1st Edition
Relational Psychoanalysis at the Heart of Teaching and Learning How and Why it Matters
Acknowledgements
Prologue: in which the author positions herself
Part I: The relational turn
1. Distinguishing the relational perspective
2. Psychoanalysis in education
3. Voices at education’s helm
Part II: A dialectic theory of learning: self, other, and the transitional object
4. Meaning-making and the curricular object
5. Of minds and bodies: a few orienting tenets
6. Becoming self: storied in relationality, steeped in affect
7. Theorising learning: philosophies, understandings, and perspectives over the years
8. Dialectics arrested: on learning’s refusal
Part III: Into practice: for meaningful inclusion
9. Capacity, trust, and meaning
10. Rethinking twenty-first-century orthodoxy
11. Classrooms as holding environments
12. The provision of curricular objects: teaching for discernments that matter
13. Selves and witnesses: teacher know your story
Epilogue: through angst and grace, in this together
References
Index
Biography
Lissa D’Amour recently retired from the Faculty of Education, University of Calgary. Her 15 years working with prospective and practicing teachers followed upon and benefited from 25 years of school-teaching success in a variety of everyday contexts, from pre-kindergarten through grade 12. Today, as an independent scholar, Lissa continues to work at bringing relational psychoanalytic understanding into curriculum theory and, through curriculum theory, into the lived experiences and practical lives of teachers and their students.
"Sophisticatedly simple, this book is a 'sanctuary for the mutual meeting of minds' (quoted in this volume), one wherein apparent antinomies – progressivism v. traditionalism, theory v. practice, scientific biology v. humanist philosophy – provoke not bifurcation but stunning synthesis in Lissa D’Amour’s theory of teaching and learning. Panoramic yet detailed, playful while earnest, joyful and discerning and attuned (despite past trauma, despite the dire present in which we are embedded), this book (itself a transitional object, see within) rides relational psychoanalysis to destinations solitary and shared, sublime and strategic, a sustained - and sustaining - 'a-ha' educational experience of authenticity and presence." - William F. Pinar, Professor and Canada Research Chair, University of British Columbia, Vancouver
"Lissa D’Amour has reached a brilliant and unexpected conclusion: Relational Psychoanalysis provides ideas and values that can be used to structure a humanistically-informed way of thinking about what it means to educate people, and how to do it. D’Amour encourages people, in learning, to become ever more familiar and accepting of what they find in themselves, and between themselves and others. She argues against imposing faddish values and techniques from outside. I don’t know enough about education to comment on Curriculum Theory; I am a psychoanalyst, one of the relational psychoanalysts that D’Amour cites. But with that proviso, I believe I can see that D’amour’s book is a tour de force, a brave and creative contribution to Curriculum Theory, and to all of education." - Donnel B. Stern, Ph.D., William Alanson White Institute of Psychoanalysis, New York
