In the pictures from the French fictional novel by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1943) I included in my last post- we can see some of the implications of assumptions and predetermined ideas about art and education. The narrator drew an elephant inside a boa constrictor, but the interpretations by adults -who thought it was a hat or that it was not worthwhile art- destroyed his motivation to continue exploring art and visual expression. The narrator speaks to the divisions of language when he says “grown-ups never understand anything by themselves, and it is exhausting for children to provide explanations over and over again” (p.2). In this post I want to think with Deborah Britzman’s (2006) work with psychoanalysis in educational philosophy to explore other ways of thinking about this gap or division.
In many of my past posts I have written about disrupting this division between theory and practice- thought and action- in ways that question the fluidity of ideas and movement, and I have suggested that these concepts might be inseparable. However; I also want to acknowledge ideas from social constructivist theories and philosophers, like Foucault (Mac Naughton, 2005), who speak about the power of language, and I want to clarify that the divisions that are socially constructed through language and norms of relationships are no less or more real than physical divisions. The thought and theorists we have engaged with in earlier posts can help us become aware of divisions and aware of the actions and theories we engage with blindly that privilege specific cultures, groups of people and ways of being in the world. Ecology theory, in particular, disrupts the idea of divisions as it talks about how everything is interconnected- but it also emphasizes the relationships between things- in that space of the divide. It is this space of division that is taken up by psychoanalytical theorists (Britzman, 2006).
In some of Britzman’s (2006, and in Boldt & Salvio, 2006) works, she thinks with psychoanalysis to focus on the divisions between knowledge and the unknown, learning and unlearning. Rather than looking at ways to break down this division- she considers its complexity. Our desires to know, and our desires to teach specific knowledge, are challenged on one hand by things that are taboo and on the other by things that are taken for granted. Briztman (in Boldt &Salvio, p.167) says that “in our attempts to know the depth of our world, we become entangled with our own phantasies of knowledge and resistance to this knowing.” With Britzman I have come to question how teaching pursues specific knowledges or resistances to knowing. How can we engage with children and curriculum in education in ways where we respect the gap between the known and the unknown? Britzman talks about the drive teachers have to teach- to share knowledge- and how this is both the beauty of teaching and the danger of education, as we assume that learning happens in particular ways when engaging in particular experiences. Britzman quotes Gardner (p. 118): “What is the furor to teach? It is a menace. It is a menace to teacher’s, to students and to innocent bystanders. Teachers possessed by that furor are in trouble. Teachers devoid of that furor- if such can be called teachers- are in more trouble.”
Britzman, D. P. (2006). Novel education: Psychoanalytic studies of learning and not learning. New York: Peter Lang Publishing. Retrieved from http://books.google.ca/books?id=tppiMsRJ-N8C&printsec=frontcover&dq=britzman+novel+education&source=bl&ots=uQuOyTj8P5&sig=tLAGtnPTBHB6mG-IIMlzepJPdOg&hl=en&ei=38DpTJaiBobQsAPe4KWxCw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CBoQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false
Britzman, D. (2006). Sigmund Freud, Melanie Klein and little Oedipus: On the pleasures and disappointments of sexual enlightenment. In G.M. Boldt, & P.M. Salvio (Ed.) Psychoanalytic Essays on Childhood, Teaching, and Learning. New York: Routledge.
De Saint-Exupéry, A. (1943). Le Petit Prince. New York: Harcourt, Inc. Retrieved from http://books.google.ca/books?id=i5yLUd056GoC&printsec=frontcover&dq=petit+prince&ei=jobhTK-QN5_wkwSqpOXICA&client=firefox-a&cd=2#v=onepage&q&f=false
Mac Naughton, G. (2005). Doing Foucault in early childhood studies: Applying poststructural ideas. New York: Routledge.
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