Title: Learning Too Late? A Psychoanalytic Reflection on the Affective, Defensive and Repressive Dynamics of Learning about "Race" in Women's Studies
Abstract: Drawing on psychoanalytic theories of defense and repression in learning, this paper analyzes author's attachment to a personal story of conflict and contestation over issues of identity, race and prejudice in Women's Studies classroom. It is suggested that tracing stories of conflict and varied and complex effects of personal crisis in teaching and learning is an important educational practice that holds potential for developing more ethical pedagogical relationships. Because self-knowledge is always a reconstruction it is always out of date. The is a thing of past. Adam Phillips, 1998.Story telling, fantasy, imaginative construction, reflection and reconstruction are increasingly recognized in educational research as processes through which subjective, personal meaning is made of cultural discourses (Britzman, 1998; Razack, 1993; St. Pierre and Pillow, 2000). Recent theory that bridges psychoanalysis, social sciences and cultural and educational studies has highlighted how intersubjectivity is mediated through psychical processes, reminding us that unconscious greatly complicates how we understand relationship between subject and culture. (Chodorow, 1999; Felman, 1987; Gallop, 1995; Lane, 1998; Minsky, 1998; Parker, 1997). Extending psychoanalysis to examine relations of teaching and learning and curriculum, Alice Pitt suggests, for instance, much of work of making a relation to knowledge takes place in unconscious where fantasmatic ideals anchor sense of self (Pitt, 1997, p. 301). Deborah Britzman also draws attention to creativity that might be unleashed through educational inquiry capable of asking questions that can unsettle docility of education,...tolerate study of vicissitudes of life and death and consider, as a question of ethicality, surprises of imaginary domain (Britzman, 1998, p. 77).While responding to these theoretical and methodological interventions into analysis of subjectivity, experience and imaginative meaningmaking in education, in this article will examine desires that fuel my own deep attachment to a pedagogical story that emerged out of my experiences in an undergraduate Women's Studies course. The story offer is one of several versions of a complex narrative that figures students struggling with issues of identity, race and prejudice. reinterpret my narrative via some psychoanalytic concepts gaining currency in educational research for their ability to explain emotional dynamics, and investments and disengagements in teaching and learning.Although still marginalized in field of educational research, a growing body of educational literature informed by psychoanalysis has been important for theorizing psychic complexities of teaching and learning, opening new possibilities for understanding social and subjective change. Psychoanalysis highlights impossibility of teaching (at least what one sets out to teach) and psychic convolutions of learning (do we ever learn what or when we intend to?).(1) The insistence on impossibility of teaching is drawn from Freud and is meant to remind educators of how intrapsychic and intersubjective complexities at work in classroom impede the entire enterprise of education and its founding insistence upon linear relation between teaching and learning and between knowledge and conduct (Britzman, 1998, pp. 139-140).The complexity and difficulty of teaching and learning is made clear by Shoshana Felman when she writes: I would venture to propose, today, that teaching in itself, teaching as such, takes place precisely only through a crisis: if teaching does not hit upon some sort of crisis, if it does not encounter either vulnerability or explosiveness of a (explicit or implicit) critical and unpredictable dimension, it has perhaps not truly taught (1992, p. 5). According to this reading of teaching, learning, if we take this to mean capacity to change one's mind, often requires psychic conflict, since new knowledge may be viewed as a threat to ego's established beliefs and attachments to knowledge (Britzman, 1998). …
Publication Year: 2003
Publication Date: 2003-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
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Cited By Count: 3
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