To teach is to bring our questions to others, to share as teacher and as students in this process of thinking about who we are on the Earth.
Rebecca A. Martusewicz, “Say Me to Me: Desire and Education”*
Education is never a neutral endeavor. The classroom is an environment where teachers and students bring hopes, fears, and unconscious fantasies about what it means to learn. Teaching requires a love of one’s subject matter and a willingness to understand the disruptive nature of learning, for teacher and student. The multi-layered dimension of teaching requires an attentiveness to the teacher/student dyad and unconscious process as it unfolds in a classroom.
This course will include classroom experience where we read and explore what it means to provoke learning.
Topics to be explored:
- Why teach?
- What constitutes a “mistake” in teaching?
- How do you engage a resistant learner?
- What ways do you encounter and work with negative and positive transferences in the classroom?
- Difference as an ethical encounter
- How can you engage unconscious process to enhance learning?
- How can teachers listen to what is not being said?
*In Learning Desire: Perspectives on Pedagogy, Culture, and the Unsaid (New York: Routledge, 1998), 97-116.
NCSPP is aware that historically psychoanalysis has either excluded or pathologized groups outside of the dominant population in terms of age, race, ethnicity, nationality, language, gender, religion, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, disability, and size. As an organization, we are committed to bringing awareness to matters of anti-oppression, inequity, inequality, diversity, and inclusion as they pertain to our educational offerings, our theoretical orientation, our community, and the broader world we all inhabit.
Presenters Response:
In The Unconscious Goes to School, we will be addressing how teachers can discuss difference and exclusion when presenting any article assigned for a class reading. There will be a discussion during this course on how and why it is necessary to examine developing a curriculum that can include historical texts and also contemporary literature that disrupts traditional narratives.
Rachel Newcombe, LCSW, is a psychoanalyst and supervisor on Orcas Island, WA. She co-leads a writing collective of fellow therapists interested in exploring how creative non-fiction can be an aspect of professional writing. Her work has appeared in Contemporary Psychoanalysis, The Psychoanalytic Review, fort da, Rumpus, 7X7LA, and elsewhere.