Relational Psychoanalysis at the Heart of Teaching and Learning: How and Why It Matters
This paper challenges the deeply entrenched, self-replicating nature of mathematics educators, leveraging the groundbreaking and paradigm-shifting works of Wynter’s (The ceremony found: Towards the autopoetic turn/overturn, its autonomy of human agency and extraterritoriality of (self-)cognition. In: Black knowledges/black struggles, pp. 184–252, 2015) Autopoetic Turn/Overturn and Doll’s (The mythopoetics of currere: memories, dreams and literary texts as teaching avenues to self-study. Routledge, 2017) Mythopoetics of Currere. Through a deeply immersive analysis, this piece vividly captures the lived experiences of individuals who have faced countless struggles within mathematics classrooms, compelling mathematics educators to examine and confront the pressing issues within their own pedagogies. The examination is structured into two essential parts: firstly, an unflinching witness to the systemic violence and harm that pervades mathematics classrooms, and secondly, a call to action for mathematics educators to confront and address the structural violence that persists within their own classrooms.
This paper’s unique contribution lies in its incorporation of the story of Wisahkecahk and the Birch Trees, shared by Cree knowledge keeper Solomon Ratt (Ogg, Wisahkecahk eats his own scab, 2016, 2019, 2020: Solomon Ratt (th-dialect). Cree Literacy Network, 2021). The wisdom found in this story of Wisahkecahk guides educators in their journey toward reinvention as they process their own anger and frustration when confronted with the harms resulting from their current pedagogies. It offers a supportive space for readers to acknowledge the harm normalized by the professed “normal” human who encourages the continuation of harm-imposing actions. As an impetus for mathematics educators, it encourages them to listen to critical encounters shared by students who have experienced violence as a result of their instructors’ pedagogies. Furthermore, it serves as a source of encouragement for those who have had little success in addressing personal and systemic harms, emphasizing the inevitability of failure as a natural part of the journey toward creating meaningful change.
Dr. Lissa D’Amour brings together relational psychoanalysis and developmental theory to offer practitioners of education an opportunity to unify theories of learning into a cohesive “dialectic model of learning and of learning’s refusal” (D’Amour, 2020, p. 142), a unification sorely needed in mathematics education as educators in Alberta feud over ‘back-to-basics’. Dr. D’Amour’s (2020) book, entitled Relational Psychoanalysis at the Heart of Teaching and Learning: How and Why It Matters, attempts to kick-start conversations about the relationships present in classrooms and offers respite from, and an alternative perspective of, the educational behemoth I have become a part of, one that increasingly ignores us humans, the relationships we have and our affective attunement with all that is around us.
After Wall Street firms repeatedly had to shell out millions to settle discrimination lawsuits, businesses started to get serious about their efforts to increase diversity. But unfortunately, they don’t seem to be getting results: Women and minorities have not gained much ground in management over the past 20 years.
The problem is, organizations are trying to reduce bias with the same kinds of programs they’ve been using since the 1960s. And the usual tools—diversity training, hiring tests, performance ratings, grievance systems—tend to make things worse, not better. The authors’ analysis of data from 829 firms over three decades shows that these tools actually decrease the proportion of women and minorities in management. They’re designed to preempt lawsuits by policing managers’ decisions and actions. But as lab studies show, this kind of force-feeding can activate bias and encourage rebellion.
However, in their analysis the authors uncovered numerous diversity tactics that do move the needle, such as recruiting initiatives, mentoring programs, and diversity task forces. They engage managers in solving the problem, increase contact with women and minority workers, and promote social accountability. In this article, the authors dig into the data, executive interviews, and several examples to shed light on what doesn’t work and what does.
p>This study investigates the associations between the narcissistic leader and performance and the moderating effect of a leader’s tenure and self-esteem. The hypothesis were studied with Pearson correlations and stepwise hierarchical multiple regression analyses (n=203). The moderating effect of leader’s tenure on the relationship between narcissism and leader performance was confirmed. The narcissistic leader’s performance tends to be positively evaluated only because the leader has held the position for a very short period. Self-esteem exhibited a very strong correlation to leader performance. The results support the view that narcissism is a personality dimension, albeit one that is not necessarily pathological. The results of this study suggest it would be wise to add Rorschach Comprehensive System (RCS) to the tools available in the personnel assessment situation.</p
The educational enthusiasm for both authenticity and empathy makes a number of assumptions about universal virtues, selfhood, the role of emotion in education, and the role of the teacher. In this article, we argue that authenticity and empathy are both nebulous virtues that teachers and students are called to embody with little reflection on how they are developed, taught, and modeled. Moreover, we propose that authenticity and empathy are engaged in a give-and-take relationship whereby they may not be fully actualized at the same time. By exploring some of the ways that authenticity and empathy make competing demands on the students’ and teacher’s selves, we suggest that they produce uncomfortable tensions, especially when confronted with the challenges of social justice education.
For four years we have invested in improving mathematics teaching at the elementary level. By drawing from diverse research emphases in mathematics education and by considering the impact of lessons in terms of student engagement and performance, we have identified four key elements impacting learning in mathematics. Here, we describe the protocol currently used to structure feedback for teachers in the Math Minds Initiative. The key elements that comprise the protocol are: (1) effective variation, (2) continuous assessment, (3) responsive teaching, and (4) engagement.
A report for the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL)
http://www.casel.org/teacher-preparation/
Research shows that mathematics anxiety and mathematics achievement present a challenge for many educators, particularly elementary school teachers who usually have lower mathematics content knowledge and higher math anxiety levels than average college students. This study investigated education majors' cognitive abilities and mathematics perceptions that affect their mathematics performance in geometry, word problem-solving, and non-word problem-solving. We examined relationships between mathematics problem-solving and math anxiety in each of the three mathematical domains as a function of working memory (WM), spatial ability, and attitudes toward learning mathematics. Math anxiety, WM, and spatial ability explained 62% of the variance in student overall mathematics performance with math anxiety being the highest (negative) predictor. Although relationships between math anxiety and mathematics performance varied by mathematical domain, the negative effects of math anxiety were equally detrimental in each of the three mathematical domains, even after controlling for the effects of WM performance and spatial ability.
Here, we report on the development of a theoretical framework for mathematics teaching that looks aside from common traditional / reform dichotomies. Attention is focused on managing the amount of new information students must attend to, while structuring that information in a manner that allows discernment of key features and continuous extension of meaning. Drawing on and combining ideas based on mastery learning and on the variation theory of learning, we propose an alternative where fluency and emergent knowing are inseparable and mutually reinforcing, and motivation is based on success and the challenge of pressing the boundaries of knowing. Gains in student achievement associated with this framework have been significantly faster than national norms. Introduction and Purpose Recent calls to find a balance between allegedly opposite instructional approaches— commonly dichotomized as " traditional " and " reform " approaches—have at times posited these extreme approaches as complementary, suggesting that the two may productively interact. For instance, Ansari (2015) claimed that " [I]t is time to heed the empirical evidence coming from multiple scientific disciplines that clearly shows that math instruction is effective when different approaches are combined in developmentally appropriate ways " (para. 14). In this paper, we argue that such seemingly contradictory approaches are in fact very similar in significant ways and propose a 'third way' that addresses important features not stressed by either approach. The work reported here developed from our work with the Math Minds initiative, which is a five-year partnership between a large school district, a mathematical charity, a children's support group, a university education faculty, and a funder. It is aimed at improving mathematics teaching and learning at the elementary level. More specifically, it aims to deepen understanding of relationships between teachers' knowledge, curricular resources, professional development, and students' performance, a combination not commonly addressed in the literature. In particular, we are working to identify features of resources that can support the development of teachers' mathematical knowledge for teaching. Here, we outline key principles that we have identified as significant for teaching mathematics and then contrast these principles with other approaches. While our primary aim here is theoretical, we also provide a brief statement regarding impact on student achievement.
Primary maternal preoccupation is a term coined by D. Winnicott (1956) to describe the mother's special mental state during the time surrounding the birth of a new infant. He described this state of mind as "almost an illness" that a mother must experience and recover from in order to create and sustain the environment that can meet the physical and psychological needs of her child. Winnicott speculated that this special state began towards the end of the pregnancy and continued through the first weeks of the infant's life. In this chapter we take a close look at the content of these preoccupations and the caretaking behaviours they complement and engender. Next, we consider recent research on the genetic, epigenetic, and neurobiological substrates of maternal behaviour in mammalian species and their potential relevance for understanding human risk and resiliency. Here we utilize an evolutionary point of view concerning some forms of developmental psychopathology. This viewpoint begins with the recognition that individuals vary with regard to adaptive skills and problem-solving abilities and that these individual variations may lead to differential reproductive success. The selection of a mate, bearing of viable offspring, and the formation of parental commitments that will sustain an infant through a lengthy period of dependency are just a few of the interdependent processes needed for an individual to survive. Although most of our biological and behavioural potentialities are likely to be called upon at one point or another in the service of these goals, there must be highly conserved brain-based systems that are specifically activated at developmentally appropriate moments to achieve and sustain these processes. We hypothesize that a thorough understanding of these normative processes will also lead to deeper insights into our vulnerability to develop a range of psychopathological outcomes (Leckman & Mayes, 1998). An additional theoretical perspective adapted in this chapter is Winnicott's (1956) formulations on the "holding environment", the non-specific environment (in terms of the attachment relationship) the special provisions of which support the infant's physical and emotional growth. The chapter concludes with a commentary section by David R. Shanks. This chapter elegantly illustrates how a story about maternal caregiving at multiple levels is beginning to be sketched out, which, while of course incomplete and missing many critical details, seems to have surmounted most of the
conceptual difficulties that confronted us only a brief time ago such as how even to begin to determine the influence of specific genes on behaviour. With such dramatic changes taking place around us, it becomes important to reflect continually on the fundamental questions that have driven psychology since its earliest days. One of these is the nature/nurture debate, and in this commentary Shanks considers how discoveries such as those described here might incline us to rethink long-held views. Shanks also considers one aspect of the emerging story about genes, brain, and behaviour where we are not at present fully exploiting the tools available to us: this is the important contribution that computational modelling can play in theory development. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Inclusive education/mainstreaming is a key policy objective for the education of children and young people with special educational needs (SEN) and disabilities.
This paper reviews the literature on the effectiveness of inclusive education/mainstreaming. The focus is on evidence for effects in terms of child outcomes with examination also of evidence on processes that support effectiveness.
The review covers a range of SEN and children from pre-school to the end of compulsory education.
Following an historical review of evidence on inclusive education/mainstreaming, the core of the paper is a detailed examination of all the papers published in eight journals from the field of special education published 2001-2005 (N=1373): Journal of Special Education, Exceptional Children, Learning Disabilities Research and Practice, Journal of Learning Disabilities, Remedial and Special Education, British Journal of Special Education, European Journal of Special Needs Education, and the International Journal of Inclusive Education. The derived categories were: comparative studies of outcomes: other outcome studies; non-comparative qualitative studies including non-experimental case studies; teacher practice and development; teacher attitudes; and the use of teaching assistants.
Only 14 papers (1.0%) were identified as comparative outcome studies of children with some form of SEN. Measures used varied but included social as well as educational outcomes. Other papers included qualitative studies of inclusive practice, some of which used a non-comparative case study design while others were based on respondent's judgements, or explored process factors including teacher attitudes and the use of teaching assistants.
Inclusive education/mainstreaming has been promoted on two bases: the rights of children to be included in mainstream education and the proposition that inclusive education is more effective. This review focuses on the latter issue. The evidence from this review does not provide a clear endorsement for the positive effects of inclusion. There is a lack of evidence from appropriate studies and, where evidence does exist, the balance was only marginally positive. It is argued that the policy has been driven by a concern for children's rights. The important task now is to research more thoroughly the mediators and moderators that support the optimal education for children with SEN and disabilities and, as a consequence, develop an evidence-based approach to these children's education.
This primer for teachers (prospective and practicing) asks students to question the historical present and their relation to it, and in so doing, to construct their own understandings of what it means to teach, to study, to become 'educated.' Curriculum theory is presented as the interdisciplinary study of educational experience. The mentral concept of curriculum studies as a 'complicated conversation' is explored. Within this framework, Pinar offers a compelling interpretation of contemporary 'school reform' policies and practices, and an explication of curriculum theory's power to bring forth understanding, resistance, and change. His argument is this: Public education today is dominated by a conservative agenda based on a business model of education focused on the 'bottom line' (test scores). The origins of this agenda go back to the 1950s, when gendered anxieties over the Cold War and racialized anxieties over school desegregation coded public education (not for the first time) as 'feminized' and 'black.' The nature of many politicians' and some parents' criticisms of public education is intelligible only as a recoding of these gendered and racialized anxieties, deferred and displaced from their originating events onto 'school reform.' This has rendered the classroom a privatized and racialized domestic sphere which politicians--mostly (white) men--endeavor to control, disguised by apparently commonsense claims of 'accountability.' What is dangerously at stake is academic freedom and control of the curriculum--what teachers are permitted to teach, what children are permitted to study. This text offers both an understanding of the problem and a way to address it. Pinar uses the concept of currere --the Latin infinitive of curriculum--to describe an autobiographical method that provides a strategy for self-study, a way for both individuals and groups to understand their situations, leading to action. Through currere , it is possible for educators to begin to reconstruct the public sphere--now a 'shopping mall' in which citizens and students have been reduced to consumers--by connecting academic knowledge to their students (and their own) subjectivities, to society, and to the historical moment. In doing so, they can take back (relative) intellectual freedom and rebuild schooling to speak to persisting problems of race, class, and gender. It is this link, this promise of education for our private-and-public lives as Americans, that curriculum theory enables. Comprehensive and ground-breaking, What Is Curriculum Theory? is indispensable for scholars and students worldwide across the fields of curriculum studies, foundations of education, educational policy, school reform, and teacher education. © 2004 by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. All rights reserved.
In The Death of Expertise: The Campaign against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters, Tom Nichols explores the rejection of experts and the ongoing assaults against knowledge and critical thinking. He notes several influences, including the ubiquity of the Internet, the emergence of a customer satisfaction model in higher education, and the transformation of the news industry into a continual entertainment machine, among others. In this updated and expanded edition, Nichols returns to these themes and he is more alarmed than ever, especially in the aftermath of a pandemic and the outbreak of war in Europe. The rejection of expertise—in which people are hobbled by narcissism and reliant on an overestimation of their own knowledge—is now the foundation for populist political movements. The attacks on science and knowledge have become attacks on democracy itself by an army of ill-informed and angry citizens who are lost in a maze of misinformation, conspiracy theories—and even paranoia.
This book explores the contributions, actual and potential, of complexity thinking to educational research and practice. While its focus is on the theoretical premises and the methodology, not specific applications, the aim is pragmatic--to present complexity thinking as an important and appropriate attitude for educators and educational researchers. Part I is concerned with global issues around complexity thinking, as read through an educational lens. Part II cites a diversity of practices and studies that are either explicitly informed by or that might be aligned with complexity research, and offers focused and practiced advice for structuring projects in ways that are consistent with complexity thinking. Complexity thinking offers a powerful alternative to the linear, reductionist approaches to inquiry that have dominated the sciences for hundreds of years and educational research for more than a century. It has captured the attention of many researchers whose studies reach across traditional disciplinary boundaries to investigate phenomena such as: How does the brain work? What is consciousness? What is intelligence? What is the role of emergent technologies in shaping personalities and possibilities? How do social collectives work? What is knowledge? Complexity research posits that a deep similarity among these phenomena is that each points toward some sort of system that learns. The authors’ intent is not to offer a complete account of the relevance of complexity thinking to education, not to prescribe and delimit, but to challenge readers to examine their own assumptions and theoretical commitments--whether anchored by commonsense, classical thought or any of the posts (such as postmodernism, poststructuralism, postcolonialism, postpositivism, postformalism, postepistemology) that mark the edges of current discursive possibility. Complexity and Education is THE introduction to the emerging field of complexity thinking for the education community. It is specifically relevant for educational researchers, graduate students, and inquiry-oriented teacher practitioners. © 2006 by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. All rights reserved.
Before students are able to be successful with academic demands they must be able to regulate their own emotions. Seven kindergarten students at a Title One school outside of Washington, DC participated in a small-group intervention in order to increase their ability to regulate their own emotions. The curriculum for this group was created based on the neurological implications of how the brain processes emotions.
Integrating clinical material and neuropsychological research, this book presents a new model of unconscious processes. This model veers away from more traditional views of the unconscious as a static reservoir for distinct repressed memory. Rather, it sees the unconscious as the embodiment of brain/mind/body processes that underpin and automatically enact entrenched self-states. These unconscious self-states or systems represent early emotional memories and intersubjective experiences that as we grow influence all our emotional, mental and behavioral functions.
In this ambitious and accomplished work, Taussig explores the complex and interwoven concepts of mimesis, the practice of imitation, and alterity, the opposition of Self and Other. The book moves from the nineteenth-century invention of mimetically capacious machines, such as the camera, to the fable of colonial ‘first contact’ and the alleged mimetic power of ‘primitives’. Twenty years after the original publication, Taussig revisits the work in a new preface which contextualises the impact of Mimesis and Alterity. Drawing on the ideas of Benjamin, Adorno and Horckheimer and ethnographic accounts of the Cuna, Taussig demonstrates how the history of mimesis is deeply tied to colonialism and the idea of alterity has become increasingly unstable. Vigorous and unorthodox, this cross-cultural discussion continues to deepen our understanding of the relationship between ethnography, racism and society.
The notion of inclusive education has multiple meanings and the precise definition remains contested. In particular, the debate rages as to whether it is appropriate for some schools to offer specialised provision to particular cohorts of students rather than to educate everyone within a common school. This manuscript foregrounds rich empirical data from students, parents and educators at Pride School Atlanta, described as ‘the South’s first school for LGBTQ students’, a new small, democratic, private school with the explicit intention of creating a ‘thriving space’ for ‘gay, straight, queer, gender-queer’ children, young people and families; a space that moves ‘beyond safety’. By drawing on Dyson’s [2012. ‘Inclusion and Inclusions: Theories and Discourses in Inclusive Education.’ In World Yearbook of Education 1999: Inclusive Education, edited by H. Daniels and P. Garner. Oxon: Routledge] work on ‘inclusions’ and moving away from the simple binary of what is inclusive/exclusive, this manuscript addresses the question of whether a school, which offers specialised provision to a small group of students, can play a role in inclusive education. It argues that this model of schooling, described by one student as ‘a whole new thing’ offers opportunities for presence, participation and achievement, recognition and achievement.
The understanding of inclusion in education has transcended the assumption that inclusion is about students with special needs. It concerns the inclusion of all children. With systems theory as a framework, the article argues that in order to handle inclusion as a phenomenon that concerns all children, we need an operational definition of inclusion differentiated according to three dimensions. The first dimension covers different levels of inclusion. The second dimension concerns different types of social communities in and out of school, from which a child may be included or excluded. The class is one such type of social community, but equally important is membership in the self-organised community of children in the school-yard, the bilateral relationships with other children and/or teachers, etc. The third dimension concerns different degrees of being included in and/or excluded from the different communities. The point is that a child is not either completely included or excluded, but that he/she is included in or excluded from the different communities in different degrees. A comprehensive matrix definition is presented combining the three dimensions, which matches the present understanding of inclusion in education.
A new edition of a classic work that originated the “embodied cognition” movement and was one of the first to link science and Buddhist practices.
This classic book, first published in 1991, was one of the first to propose the “embodied cognition” approach in cognitive science. It pioneered the connections between phenomenology and science and between Buddhist practices and science—claims that have since become highly influential. Through this cross-fertilization of disparate fields of study, The Embodied Mind introduced a new form of cognitive science called “enaction,” in which both the environment and first person experience are aspects of embodiment. However, enactive embodiment is not the grasping of an independent, outside world by a brain, a mind, or a self; rather it is the bringing forth of an interdependent world in and through embodied action. Although enacted cognition lacks an absolute foundation, the book shows how that does not lead to either experiential or philosophical nihilism. Above all, the book's arguments were powered by the conviction that the sciences of mind must encompass lived human experience and the possibilities for transformation inherent in human experience.
This revised edition includes substantive introductions by Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosch that clarify central arguments of the work and discuss and evaluate subsequent research that has expanded on the themes of the book, including the renewed theoretical and practical interest in Buddhism and mindfulness. A preface by Jon Kabat-Zinn, the originator of the mindfulness-based stress reduction program, contextualizes the book and describes its influence on his life and work.
The interdisciplinary field of the learning sciences encompasses educational psychology, cognitive science, computer science, and anthropology, among other disciplines. The Cambridge Handbook of the Learning Sciences, first published in 2006, is the definitive introduction to this innovative approach to teaching, learning, and educational technology. In this dramatically revised second edition, leading scholars incorporate the latest research to provide practical advice on a wide range of issues. The authors address the best ways to write textbooks, design educational software, prepare effective teachers, organize classrooms, and use the Internet to enhance student learning. They illustrate the importance of creating productive learning environments both inside and outside school, including after school clubs, libraries, and museums. Accessible and engaging, the Handbook has proven to be an essential resource for graduate students, researchers, teachers, administrators, consultants, software designers, and policy makers on a global scale.
What is the difference between a wink and a blink? The answer is important not only to philosophers of mind, for significant moral and legal consequences rest on the distinction between voluntary and involuntary behavior. However, "action theory"—the branch of philosophy that has traditionally articulated the boundaries between action and non-action, and between voluntary and involuntary behavior—has been unable to account for the difference.
Alicia Juarrero argues that a mistaken, 350-year-old model of cause and explanation—one that takes all causes to be of the push-pull, efficient cause sort, and all explanation to be prooflike—underlies contemporary theories of action. Juarrero then proposes a new framework for conceptualizing causes based on complex adaptive systems. Thinking of causes as dynamical constraints makes bottom-up and top-down causal relations, including those involving intentional causes, suddenly tractable. A different logic for explaining actions—as historical narrative, not inference—follows if one adopts this novel approach to long-standing questions of action and responsibility.
Bradford Books imprint
In Beyond Doer and Done To, Jessica Benjamin, author of the path-breaking Bonds of Love, expands her theory of mutual recognition and its breakdown into the complementarity of "doer and done to." Her innovative theory charts the growth of the Third in early development through the movement between recognition and breakdown, and shows how it parallels the enactments in the psychoanalytic relationship. Benjamin's recognition theory illuminates the radical potential of acknowledgment in healing both individual and social trauma, in creating relational repair in the transformational space of thirdness. Benjamin's unique formulations of intersubjectivity make essential reading for both psychoanalytic therapists and theorists in the humanities and social sciences.
The book derives from an intense collaboration among colleagues from various countries about the current state of education, and a desire to bring education and psychoanalysis into renewed dialogue: the latter we believe can illuminate the messiness, muddle and ambivalence that education is always and inevitably heir to. Human beings are inevitably divided and inwardly ruptured beings, while education is a constant negotiation of self, identity and processes of separation from the old into the new. How infants and people negotiate the rupture and pervasive ambivalence is a core feature of education, across the lifespan, and psychoanalysis provides conceptual and reflexive tools to negotiate the journey of self and others.
This article uses three tenets of critical race theory to critique the common pattern of teacher education focusing on preparing predominantly White cohorts of teacher candidates for racially and ethnically diverse students. The tenet of interest convergence asks how White interests are served through incremental steps. The tenet of color blindness prompts asking how structures that seem neutral, such as teacher testing, reinforce Whiteness and White interests. The tenet of experiential knowledge prompts asking whose voices are being heard. The article argues that much about teacher education can be changed, offering suggestions that derive from these tenets.
Racial/ethnic stereotypes are deep rooted in our history; among these, the dangerous Black male stereotype is especially relevant to issues of differential school discipline today. Although integration in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education was intended to counteract stereotype and bias, resegregation has allowed little true integration. Thus, old patterns continue to be reinforced through the ongoing processes of implicit bias, micro-aggression, and colorblindness. Thus, to effectively address inequity, the role of race must be explicitly acknowledged in addressing racial disparities in discipline. We close with a set of recommendations for talking about and acting on racial disparities.
Engaging current debates within the studies of life writing and of the nation-state, Writing the Roaming Subject focuses on a group of Canadian writers who pose questions about cultural difference and national identity while writing about their own lives and their own experiences of displacement. Joanne Saul.uses the term ‘biotext’ to describe the unique form of writing that challenges critical practices regarding both life writing and immigrant and ethnic minority writing by blurring the borders of biography, autobiography, history, fiction and theory, as well as poetry, prose, and visual representation. In her readings of selected contemporary Canadian biotexts - including Michael Ondaatje’s Running in the Family, Daphne Marlatt’s Ghost Works, Roy Kiyooka’s Mothertalk, and Fred Wah’s Diamond Grill - Saul.suggests that by crossing generic boundaries, these works illuminate the complex relationships between language, place, and self as they are manifested in textual form. Writing the Roaming Subject explores issues of identity formation, representation, and resistance in Canada and suggests that these are particularly crucial questions during a period of Canadian literary history when so many writers are insisting on new, more diverse cultural performances that resist the pull of the national imaginary.
Advances in science and the humanities have demonstrated the complexity of psychological, social and neurological factors influencing identity. A contemporary discourse is needed to anchor the concepts required in speaking about identity in present day understanding. In Identity and the New Psychoanalytic Explorations of Self-organization, Mardi Horowitz offers new ways of speaking about parts of self, explaining what causes a range of experiences from solidity in grounding the self to disturbances in a sense of identity. The book covers many aspects of both the formation and the deconstruction of identity. Horowitz examines themes including: -The sense of identity -Social learning -Biological learning -Identity and self-esteem -Levels of personality functioning and growth The book clarifies basic questions, defines useful terms, examines typical identity disturbances and presents a biopsychosocial theory which indicates how schemas operate in conscious and unconscious mental processing. The answers to the basic questions lead to improvements in psychotherapy practices as well as teaching and research methods. Identity and the New Psychoanalytic Explorations of Self-organization will prove fascinating reading for those working in the fields of psychoanalysis, psychology, psychiatry, neuroscience and the social disciplines.
A Pulitzer Prize-winning poet who confessed the unrelenting anguish of addiction and depression, Anne Sexton (1928-1974) was also a dedicated teacher. In this book, Paula M. Salvio opens up Sexton's classroom, uncovering a teacher who willfully demonstrated that the personal could also be plural. Looking at how Sexton framed and used the personal in teaching and learning, Salvio considers the extent to which our histories-both personal and social-exert their influence on teaching. In doing so, she situates the teaching life of Anne Sexton at the center of some of the key problems and questions in feminist teaching: navigating the appropriate distance between teacher and student, the relationship between writer and poetic subject, and the relationship between emotional life and knowledge. Examining Sexton's pedagogy, with its "weird abundance" of tactics and strategies, Salvio argues that Sexton's use of the autobiographical "I" is as much a literary identity as a literal identity, one that can speak with great force to educators who recognize its vital role in the humanities classroom.
Learning from the Other presents a philosophical investigation into the ethical possibilities of education, especially social justice education. In this original treatment, Sharon Todd rethinks the ethical basis of responsibility as emerging out of the everyday and complex ways we engage difference within educational settings. She works through the implications of the productive tension between the thought of Emmanuel Levinas and that of Sigmund Freud, Melanie Klein, Judith Butler, Cornelius Castoriadis, and others. Challenging the idea that knowledge about the other is the answer to questions of responsibility, she proposes that responsibility is rooted instead in a learning from the other. The author focuses on empathy, love, guilt, and listening to highlight the complex nature of learning from difference and to probe where the conditions for ethical possibility might lie.
Pinar positions himself against three pressing problems of the profession: the crime of collectivism that identity politics commits, the devaluation of academic knowledge by the programmatic preoccupations of teacher education, and the effacement of educational experience by standardized testing. A cosmopolitan curriculum, Pinar argues, juxtaposes the abstract and the concrete, the collective and the individual: history and biography, politics and art, public service and private passion. Such a curriculum provides passages between the subjective and the social, and in so doing, engenders that worldliness a cosmopolitan education invites. Such worldliness is vividly discernible in the lives of three heroic individuals: Jane Addams (1860-1935), Laura Bragg (1881-1978), and Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-1975). What these disparate individuals demonstrate is the centrality of subjectivity in the cultivation of cosmopolitanism. Subjectivity takes form in the world, and the world is itself reconstructed by subjectivity's engagement with it. In this intriguing, thought-provoking, and nuanced work, Pinar outlines a cosmopolitan curriculum focused on passionate lives in public service, providing one set of answers to how the field accepts and attends to the inextricably interwoven relations among intellectual rigor, scholarly erudition, and intense but variegated engagement with the world.
In classrooms and lectures we learn not only about academic topics but also about ourselves, our peers and how people and ideas interact. Education - An Impossible Profession extends the ways in which we might think about these processes by offering a refreshing reconsideration of key educational experiences including those of: Being judged and assessed, both formally and informally. Adapting to different groups for different purposes. Struggling to think under pressure. Learning to recognise and adapt to the expectations of others. This book brings psychoanalysis to new audiences, graphically illustrating its importance to understandings of teaching, learning and classrooms. Drawing on the author's original research, it considers the classroom context, including policy demands and professional pressures, and the complexity of peer and pedagogic relationships and interactions asking how these might be being experienced and what implications such experiences might have for learners and teachers. The discussions will be of interest not only to teachers, leading-learners and teacher-educators, but also to individuals interested in education policy, professional practice and theories of education.