This article continues and extends the conversation regarding an ethic of care as reflected by two male elementary school teachers. It seeks to discover ways in which these men approach and practice their teaching that demonstrate the ethic of care traditionally linked with women. This article looks in depth at two male teachers in an effort to…

Many people have ideas about what it means to teach in inner-city schools, but they are often off the mark. This essay explores the challenges, beauties, and complexities of working in an alternative/transfer school in New York City, with a population that is at very high risk for dropping out. Through individual portraits of students, the author…

This article examines the idea of loss in relation to elementary education. The goal is to show the importance of teachers attending to their students' individual experience and, in particular, to the ways schools can make children feel lost or found. The article relies primarily on classroom narratives, focusing heavily on stories about one…

This essay is a call for a more psychoanalytically informed approach to educational psychology and teacher formation. To this end, the author gives an overview of a course in psychology that he recommends for inclusion in teacher education. This course is in two parts. The first part is an introduction to some important elements of psychoanalytic…

What is the lived experience of teachers and students in school? How does that lived experience constitute a kind of learning on its own apart from any particular outcome? This article addresses the ways teachers and students encounter one another in schools and why the quality of those encounters is paramount in both the child's and the…

For the past two years, the author had the privilege of sharing a course with intelligent, inventive, and diligent students. "Schools Across Borders, Schools Across Time"--very soon abbreviated and known for two years now as SABSAT--was initially a one-time experiment, a course designed to produce a student documentary on progressive and soka…

This article connects the theoretical perspective of Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed with the teaching and learning styles of teachers and students at Central Park East Secondary School (CPESS) in East Harlem, New York. It examines some of the ways the Freireian model has worked within the public school system and considers some of the…

This story captures the tensions that existed when a small charter high school attempted to provide powerful leadership opportunities for students who had few. It details the process and outcome of offering students leadership roles in designing and implementing a student-led discipline committee. In the process, much changed at the school. The…

In the article, we explore conditions under which people may allow their listening to be interrupted, that is, allow themselves to start listening for something they had not been trying to hear previously. We present empirical evidence for the conditions by analyzing an interview with a teacher who tells us how his listening was interrupted as he…

In this article, the author, a university faculty member, shares her experience of teaching young children as she tries to see if she can practice the ideas she has been advocating to university students. She narrates how she adjusted her classroom routines as Alex, a new child student, arrived. She demonstrates how she and her assistant manage…

This is a paper by an educator for other educators. This article is informed by psychoanalytic theory, although it is not about psychoanalysis. The hope for this paper is that it will inform teachers about shaming in the context of child and adolescent development--the child's as well as the teacher's own development. Shaming is not a solo. It's a…

In this article, the author reflects on Bert Cohler's essay "Desire, Teaching and Learning" and relates it to his teacher, Miss Anna Freud's story. The author asks whether it is possible that what one sees and hears, and encounters as teacher is only partially what is really out there in one's classroom and in the heads of one's students and…