The Anxious Underworld of Teacher Education

ENEATH THE VISIBLE, LEGIBLE, QUANTIFIABLE CURRENTS of classroom life lays a seething vortex of ambient, proto-cultural form, "unsigned, unreadable, and unsymbolized" (de Certeau, 1984, p. xvii).Between what can and cannot be expressed, there remains a constant flow of emotion and embodied, unclear gestures: stutters, bursts of nervous energy, slowly closing eyes, sighs of disinterest, flits of unformed feeling, posturing, sleepy smiles.This unseen world outside resembles an unseen inner world, and much like the dust that floats in the air, which is rarely noticed except through a slant of unbidden light, our seemingly sovereign nodes of conscious thought are incessantly interwoven by something else, a displacement away from the self-obsessed authorities of waking life."It is what dreams teach us," Cixous (1993) claimed, "not to be afraid of not being the driver" (p.100), yet on waking, we hardly remember these visual poems that suddenly appear and disappear without entrance or exit.In recognition of this inarticulable quality of psychic and social existence, I often ask students to dive into the fray of what Winnicott (2005) titled potential space: an "intermediate area of experiencing" (p.3), "between the subjective and that which is objectively perceived" (p.70), running the gamut from children's play to various forms of cultural experience.As an example of such activity, fusing intellect and intuition, I will here share scenes from a number of comics created by students enrolled in an undergraduate course on multimodal literacies.Since these visual narratives describe dreams that are set in school, they also represent a step towards and through the subterranean zones of teacher education.Though we all presumably possess the capacity to experience the seductive force of dreaming, it seems that most of the time we are asked to stay awake and alert in school, where "stark truth" (Winnicott, 1987, p. 236) and expectations of clarity matter most.This disavowal, however, is not without consequence, and especially because our psychic life cannot simply be willed away, I use this paper to pose the question of what it means to think with rather than away from the naughty and frightful fact of dreams.In what follows, I first conceptualize my B

Art · Comics · Dream · Linguistics · Literature · Mathematics education · Pedagogy · Psychotherapist · Comics and Graphic Narratives · Philosophy · Psychology

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