1st Edition

Love's Return Psychoanalytic Essays on Childhood, Teaching, and Learning

Edited By Gail M. Boldt, Paula M. Salvio Copyright 2006

    The idea that teachers love children is often taken for granted in education. Rarely is the idea of love itself examined. Bringing together the work of educators, curriculum theorists and clinical psychoanalysts, and drawing upon autobiographical and narrative case studies, this groundbreaking collection examines the collision of love and learning, including the ways in which such intersections are provoked, repressed and denied. Contributors turn to psychoanalysis to explore questions of love in all of its varying permutations - ambivalence, sexuality, hatred, desire, projection, and loss - in order to demonstrate how the social ramifications of such work is critical to the ways teachers are currently being prepared for life in the classroom.

    Introduction.  Introduction to the Interludes  Interlude 1: Scenes of Love and Control: Born Into Brothels.  I Love Them To Death.   Savage Inequalities Indeed: Irrationality and Urban School Reform  Interlude 2: Scenes from The Black Couch: Dottie Gets Spanked.  On the Vicissitudes of Love and Hate: Anne Sexton’s Pedagogy of Loss and Reparation.  Mother Love’s Education.  Interlude 3. The Painful Politics of Love and History.  Transnational Adoptions and Queer Diasporas.  Parenting and the Narcisstic Demands of Whiteness.  Interlude 4: The Child’s Question  Sigmund Freud, Melanie Klein and Little Oedipus: On the Pleasures and Disappointments of Sexual Enlightenment.  On Knowing and Desiring Children: The Significance of the Unthought Known  Interlude 5: Curriculum and the Erotics of Learning.  Romantic Research: Why We Love to Read.  Reading, Writing and the Wrath of My Father.  Love in the Classroom: Desire and Transference in Teaching and Learning.  About the Contributors

     

     

     

     

    Biography

    Gail Masuchika Boldt, Ph.D., is Assistant Professor in the College of Education at the University of Iowa. She teaches courses on theories of identity and representation, Foucault and education, media education and children's popular culture, methods of elementary language arts, and methods of elementary reading.
    Paula M. Salvio, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of Education at the University of New Hampshire. She teaches courses on literacy education, the teaching of writing, writing and performance, curriculum theory, and the philosophy of education.