Landwash Readers: A Space of Collective Reading in the Medical Humanities

As readers, the sedimentations of our surrounding world ensure that we never read alone. There is an uneasy otherness in all readings, through which naming our obstacles is a bringing to the fore a consciousness of lack and flatness; what Maxine Greene calls an achievement of freedom in education as a transcendence of the given, an overcoming that is never complete. Obstacles in learning, which signify the dialectical nature of every human situation, are stirrings that engage dialogue in the place of an assumed silence, imagining the possible pluralities of subjectivity through learning on the verges of a fractured space. Within the context of this pedagogical confrontation, I examine the articulations of a reading group in the medical humanities from St. John’s, Newfoundland. Surpassing the closed nature of individual readings, such groups choose to act out their freedoms, and in doing so, interact with other people and textual forms as obstacles, where reading is a looping, a struggle, and a risking of free choice in a landspace that is forever shifting. As a commitment of an inherently social nature, Greene’s struggle for freedom in learning enables an embracing of alterity in a reader’s process of becoming; to become different from what one is, and what one is supposed to be—pursuing a curriculum of incessant rupturing, where openings and cleavages are always available. In this paper, I look at one use-value of social reading shared by members of this reading group: Resistance, and a Legitimation of Artistry in Medicine

Detours of Growth

Review of: Farley, Lisa. Childhood beyond Pathology: A Psychoanalytic Study of Development and Diagnosis. SUNY P, 2018.   DOI: 10.1353/jeu.2020.001

Burning at the Edges: Judith P. Robertson and the Provocations of Reading

In the writings of curriculum and literary theorist Judith P. Robertson, we encounter the stirrings of a language that often refers to something outside of the material heart of reading, yet essential to its very operations. There is something that "burns" at reading's edges, a desire that the encounter of reading awakes, provokes, and inspires. This paper examines these implications of Robertson's writings, paying particular attention to her considerations of reading as a social experience, as an erotic and embodied activity, as a gathering of the psychic and physical worlds of the reader, and as a function of travelling and landscape.

Saltwater Chronicles: reading representational spaces in selected book clubs in St. John's, Newfoundland

Saltwater Chronicles investigates the notion of “islandness” in contemporary Newfoundland readership through two in-depth case studies of book clubs as representational spaces in the elaboration of local knowledge and identities. We demonstrate how select Newfoundland readers perform acts of regeneration in which the lived, loved, and experiential dimensions of literary space come to invoke the permeability of psychic and geographic borders, the dangers and possibilities of the landwash, and the always-already precarious designation of limits between self and other. We provide examples of how, for these island readers, “islandness” as a symbolic point of address slips and border-crosses in the in-between semiotic spaces of literary encounter

Education and The School of Dreams: Learning and Teaching on the Invisible Edge of Reality and Fantasy

This paper involves a series of speculations, through literature, on what it might mean for the teacher and student to dwell on the precarious frontier of dreaming, and also, what education is bound to lose if its efforts only allow the immediate qualities of doing and knowing, ignoring the hints of a life that doubles the one we live in the clear of day. I theorize how dreaming may contribute to a theory of education that does not necessarily have to disavow what it cannot read, and what it does not yet understand. I open this paper with a short illustration of the powerful urge to the wakeful and rational, drawn from the pages of comic artist Lynda Barry’s (1992) graphic narrative My Perfect Life. I then explore the creative possibilities of dreaming as found in Laurie Halse Anderson’s (1999) young adult novel Speak, which offers a useful example of a teacher at times encouraging his student’s movement to dream

To Linger on the Edge of Bad Feelings: Thoughts and Advice for Graduate Students on the Unsure Dance of Writing for Publication

In this paper, I discuss the process of developing a piece of writing for publication. Written for an intended audience of graduate students in the field of education, I discuss writing for publication as an arrangement for significance, the question of finding a discursive and intellectual home, the selection of an appropriate journal in which to publish, the importance of spaces and rituals of writing, and the conversational dynamics of peer review.Dans cet article, j’aborde le processus de production d’un texte dans le but d’être publié. M’adressant aux étudiants gradués dans le domaine de l’éducation, je parle de la publication en tant qu’élaboration d’un message, de la recherche d’une famille discursive et intellectuelle, de la sélection d’une revue dans laquelle publier, de l’importance de l’espace et des rituels de la rédaction et des dynamiques conversationnelles de l’évaluation par les pairs

The Possibilities for a Pedagogy of Boredom: Rethinking the Opportunities of Elusive Learning

This paper theorizes on the elusive relationship between boredom and education, rethinking the opportunities and implications of encountering the boring in the sphere of schooling. In approaching the writings of Heidegger, Benjamin, and Kracauer, among others, I wonder whether a failure to recognize the utter ambiguity and ambivalence of boredom, as something that affects both teachers and students, bespeaks an impulse to ignore the potential that lies in the uncertainties of educational practice. I also reflect on how the shape of this recognition influences whether we consent to, or disavow, the inevitable absence of omnipotence and mastery in the movements of teaching and learning

The Something from Within: Asking of Education's Desire and Impossibility

David Lewkowich 67 The rhythms of reading, always strange and silent, always present and piercing, often wrench me violently around in time and space, as piles of dog-eared books clutter and confuse the many surfaces of my life. Though sometimes, in books and other places, their song is a trace more serene, as their pulsings remind me of the melodies in my own breath. In recent months, I've frequently found myself at Deborah Britzman's Lost Subjects, Contested Objects (1998), and when I read over page 42, I am struck by the recurrence of a single sentence: "Something from within must pressure the learner." Halfway through the page we see it for the first time, and I am still taken slightly aback by the poetic simplicity of its structure, and then near the bottom we encounter it again, as refrain: "Something from within must pressure the learner." At first, I wrote off this textual echo as unintended and perhaps an editing mistake, despite the almost perfect cadence in its constitution. But now, after poring over the stain of its letters more than a few times, I recognize the significance of its journey. The words themselves enact a return, and the transferential relations of love and hate in pedagogical spaces, the unconscious return of which Britzman speaks, is made performance, and on my lips, is made flesh. And since as teachers, "our bodies are read as texts and … we have no control over the meanings extracted" (Khayatt, 1999, p. 112), something from within must pressure the learner. In what follows, and in trying to understand the substance of this "something" and the pulls of this "pressure," I explore the relations of desire and knowledge in spaces of teaching and learning. In situatin

Technology and Curriculum: Shadows and Machines

The influence of technology in today’s classroom is undeniably ubiquitous and scattered, and though the practice of conceptualizing technological application emerges from within an already contested and highly politicized field of human relations, when approached in the context of curriculum, this contestation takes on new significance. In this paper, I construct a claim that, when introduced into the sphere of education, technology brings its own curricular shadows. I argue that while certain technologies seem to place restrictions on a learner’s capacity for expression and experimentation, these restrictions are by no means absolute or immovable, and that to think through technology aesthetically is to posit the presence of alternative possibilities and meanings. The performative potential of technology is here considered as within a dialogue with the curriculum-as-lived-experience, where learning necessarily exclaims its ambiguity as a forever-fluctuating relationality.De nos jours, l’influence de la technologie au sein des classes est indéniablement perméable et répandue. L’utilisation d’applications technologiques conceptuelles émerge d’un domaine des relations humaines largement politisé et déjà contesté. Cependant, cette contestation, lorsqu’étudiée dans le contexte des programmes, prend un tout nouveau sens. Dans cet article, j’énonce que la technologie, une fois introduite dans la sphère éducationnelle, crée des zones ombres sur le programme. Je soutiens que, même si certaines technologies semblent restreindre la capacité de l’apprenant à s’exprimer et expérimenter, ces restrictions ne sont en aucun cas absolues et inébranlables. En fait, considérer la technologie de manière esthétique équivaut à postuler l’existence de possibilités et sens alternatifs. Le potentiel performant de la technologie est considéré ici comme faisant partie d’un dialogue avec le programme comme expérience vécue, au coeur de laquelle l’apprentissage exprime son ambiguïté comme relation toujours fluctuante