The Teacher as Container of Anxiety: Psychoanalysis and the Role of Teacher

French, Robert

doi:10.1177/105256299702100404

Cited by 39 publications

(30 citation statements)

References 7 publications

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“…After reading, writing, "rithmetic, the fourth "R" should be relationship (Bukowski, Laursen, & Hoza, 2010;Bukowski, Newcomb & Hartup, 1996). Indeed, it has been claimed that all learning occurs in within a relational context (French, 1997). The results have shown that there are close associations between the teacher-student relationships and the learning process, including aspects of motivation, interest and school well-being.…”

Section: Observation Sequence 01/28/2003mentioning

confidence: 72%

Thick Description of the Teacher-student Relationship in the Educational Context of School: Results of an Ethnographic Field Study

Raufelder

Bukowski²,

Mohr

2013

Journal of Education and Training Studies

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Complexities of essential aspects of the teacher-student relationship were identified in a group of German adolescents and their teachers through participant observation. It is already known that the determinants of the teacher-student relationship cannot be simply categorized and analyzed as univariate features. Using Clifford Geertz"s concept of "thick description," empirical data were collected during a six-month field study at a secondary school in the south of Germany. Thematic analyses of the extant empirical database identified six sociological principles that constitute fundamental components of the teacher-student relationship: power, dualism, solidarity, productivity, sympathy, and identity. Analyses showed that meaningful ritualized structures limit teachers and students to institutional roles that are incongruent with the general aim of having productive interactions in educational settings. The complexity of educational settings can only be grasped if the teacher-student relationship is understood as an interpersonal process. When reduced to their institutional roles, both teachers and students experienced their relationship and educational settings as unsatisfactory.

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Section: Observation Sequence 01/28/2003mentioning

confidence: 72%

Thick Description of the Teacher-student Relationship in the Educational Context of School: Results of an Ethnographic Field Study

Raufelder

Bukowski²,

Mohr

2013

Journal of Education and Training Studies

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“…For instance, Heron (1992) refers to the emotional competence required to acknowledge and live with feelings, both one's own and others'. The psychoanalytic literature on learning emphasises the need to contain anxiety and manage the dynamics of transference, both flattering and more hostile (French, 1997). Here, emotional resilience is a kind of expertise, not antithetical but complementary to the expertise of the intellect.…”

Section: Nuanced Understandings Of Expertisementioning

confidence: 99%

“…The greatest anxiety seemed to be mine! To shield myself from the anxiety of failing as the 'one who is supposed to know' (French, 1997), I had chosen a topic where I had a large repertoire of knowledge and illustrations upon which to draw. But in reality, my anxieties were not related to knowledge or expertise; they felt more closely connected with fears of personal rejection, including vague fears of being thought unattractive, in looks and/or personality.…”

Section: Expressing and Thrusting Into Spacementioning

confidence: 99%

‘Oh, was that “experiential learning”?!’ Spaces, synergies and surprises with Kolb’s learning cycle

Tomkins

Ulus

2015

Management Learning

111

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We share findings from empirical research into Kolb's experiential learning (EL) approach, using our reflections as teachers and data from our undergraduate management students.The EL experience emerges as a space where bodies, feelings and ideas move and develop in intimate relationship with one another. This is a space where teachers exercise authority over, and commitment to, the here-and-now, risking corporeal and intellectual exposure. We probe the concept of experience in EL, suggesting that teachers require a kind of 'experiential expertise' to draw both on embodied felt sense and on what one has done in one's own career to role-model the transformation of experience into knowledge, which is at the heart of Kolb's theory. We explore a blurring of experiential agency, and the tendency for students to appropriate the teacher's experience rather than dwell on or develop their own. For us, EL is more usefully seen as 'relationship-centred' than 'student-centred', and we contrast this relational focus with the way EL seems to have been popularised as antiinterventionist, a kind of educational 'laissez-faire'. Based on these reflections, we suggest powerful connections between phenomenology and theories of space as a way of conceptualising the complexities and richness of teaching and learning experiences. Key words:experiential learning; embodiment; phenomenology; space; feelings Page 2 THE CASE FOR EXPERIENTIAL LEARNINGIn the last few decades, experiential learning (EL) has become increasingly prevalent in management education at undergraduate, postgraduate and executive education levels (Kayes, 2002;Reynolds and Vince, 2007). Its popularity seems related to dissatisfaction with traditional information transfer approaches and a reaction against the 'banking model', where teachers make knowledge 'deposits' (Freire, 1982). Such methods are being supplemented and, in some cases, replaced by a range of more 'student-centred' approaches, one of which is EL (Kirschner et al., 2006). These encourage students to make their own sense of the content, and craft their own connections amongst the various concepts (Biggs, 1999;Säljö, 1979).We think the popularity of EL reflects something of a 'turn to experience' in a range of disciplines, including management studies (Cunliffe and Coupland, 2011;Sanders, 1982); management education (Yakhlef, 2010;Strati, 2007); phenomenological psychology (Langdridge, 2007;Smith et al., 2009); positive psychology (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990;Rathunde, 2001); and neuroscience (Gallagher and Brøsted Sørensen, 2006;Gallese, 2003). In their various ways, writers in these fields use the notion of experience as their core unit of analysis, whether subjective experience is investigated in its own right or linked to more objectively observable neurological or behavioural activity. For us, such a 'turn to experience' is beautifully crystallised in R.D. Laing's injunction to defend the 'unreal' against the 'real' (Laing, 1967): Taking experience seriously means honouring and valuing people's sub...

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“…Is it because feelings of violation are uncomfortable and will probably cause more problems in the sense that they demand more thought and more work, if they are to be taken more seriously? In any event, the case conference did not appear to help mobilise more mature mental capacity and enable Anne to overcome the unavoidable emotional imbalance that comes with being a teacher [43] [44]. Instead, it seems important for teachers avoid unbearable feelings.…”

Section: The Case Conferencementioning

confidence: 99%

Passing the Buck, or Thinking about Experience? Conditions for Professional Development among Teachers in a Norwegian Middle School

Ramvi¹

2017

JSS

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This paper uses psychoanalytic ideas to explore obstacles and conditions for learning from experience among teachers. In specific, this is about consequences of failure in relationships. A particular situation that happened during an ethnographic study in a middle school in Norway is used to get as close as possible to a teacher's feelings and perceptions of a frustrating situation. The situation is followed up to understand how the individual teacher tried to deal with the problem and how her colleagues and the school management tried to support and help her. Interpreting the situation to involve violation of all dimensions of the teacher's subjectivity (personal, professional and cultural), the problem seems to be too complex to deal with in the school organization. It seems as if teachers and leadership unconsciously avoid unbearable feelings, with the consequence that violation of the teachers is not recognised, and thus not possible to learn from. Problems were repeated rather than understood.

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The Teacher as Container of Anxiety: Psychoanalysis and the Role of Teacher

Cited by 39 publications

References 7 publications

Thick Description of the Teacher-student Relationship in the Educational Context of School: Results of an Ethnographic Field Study

Thick Description of the Teacher-student Relationship in the Educational Context of School: Results of an Ethnographic Field Study

‘Oh, was that “experiential learning”?!’ Spaces, synergies and surprises with Kolb’s learning cycle

Passing the Buck, or Thinking about Experience? Conditions for Professional Development among Teachers in a Norwegian Middle School

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