Book Announcement by Lissa D’Amour (Canada)
This book introduces the insights of contemporary relational psychoanalysis into educational thought and schooling practices. Drawing heavily on the work of Donnel Stern, Jessica Benjamin and Winnicott, D’Amour uses relational theory as the foundation for a comprehensive model for teaching and learning processes. This model integrates what is known about conscious thought, motivation and the physical body, and translates these understandings in ways that are meaningful and relevant to the circumstances of practicing teachers, school leaders, and teachers of teachers.
Steeped in humanist sensibilities and sitting somewhere in a middle region across modern–postmodern divides, D’Amour’s project joins Curriculum Theory in pushing back on modernity’s stronghold in schooling with its never-ending panoply of school reforms, such as current allegiances between business, government, STEM and the Learning Sciences. D’Amour stands with calls for inclusivity, arguing against admonishing anyone on the right way to be a person. She instead emphasizes understanding and, in understanding, practicing well. Readers will gain a deeper appreciation of the nature of awareness and sense-making, the practical implications of cognition as embodied, of life forms as non-linear dynamic systems, and of relationships as core to human development and classroom life.
Under the duress of increasingly divided societies, diminishing planetary resources, and ecological disaster, today’s exigencies ask for human wisdom far beyond what has been our collective habit. What is at stake seems nothing short of society’s health and the cascading effects that reverberate across the biosphere. A framework is offered to anchor an interpretive attitude in teaching and learning that checks the tendency to separate physical bodies, affective meanings and symbolic systems of thought.
In the humbling awareness of the opacity of ourselves to ourselves and to the stories that have storied us, the book advocates for grace rendered as much inward as outward, and, by placing relational psychoanalytic theory at the center of teaching and learning, aims to suggest how we might better approach inclusivity in practice.
Lissa D’Amour recently retired from the Faculty of Education, University of Calgary. Her 15 years working with prospective and practicing teachers followed upon and benefited from 25 years of school-teaching success in a variety of everyday contexts, from pre-kindergarten through grade 12. Today, as an independent scholar, Lissa continues to work at bringing relational psychoanalytic understanding into curriculum theory and, through curriculum theory, into the lived experiences and practical lives of teachers and their students.
Lissa D’Amour, PhD
Ontario, Quebec
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