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Writing in The New Yorker, Louis Menand (2011) recently debated the value of a college education. He articulated two distinct approaches to education: one approach sorts out the intelligent from the less so and socializes children to the norms of society in order to train better workers; the other values education and knowledge as contributing to the fostering of a well-rounded human being, an active and engaged citizen empowered to participate in society. Tamara Bibby makes an invaluable contribution to the resolution of this stark quandary.
Bibby portrays herself as being increasingly frustrated by narrow theoretical understandings of education and learning. Borrowing heavily from Deborah Britzman throughout the book, Bibby seeks to introduce teachers to psychoanalytic process and to Winnicott's and Bion's ideas of transformation.
As an educator and a trained psychoanalyst, I found some of her descriptions of psychoanalytic concepts refreshing (for example, her contextualization of the unconscious as always psychosocial). At other times, however, as she delved further into the group work of Bion, I found her theoretical descriptions less rich.
The book chronicles her research, which involved observing one class of nine-year-old children from summer to the end of fall the following year. The school, as described by Bibby, is a multiethnic urban school in London that is consistently rated highly by the local authorities. But this is no ordinary teacher-observation study. For, while interesting in-depth methods of research remain on the fringes in the US, out of the range of mainstream journals and grant-funding, they seem (from the view of these shores at least) to thrive in the UK. Bibby not only takes a team into the classroom, she also creates a participatory action research project, actively involving the children: they develop questionnaires to administer to their peers, interview classmates and adults in the school (including their teachers), and help to analyze