Myers Education Press Anticipating Education: Concepts for Imagining Pedagogy with Psychoanalysis

Anticipating Education is an interdisciplinary collection of Britzman’s previously published and unpublished papers that examines the dilemmas created by anticipating education, provoked when teachers, students, and professors encounter the unknown while trying to know emotional situations affecting their waiting, wanting, and wishing for teaching and learning. Anticipation has a particular flavor in scenes of education and not only since schooling presents again the mise-en-scène of childhood; anticipation also signifies the estranged temporality of anxiety, phantasies, and defense that compose and decompose hopes for transforming knowledge, sociality, and subjectivity in group life. This book is composed of Britzman’s well regarded and highly cited conceptual contributions to thinking broadly on topics of intersubjectivity and pedagogy at the university and schools; the reception of difficult knowledge as unresolved social conflicts in pedagogical thought; and the significance of psychoanalysis with pedagogy. Four themes address the anxieties of teaching and learning: phantasies of education; difficult knowledge; transforming subjects; and, psychoanalysis with education.Anticipating Education is required reading for every newly-minted faculty member. The wisdom provided in this volume will prove to be invaluable to your future career. Review "Deborah Britzman has written so many beautiful books about pedagogy and psychoanalysis that you may be thinking 'why this one?' Hands down, this is Britzman's best book yet: lyrical, incisive, rigorous, true. The book is ultimately about love as the highest intellectual pursuit, and education as its vehicle. It is a tour de force. I could not put it down. In a world where students are more anxious than ever, and teachers stand at the threshold of burnout, you may be asking yourselves what we possibly can do now. Start here. Read this book."--Dawn Skorczewski, Research Professor Emerita, Brandeis University"In these exquisitely crafted essays, Deborah P. Britzman personifies her psychoanalytic state of mind, entering what she calls the crypt of curriculum, asking: 'why curriculum at all?' This book is itself the resounding answer. Enlivening knowledge through her thinking, Deborah's insights invite us inside thought itself, where complicated conversation can commence. If you have--as I do--a shelf in your library devoted to Britzman, be sure to add this one. If space limits you to one Britzman book, make it this one."--William F. Pinar, Tetsuo Aoki Professor in Curriculum Studies, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada"This erudite and poetic book offers an invitation to return to the source of education, a place of vulnerability, anguish, wonderment and possibility. Beneath the 'mind-numbing stultification' of bureaucratized schooling can be found teachers seeking to embrace childhood subjectivity and difference and release the imagination. This book is for such educators. In its expansiveness and vision, this book builds on the work of Paulo Freire and Maxine Greene to articulate a pedagogy of the imagination. Britzman illustrates the beautiful complementarity of psychoanalysis and critical educational theory in articulating a pedagogy of interiority, social justice, and creative possibility that so many educators hunger for."--Michael O'Loughlin, Adelphi University, New York"Dr. Britzman--leading international authority on psychoanalysis and education and practicing psychoanalyst--offers a collection of her work written with intellectual depth, immense virtuosity, and whole heart. Britzman's repertoire is wide-ranging as she instructs us why we must not forget there is no emotional situation-free zone for education. I can't think of any contemporary scholar and writer who has more poet in her soul; this volume will be one of the most treasured books in the field of psychoanalysis and education."--Jenna Min Shim, Professor and Associate Dea