Introduction
This paper investigates the use of photography as a narrative approach to learning in the context of postsecondary education. Two case presentations are discussed: a social studies methods course in a teacher education program in the south of the USA and a senior undergraduate seminar on global violence at a university in southern Ontario, Canada. With each case, we explore how the assignment of photography contains and works through the complexities of learning out of crisis, frustration and anxiety. Learning to witness narratives of global violence and learning to teach social studiesâwhile significantly different in many waysâare similar encounters in that they both contain dilemmas of representation, both are mitigated by larger sociopolitical discourses, and both call upon deep affective attachments to the world. One of the dilemmas of classroom learning that involves encounters with difficult social histories is how to reflect on the dynamics of learning at stake for both teachers and students who have different kinds of work in this regard. In this chapter, we theorize reflective practice as a relation to learning in which meaning is made from an understanding of how the curriculum stages an encounter between oneâs own archive of experience and the wider social world.
As a way to represent and interpret these layered processes in our classrooms, we have each assigned our students the task of creating and narrating photographs. With these assignments, the intent was to explore how photography, as a mode of both representation and interpretation, could help students to tolerate, symbolize, and narrate encounters in learning that were experienced as intellectually and emotionally demanding. As a practice that literally expresses oneâs relation to the world through visuality, photography offers a unique method for reflecting on meaning as a relation rather than a thing in itself. The chapter, thus, has two different objectives. One purpose is an inquiry into how students symbolize their learning when that experience contains and/or represents a difficult demandâsuch as in learning to teach or learning to witness narratives of violence. We explain the distinct dynamics of each of these calls to learning in our case presentations below. Second, we inquire as to how the photography assignments we invite our students to complete can contain these experiences and, through reflective practice, lead to new forms of thought. Here, we are concerned with the studentsâ ability to think with rather than refuse the frustrations and anxieties of learning.
We propose that the practice of photography offers the student a way to represent and interpret their experience, bringing about a tolerable and instructive containment (Bion, 1962; Waddell, 2002). We begin our support of this proposition by elaborating our theoretical framework, drawing on psychoanalytic inquiries of pedagogy and curriculum to do so. Developing the concept of pedagogical complexity, a term of learning that attends to the ways in which education is felt as a form of interference that blurs the boundaries between oneâs inner and outer worlds, we then consider the psychical function of containment as it relates to the practice of photography. To do this, we employ a case presentation structure, discussing how each of us conceptualized and implemented our photography assignments as well as how students engaged with them. 1 Case presentations allow us to preserve and delve into our respective approaches to the photography assignment as well as work through our distinct investments and interpretive strategies. We then develop a cross-case analysis of our case presentation âdataâ, exploring the significance of any similarities and divergences. Finally, we return to a discussion of the relationship between reflection, containment, and pedagogical complexity as theorized through these insights.
Psychoanalysis, Complexity, and Containment
If one gives credence to the emotional (e.g. Boler, 1999), political (e.g. Apple, 2004; Giroux, 2005), social (e.g. Anyon, 1980), and psychical (e.g. Britzman, 2003a, 2003b) components of any classroom context, there is no avoiding the fact of complexity in pedagogy. Our use of the term âpedagogical complexityâ is inspired by inquiries into learning that view the self as relational and so consider how oneâs attachments to the social worldâsometimes conflicted, sometimes passionate and/or indifferentâcan lead to new forms of knowledge and understanding. Here, we are influenced by terms of learning such as Britzmanâs (1998) âdifficult knowledgeâ, Felmanâs (1992) âteaching out of crisisâ, and Ellsworthâs (2005) âpedagogical addressâ. What these terms share is a perspective that education is a relation that brings the learner to the limits of knowledge and of the self, an encounter that is both affectively charged and emotionally significant. For example, Ellsworthâs theorization of âpedagogical addressâ aids our understanding of pedagogy as part of a relational structure rather than a didactic exchange (p. 103). For Ellsworth, what makes pedagogy powerful is the ârefusal of narrative closureâ in which lessons remain open questions. In the context of learning from difficult social histories, Britzmanâs (1998) term helps us to think about how curriculum provokes a relational encounter where social trauma as it is represented in the world outside comes to resonate with the learnersâ inner world. Both student and teacher must work to interpret these resonances if significance is to be made. This is similar to Felmanâs (1992) thought that teaching âtakes place precisely only through a crisisâ (p. 53) in which both the teacher and the learner are brought to their respective limits. In this model, learning is viewed as a process of self-transformation that is predicated on being able to work productively with the traumatic qualities of learning itself.
To address these conditions of learning, and in keeping with the theoretical orientations of the authors above, we turn to psychoanalysis because it is a disciplinary and theoretical orientation that attempts to theorize the movement between affect and thought, a dynamic we argue is central to the problem of learning from complexity.
While far from monolithic, psychoanalysis posits the existence and influence of the unconscious, the degree to which the subject will defend itself from conscious awareness of intolerable thoughts, wishes, and desires, and the notion that individual subjects can come to have new relationships to those wishes and desires through the analytic situation. Educational theorists and researchers drawing from Freud (Britzman, 2011), Winnicott (Farley, 2009), Bollas (Cartwright, 2010), and Lacan (Bibby, 2010; Taubman, 2007), frame educational inquiries from within the dynamic nature of knowledge that psychoanalytic theory characterizes. What is felt to be knowledge is often expressed in ways that carry the traces of anxieties and memories, wishes and fantasies. In other words, what we say is always heavily weighted with things other than what seems most apparent. As processes like these are brought into the realm of the classroom, where teaching and learning are supposed to be happening, psychoanalytic inquiries will pose questions about how all involved will hear and say simultaneously more and less than the manifest content of the lessons on offer. And while it is beyond the scope of this paper to delineate the fine-grained details of the unconscious and its treatment in the educational and curricular literature, we find psychoanalytic theory to be productive in our pedagogical work because it allows us to ask questions about the consequences of individual subjects coming into conversation with the social/political world. We understand this conversation as blurring the lines between what could be considered the inner, or personal, world with the outside, or social, one.
Drawn from the Latin complex-us, meaning âa whole comprehending in its compass a number of partsâŚelements not simply coordinated, but some of them involved in various degrees of subordinationâŚnot easily analyzed or disentangledâ (Oxford English Dictionary), complexity is thus both a potential and a dilemma for education. The promise is with a view of learning as made from the tensions of relationalityâof how we connect with ourselves and with others. These same tensions, however, are difficult to weather. They may tempt the pedagogue to find resolution in pedagogies of management, knowledge transfer, role performance, and other expressions of hardened authority such as outcomes-based learning (e.g. Taubman, 2009). Thinking about pedagogy as a social relation, and not merely a practice, we suggest, can be an antidote to the inclination to view problems only for instrumental solutions (Florio-Ruane, 2002).
Our teaching practices share the goals of helping students to work through the social relations of learning and to broaden the base from which they might understand and act in the world. In our teaching, the effort made to both engage and contain students in their encounters with pedagogical complexity often makes for considerable trouble. This trouble might take on different dimensions, perhaps manifest as expressions of resentment, anger, guilt, indifference, and/or withdrawal, but just as likely with passionate identification, attachment, and excitement. Knowledge, we have come to understand, can as often be felt as an unwelcome burden as it is an exciting facilitator. In education, where the entirety of the situation is purposed toward the development of new thoughts, there will therefore be a dynamic push and pull between the invitation toward thoughts and the dangers inherent in thinking them. Here, the distinction between the self, oneâs inner life, and the social are disturbed, opening possibilities for different ways of relating to the self and to others, but also troubling the view that understanding can ever be fully known. In the analytic sense, these dilemmas of understanding can be interpreted through the concept of transference in which old conflicts find purchase in contemporary situations, including the ârepetition of familiar strategies of self-mastery and that work to maintain the illusion of the self as a coherent and cohesive entity in charge of itselfâ (Britzman & Pitt, 1996, p. 121). Through the dynamics of the transference the unconscious life of both teacher and student are therefore implicated in classroom discourse, presenting the complexities of learning as open to psychical interpretation.
Taubman (2007) brings these concerns to his discussion of reflective practice in educational experience, distinguishing two general trends. The first explores reflection as a measure of teaching effectiveness as aligned with an outcomes approach to learning. The second considers reflection as a practice of accounting for relations of power and intersectionality in learning encounters. Whereas both of these attitudes focus on evaluation of âattitudes, values, dispositions, knowledge and skills in terms of a priori standards phrased in terms of student learningâ, what is different about a psychoanalytic approach to reflective practice is that it âleads us to question how unconscious forces affect our interactions with students, the curriculum and the meanings we give our experiencesâ (Taubman, p. 3). What we like about Taubmanâs formulation of critical self-reflection is that instead of seeing the self as a unitary identity and knowledge as truth, there is a move to consider meaning as a provisional way of attaching to and therefore of understanding ourselves as part of the social world. Taubman (2007) takes up this discussion in relation to the teacherâs position; in our work we think about our role as teachers (who are also researchers) but also the student whose work it is to reflect on and symbolize the dynamics of the curricular encounter.
Recognizing pedagogy as being shot through with complexity means that, even as we strive to create âgood enoughâ (Winnicott, 1970) conditions for learning, any wish for being certain about outcomes is similarly troubled. Psychoanalytic commitments also encourage us to scrutinize ourselves: what are our own investments? Are we being overly hostile in our interpretations of, and responses to, our students and their work? What might be the transference of pedagogical design? Our reflections and our understandings of psychoanalytic processes do provoke and maintain our caution and humility in the face of the variety of student reactions, be they the most glowing and full of affection or the most resentful and angry.
Pedagogical complexity, then, entails invitations to think about classroom life as becoming increasingly populated with the frayed edges of understanding rather than a tight seam. Being able to tolerate the ambiguities of classroom life, as in the encounter with narratives of violence or with learning to teach, calls for the ability to withstand the wish for final answers or finite knowledge. What makes complexity pedagogical is far from a certainty, but we think that in order for it be so, that something of a containing function be present. It is this function and how it might operate in the context of learning to which we next turn our attention.
Containment and the Assignment of Photography
Containment is a psychoanalytic term that we find useful for describing the ways in which pedagogical anxieties and frustrations might be reflected upon and brought into significance through the learning encounter. The idea that learning is a dynamic encounter between the student, the teacher, and the curriculum is important for an understanding of exactly how containment functions in the educational setting. One way to illustrate this function is to think about how pedagogues and learners come to recognize, interpret, and then symbolize their respective psychical investments in the process of coming to know.
French (1997) identifies two common psychical investments of the teacher; the fear of competence or incompetence and the fear of loss of control (p. 488). Teachers will be confronted with these investments as they are called to answer questions to which they do ...