Exploring How Teachers’ Emotions Interact With Intercultural Texts: A Psychoanalytic Perspective

Abstract

A major goal of this study was to inquire into and gain an understanding of teachers’ emotional responses to cultural differences by investigating how teachers handle stories with intercultural themes. The broader goal was to inquire into teachers’ emotional lives that though not necessarily visible to them, nonetheless affect what they perceive as necessary factors in productive intercultural relations and multicultural education. Given such goals, the study is grounded in psychoanalytic theory (Lacan, 1949/2004). The study also employs postcolonial theory (Bhabha, 1999, 2005; Said, 1994) which attends to the dynamics of the intercultural relations and discourse of difference to complement psychoanalytic theory in the data analysis. The conclusion suggests future directions for the psychoanalysis of education of teachers in increasingly diverse societies and schools. In the final section, the author takes into account the nature of the countertransference to question the emotional life of the researcher and how in the data analysis she, too, is affected by her own emotions.

Note

Notes

1 However, there are several existing psychoanalytic‐based works that focus on emotions and subjectivity in education (Baron, 1960; Britzman,1992b, 2000, 2004, 2007; Britzman & Dippo, 2000; Mayes, 2001, 2002; Pitt, 2010; Pitt & Britzman, 2003; Weiss, 2002a, 2002b).