What Might We Learn From Heartache?: Loss, Loneliness, and Pedagogy

Abstract

This essay traverses back and forth across the institutionally-imposed boundary between storytelling and critical reflection to explore how my thinking about feminist pedagogical praxis has been irrevocably altered by the experience of losing a parent as well as facilitating mutual support groups for young adults whose parents or siblings have died. I am documenting a piece of my growth as a learning teacher over the 2006–7 academic year. I have taught first-year university students in a tutorial setting for the past five years as a master of arts student at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia, and as a PhD candidate at York University in Toronto, Ontario. My undergraduate and graduate degrees are all in women’s studies, and I have taught within my home discipline, Social Science and Fine Arts Cultural Studies. I begin by spinning a yarn that twists together the loss of my father, teaching first year students, and facilitating a mutual support group for the first time. I reflect upon how we carry our loss histories with us into the classroom: this loss could be death, but it is more multifarious than that. This is loss in its broadest sense. Loss amplifies the effects we feel when we are perceived in cliched and discriminatory ways, so it is fundamental to acknowledge its presence in the classroom. What do we do with this loss? How can we respond to it? Theorizing the importance of loneliness in education is a helpful starting point to begin thinking about these critical questions. Finally, I conclude by discussing the transformative impact that my facilitating and teaching have had upon each other, and upon how I live with, and invite warmly though sorrowfully, the loss and grief of myself and others whenever I am capable of doing so. Denying the existence of loss bars an opportunity that we have to recognize and work with the loneliness engendered by learning and death. This reflection has taken me all the way back to the almost impossible-to-write final paper about loneliness and education for the first course I took during my PhD coursework, the same semester that my father was diagnosed with cancer for the second and final time. This essay returns to Deborah Britzman’s pedagogy and psychoanalytic theory course at York University, which marked a pivotal moment in my academic career and in my life. This course made me