Affect in the Classroom: A Psychoanalytic and Cultural Exploration of Social and Emotional Learning

This dissertation explores the contemporary educational construct known as Social and Emotional Learning, or SEL. It investigates how the child, the teacher and the relationship between children and teachers are figured in the SEL-managed classroom. The dissertation also examines the extent to which SEL is produced by, and productive of, culture, as well as what becomes of negative and unruly affect in the context of SEL. The dissertation triangulates data from Critical Discourse Analysis of selected SEL materials, classroom observations in two different public school elementary school classrooms, and interviews with participating teachers. A combination of Kleinian psychoanalysis and affect theory are drawn on as a theoretical frame. The dissertation argues that SEL figures the child as someone feral and in need of external control, which can be provided by the teacher as knowing subject and emotional expert. Further, analysis shows that SEL contributes to and is influenced by an ongoing cultural disavowal of race, class, sex, and the body in the childhood classroom. Finally, the dissertation argues that SEL contributes to a phenomenon called hegemonic positivity, refusing to take seriously the lessons and possibilities constituted within negative affect and conflict

Social inclusion for young people with and without psychosis: the importance of internal and external factors

Psychosis most commonly first occurs during adolescence or early adulthood, disrupting the social and occupational transitions characterising this time. Studies on social and occupational outcomes in psychosis have tended to focus on observer-rated, dysfunction-based outcomes. However, mental health services are increasingly adopting a personal recovery model; focusing on facilitating hopeful and individually meaningful lives. Social inclusion is paramount to personal recovery but there is a need for greater awareness of the processes by which mental health services facilitate social inclusion for young people with psychosis. Cognitive models and research with longterm psychosis service users suggests that negative self-beliefs contribute to poorer social outcomes in psychosis, whereas personal recovery models emphasise the role of hopefulness and therapeutic relationships with optimistic mental health professionals. This thesis first investigates a structural model of social inclusion and its association with hope and negative self-beliefs for healthy young people (n= 387). Then the processes by which young service users’ self-beliefs, therapeutic relationships and professionals’ beliefs influence social inclusion are explored using directed path models (n= 51). Directed path models then test how professional characteristics, focusing on attachment styles and job attitudes, facilitate therapeutic relationships (n= 61). Finally, the contributions of self-beliefs, therapeutic relationships, professional beliefs and social inclusion in predicting vocational outcomes are explored (n= 51). Current findings support the relative importance of hopefulness over negative selfbeliefs in social inclusion for young people with and without psychosis. Hope appears particularly important for adolescents compared to young adults. Positive relationships with optimistic professionals predict service users’ hopefulness, social inclusion and vocational activity. Findings suggest that professionals’ own attachment style and job attitudes may aid in positive therapeutic relationship formation. These findings encourage a greater focus on therapeutic relationships and service users’ hopefulness in youth psychosis service provision. Professional training should encourage greater awareness of professionals’ own attachment style and job attitudes, and how these factors impact on positive therapeutic relationship developmen

How History Shows the Damage Done by Corporate Influence on Education. A Book Review of \u3cem\u3eSchooling Corporate Citizens: How Accountability Reform Has Damaged Civic Education and Undermined Democracy\u3c/em\u3e

Evans’s book addressed the history of accountability-based reform against the thesis that corporate interests have played an extensive, insidious rule in directing the nature of educational policy. This review lauds Evans’s careful history and documentation, as well as his sharp critique of the dangerous implications of corporate involvement for social studies education. The review questions Evans’s open-mindedness in relation to the Common Core State Standards

An Embodied Education: Questioning Hospitality to the Queer

This is an essay about hospitality and the ways we must question frameworks telling us to welcome the queer in educational contexts. I will show how educational scholarship as well as programming for schools, teachers and students have emphasized the interconnected concepts of hospitality and welcome as a way of keeping queer bodies legislatively, physically and psychically safe. While acknowledging the importance of hospitality as a starting point, I examine its limits with the hope of showing how it might foreclose curiosity. I argue that one fundamental problem with hospitality and welcome toward the queer is the way these phenomena can disembody individual and mutual existence. My goal is not primarily to critique extant efforts at queering education but rather to offer an alternate vision of the relationship between queerness and education that takes the body seriously. An aspect of my aim is indeed to provoke; while I understand that an embodied vision for education is unlikely to come to fruition with any alacrity, I wonder if urging queer educational discourse and even programming in this direction might create new possibilities for mutual coexistence and discovery

Copepods controlling bacterial communities on fecal pellets

The traditional view of the marine food web depicts bacteria and copepods (mainly planktonic species) as separate units, indirectly connected via nutrient cycling and trophic cascade processes. In contrast, several recent studies have demonstrated that zooplankton and bacteria directly interact, physically, e.g. bacteria attached to zooplankton bodies and biologically, e.g. zooplankton feeding supports bacterial growth through their excretions. Copepods produce large numbers of fecal pellets in the marine environment. Almost immediately after egestion, pellets host extensive bacterial communities. Low amounts of fecal material in sediment traps indicate most part of fecal pellet production is retained in the water column as a result of high microbial degradation rates and planktonic copepods reworking the fecal pellets. First observations on the re-use of feces by benthic copepods points out that these crustaceans profit in a yet unknown way from fecal pellet bacteria. Recently it was illustrated that the benthic species Paramphiascella fulvofasciata increases its fecal pellet production according to its food source. Presumably the bacteria associated with fecal pellets create a trophic upgrading of the fecal material. A detailed characterization of these bacteria is crucial to understand the trophic pathways in the lower marine food web. Culture-independent molecular techniques (e.g. DGGE) showed the specificity of these communities. Shifts in the bacterial communities are caused by age, original food source (e.g. diatoms) and producer of the fecal pellet. Moreover, an additional grazing experiment illustrated the importance of the freshness of the initial food source for grazing preferences but also for the bacterial communities on the fecal pellets. Food of low quality was compensated by more diverse bacterial communities that were available for additional grazing. These results illustrated the importance of fecal bacteria in the transformation of organic matter and energy transfer in marine sediments

Toward a More Loving Framework for Literacy Education

In this provocative and moving essay, Clio Stearns, a Bank Street educated teacher, toggles back and forth between moments with her young daughter who daily grows more attached to books and moments with her fifth grade students who remain disconnected from her carefully chosen texts. Refracted through a psychoanalytic lens and a deeply caring heart, Stearns’ description of her classroom practices offers a canny account of all that she must give up in order to see through and past her students’ resistance. In a surprising turn of events she learns to join with her students as they become curious readers of the world that really matters to them

Rough Beginnings: Imagining the Origins of Agriculture in Late Medieval and Early Modern Britain

The Renaissance had both apocalyptic and hopeful visions of the future, but both were tied into the idea of the Golden Age, a past age that could be described as perfectly fertile or hopelessly barren, as a time of plenty or of hunger. The idea of a time before agriculture was approached with ambivalence: it was at once the innocent, ideal beginning and the feared end. I argue in my dissertation, “Rough Beginnings: Imagining the Origins of Agriculture in Late Medieval and Early Modern Britain,” that stories about the invention of agriculture allowed writers of poetry, drama, history, and husbandry manuals to think through the question of what humans owed to the Earth and its peoples