The Cowl - v.54 - n.7 - Nov 1, 1989

The Cowl - student newspaper of Providence College. Volume 54, Number 7 - November 1, 1989. 20 pages

PREY BEGINS WITH PLAY

My work examines the lasting psychological and emotional torment of trauma focusing on sexual violence against women. My thesis consists of five short animated films recounting non-fiction experiences of sexual assault. To contextualize my work within cultural and historical representations of sexual violence, this text reflects my research on the mishandling of rape in Western art history as well as contemporary politics and cinema. In both my work and research, I address the complicated, and often contradictory, internal reality of experiencing and remembering trauma and how this relates to artistic strategies such as collage and maximalism. My personal struggles recovering from sexual abuse are woven throughout this research to illuminate specific choices made in my work, such as the use of animation and playful aesthetics

Re-imagining Teacher Leadership: An Autoethnographic Inquiry

Leadership has been given deliberate prominence in education in the quest to activate educational capacity and improve educational performance within schools (Hargreaves & Ainscow, 2015). Expectations for the teaching profession as a whole, and in particular teacher leadership, are central to the hopes of “improving school outcomes, improving the educational attainment of students, and replacing conceptualizations of leadership” (Torrance & Humes, 2015, p. 792). In spite of the positive rhetoric regarding teacher leadership, it has not been successful in achieving these aims, especially on a wider scale (Barth, 2013; Coggins & McGovern, 2014). Re-imagining teacher leadership raises the question of what teacher leadership is, why it has not been deemed successful, and what spaces exist for teachers to lead within. The author’s experiences are situated through self-narrative writing and compared to existing literature on teacher leadership, raising questions as to why existing educational landscapes might remain inhospitable to the legitimacy of teacher leadership. While micro-events are the focus of this research, their relationship to macro-structures indicates the need for re-imagining the spaces where teachers can lead within school systems. This autoethnographic inquiry illustrates how reflection on career events and teacher leadership experiences can enrich the description of educational leadership and the role educators can take in fostering leadership.

Screening the Psycho-Dynamics of Learning to Teach: A Study of Depression in Teacher Education

Screening the Psycho-Dynamics of Learning to Teach is a psychoanalytic study about the status of depression in teacher education. How do films that depict depressed teachers and students offer educationalists a resource for working through depression in pedagogy? I suggest that the interminable process of learning to teach requires teachers to encounter loss, vulnerability, and sadness. Yet, the ubiquity of these emotional conditions means that depression, as a psychical defense against strong emotions, pervades the profession of teaching and prevents teachers and learners from thinking creatively. With the problem of the teachers depression in mind, I turn to three recent films about depressed educational subjects, Monsieur Lazhar (2011), Half Nelson (2006), and Mona Lisa Smile (2004) to examine both how popular representations of education depict depression in teaching and how these representations may be used as a resource for making significance of the extraordinary and mundane emotional conflicts of learning to teach. I frame my discussion of depression using the psychoanalytic theories of the dead mother (Green, 1980) and the dead teacher (Farley, 2014) in order to think about how new teachers (lost) desire affects teaching and learning relations. In each chapter, I analyze one film using one psychoanalytic concept that is relevant to pedagogy: transference in Half Nelson, identification in Mona Lisa Smile, and melancholia in Monsieur Lazhar. Alternatively, these chapters each analyze one depressed figure who haunts the scene of education: the teacher in Half Nelson who is in transference with a caring student repeats the unconscious fantasy of the emotionally dead mother; the new teacher in Mona Lisa Smile identifies with feminist historical fantasies in order to sustain her teaching desire for the depressed student(s); and, the depressed teacher in Monsieur Lazhar finds a surviving maternal teacher through whom he learns to symbolize and mourn his losses in teaching. The final chapter turns from visual analysis of the films to a discussion of the films as sites of viewer pedagogy. I suggest finally that viewer emotional responses to the films often repeat the psychodynamics of pedagogy represented on screen. Film pedagogy thus creates a space for viewers to remember, repeat, and work through the emotional conflicts of teaching and learning

Revisiting Privilege Revealed and Reflecting on Teaching and Learning Together

In 1996, Professor Stephanie M. Wildman co-authored Privilege Revealed: How Invisible Preference Undermines America, a book offering differing perspectives on how various privileges arise and how society needs to become aware of the invisible privileges in everyday life. In this article, Professor Wildman revisits Privilege Revealed and addresses why teaching about privilege is important and the value in learning about systemic privilege. She provides student reflections on studying privilege to highlight that everyone needs knowledge to make privilege visible and to combat its operation. Professor Wildman argues that a society which urges people to be colorblind is counter to the idea of mindfulness, as people need to understand the role race plays in society. Professor Wildman offers the notion that ‘color insight’ better serves the goals of racial equality and justice. Applying color insight utilizes four steps: (1) considering context for any discussion about race; (2) examining systems of privilege; (3) unmasking perspectivelessness and white normativeness; and (4) combating stereotyping and looking for the ‘me’ in each individual. Professor Wildman concludes that mindfulness of other people’s oppression offers a positive response to privilege, enabling the holder to use that privilege as a step toward social justice

Bridging The Gap Between School and Community: A project based high school for contemporary education

This thesis presents a design exploration into educational facility design, in particular to high schools, and the implications of educational pedagogy on high school design. The thesis poses the question, how can architectural design bridge the gap between schools and community, raising the value of education for students, parents, advisors, and community? A literature review and case study analyses examines both the existing paradigm of traditional school models and the alternative paradigm of the project based model. This thesis focuses on the project based learning model as it relates to design, significantly the three relationships: student to student, student to advisor, and school to community through their influence on design

The Guilty Breast: A Fleshy Semiotics

The Guilty Breast: A Fleshy Semiotics takes up the subject of the nude female breast, from St. Augustine\u27s developing and a shifting semiotic theory of signs and the flesh in Christian doctrine through feminist theories and Foucault\u27s analysis of the scientific “Gaze†to the protests of breastfeeding on social media, such as Facebook and Instagram, and in the public sphere. The dissertation argues that boobs teach us how to see by examining the breast\u27s semiotic anatomy in five parts. “Chapter One: Nipple†asserts that breasts are both…and: maternal and sexual, subjective and objective, metaphoric and actual. “Chapter Two: Cleavage†juxtaposes St. Augustine with French feminist Hélène Cixous to reveal their shared life project of making “the sign†(and substance) of the guilty body—and by extension/ostension, female breasts—morally good. “Chapter Three: Milk†“mangles†and disrupts “the Gaze†of biological theory by dripping thirst, claiming that leaking itself is onto-epistemological. “Chapter Four: Areola†highlights social media\u27s censorship of breastfeeding to explore socially constructed borders. “Chapter Five: Ducts†investigates two political examples of breasts-as-weapon. “Chapter Six: Support†offers “breast semiotics†as a new hermeneutic by which to read nude female breast texts via the plurality of bodies and concludes with a visual example