Love in Education: A Progressive-Critical-Psychoanalytic Model

• In Event: Roundtable Session 27
  In Roundtable Session: Love, Self, and Possibility

Abstract

This theoretical paper focuses on love’s role in educational thought by looking at writers who have treated love as a “truth” or at least a key facet of education, from three perspectives: progressivism, critical pedagogy, and psychoanalytic theory. Sifting through these viewpoints, I describe and then consolidate how love--and relatedly, desire, eros, and passion--has been conceptualized and imagined in the complicated activities of teaching and learning. Out of this discussion I distill two models of love as significant to education in its minute-to-minute messiness and in its potential for social change. From these, I consider implications for marginalized students when love is noticed and sought in school(ing), both as it affects relationships and as it imagines possible futures.

Author

• Anne Crampton, University of Minnesota