Deborah P Britzman
Biographic Data
| ID | 1256053 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Deborah P Britzman |
| GIVEN NAMES | Deborah P |
| FAMILY NAME | Britzman |
| SIGNATURE | BRITZMAN D P |
| AFFILIATIONS | York University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-7871-5087 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 30 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 401 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 30 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1986 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
Max Cavitch, Psychoanalysis and the University
Psychoanalysis as Radical Hospitality
A psychoanalyst in the classroom
That Other Scene of Pedagogy
My discussion embraces the subjective qualities of the psychoanalytic clinical case study as a method for writing narratives of pedagogy dedicated to interpreting the latency of communication: what has been held back, forgotten, acted out and unconsciously repeated. At the heart of the case study is the literary dilemma of putting to words the transference, thought here as the unconscious desire for the other’s knowledge, authority and love. Of s…
Between Psychoanalysis and Pedagogy
With the question of what is between psychoanalysis and pedagogy, this essay presents a psychoanalytic frame for thinking about the study of uncertainty in teaching and learning from the vantage of the education of the author and her notion of “difficult knowledge.” I review my body of research through these dilemmas to picture a theory of learning curious about the fate of uncertainty and affected by the object of study namely, the human subject…
What is the use of theory? A psychoanalytic discussion
Freud asking whether psychoanalysis could be taught in the university, and then whether it could be learned, provides an occasion for asking about the emotional uses of theory. The paper draws from literature, clinical writing and pedagogy to build a psychoanalytic discussion of teaching and learning that takes seriously phantasies of knowledge made from the creation, conveyance and reception of theory. This learning complex involves symptoms in …
Practice Makes Practice
Teachers and Eros
The Great Question before us is: Are we doomed? The Great Question before us is: Will the Past release us? The Great Question before us is: Can we change? In Time? ... And Theory? How are we to proce
On the madness of lecturing on gender
This essay comments on the emotional difficulties psychoanalytic discussion introduces to conceptualising the poesis of gender through its reconsideration of the valence of aggression and its development in psychical reality. It returns to the 1936 lectures on the emotional life of gender given by Melanie Klein and Joan Riviere to a public about to go to war. These psychoanalysts are known for representing ‘the mad side’ of gender and consider fe…
The Poetics of Supervision
Why would anyone want to become a teacher? What at first glance feels like a test question will turn out to become a startling way to conceptualise the poetics of supervision. The nature of this cr
Affective equality
by Kathleen Lynch, John Baker and Maureen Lyons with Sara Cantillon, Judy Walsh, Maggie Feeley, Niall Hanlon and Maeve O’Brien, New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, 336 pp., $85 (hardback), ISBN 978
Professor@s e Eros
Professores/as são testemunhas do fantástico mundo da sexualidade. Esse artigo explora a centralidade de Eros para a educação e estabelece uma relação entre o desejo do/a professor/a e os acontecimentos emocionais da relação própria relação aluno/professor. Eu proponho que o aprendizado deva envolver nosso "eu" erótico, além das nossas fantasias. Mas esta perspectiva requer que professores/as considerem uma psicologia do amor como um caminho prin…
On being a slow reader
A novel can teach us about our act of reading. Ishiguro's Never let me go is analysed as an occasion for thinking about reading as an allegory of psychic development. Drawing on the work of Melanie Klein and Hannah Arendt, my psychoanalytic reading explores the discord between the signifier and the signified, seeing this conflict as belonging to language, development and social thought. I analyse the slow events of reading to illustrate two irres…
Monsters in literature
Thirty years ago I began teaching in a public alternative high school. The summer before, I was expected to create and then teach an interesting new course. I called my first high school curriculum
After-Education
Speculations on qualities of difficult knowledge in teaching and learning
This paper explores two questions in relation to the authors' project, “Difficult Knowledge in Teaching and Learning: A Psychoanalytic Inquiry.” They describe how their original question, “What makes knowledge difficult?,” transformed into “What is it to represent ‘difficult’ knowledge?” They speculate on the resonances that this crisis of representation leaves in narration by way of three psychoanalytic concepts: deferred action, transference, a…
"O retorno da "criança-questão
Este artigo analisa a complicada relação entre educação e psicanálise com base no primeiro estudo de caso de Melanie Klein, sobre "Fritz", o estudo de Freud do "Pequeno Hans" e um filme contemporâneo. Todos eles representam dilemas da relação criança-adulto, e o fazem através de surpreendentes questionamentos por parte das crianças sobre a sexualidade e a natureza da existência. Esses textos do arquivo introduzem também a questão de 'o que mais a…
A Psychoanalysis We Can Bear to Learn from
Teacher Education in the Confusion of Our Times
There is little agreement in teacher education as to what counts as knowledge and how individuals come to be affected by ideas, people, and events in their world. Whereas teacher education seems to debate questions about the adequacy of its structures, it has forgotten its place in the world and its obligations to world making. However, teacher education has not yet grappled with a theory of knowledge that can analyze social fractures, profound s…
The tangles of implication
Towards a Polymorphous Perverse Curriculum
Pedagogy and transference
1996). Pedagogy and transference: Casting the past of learning into the presence of teaching. Theory Into Practice: Vol. 35, Situated Pedagogies: Classroom Practices in Postmodern Times, pp. 117-123
The question of belief”
This article engages current poststructural debates over ethnographic representation. It questions three types of ethnographic authority: the authority of empiricism, the authority of language, and the authority of reading. In performing a form of self‐speculative critique, the author moves behind the scenes of her own ethnography, Practice Makes Practice: A Critical Study of Learning to Teach, to consider the problem of what poststructural theor…
Is There a Queer Pedagogy? Or, Stop Reading Straight
"Practice Makes Practice"
Is There a Queer Pedagogy? Or, Stop Reading Straight
Speculations on qualities of difficult knowledge in teaching and learning
This paper explores two questions in relation to the authors' project, “Difficult Knowledge in Teaching and Learning: A Psychoanalytic Inquiry.” They describe how their original question, “What makes knowledge difficult?,” transformed into “What is it to represent ‘difficult’ knowledge?” They speculate on the resonances that this crisis of representation leaves in narration by way of three psychoanalytic concepts: deferred action, transference, a…
The question of belief”
This article engages current poststructural debates over ethnographic representation. It questions three types of ethnographic authority: the authority of empiricism, the authority of language, and the authority of reading. In performing a form of self‐speculative critique, the author moves behind the scenes of her own ethnography, Practice Makes Practice: A Critical Study of Learning to Teach, to consider the problem of what poststructural theor…
Between Psychoanalysis and Pedagogy
With the question of what is between psychoanalysis and pedagogy, this essay presents a psychoanalytic frame for thinking about the study of uncertainty in teaching and learning from the vantage of the education of the author and her notion of “difficult knowledge.” I review my body of research through these dilemmas to picture a theory of learning curious about the fate of uncertainty and affected by the object of study namely, the human subject…
Pedagogy and transference
1996). Pedagogy and transference: Casting the past of learning into the presence of teaching. Theory Into Practice: Vol. 35, Situated Pedagogies: Classroom Practices in Postmodern Times, pp. 117-123
Structures of feeling in curriculum and teaching
Those who enter secondary teacher education as graduate students have already spent years in both the academy and the school. As students, they have been relatively successful in these institutional settings and hence bring to their secondary teacher education very specific expectations about what it takes to teach and to learn. Their expectations do not yet include what it might require of them to understand the learning struggles of others and …
Teacher Education in the Confusion of Our Times
There is little agreement in teacher education as to what counts as knowledge and how individuals come to be affected by ideas, people, and events in their world. Whereas teacher education seems to debate questions about the adequacy of its structures, it has forgotten its place in the world and its obligations to world making. However, teacher education has not yet grappled with a theory of knowledge that can analyze social fractures, profound s…
Who Has the Floor? Curriculum, Teaching, and the English Student Teacher's Struggle for Voice
This article presents an ethnographic inquiry into the problems of theorizing about teaching and learning within a social context organized to suppress the subjective experiences and meanings of classroom actors. Three questions are explored: 1) What is the nature of curriculum practice in secondary education, and how does it shape the voices of students and teachers?; 2) What meanings do classroom actors construct about teaching and learning, an…
The tangles of implication
Other Positions
Personal meanings are always paradoxical. The meanings we construct, while seemingly ours alone, never solely belong to us. Always asserted in each of our voices are the intentions of others, the ambiguity of language, the antagonisms of meaning, appearance, and representation, and the contradictions that open and suppress what we take to be the unique. Unlike David Hunt, I voice the messiness of personal meanings, the fact that when we work with…
The Practical Work of Positioning Ourselves
On the madness of lecturing on gender
This essay comments on the emotional difficulties psychoanalytic discussion introduces to conceptualising the poesis of gender through its reconsideration of the valence of aggression and its development in psychical reality. It returns to the 1936 lectures on the emotional life of gender given by Melanie Klein and Joan Riviere to a public about to go to war. These psychoanalysts are known for representing ‘the mad side’ of gender and consider fe…
Professor@s e Eros
Professores/as são testemunhas do fantástico mundo da sexualidade. Esse artigo explora a centralidade de Eros para a educação e estabelece uma relação entre o desejo do/a professor/a e os acontecimentos emocionais da relação própria relação aluno/professor. Eu proponho que o aprendizado deva envolver nosso "eu" erótico, além das nossas fantasias. Mas esta perspectiva requer que professores/as considerem uma psicologia do amor como um caminho prin…
Cultural Myths in the Making of a Teacher
Deborah Britzman believes that recent theoretical discussions of the role of education in the reproduction of the social system, while illuminative, need to be grounded in descriptions of particular aspects of the educative process. The author addresses this need by drawing on her experiences as a teacher/educator to offer an analysis of the reproductive mechanisms at work in teacher education. She describes the way in which teachers' personal hi…
The Practical Work of Positioning Ourselves
Who Has the Floor? Curriculum, Teaching, and the English Student Teacher's Struggle for Voice
This article presents an ethnographic inquiry into the problems of theorizing about teaching and learning within a social context organized to suppress the subjective experiences and meanings of classroom actors. Three questions are explored: 1) What is the nature of curriculum practice in secondary education, and how does it shape the voices of students and teachers?; 2) What meanings do classroom actors construct about teaching and learning, an…
Other Positions
Personal meanings are always paradoxical. The meanings we construct, while seemingly ours alone, never solely belong to us. Always asserted in each of our voices are the intentions of others, the ambiguity of language, the antagonisms of meaning, appearance, and representation, and the contradictions that open and suppress what we take to be the unique. Unlike David Hunt, I voice the messiness of personal meanings, the fact that when we work with…
"Practice Makes Practice"
Structures of feeling in curriculum and teaching
Those who enter secondary teacher education as graduate students have already spent years in both the academy and the school. As students, they have been relatively successful in these institutional settings and hence bring to their secondary teacher education very specific expectations about what it takes to teach and to learn. Their expectations do not yet include what it might require of them to understand the learning struggles of others and …
The question of belief”
This article engages current poststructural debates over ethnographic representation. It questions three types of ethnographic authority: the authority of empiricism, the authority of language, and the authority of reading. In performing a form of self‐speculative critique, the author moves behind the scenes of her own ethnography, Practice Makes Practice: A Critical Study of Learning to Teach, to consider the problem of what poststructural theor…
Is There a Queer Pedagogy? Or, Stop Reading Straight
Towards a Polymorphous Perverse Curriculum
Pedagogy and transference
1996). Pedagogy and transference: Casting the past of learning into the presence of teaching. Theory Into Practice: Vol. 35, Situated Pedagogies: Classroom Practices in Postmodern Times, pp. 117-123
The tangles of implication
A Psychoanalysis We Can Bear to Learn from
Teacher Education in the Confusion of Our Times
There is little agreement in teacher education as to what counts as knowledge and how individuals come to be affected by ideas, people, and events in their world. Whereas teacher education seems to debate questions about the adequacy of its structures, it has forgotten its place in the world and its obligations to world making. However, teacher education has not yet grappled with a theory of knowledge that can analyze social fractures, profound s…
"O retorno da "criança-questão
Este artigo analisa a complicada relação entre educação e psicanálise com base no primeiro estudo de caso de Melanie Klein, sobre "Fritz", o estudo de Freud do "Pequeno Hans" e um filme contemporâneo. Todos eles representam dilemas da relação criança-adulto, e o fazem através de surpreendentes questionamentos por parte das crianças sobre a sexualidade e a natureza da existência. Esses textos do arquivo introduzem também a questão de 'o que mais a…
After-Education
Speculations on qualities of difficult knowledge in teaching and learning
This paper explores two questions in relation to the authors' project, “Difficult Knowledge in Teaching and Learning: A Psychoanalytic Inquiry.” They describe how their original question, “What makes knowledge difficult?,” transformed into “What is it to represent ‘difficult’ knowledge?” They speculate on the resonances that this crisis of representation leaves in narration by way of three psychoanalytic concepts: deferred action, transference, a…
Monsters in literature
Thirty years ago I began teaching in a public alternative high school. The summer before, I was expected to create and then teach an interesting new course. I called my first high school curriculum
On being a slow reader
A novel can teach us about our act of reading. Ishiguro's Never let me go is analysed as an occasion for thinking about reading as an allegory of psychic development. Drawing on the work of Melanie Klein and Hannah Arendt, my psychoanalytic reading explores the discord between the signifier and the signified, seeing this conflict as belonging to language, development and social thought. I analyse the slow events of reading to illustrate two irres…
The Poetics of Supervision
Why would anyone want to become a teacher? What at first glance feels like a test question will turn out to become a startling way to conceptualise the poetics of supervision. The nature of this cr
Affective equality
by Kathleen Lynch, John Baker and Maureen Lyons with Sara Cantillon, Judy Walsh, Maggie Feeley, Niall Hanlon and Maeve O’Brien, New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, 336 pp., $85 (hardback), ISBN 978
Professor@s e Eros
Professores/as são testemunhas do fantástico mundo da sexualidade. Esse artigo explora a centralidade de Eros para a educação e estabelece uma relação entre o desejo do/a professor/a e os acontecimentos emocionais da relação própria relação aluno/professor. Eu proponho que o aprendizado deva envolver nosso "eu" erótico, além das nossas fantasias. Mas esta perspectiva requer que professores/as considerem uma psicologia do amor como um caminho prin…
Teachers and Eros
The Great Question before us is: Are we doomed? The Great Question before us is: Will the Past release us? The Great Question before us is: Can we change? In Time? ... And Theory? How are we to proce
On the madness of lecturing on gender
This essay comments on the emotional difficulties psychoanalytic discussion introduces to conceptualising the poesis of gender through its reconsideration of the valence of aggression and its development in psychical reality. It returns to the 1936 lectures on the emotional life of gender given by Melanie Klein and Joan Riviere to a public about to go to war. These psychoanalysts are known for representing ‘the mad side’ of gender and consider fe…
What is the use of theory? A psychoanalytic discussion
Freud asking whether psychoanalysis could be taught in the university, and then whether it could be learned, provides an occasion for asking about the emotional uses of theory. The paper draws from literature, clinical writing and pedagogy to build a psychoanalytic discussion of teaching and learning that takes seriously phantasies of knowledge made from the creation, conveyance and reception of theory. This learning complex involves symptoms in …
Practice Makes Practice
Psychology (22 works) · Sociology (21 works) · Pedagogy (13 works) · Philosophy (13 works) · Psychoanalysis (13 works) · Epistemology (10 works) · Philosophy (9 works) · Mathematics education (7 works) · Psychoanalytic theory (7 works) · Educator Training and Historical Pedagogy (6 works)