ABSTRACT
An underlying theme of the essays in this book is the importance for educators to acknowledge and to reflect on our cultural engagements or readings of culture as auto/biographical moments, as telltale signifiers of investment, desire, and identity. Engagements with/in pedagogy are an indispensable aspect of analysis of the politics and culture of pedagogy where pedagogy is located within cultural practices of power and design. This note is struck resoundingly well by Alice Kaplan in her memoir, French Lessons (see Chapter 3), and is reiterated by several theorists who see the work of schooling and desire as irrevocably bound (Britzman 1992; Taubman 1992; Simon 1995; Grumet 1995; Gallop 1995; hooks 1994; Pagano 1991). The purpose of this chapter is to focus eros and pedagogy, both its more hopeful and darker sides, as that most intimate exchange of pedagogical desire. Unlike the previous chapters—the issues of which were addressed specifically, although not exclusively, to literacy educators—this chapter addresses the cultural work of education more generally.
