Thriving on difficult knowledge, poststructuralist pedagogy and relational psychoanalysis

grantor: University of TorontoPoststructuralist pedagogy produces knowledges which are difficult because they require radical "decentring" changes in how learners construct knowledge. This thesis asks how learners, particularly those of privileged social locations, might thrive in these difficult contexts of learning--a psychological, ethical, and epistemological question. Answers unfold through the reading of two main texts: Elizabeth Ellsworth's 'Teaching Positions: Difference, Pedagogy, and the Power of Address', and Lewis Aron's ' A Meeting of Minds: Mutuality On Psychoanalysis'. Part One traces, first, the emergence of Ellsworth's poststructuralist pedagogy from critical pedagogy and next, the connections between her paradoxical, performative model and the paradoxes embodied in certain feminist, anti-racist, and queer pedagogies. Then it shows how Ellsworth's use of psychoanalysis is her way to theorize the relational spaces within which learners become subjects who seek to inhabit self-reflexively and responsibly the self-with-other knowledges which constitute their subjectivities. Part Two of the thesis argues that relational psychoanalysis develops a similar picture of subjects who profit from reflecting on the relational co-construction of their knowledges and subjectivities. First Aron's work is read in relation to Ellsworth's positions on truth, difficult knowledge, subjectivity, self-with-other, learning processes, and "thriving." Then relational psychoanalytic pedagogy is contrasted with Lacanian and "(post)Freudian" positions. Each of the three versions of psychoanalysis is discussed in terms of its views on constitutive processes of subjectivity and processes of learning. A final chapter is a thought experiment in relational classroom practice with young adolescents. The practice departs from progressive liberal models as conflictual issues of difference emerge, demanding difficult knowledge-making. A relational view sees teacher-learner relationships supporting flexible, centred subjectivities while it simultaneously supports difficult decentring learning processes. The thesis concludes that reading Ellsworth and Aron "through" each other expands and enriches a reading of both. Such a reading asks Ellsworth to attend to powerful psychological issues, both developmental and interpersonal, which are embedded in difficult learning, and it asks Aron to attend to the power of social difference to construct both the relation between analyst and patient and their mutual performances of knowledge.Ph.D