Pedagogical Desire

The importance of a pedagogy informed by the tenets of psychoanalysis is the theme of this collection of essays.

First Published in 1998. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

What is the right pedagogical distance for learning to take place? What should be the teacher's role concerning a student's desire? Ethically speaking, how are we to understand the dialectic between desire and the drive? Are we obligated to help students mourn the knowledge that they must let go? Can ignorance (which sounds pejorative) be pedagogically useful as that which is unsaid and repressed? When the pedagogical distance collapses and seduction takes place, can such behavior be excused? These are just some of the questions that are raised throughout this collection by the authors. Lacanian psychoanalysis presents a challenge to our usual understanding of the subject as formulated by ego psychology, as well as the discursive subject of postmodernism. Can Lacan's tripartite psychic registers of the Real, Imaginary, and the Symbolic present the subject in unending intrapsychic conflict? Can pedagogy address this struggle? How do we, as educators, take the notion of the unconscious seriously into account? The authors of this collection engage themselves in such questioning, in some cases examining their own practices and in other cases developing possible strategies with a view of understanding the psychic life of teaching.

This title explores the cultural, political, and economic origins of Chinese desire for a college education as well as its vast consequences, which include household and national economic priorities, birthrates, ethnic relations, and patterns of governance.

This book examines the Singapore government’s controversial practice of recruiting students from China and granting them full scholarships on the condition of a service “bond”. It offers detailed ethnographic accounts of the Chinese “foreign talent” students’ educational and cross-cultural experiences in Singapore to illustrate the complex intersections between international mobility and educational desire. In doing so, the book presents contemporary Singapore society’s concerns over immigration and cross-cultural encounters from a unique perspective.

The Pedagogical Contract explores the relationship between teacher and student and argues for ways of reconceiving pedagogy. It discloses this relationship as one that since antiquity has been regarded as a scene of give-and-take, where the teacher exchanges knowledge for some sort of payment by the student and where pedagogy always runs the risk of becoming a broken contract. The book seeks to liberate teaching and learning from this historical scene and the anxieties that it engenders, arguing that there are alternative ways of conceiving the economy underlying pedagogical activities. Reading ancient material together with contemporary representations of teaching and learning, Yun Lee Too shows that apart from being conceived as a scene of self-interest in which a professional teacher, or sophist, is the charlatan who cheats his pupil, pedagogy might also purport to be a disinterested process of socialization or a scene in which lack and neediness are redeemed through the realization that they are required precisely to stimulate the desire to learn. The author also argues that pedagogy ideally ignores the imperative of the conventional marketplace for relevance, utility, and productivity, inasmuch as teaching and learning most enrich a community when they disregard the immediate material concerns of the community. The book will appeal to all those who understand scholarship as having an important social and/or political role to play; it will also be of interest to literary scholars, literary and cultural theorists, philosophers, historians, legal theorists, feminists, scholars of education, sociologists, and political theorists. Yun Lee Too is Assistant Professor of Classics, Columbia University. She is the author of Rethinking Sexual Harassment;The Rhetoric of Identity in Socrates: Text, Power, Pedagogy; and The Idea of Ancient Literary Criticism, forthcoming; and coeditor, with Niall Livingstone, of Pedagogy and Power: Rhetorics of Classical Learning.

This volume on international studies pedagogy helps us think purposefully about the worlds we teach to our students and it shows us why engaging in reflective practice about how and what we teach matters. The Handbook also provides strategies to engage students in a variety of ways to reflect on and engage with the complexities of the world in which we live.

This book reveals the emotional and social consequences of gendered difference and racial division as experienced by black and ethnicised women, teachers and students in schools and universities, taking the topic in new, challenging directions.