Vital Literacies from the Clinic to the Classroom: Exploring the Unconscious Dynamics of Learning and Change

Drawing upon the author's experiences as a child psychotherapist, classroom teacher, and literacy scholar, this book explores the affective and unconscious dynamics that are at the heart of literacy in order to reconceptualize learning in the elementary literacy classroom.Moving beyond rationalist understandings of literacy, the book argues for the importance of unconscious, embodied, and relational processes in literacy research and teacher education. Boldt shows how her clinical practice with children who rarely used speech to represent their lives or their struggles altered her understanding of the role of language, representation, and learning in classrooms. Bringing these insights to literacy classrooms, the book argues that such affective and relational processes are fundamental to how children encounter curriculum, one another, and themselves as learners, while also revealing how curriculum and pedagogy implicitly and explicitly communicate who and what comes to matter in schools.This book will be an enlightening resource for teacher educators, literacy researchers and curriculum theorists, as well as students and scholars of early childhood education.

About the Author

Gail Boldt is a Distinguished Professor of Education in Literacy in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at Penn State University. She is also a psychoanalytically-oriented therapist, trained in providing play therapy to children.