Alice J. Pitt

The Significance of Emotions in Teaching and Learning: On Making Emotional Significance.

We follow the insights of psychoanalytic theory to offer a way of thinking about emotional life in the classroom. Using three case studies, each of which illuminates an aspect of emotional difficulty in relation to learning and failing to learn, we argue that educators and educational leaders benefit from attending to and listening for difficulties in making emotional significance, that is, in refusing to separate affective and cognitive processes, in encounters with knowledge and with others.

Paradoxes of Autonomy in Professional Life: a Research Problem

Stories of origin are notoriously incomplete, inaccurate or beside the point, often all three. One event stands out for us, however, as a point of reference for our thoughts on what it means to enter into and live out a career in the teaching profession today. At a meeting of school board directors and the administrative team of one of our faculties of education, those present were asked to identify their priorities for the upcoming year. One of the directors, instead of outlining his board’s literacy/ numeracy initiatives and professional development plans, surprised us by saying that his priority was to create conditions for classroom teachers to contribute publicly to debates about education. There was an unusual giddiness in the room that morning, because a provincial government had just been soundly defeated after eight years of majority leadership. This was a government that had found nothing about teachers, schools or curricula worthy of support or celebration. The Premier’s first Minister of Education had not graduated from high school. His role as Minister was defined by his ill-concealed project to ‘manufacture a crisis’ in education. The school board director’s comment that fall morning expressed both his frustration at how easy it had been for this government to denigrate teachers publicly and his dismay at the woefully inadequate responses. Attempts on the part of teacher federations were all too easily recuperated as part of the problem, and individual teachers’ views, rare as these were, seemed to come from those who had either recently fled the profession or whose years of retirement called up a mythical golden age. Conditions in Ontario have improved somewhat, but in this Canadian province as well as other North American and European jurisdictions, the educational landscape continues to be dominated by practices and policies that value uniformity and conformity, privilege centralized over local control and conflate good teaching with student achievement on high stakes testing instruments. There is still little evidence that teachers have been invited or have forced their way into public discussions about these important issues and the questions they raise, not only for teachers, but also for the quality of our collective, civic lives. In this research project, we are curious about the professional lives of teachers in the context of heightened – and often shrill – demands for public accountability in an atmosphere of damaged trust between teachers and the public. We turn to the concept of autonomy in order to illuminate some of the dilemmas within the profession with full awareness that the complex nature of the teaching profession challenges some of the taken-for-granted ways we think about individual and professional autonomy. We begin our exploration with the following definition: autonomy refers to thinking for oneself in uncertain and complex situations in which