Jacques Lacan And Education

This is an introductory level text with emphasis on Lacan’s theoretical relationship to education and which uses Lacan’s theories as a springboard for a different educational discourse, one that forces us to assess inward rather than outward.

Research on Becoming an English Teacher considers the process of becoming a teacher from a variety of perspectives, where the ambition is to consider how people can change themselves within that process. By pursuing an approach influenced by the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan, the authors consider practitioner research as an approach to professional and personal development, and how it might be understood as a strategy within both teaching and teacher education. Taking English teaching as the main example, this book explores the processes and discourses that shape the experience of English teaching in schools. Chapters consider the origin and development of English education, practice and theory in English education, the process of becoming a teacher in school-based environments and creating an analytical space for learning narratives in teacher education. This book will be of interest to academics, researchers and post-graduate students in the fields of teacher education, curriculum studies, educational theory and educational psychology.

This book employs Lacanian psychoanalysis to develop new ways of understanding educational domains. It analyses events, practices and policies that occur in school classrooms, teacher education and higher-degree studies including educational research. It provides an accessible introduction, description and analysis of those aspects of Lacan's work concerned with language, identity and subjectivity directly relevant to the field of education. Regulative discourses and practices in education are a central concern and the authors demonstrate how Lacanian theory empowers our understanding of how such discourses are instrumental in forming teacher and researcher identities. The book also shows how regulatory practices and discourses are relevant to research methodologies that arise in the field of action research in education.

Lacan and Education Policy draws on the rich conceptual resources of Lacanian psychoanalysis. Using Lacan's four discourses Matthew Clarke offers a sophisticated critique of recent education policy and the neoliberal model of political economy within which it sits, including the ways in which education has been diminished and trivialised through the economistic and depoliticising moves of policy. Clarke articulates possibilities for thinking differently about education and education policy beyond the reductive narratives of neoliberalism. He argues that psychoanalytic theory is valuable, not so much for allowing us to see what education 'really is', but for offering insights into what prevents education from 'being', enabling us to shift our focus instead into the possibilities education offers as a space of 'becoming'. The book suggests possibilities for conceptualising and creating 'the other side' of education.

All areas of education policy and practice are driven by unconscious investments in ignorance, or idealised images of transformation of the individual, society and economy. The promise of fulfilment and associated threats of disappointment or destruction tend to dominate conscious accounts of education. Other more vulnerable or unspeakable aspects of our engagements with education are covered over when we account for learning, and justify teaching as professionals, policy makers and researchers; but they leak out in slips, lapses, emphasis, paradox and contradiction. Freud’s account of resistance and repetition; Lacan’s theorisation of the role of language and desire; and Zizek’s elaboration of these ideas in a theory of ideology and enjoyment – all provide tools for exploring the vulnerable, uncomfortable and often surprising other side of education: the hidden, unconscious and unspoken desires that we invest in educational institutions and practices. This collection offers glimpses of this other side of education produced in empirical studies using a variety of methodological approaches: practice-based theoretical speculation, policy analysis, ethnography, interviews and free associative methods, as well as ideological critique of the field of critical educational practice and research. The book foregrounds political and unconscious aspects of investments in the fields of education and educational research. The chapters in this book were originally published as articles in Taylor and Francis journals.

Bringing together three previously unpublished lectures presented to the public by Lacan at the height of his career, and prefaced by Jacques-Alain Miller, My Teaching is a clear, concise introduction to the thought of the influential psychoanalyst after Freud.

This volume presents a distinctively Lacanian psychoanalytic approach to the theorizing, understanding, and critique of curriculum in higher education. In this work, the author presents the main theories of curriculum in the current discourse, develops a notion of critique, and applies it to existing global guidelines for curriculum reform. Relying on the architectonic of the subject as developed across the work of Jacques Lacan—expressed in the registers of the Symbolic, the Imaginary, and the Real—the author provides a new approach to understanding curriculum in terms of the psychic dynamics that explain its workings.

Felman analyzes Lacan's investigation of psychoanalysis not as dogma but as an ongoing self-critical process of discovery. By focusing on Lacan's singular way of making Freud's thought new again, Felman shows how this moment of illumination has become crucial to contemporary thinking and has redefined insight as such.