Abstract
In this chapter, eschewing the traditional belief in education as a process of passing on knowledge to the next generation, expert to novice, I posit that it’s equally important to understand successful teaching-learning as a relational as well as a cognitive achievement. We are always learning through and with others. Drawing on stories from the classroom and the psychotherapist’s office, I describe how authority and power, love and resistance circulate between teacher and student, therapist and client. Without transgressing the boundaries of age and role, I suggest that loving and being loved are part of the motivating dynamic that makes for the most effective learning in and out of school. Finally, I illustrate the layered emotional investments, often reverberating with our own early care/learning experiences, which characterize the most meaningful student-teacher relationships.
The study of learning is a study of how individuals attach, displace, forget, and disengage knowledge …. the study of learning is inseparable from the study of love.
(Britzman 1998 , p. 31)
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Silin, J.G. (2018). What’s Love Got to Do with It: Navigating the Emotional Thicket of the Classroom. In: Early Childhood, Aging, and the Life Cycle. Critical Cultural Studies of Childhood. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71628-2_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71628-2_7
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