Deborah P. Britzman

“The question of belief”: writing poststructural ethnography

This article engages current poststructural debates over ethnographic representation. It questions three types of ethnographic authority: the authority of empiricism, the authority of language, and the authority of reading. In performing a form of self‐speculative critique, the author moves behind the scenes of her own ethnography, Practice Makes Practice: A Critical Study of Learning to Teach, to consider the problem of what poststructural theories “do” to ethnographic writing. Two related themes are elaborated in relation to how poststructural debates fashioned interpretive efforts: conceptual issues in the poststructural study of teaching and theoretical issues in the production of ethnographic narratives. Can there be an educational ethnography that exceeds the constraints of humanism? What if the ethnographer began not just to question the discourse of others but to engage the relation between the discourses that render ethnography intelligible and the ethnographic report?

What will have been said about gayness in teacher education

This article explores a theory of narrative that can account for its underlying structures and can critique a paradox of consciousness‐raising: that the more that narratives are privileged in teacher education, the less we know about how this narrative affects what will come to be said about teacher educations reliance upon stories of experience and identity. We bring this paradox to narratives of gayness in teacher education, suggesting three dominant orientations: narratives of difficulty, narratives of relationships and narratives of hospitality. Our resources for thinking about gayness are tied to archives of discrimination and freedom, themselves now affected by the pandemic known as AIDS. Each narrative, we argue, frames what can be said, what will have been said and what remains to be said. This way of analyzing the history of our present and what can count as a problem today, takes inspiration from an eighteenth‐century debate that focused on the question “What is enlightenment?” We argue that this debate allows for new conceptualizations of gayness in teacher education and that new conceptualizations of teacher education can emerge from an encounter with discussions of gayness.

On the Future of Awful Thoughts in Teacher Education

This article explores the idea that the future of a profession resides in the questions it might ask of itself and how such questions affect its thinking. We consider how current conditions in teacher education-its crisis-driven orientation, its manic pace, its focus on control and stable knowledge-foreclose the capacity to think creatively from the having of awful thoughts. Drawing an example from literature we ask, what can it mean, to the lives we already live, to encounter human relations at the most difficult moments and in their most generous and ethical attempts? From this question, we raise themes that might allow us to rethink teacher education: affiliation, commitment, trauma, destruction and community.

Between Psychoanalysis and Pedagogy: Scenes of Rapprochement and Alienation

Abstract With the question of what is between psychoanalysis and pedagogy, this essay presents a psychoanalytic frame for thinking about the study of uncertainty in teaching and learning from the vantage of the education of the author and her notion of “difficult knowledge.” I review my body of research through these dilemmas to picture a theory of learning curious about the fate of uncertainty and affected by the object of study namely, the human subject of education. Two problematics are explored: the theoretical impetus for representing a learning matrix through the vicissitudes of uncertainty, and second, commentary on an affected research. The essay suggests a research and writing style that returns to what could not be known from the immediacy of felt experience and that only later can be narrated as a story of the disparities, accidents, vacillations and fragmentary impressions that come to compose the problem that education as an emotional situation and as such difficult to know.

The Poetics of Supervision: A Psychoanalytical Experiment for Teacher Education

Why would anyone want to become a teacher? What at first glance feels like a test question will turn out to become a startling way to conceptualise the poetics of supervision. The nature of this creativity, however, involves interpreting conscious and unconscious obstacles and inhibitions in teacher education that confine both this question and the supervisor’s work to the supposed realism of classroom observation. This will take us into a forgotten history of learning for love and having to grow up in the classrooms that one returns to as an adult. Bringing the past to bear upon the confines of the present will be one way to transform an understanding of experience in supervision into a philosophical problem of value and desire, akin to what the programme of abstract art gives us over to think: an encounter with what is evocative in the assemblage of material, in lines of force and resistance, in the play of light and darkness, and in the fading away of objects. These dynamics belong to being in language, where the cast of a self’s shadow falls into the epic of words. If the supervisory relationship can be imagined as an experiment in the field of speech, a new discussion on the contentious problem of learning can be made from the vantage of listening to and elaborating the language of teaching. Then, when the subject represents her or his practices to another, supervision will find itself wandering into the thicket of what is most enigmatic in the desire to become a speaking subject. Yet when asked why would anyone want to become a teacher, beginners repeat or feel that they must repeat stock answers to be intelligible to whomever they imagine the questioner to represent. Replies go something like this: I want to become a teacher because I care about children or love my subject area that has been ruined by others; I feel the call to be helpful to society and to the future; I wish to emulate a past teacher who helped me and be a role model to others who have none; I need to change the educational establishment because of my own (bad or good) experience as a student. Supervisors are rarely asked why they want to become a supervisor, although they, too, may say they supervise only to improve practices, share their experience and help others avoid what has already happened to them. But this reduces everyone to needs waiting to be met, spoken about rather than urged to speak. It is as if, in the effort to distinguish firmly good from bad and success from failure, the profession must guarantee itself before the time of understanding. In other words, the profession is caught in the trap of repeating mantras of teaching without remembering or working through childhood fantasies, anxieties and defences made from being educated while

What is the use of theory? A psychoanalytic discussion

Freud asking whether psychoanalysis could be taught in the university, and then whether it could be learned, provides an occasion for asking about the emotional uses of theory. The paper draws from literature, clinical writing and pedagogy to build a psychoanalytic discussion of teaching and learning that takes seriously phantasies of knowledge made from the creation, conveyance and reception of theory. This learning complex involves symptoms in education: resistance to theory, fear of theory, fear of words, and writing inhibitions. Freud’s third model of psychoanalysis, ‘working through’, suggests a new approach to the use of theory in university.

The Adolescent Teacher: A Psychoanalytic Note on Regression in the Professions

Encounters with adolescence and its quest for truth, beauty, and thought can be used as a psychoanalytic framework in understanding the education of the helping professions. A significant conflict resides in the state of professional knowledge toward psychical life that tends to be expressed as alienation between developmental theory and pedagogy. I treat my undergraduate teacher education course The Adolescent and the Teacher as a psychoanalytic case study on the developing education of adults who grew up within the school system and return to work there. The paper focuses on problems in teacher education, an area hardly considered as affecting the imaginary of school psychology, counseling, and social work, and discussions about the nature of adolescence, yet provides a commentary on the impossible professions dedicated to education. The discussion leans on the psychoanalytic idea that adults working in schools are subject to their adolescence—elemental sets of internal conflicts, phantasies, and defenses—that return in professional knowledge as demands for certainty and as a belief that learning is a tonic to conflict as opposed to conflicts delegate. Working with Kristevas (2007) formulation of “the adolescent syndrome of ideality,” the paper speculates on psychical life as our most radical relation to the self and other. Yet in this meeting a kernel of alienation is carried into responses to conflicts in the structure of schooling, self/other relations, the arrangement of professional knowledge, and reaches into the confusion between phantasies of a profession and the daily imperatives to act with certainty.

Affective equality: love, care and injustice

But what are our selves? Everything, good or bad, that we have gone through from our earliest days onwards; all that we have received from the external world and all that we have felt in our inner world, happy and unhappy experiences, relationships to people, activities, interests and thoughts of all kinds—that is to say, everything we have lived through—makes part of ourselves and goes on to build up our personalities ... These earliest emotional situations fundamentally influence our relationships to ourselves. (Melanie Klein)

That Other Scene of Pedagogy: A Psychoanalytic Narrative

My discussion embraces the subjective qualities of the psychoanalytic clinical case study as a method for writing narratives of pedagogy dedicated to interpreting the latency of communication: what has been held back, forgotten, acted out and unconsciously repeated. At the heart of the case study is the literary dilemma of putting to words the transference, thought here as the unconscious desire for the other’s knowledge, authority and love. Of special interest is a narrative conundrum both educators and psychoanalysts share when trying to depict the felt qualities of their work: a great deal is experienced before anything can be known while learning from intersubjective acts is of a different order from anticipation of how things should proceed. The difficulty is that the nature of knowledge exchanged in either psychoanalysis or education may also carry a failure of symbolization, founded in a subjective gap within human relations and repeated in language. Here is where we meet the latency of communication and the question of education as human condition.

On the madness of lecturing on gender: a psychoanalytic discussion

This essay comments on the emotional difficulties psychoanalytic discussion introduces to conceptualising the poesis of gender through its reconsideration of the valence of aggression and its development in psychical reality. It returns to the 1936 lectures on the emotional life of gender given by Melanie Klein and Joan Riviere to a public about to go to war. These psychoanalysts are known for representing ‘the mad side’ of gender and consider femininity and masculinity as lending emotional weight to the body and as one source for phantasy material that propels gender’s reach into symbolisation, conflicts, and intersubjectivity. Their views are brought into tension with Winnicott’s reconceptualisation of aggression in gender development. While historical questions on the relation between psychoanalytic theories of gender and the context of World War II are raised, Winnicott turns to a little war in the emotional life of gender to analyse traces of mental pain that its history leaves in its wake. He raises the new problem of the play between internal and external reality and how a one‐sided take on gender as either masculine or feminine as the entire experience and goal of the body forecloses attempts to understand the self’s gender work as both internal conflict and intersubjectivity. Loyalty to one side, or the defence of splitting into good and bad, itself the condition for war, has as one of its roots gender polarity. The madness of lecturing on gender resides in conveying this problem. My contribution leans on psychoanalytic allegory: that a return to historical discussion of psychoanalysis on the problems of representations of gender may allow reflection on our world of war and create elbow room needed to reconceptualise the currency, difficulties, and emotional obstacles repeated in contemporary pedagogical efforts and research.