Love and despair in teaching

Educational Theory

Volumn 50, Issue 1, 2000, Pages 81-102

  Liston, Daniel P ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 65249167172     PISSN: 00132004     EISSN: 17415446     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1741-5446.2000.00081.x     Document Type: Article

References (40)

1. William Styron, Darkness Visible (New York: Random House, 1990).
2. Parker Palmer draws upon Rainer Maria Rilke's notion of the "grace of great things" to convey the power and wonder entailed in understanding the world, others, and ourselves in educational settings. See Barker Palmer, The Courage to Teach [San Francisco: Jossey Bass). This book will he cited as CT in the text for all subsequent references.1998.
3. Yvonne Gold and Robert Roth, Teachers Managing Stress and Preventing Burnout: The Professional Health Solution (Washington D.C.: Palmer Press, 1993).
4. Derrick Bell, Faces at the Bottom of the Well: the Permanence of Racism (New York: Basic Books, 1992.
5. Cornel West, Race Matters (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993.
6. bell hooks, Outlaw Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994).
7. Samuel Freedman, Small Victories (New York: Harper Collins, 1990).
8. Tracy KidderThis book will be cited as SV in the text for all subsequent references. See also Among Schoolchildren (New York: Avon Books, 1990).
9. Here I will explore Andre Dubus's insights. See Andre Dubus, Dancing After Hours (New York: Alfred A. Knopf). This book will be cited as DH in the text for all subsequent references.1996.
10. Jane Tompkins, A Life in School: What the Teacher Learned (Redding, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1996.
11. This book will be cited as LS in the text for all subsequent references.
12. A number of distinct writers comment on the peculiar power of this particular kind of love. In philosophy Soren Kierkegaard and Iris Murdoch have written extensively about this phenomenon. See Soren Kierkegaard, Works of Love (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995.
13. Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good (New York: Schocken, 1971.
14. Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (New York: Penguin Press, 1993.
15. The Sovereignty of Good will be cited as SG in the text for all subsequent references. In the critical race literature Cornel West in Race Matters, and bell hooks in Outlaw Culture, have touched on this topic. And in the educational literature Parker Palmer in The Courage to Teach and Jim Garrison have explored the role of suffering and love. See James Garrison, Dewey and Eros (New York: Teachers College Press, 1997).
16. Responding to a draft of this essay Dwayne Huebner wrote that "the despair and lack of love in teaching is, in part, a manifestation of the structure of schooling in our society. By framing your work as you do, you imply that it is the teacher's problem, rather than a large social-cultural problem which deserves thoughtful social analysis" (personal communication, 20 July). In the context of this paper, Hucbner is correct; I do "err" in my focus on the individual teacher. But it is an inevitable "error"; at this point a fociis on the individual is necessary. In the conclusion of this essay 1 point to features of a contextual analysis and in Love and Despair in Teaching (New York: Routledge, in progress) I rectify this exclusive focus and address the structural-institutional issues.1999.
17. Eudora Welty, One Writers Beginnings (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984). 9.
18. Anne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet (Princeton: Princeton University Press), 55, 57. This book will be cited as ED in the text for all subsequent references.
19. Timothy Fuller, The Voice of Liberal Learning: Michael Oakeshoti on Learning (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press).
20. The role of love in paradox and suffering is explored poetically and evocatively by Carson in Eros, and discursively by Garrison in Dewey and Eros, and Palmer in The Courage to Teach.
21. R.M. Sainsbury Offers an analytical approach to particular "families" of paradox. See R.M. Sainsbury, Paradoxes (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988.
22. Garrison, Dewey and Eros, 115-25.
23. It would be a mistake to claim that despair necessarily calls forth an enlarged love. For seme the connection may occur but for others despair may prevail. Marcia Westkott (personal communication, 2 June 1999) holds that a Buddhist meditative stance enables some to move from despair to an enlarged love and Dwayne Huebner believes the relationship between suffering and love to be central in Christian thought and I pursue this connection in Love and Despair in Teaching. practice (personal communication, 20 July 1999).
24. Garrison, Dewey and Eros, 48-49.
25. Lisa Goldstein, Teaching with Love (New York: Peter Lang, 1997).
26. Soren Kierkegaard, Works of Love; Simone Weil, ed. Eric Springsted, Simone Well (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1998.
27. Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good; And Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals.
28. Charles Taylor and Martha Nussbaum Explore further some of these and other features of Murdoch's formulations.
29. Charles Taylor, "Iris Murdoch and Moral Philosophy," In Iris Murdoch and the Search for Human Goodness, ed. Maria Antonaccio and William Schweiker (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 3-28.
30. Martha Nussbaum, "Love and Vision: Iris Murdoch on Eros and the Individual" in Antonaccio and Schweiker, Iris Murdoch and the Search for Human Goodness, 29-53.
31. Simone Weil, Simone Weil; Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963.
32. Simone Weil, Waiting for God (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1951).
33. Emily and Jessica's Despair seemed to follow this pattern. The "basis" for Jane's despair seemed to lie in her graduate school experiences. There she experienced a significant diminishment of her love of learning and teaching.
34. Kierkegaard, Works of Love, 209-79.
35. Leonard Covello, The Heart is the Teacher (New York: McGruw Hill, 1954).
36. For a helpful discussion of these rhythras see Garrison, Dewey and Eros, chap. 2.
37. Goldstein, Teaching with Love. 86.
38. Gold and Roth, Teachers Managing Stress and Preventing Burnout, 41.
39. David Brazier, Zen Therapy: Transcending the Sorrows of the Human Mind (New York: John Wiley and Sons), 1995.
40. Styron, Darkness Visible, 76.