Fostering Childish Tendencies in Teacher Education and Young Adult Literature: The Problem of Teaching Ideas You Love

In teaching young adult literature in a teacher education programme at the undergraduate level, I pose the question of how I can best introduce my personal theoretical stances into the formal curriculum and syllabi, without unintentionally conveying such theories to my students as necessary postures. I first outline the theoretical underpinnings that inform my own work: which include psychoanalytic theory, ideas of fantasy and loss in reading experience, the concept of adolescence as a psychic and cultural relation, and the dynamics of forgetting in teacher education. In theorizing part of the process of learning to teach as the productive activation of a person’s internal archive, I then describe the methodological choices I made while constructing my course in young adult literature, where, in reference to Lynda Barry’s One Hundred Demons, my students consider the ways to best approach their own adolescent ‘demons’.