Pointing at the moon: teaching and learning without resistance

Abstract

Teachers often embrace narratives in which students' resistance to our teaching marks repression of the truths delivered by our learned selves. In students' counter-narratives, the tale of resistance can morph into one about principled refusal of powerful figures trying to force them into stances not their own. Both stories have strong temporal dimensions in which closure, even if it comes decades later, reveals that one party or the other was indeed influenced and changed, whether or not that change was evident at semester's end. My interest here is in how to question premature closure and how to work instead within the suspended liminal time of knowing/not knowing for teacher and student.

Keywords

• Pedagogy. Psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis and narrative. Resistance. Liminality.