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

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

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

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

Let Them Get Mad: Using the Psychoanalytic Frame to Rethink SEL and Trauma Infomed Practice

This article draws on the concept of the psychoanalytic frame to argue that SEL and trauma-informed practices, as codified constructs, might be excessively rigid when it comes to making sense of children\u27s and teacher\u27s emotional worlds. Drawing on vignettes from observations in a third-grade classroom where there is not yet a mandate for SEL, the author shows how sometimes, the very absence of a codified approach to children\u27s difficult behaviors and emotions can lead to an increase in their sense that they are seen and heard by their teacher and by one another

MeToo and the Problematic Valor of Truth: Sexual Violence, Consent, and Ambivalence in Public Pedagogy

In this paper, the authors consider the #MeToo movement as an act of public pedagogy. They read #MeToo as an example of a public curriculum that speaks back to, and simultaneously participates in, the posttruth era associated with the Trump presidency. What are the public pedagogical and curricular implications of this outcry against sexual assault and harassment? What about understanding education’s complicated relationships with truth and consent? Using the Time Magazine article, The Silence Breakers, and the curriculum documents organized under the hashtag #MeTooK12, Clarke-Vivier and Stearns explore the relationship between public conversations about sexual violence and notions of truth, consent, and education