Classrooms as Holding Environments

This chapter and the next draw from Winnicott’s notions of the holding mother/environment and the object mother. Here I call for us to move past an optics of community and instead present how “holding” might come to be enacted. Drawing on Benjamin’s notion of thirdness, Buber’s I and Thou, and Maturana and Varela’s notions of autopoietic life, I point to the honing of critical sensibilities (not technique) as a way to approach inclusive practices.