Main description:

This book introduces the insights of contemporary relational psychoanalysis to educational thought and uses them as the foundation for a comprehensive model for understanding and informing teaching and learning practice. The model integrates what we know about conscious thought, motivation, and the physical body and translates these understandings in ways that are meaningful and relevant to the circumstances of practicing teachers, school leaders, and teachers of teachers. It will be of great interest to them and to those educational scholars whose attentions turn to the exigencies of the current era.

Echoing calls for inclusivity, the book stands against admonishing anyone on the right way to be a person. Instead it emphasises understanding and, in understanding, practicing well. Readers will gain a deeper appreciation of the nature of sense-making and awareness and of the practical implications of cognition as embodied, life forms as non-linear dynamic systems, and relationships as core to human development and classroom life.

It was Einstein who, in a letter to Freud, once asked for an educational solution to the menace of war. Today's urgencies - of nations divided, diminishing planetary resources, and certain ecological disasters - press for wisdom beyond our collective habit. Thankfully the once-elusive mysteries of life, mind, learning, and learning systems now yield in ways to help shape answers to Einstein's question. Relational psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, educational theorists, teachers, and those who work with them will be intrigued by the convergences and heartened at the possibilities.

Contents:

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