‘I just have to tell you’: pedagogical encounters into the emotional terrain of learning

Abstract

Student engagements with difficult knowledge can produce strange effects. When learning from traumatic human histories students can become personally confronted by unthinkable knowledge of the other’s existence. My inquiry situates itself in the emotional space of student disclosure that references particular conflicts with learning from representations of the other’s unthinkable lived experience used in my classroom. I discuss the pedagogical and ethical problems and challenges faced by lecturers such as myself who engage students’ personal disclosures as a resource for learning. I find that psychoanalytic constructs, with its accompanying practices of interpretation, can support teachers to produce from and with their students’ personal disclosures profound insights for learning and new knowledge for pedagogical theory and practice.