Mitch's Memorandum #9 on Pitt and Britzman

Memorandum on…	Submitted by: Mitch Bleier
Pitt, A. and Britzman, D. (2006). Speculations on qualities of difficult knowledge in teaching and learning. In K. Tobin and J. Kincheloe, (eds.) Doing educational research – A handbook (379 – 401). Rotterdam (NL): Sense Publishers.	U ED 70300 Prof. Tobin Spring 2008 May 7, 2008

Pitt and Britzman explore the questions, what makes knowledge difficult? and what is it to represent and narrate “difficult knowledge”? They use “difficult knowledge” to describe “a concept meant to signify both representations of social traumas (both large and small-scale) in curriculum and the individual’s encounters with them in pedagogy” (p. 379).

The inability or failure to address traumas as they occur (deferred action) mediates both how those traumas eventually are written/rewritten in memory and how they are used to deal with current traumas with which they resonate. Pitt and Britzman refer to Caruth’s term “unclaimed experience” to describe the unanalyzed, uninterpreted, unincorporated, unresolved trauma. (p. 381 – 382)

“The crisis of representation” refers to “the adequacy of language to capture experience is considered an effect of discourse rather than a reflection of that experience” (p. 380). What would Rorty say about this?

Crisis of representation around traumas leave traces in narratives about “difficult knowledge.” (p. 380)

“…psychoanalytic inquiry begins with the problem of resistance to discourse, and,…‘must take into account the fact that the human subject is a theorizing being and a being that theorizes itself.’… Psychoanalytic research posits education as an exemplary site where the crisis of representation that is outside meets the crisis of representation that is inside” – a phenomenon that Freud called “the playground of transference.” (p. 380)

Deferred action

Traumas are not dealt with in the moment. They form the basis for interpretation of current experience. Traumas are dealt with later and they are reconstructed and redefined.

Transference

“…one makes sense of present situations through the imperatives of older conflicts” (p. 383)

“Where does one situate the event that is experience, in the past that is narrated or in the presence of its interpretation? For Freud, both positions of time are embodied in the transference” (p. 383).

Symbolization

After a description of a psychoanalyst and a boy (having difficulty in school) reversing roles in the creation of a strict classroom situation: “If transference is an obstacle to representing learning in the present, symbolization allows one to return the obstacles to the archaic conflicts they represent” (p. 385).

“…in symbolization the idea and the affect influence one another” (p. 385).

PARTICIPANTS’ CONSTRUCTIONS OF DIFFICULTY MADE FROM THE PROTOCOL (p. 387 – 393)

A series of survey responses is used to illustrate and explore the above ideas.

• It is interesting that the first two respondents, the undergraduates, acknowledge the power, if not always the legitimacy, of knowledge, and the consequences they might suffer if access to knowledge is given to or withheld from them.

• But they don’t consider rationalization, justification, obfuscation as possibilities.

• Nor do they recognize knowledge as dynamic and situated. They don’t talk about constructing or creating knowledge, they talk about obtaining and distributing knowledge.

• The other interviewees have a more introspective approach to knowledge and how their inner selves interpret and use prior experience to mediate current experiences.