Pedagogies Made from Doubt
For the psychoanalytic philosopher, Julia Kristeva (2000), doubt surfaces as she delineates movements in the history of a culture of revolt. My interest in pedagogies of doubt is not entirely separate from this view that doubt can be linked to larger cultural shifts. Like Kristeva, albeit for my purposes situated in the contexts of early childhood institutions and pedagogies, I wonder if current logics and cultures have been disconnected from both histories of revolt and new iterations of cultural processes that drive questioning. In our current times of uncertainty, doubt remains an uncomfortable subject in pedagogical work with its associative meanings of apprehension, indecision, and as antonym of confidence. Yet, we might think about these associations differently if we trace doubt, as Lisa Farley does, in psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott’s comments on education and pedagogy in times of war, naming doubt as “the very resource needed to think against false certainties” (2012, p.42). It is precisely the way that this feeling and concept invites us to recognize certainty as something false that propels a pedagogy of doubt. Doubt is important for me in the way it holds a space in pedagogical time prior to the arrival of a question. A pedagogy of doubt works to take apart self and ideas, undoes what might appear established, and thus is a double movement of creativity and destruction. In this time before, pedagogies made from doubt propose the vitality of connections made prior to meaning between bodily feelings and knowledge, experience and world-making, and in this time we can hear the force of the pressing question, “how then are questions made” as Deborah Britzman asks when she turns her attention towards doubt (2003, p.203).
Lucy Angus
References
Britzman, D. (2000). Teacher Education in the Confusion of Our Times. Journal of Teacher Education, 51(3), 200–205. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022487100051003007
Farley, L. (2012). “Operation Pied Piper”: A Psychoanalytic Narrative of Authority in a Time of War. Psychoanalysis and History, 14(1), 29–52. https://doi.org/10.3366/pah.2012.0098
Kristeva, J. (2000). The sense and non-sense of revolt. Columbia University Press.