Fostering Childish Tendencies in Teacher Education and Young Adult Literature: The Problem of Teaching Ideas You Love

Abstract

In teaching young adult literature in a teacher education programme at the undergraduate level, I pose the question of how I can best introduce my personal theoretical stances into the formal curriculum and syllabi, without unintentionally conveying such theories to my students as necessary postures. I first outline the theoretical underpinnings that inform my own work: which include psychoanalytic theory, ideas of fantasy and loss in reading experience, the concept of adolescence as a psychic and cultural relation, and the dynamics of forgetting in teacher education. In theorizing part of the process of learning to teach as the productive activation of a person’s internal archive, I then describe the methodological choices I made while constructing my course in young adult literature, where, in reference to Lynda Barry’s One Hundred Demons, my students consider the ways to best approach their own adolescent ‘demons’.

Keywords:

• young adult literature
• teacher education
• reading
• psychoanalytic theory

Funding

This work was supported by the Fonds Québécois de la recherche sur la société et la culture (FQRSC), Bourses de recherche postdoctorale [grant number 177310].