The Place of Reparation

Abstract

In the Fall of 2000, when Jim Garrison and Dan Liston invited me to contribute a chapter to an edited collection they were compiling on the place of love in teaching and learning, I had just returned to Newfoundland and Labrador, my place of birth, to begin a position at my alma mater, Memorial University of Newfoundland. As I have written in Chapter 1 of this book, that return was prompted and marked by much chaos and ambivalence. I attempted to write my way through some of these difficulties in the chapter I wrote in response to their invitation. I began with the questions, What brings me to teaching? What do I bring to teaching? Out of what circumstances and struggles do these questions present themselves? I set out to explore these questions in a manner that might help me confront the disquiet that has haunted my relationship to teaching since the death of my mother two years prior to my return home. This chapter, a revised version of the one written for and published in that edited collection, entitled Teaching, Loving and Learning, is an attempt to bring a notion of reflective grief to a study of my teaching and to speculate on the place of such inquiry in an educational discourse of loss.KeywordsPsychic LifeUnconscious MindPsychic ProcessPsychic EventDepressive PositionThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.