Reparative Curriculum

Abstract

Supporting learners’ public engagement with traumatic histories of mass human violence can develop and sustain reparative relations across and between strained social collectives. In this article I theorize the intrapersonal and inter-political dynamics of psychical and social reparation through a classroom case of reparative learning. I analyze the emotional responses of beginning teachers engaging with traumatic Aboriginal history as depicted in Robert Arthur Alexie’s novel Porcupines and China Dolls. My analysis of students’ trouble with the novel offers insight into the psychical production of reparative curriculum as it is raggedly pieced together in the learner’s capacity to feel for the unimaginable lives and worlds of others.

Notes

Notes

1 In his sole essay explicitly on teaching, Derrida (2000) theorizes the impossibility of representing pedagogy. Playing on the psychoanalytic language of indifference, desire, repetition, projection and defense, Derrida suggests that pedagogy is best qualified and represented as and in the psychical transference of bodies: psychical bodies, real bodies, bodies of knowledge, and so forth. Representations of pedagogy are haunted and taken over by the ghosts of these teaching bodies. Writes Derrida: “My body is in no way responsible: it would exist, would be there only to represent, signify, teach, deliver the signs of at least two other bodies. Which . . .” (p. 106). Breaking off his thought of pedagogy in mid-sentence (. . .), Derrida indicates the inherent impossibility of justly representing the other’s reception of one’s teaching. My struggle to represent pedagogy in a story of a class marks an impossible attempt: to assume responsibility for the thinking and actions of my teaching body. Despite pedagogy’s resistance to representation, we still have to try.…For more on the aporia of pedagogy, see Derrida (2000).

2 Felman’s (1992) pedagogical response to students in crisis has been subject to wide criticism, most notably by my graduate students reading this piece. Some students express a wish that Felman “know better” than to subject her students to such suffering. Their expression of “knowing better” touches on for me what is most difficult about any form of pedagogy: the teacher’s failure. However, rather than view failure as impasse, Felman’s pedagogy, drawn along the lines of crisis, already admits the possibility for teaching failure. To admit failure in teaching is to admit the formerly inadmissible into the educational profession: teaching’s potential for hurt and harm. A vigilant attention to and analysis of teaching failure provides teachers with the grounds and ethical impetus for rethinking and redressing failed and potentially hurtful pedagogical interventions in the classroom. As well, Felman’s story of failure in class, brought about by a crisis in pedagogy, is a gift to other teachers as it presents a series of analytic cautions and considerations of help to teachers of testimony.

3 It is important to emphasize that teachers working with difficult knowledge be prepared to receive their students’ emotional responses. We can try to prepare students to receive their emotions, however limited are symbolic preparations for one’s emotional learning. In my personal and professional observation of emotional learning, when one is overcome, caught, or trapped by one’s feelings, one can lose grip on one’s knowledge and reality—we lose sense of ourselves and knowledge in the emotional throes of an intellectual disturbance or crisis. Although difficult to anticipate the quality and texture of students’ responses, the teacher can, at the very least, anticipate some forms of struggle accompanying students’ emotional or somatic response. The teacher should be equipped, with the necessary theoretical, symbolic, and gestural resources to respond to and hold students’ feelings of crisis knowing, once again, that there is no guarantee that teacher preparation secures ethics. Psychoanalytic learning offers the student immersion into a language of the psyche, affect, and emotion. Analytic teaching offers the teacher an interpretive apparatus with which to respond, word, work through and repair students’ feelings of pathos, guilt, suffering and harm in relation to the teacher’s pedagogy and difficult knowledge.

4 I take this and other student comments from my analytical notes on teaching made before, during, and after class.