American children have shared and discussed at home regarding racism against Asians and Asian Americans during the pandemic. From the intersectional positions of an Asian American mother, researcher, and teacher educator, the author navigates children’s voices on race and racism against Asian Americans and describes the silence on race and racism in schools, which can lead to further marginalization of Asian and Asian American children. This chapter also provides insight into theoretical and pedagogical stances for early childhood educators to support and address anti-racism in terms of anti-discriminatory education.
This article theorises the concept of sane-heteroprofessionalism as a regulatory mechanism operating at the intersections of sanism, cis-heteronormativity, and other structural oppressions within pre-service post-secondary education programmes. Building upon existing discussions of heteroprofessionalism, we examine how sane-heteroprofessionalism functions to govern m/Mad, queer, and trans knowledge and subjectivities within these programmes, positioning professionalism as a tool of social control. We advocate for future critical analyses of sane-heteroprofessionalism to explore how notions of professional competency and regulation systematically marginalise queer, m/Mad, and trans perspectives among faculty, students, and instructors in higher education.
This chapter investigates how the narrative conventions of comics are used to externalize and metaphorize the inner movements structuring the double lives of teaching and not-teaching. Beginning with Spider-Man (whose secret identity is frequently reprised in the role of teacher), the visual metaphors describing his everyday compromises are positioned as powerful rifts between identity positions, subsequently linked to the teacher’s enactment of multiple rescue fantasies. Looking next to the character of Black Lightning, and summoning the psychoanalytic concept of the caesura (after Wilfred Bion), this chapter explores how the narrative box in comics can be used to hyperfocus on thought, while simultaneously backgrounding the narrative’s more obviously plot-driven, representational elements. Finally, turning to the character of 1950s Western hero Johnny Thunder, this chapter focuses on how the defense reaction known as splitting, typically aimed at forestalling ambivalence, is made visible, deliberate, and legible in this comic, allowing the reader insight into the pressures faced by teachers in the presence of incompatible ideas and identities.
This introductory chapter positions this psychoanalytically informed study of teachers in comics in relation to a number of intersecting fields: curriculum and cultural studies, teacher education, and literary criticism in comics studies. The concept of the educational social unconscious, an assemblage of shared assumptions regarding (among other things) the limitations and possibilities of what it means to be a teacher, is here introduced as a way to account for the interpretive moves enacted in this book, which frames the representational form of comics as an unconventional and yet uniquely privileged site for studying the circulations of potential meaning contained, produced, and maintained by the figure of the teacher in popular culture. Particular attention is paid in this chapter to reviewing the interdisciplinary use of comics in educational research, as well as framing the status (and symbolic potential) of comics in relation to both literature and popular culture. This chapter also articulates a method of reading comics in close relation to unconscious reverie, a form of psychoanalytic communication, and emphasizes the importance of reading comics poetically, which may entail de-emphasizing the dominance of story and narrative.
This chapter attunes to the use of imagistic metaphors in comics—the lines, squiggles, and shapes surrounding characters, here referred to as emanata—to describe the otherwise unrepresentable, affective atmospheres of teaching life. Looking to non-representational theory as a way to conceive the world as composed of imperceptible things and movements whose meanings may never be finally settled, and by recalibrating the interpretive lenses that make particular forms and functions of reading possible, this chapter intensifies the emotional backgrounds framing teachers’ lives in comics. Reading for emotion is thus described as a process of de-emphasizing the narrative center, momentarily leaving questions of sequentiality aside, while simultaneously welcoming that which language and representation cannot easily abide.
Constructive controversy is a cooperative learning approach that invites students to research and present both sides of an issue. This approach has many positive outcomes; these include improving academic achievement and motivation, fostering interpersonal relationships, and encouraging students to consider multiple perspectives. This chapter describes the implementation of constructive controversy in a hybrid children's literature course for undergraduate students in an elementary/special education dual major program. Students in the class investigated and discussed several critical issues in the children's literature field. Students' perspectives of participating in constructive controversy are shared, and recommendations are made to support instructors seeking to implement constructive controversy in hybrid or online classroom settings.
This small study reveals the value of story writing as a pedagogical technique in environmental education. The qualitative research conducted in 2020 examines 14 Indian children’s place-ecological meaning as expressed in the story books they authored. Thematic analysis of the story books, interviews, journals, creative writing assignments & group discussion revealed that the children’s outdoor nature experiences shaped their place-ecological meaning and inspired a striking critique of the necropolitical-geontopolitical Anthropocene regime in local contexts. Children’s sense of marginalization forged empathy with the more-than-human, fostering feelings collective identities and resistance, despite muted agency. The research emphasizes that environmental education program should not only build awareness and conscientization among participants but also provide opportunities for expression of meaning-making. The significance of the research lies in it bringing children’s voices to the fore as they attempt to examine the Anthropocene from their experiences of local ecologies and places in Chennai, India.
In this piece, I explore the deluge of thoughts and emotions triggered by the opportunity of writing about the war in Ukraine. Thinking with Noddings’s ethic of care, Britzman’s idea of difficult knowledge, Dewey’s and Ingold’s visions on education and commoning, and Probyn’s arguments on writing about affects, I reflect on academic practices of research and writing, what constitutes the urge of responding to the call for papers of this special issue, the affective response it sparks in me concerning my relation with my own home city, and some sense of how to move forward.
The queer critical literacies (QCL) approach to education aims to meaningfully engage with gender and sexuality diversity in educational settings. This article reflects on an English course for final-year Bachelor of Education students at a South African university. In the course, the QCL framework was introduced and texts with diverse gender and sexual identities were prescribed for class discussion and assessment topics. Data were collected from students’ final essay assessments for the course and relevant extracts from selected essays were analysed through thematic content analysis. The findings indicate that the purposeful inclusion of QCL in teacher education courses can enable students to reflect deeply on how they engage with gender and sexuality diversity in their teaching, and the QCL approach can promote positions of critical allyship in pre-service teachers which can make schools more inclusive spaces. However, the data revealed limitations in students’ understandings of diverse gender identities, including the conflation of transgender identities with same-sex sexualities.
This chapter draws together all the preceding chapters to tease out common and divergent themes and approaches and evaluate the conceptual-empirical praxis contributions.
This chapter begins with the idea that in order to create ‘reparative futures’—futures that recognize and seek to repair historical injustices—it is inevitable to engage with ‘difficult knowledge’. In particular, this chapter takes on the case of ‘post-truth’—a word that has become a buzzword in recent years, reflecting the disruption of rationality and objectivity by emotion and personal belief—and discusses how post-truth claims about race and racism constitute forms of difficult knowledge in educational settings. The chapter argues that educators need to develop pedagogical resources that deal with post-truth as difficult knowledge in ways that recognize and seek to repair ongoing histories of racial violence, oppression and domination. For this purpose, the chapter considers how nurturing ‘affective solidarity’ may constitute an affective tool for reparative pedagogies, that is, pedagogies that create transformative learning spaces which seek to make a contribution in repairing historical injustices and inequalities.
This paper grapples with the challenges posed to critical geography educators by STEMification, or the enshrinement of market-oriented forms of science and technology education as the norma-tive ideal for education in general. In both reactionary and progressive contexts, STEMification decontextualizes scientific and technological activity and deepens existing hierarchies of knowledge based on quantification, perceived scientific rigour, commer-cialisation, and employability. Critical geographical knowledges often incur misrecognition, dismissal, and in some cases, outright prohibition under such conditions. Offering strategies for navigating and contesting STEMification, this paper draws on collective auto-methods, analysing narrative vignettes from our pedagogical practices as critical geography educators. We offer the notion of seeking leverage in the face of STEMification: protecting ourselves and seeking traction within our institutions by translating our goals into familiar or sanctioned forms, while using those forms to alternative ends. To that end, we highlight seven pedagogical strategies: (1) meeting students where they are, (2) using applied examples, (3) grappling with the limits of problem-based learning, (4) disalienat-ing students from assessment, (5) integrating critique with alternatives , (6) anticipating both resistance to and desire for critical content from students and colleagues, and (7) recognising the limits of institutional environments.
This study employs critical ethnographic child–parent research to examine Korean American children’s lived experiences related to anti-Asian racism, looking closely at children’s ordinary interactions in their everyday lives at home. Children’s conversations at home were audio – and video-recorded and artifacts created by children and from school were collected. While children as co-researchers actively participated in the research, they shared their perspectives on race and anti-Asian racism, noticing the invisibility and stereotypes of Asian Americans. The children’s counterstories from child–parent research reveal that racialized discourses toward Asians and Asian Americans are not discussed at school even though children experience them.
This study opens more conversations to understand and navigate Asian American children’s perspectives on race and racism and methodological insights for racially minoritized parent research with children.
Drawing from their own practice of writing letters by hand, the authors, white women art education scholars committed to critical pedagogy, present letter writing by hand as a form of inquiry for engaging in critical reflective practice. Informed by work of anti-oppressive scholars including Gloria Anzaldúa, Paulo Freire, and bell hooks, critical reflective practice involves critical self-evaluation and revision of action around relations of power. The authors began this letter writing practice in response to pandemic conditions, as other research plans were disrupted. In this inquiry through handwritten letters, the authors engage in continuous passage through inner and outer worlds, demonstrating the dynamic interplay of individuals within movements toward social transformation. You use your imagination in mediating between inner and outer experience. By writing about the always-in-progress, transformational processes and the constant, ongoing reconstruction of the way you view your world, you name and ritualize the moments/processes of transition, inserting them into the collective fabric, bringing into play personal history and fashioning a story greater than yourself.-Gloria Anzaldúa, now let us shift… the path of conocimiento… inner work, public acts, 2002
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