THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OF PSYCHODYNAMIC PEDAGOGY

AARE/ERA CONFERENCE
Singapore, November 1996


ROSLYN ARNOLD, University of Sydney


ABSTRACT This paper outlines the theoretical antecedents and 
underpinnings of psychodynamic pedagogy. Central to such a theoretical 
perspective are concepts such as emotional memory, affective 
sensitivity, mirroring and empathy. The case is argued that teaching 
and learning are enhanced when teachers are able to create in students 
a dynamic between their cognitive and affective processes. Hence the 
need for teachers to be empathetically attuned to their students' 
thinking and feeling states. The nature of empathy within educational 
contexts is explained, together with its significant function in 
psychodynamic pedagogy. Furthermore the teaching principles and some 
research issues arising from this theoretical perspective are outlined 
and discussed.


Educators with an inquiring mind and a reflective nature, will 
acknowledge that there is still much uncertainty about what influences 
truly effective teaching and learning.  Experienced teacher educators 
know that effective pedagogy, experienced often as moments of 
enlightenment for both teachers and students, occurs for reasons deeper 
than can be explained by check lists of teacher and pupil attributes or 
background.  In such moments, teachers and students all know and feel 
that something significant has happened.  Larger than the formal 
content of the lesson is the often powerful feeling of excitement, 
curiosity, mastery and even awe that such moments are inspired by.  The 
emphasis in the last three words is deliberate because it suggests that 
feeling gives life to thinking: a proposition underlying a 
psychodynamic theory of pedagogy.

The central theory of this paper is that the dynamic reciprocity 
between thinking and feeling, these two essential components of human 
experience, underpins effective pedagogy.  Further, to be effective, 
such pedagogy aims to be deeply personalised, modified and practiced by 
its adherents in coherent and integrated ways.  This position, and its 
principles, take account of the role of affect in learning, not only to 
increase students' sense of well-being in classrooms, but to develop 
their conceptual understandings of subject content, interpersonal 
dynamics and the contexts of pedagogy.  This paper will outline some 
aspects of the development of the psychodynamic theory of pedagogy and 
indicate why it has special relevance for teaching and learning.  In 
the course of doing that, reference will also be made to some 
distinguishable areas for research arising from this conceptual 
innovation in pedagogy.

The influences upon this theoretical development have been my own 
longitudinal study of school children's writing development (Arnold, 
1991a), and other work (1993a, 1994). The theory draws on a number of 
sources including early infant studies on the development of affect 
(Stern, 1985), psychoanalytic studies (Kohut 1959, 1982) and from 
writing development (Wilkinson, 1986).  These disciplines, and drama in 
education (Arnold, 1992) and teacher education (Arnold and Hughes, 
1992) have been influential not so much because they are uniquely 
relevant to such theory development but because they are the 
disciplines within which I am most actively engaged professionally.  

They are, nonetheless, disciplines which can offer teachers and 
students particular experiences in thinking, feeling, embodying, 
articulating, composing, symbolising and enacting.  Such experiences, 
arguably, help us make sense of ourselves and our world which is a 
fundamental process in the psychodynamic model and in related areas of 
pedagogy.  Further, it has become very clear to me through working with 
colleagues and postgraduate students who are developing and applying 
this model, that it needs to be experienced and reflected upon by its 
adherents, in personal, idiosyncratic and creative ways.  It is a 
theory which offers insights, principles and informing frameworks which 
beg to be certified, modulated and exemplified by those working within 
it.  it is a theory which tends to attract those educators with a 
belief in both the deeply personal and collaborative nature of human 
learning, and a need to understand and articulate the complexities of 
pedagogy.  This theory is both a comfort and a challenge to its 
adherents.  It offers no easy insights and profiles its own development 
through its essentially spiralling nature.

It will come as no surprise to teachers whose professional work is 
characterised by dynamic engagements with students - engagements which 
involve listening carefully to students' contributions, organising 
students into group or individual activities which involve complex 
levels of teachers'/students' academic and interpersonal skills - to 
recognise the argument underpinning psychodynamic pedagogy. The core of 
that argument is that effective pedagogy is enhanced by context in 
which there is an engagement between thinking and feeling, at personal, 
interpersonal and intrapersonal levels. This is not to say that 
cognitive approaches precede affective ones, or that affectivity 
underpins cognition. Rather, it is to argue for the desirability of 
teachers to be skilled in ways of recognising empathically, students' 
feeling states, and skilled in knowing how to create a dynamic between 
their feeling states and their cognitive awareness. Skilled teachers 
might well recognise when students are able to articulate their 
thinking with some fluency, but such teachers are  even more skilled 
when they can recognise the underpinning feelings informing students' 
articulations. The word `articulation' has been used deliberately here 
because it can suggest both verbal and non-verbal (or physical) 
expressiveness. Traditionally scholarship has emphasised cognitive 
abilities. Now, with the recognition of arts-based pedagogy, (Taylor, 
1996) the articulation between scholarship and pedagogy in cognitive 
and performative modes is acknowledged as necessary. The metaphor of 
articulation  is useful to suggest co-operation between self-contained 
units and the process of moving forward through synergies.

The central proposition underpinning psychodynamic pedagogy is that 
learning occurs most effectively  when it involves a dynamic and very 
complex interplay between the thoughts and feelings of the learner, and 
significant others.  Hence the fundamental inter-psychic and 
intra-psychic nature of this interplay needs to be understood.  Given 
the nature of this dynamic intervention within selves and between 
others, the process can be positively enhancing or thwarting of 
development.  It is argued here that in human learning, perception is 
followed by feelings, thoughts and behaviour (or consequences).  That 
is, the brain registers a sensory perception of events which triggers 
affective and cognitive responses.  Extreme situations such as being 
confronted by danger can serve as an example here.  In such situations 
of panic or terror feelings can be either modulated or increased by the 
activity of cognitively assessing the reality of the danger.  The 
dynamic interplay between feeling and thought can function in complex 
ways, and in less extreme ways than cited above, but it is fundamental 
in human learning, notwithstanding the capacity for denial and 
repression.


This theory posits the individual at the centre of the psychodynamic 
process, not as an isolate but as the initial percevor.  In the 
earliest phases of human life and largely throughout development, 
learning involves significant others and social contexts.  However, 
psychodynamic learning at its deepest level acknowledges the importance 
of interactions between aspects of self, both intrasubjectively, 
(between one's feeling states), and intracognitively, (between one's 
thinking states).  The dynamic nature of the process derives from the 
self-energising characteristic of an interplay between both 
intra-thinking states and intra-feeling states.  The psychodynamic 
experience involves second by second shifts in thinking and feeling, 
stimulated by perception, reflection and introspection.  Social 
influences clearly impinge and the process becomes more complex as 
individuals internalise and make sense of the thinking and feeling 
states of significant others.  Ideally, in humanistic and psychodynamic 
models of pedagogy, individuals can distinguish between their own 
effective and cognitive states and those of their significant others.  
It could be argued that this concept underpins mature psychic growth 
and as such should be an informing principle of contemporary education. 
 Needless to say, it is easier to promote and measure intellectual 
forms of logic and problem solving, for example, than it is to measure 
and promote the fluid processes of human psychic social, 
inter/intrasubjective interactions.  But is it preferable?

A concept which is important in the psychodynamic model is that or 
mirroring. In early childhood, it is argued here, the effectiveness of 
adults' mirroring of infants' affects can be crucial in emotional 
development (Stern 1985) Consistent with the fundamental principal of 
psychodynamic pedagogy, mirroring is therefore important in cognitive 
growth.



Theoretical antecedents to the psychodynamic model

In order to contextualize the psychodynamic of pedagogy, exploration of 
the theoretical antecedents is necessary.  Charles Darwin in the 1860s 
(1965) noted the expression of universally recognisable affects in 
human beings.  While there are idiosyncratic variations in the 
physiological expression of those feelings, it is possible to recognise 
in humans the expression of anxiety, anger, guilt, sadness, shame, 
excitement and joy, affects that lead to universal phenomena.  Self 
psychologists more recently have developed synonyms for these affect 
states in order to differentiate shades of feelings, but the basic 
emotions are believed to be experienced across cultures and races and 
expressed in recognisable facial forms, notwithstanding cultural and 
social pressures to repress or conceal some feelings (Horowitz, Narmar 
and Wilner, 1979).

It is interesting to note the remarks of Steven Rose, a practicing 
scientist working at the forefront of medical research, in his book, 
The Making of Memory (1993, p.36). He describes his experience of 
discovering that his feelings interfered with his game of chess, a game 
which he had previously believed involved `purely cognitive and logical 
skills'. From his scientific work and his reflections upon his own 
learning experiences, he argues that `cognition cannot be divorced from 
affect, try as one might'. He continues, `Even today I find myself 
frequently in danger of forgetting that lesson, though the problems 
that it illuminates are fundamental to my research strategy, just as 
much as their resolution ought to be fundamental to a research strategy 
for living'.


In a similar vein, but from an aesthetic perspective, Michael Heyward 
(1994), writing about the Australian artist Donald Friend, remarks, 
`What Friend thought, saw and felt was swept up by his enormous gift 
for telling stories. He knew, better than most people, that feeling is 
the source of all knowledge, and he put into his diary most of what he 
knew'. Howard Gardner (1985, p.294), in arguing for a more complex view 
of intelligence than commonly prevails, comments, `the roots of a sense 
of self lie in the individual's exploration of his own feelings and in 
his emerging ability to view his own feelings and experiences in terms 
of the interpretive schemes and symbol systems provided by the 
culture'. Stimulated by these remarks, educators and scientists might 
well join forces in articulating a fitful place for affect in education 
and in formulating models for pedagogy in the future.

The essence of what is being argued here signals the underlying 
rationale of psychodynamic theory; that formal education builds on, 
either firmly or in a skewed fashion, the earliest developmental 
experiences; that our affective coding of experience powerfully 
influences our interpretations of experience; that interactive teaching 
and learning can effectively capitalise upon the inherent dynamism of 
interplays between feeling and thought, stimulating such dynamism to 
deepen our consciousness, expressiveness and insights, into and within, 
individual and social contexts.

The role of mirroring in learning is supported by a number of infant 
studies (Lichtenberg, 1981, 1983; Beebe and Stern, 1977; Stern, 1977; 
Trevarthan, 1979, 1980, quoted in Stern, 1985) which demonstrate that 
infants are programmed to seek engagement with others and with their 
environment.  These studies focus attention of the infant's development 
of a subjective self and what Stern calls Ôthe domain of 
intersubjective relatedness' (Stern, 1985:27).  The infant engages the 
mother's attention through eye gaze, bodily movements, cries, and so 
on.  In normal development, when the mother responds to the infant she 
perceives, intuitively, his/her affect state and responds accordingly.  
If the baby cries urgently the mother tries to soothe, if he/she 
smiles, the mother smiles back, mirroring for the infant what its 
affect state stimulates in her.  This process whereby the mother's 
empathic responsiveness (or otherwise) can amplify, soothe, validate 
(or deaden) the infant's affect states, stimulates the development of 
what Stern calls Representations of Interactions that have been 
Generalised (RIGs) (Stern, 1985:97).  It is the mother's, and others' 
empathic responsiveness to the infant which influences the integration 
of `agency, coherence, and affectivity' (Stern, 1985:99) to provide the 
infant with a unified sense of a core self and a core other: `the 
existential bedrock of interpersonal relations' (Stern, 1985:125).

In the early stages of development (to about 9 months) the empathic 
process goes unnoticed but the empathic response is registered by the 
infant.  At about nine months, infants seem able to notice the 
congruence between their own affective state and the affect expression 
seen on someone's face (MacKain et al. 1985, in Stern 1985:132).  The 
infant is now able to experience inter-affectivity; the dynamic 
interplay of its affects with those of others.

While the mother's (or sometimes significant others') empathic 
responsiveness is helping the infant's encoding of affects, it is also 
creating certain meanings for him/her.  It is not the case that the 
mother (or significant other) simply feels `in tune' or `out of tune' 
with the infant.  She reacts spontaneously or makes decisions about 
responding even sometimes deliberately invalidating a particular 
response (for example, the baby may squeal with delight at the sight of 

a red-back spider, at which the significant other gasps with fright) 
thereby teaching the baby an appropriate emotional response.  The 
mother's function is not only to validate, sometimes it is to protect.  
The mother's (or others') empathic responsiveness is crucial to the 
development of the core-self in the pre-verbal stage.  Such empathic 
responsiveness is not just a case of mirroring the infant's affective 
state but rather one of responding in a way which modulates the 
infant's affects, through soothing or intensifying.  Later the child 
engages with others, and with toys and space as self-soothing or 
exciting objects.  

Clearly, empathy continues to be important in the development of 
interrelatedness, but as the child develops physically, cognitively, 
linguistically, socially and self-reflectively, other people, events, 
and objects can serve subjective and cognitive needs.  As the mother's 
empathic responsiveness in the first nine months or so is crucial in 
the development of a core self, it is easy to imagine that at a 
significant level, albeit an unconscious one, empathic responsiveness 
from adults and learning/socialisation experiences are closely aligned 
in children's minds. It is fair to assume that the infant's feelings 
about significant others become part of the encoding of experience, and 
part of the later development of intrapersonal records or templates of 
experience. That is, one records the experience at several levels of 
affectivity, creating a complex template of affective responses which 
are continuously expressed, refined, elaborated upon or repressed 
through one's life.  This somewhat simplified explanation suggests how 
interactive pedagogy can repeat, extend and work upon deeply 
internalised affective and cognitive experiences. 

Assuming that a mother and significant others have done a `good-enough' 
job in promoting a child's psychic development, to borrow Winnicott's 
(1965) empathic and insightful comment about parenting, we can assume 
that laid down in our psyches are memory traces templates of the 
powerfully affective contexts in which early learning occurred.  
Whether we can access the templates consciously depends on levels of 
self awareness, and in the case of some affectively experiences, 
psychic robustness and willingness to access memory. These concepts of 
mirroring and empathy have reference to early language development.

Halliday (1975) theorised that early language development occurs in 
part because infants recognise what language does for them.  If we 
acknowledge the role of empathy as significant in early learning, then 
it is plausible and timely to theorise that the empathic attunement of 
significant others to the infant's efforts to speak are also an 
important trigger to language development. With the development of 
language and cognition, affective coding can be expressed and made 
conscious to a greater or lesser extent throughout development. Prior 
to that development, and the development of impulse control, the infant 
might well be regarded as dominated by affects and the need to soothe 
or amplify them. It could well be that language development itself is 
prompted, in part, by a need to express feelings in more differentiated 
ways than crying allows.


A definition of empathy

The concept of empathy as a medium for learning development has its 
genesis in the infant studies mentioned above and the self-psychology 
movement emanating from the work of Heinz Kohut (1959, 1971, 1979, 
1982).

In common parlance, Ôempathy' means being able to imagine, often 

intuitively, how the other feels.  Kohut (1959) described `empathy' as 
`vicarious introspection'.  A more complex process than 
Ôidentification', `vicarious introspection' includes both affective 
attunement and the cognitive capacity to judge how best to respond 
empathically to another's feeling state.  It is important to note at 
this early stage in an exploration of the concept of empathy that it is 
not just a simple capacity to know how another feels based solely on 
awareness of how you feel yourself.  Sympathy suggests we share common 
experiences with others, empathy encourages us to decentre, to 
acknowledge that another may be feeling differently to us and it 
encourages us to experience feelings beyond those immediately 
accessible.  It is a sophisticated ability involving attunement, 
reflection, decentring and introspection.


Empathy in Human Development

As our understanding of child-centred pedagogy and language development 
has been much influenced by intensive observations of infants, it is 
worth looking at the role of empathy in normal development prior to 
discussing its place in teaching and learning.  Kohut argues that the 
assertion that the presence of empathy is beneficial both in the 
clinical setting and in human life is a scientific hypothesis because 
`it suggests an explanation for certain observable contents and/or 
sequences of events in man's psychic life' (Kohut, 1982:197).  His 
analysis of the case of Mr Z (Kohut, 1979) provides a fascinating 
background to his own theoretical development of the value of empathy 
in psychotherapy and presents a model for qualitative research into 
empathy in educational settings.  As well, Kohut demonstrates how 
reflection upon practice and a capacity for introspection can inform 
theory development.  In the case of Mr Z, Kohut had a chance to 
re-analyse a long-term client and in so doing he recognised the 
negative influence of his un-empathic lapses in the first analysis.  He 
then developed his theory of self-psychology, part of which rests on 
his argument that the development of a nuclear self into a mature 
cohesive self is promoted by the self-soothing and empathic responses 
of parents and others (Kohut, 1971).

Kohut warned `empathy is used non-intuitively, ploddingly, if you wish, 
by trial and error.  I did not write about empathy as being always 
correct and accurate' (Kohut, 1982: 96).  He stressed, `empathy is a 
value-neutral mode of observation... attuned to the inner life of man' 
(Kohut, 1982: 396) and that it should be `examined and evaluated in an 
empirical context as a mental activity' (Kohut, 1982:397) (his 
emphasis).  This distinction and his further comments about empathy as 
a precondition for a mother's appropriate functioning as the child's 
self object helps to clarify the function of empathy in child 
development, in psychotherapy and in education.  In all these 
fundamentally significant processes, one partner in the dyad has to put 
aside self needs in order to attend to the other.  That is, the mother 
has to be able to tune into the child's signals (eye gaze, cries, 
movements) and understand, intuitively, in this case, the child's 
physiological and affect state.  If she responds appropriately, picking 
up or feeding or just smiling, the child's affect is validated and self 
functioning is stimulated.

Book (1988) makes an important distinction between being empathic 
intrapsychically and being empathic interpersonally.  The intrapsychic 
experience of the therapist, who is able to feel the complexity of the 
affects being experienced by the client, and therefore able to enter 
into his/her subjective world, is `empathy' in Book's terms.  The 
empathic interpersonal response is being able to convey an 

understanding of the client's inner experience to him/her in such a way 
that he/she feels understood and soothed.  Without directly 
acknowledging it, Book tunes more finely Kohut's notion of empathy as 
`vicarious introspection' and provides clinical examples to illustrate 
how the essential oscillation functions between the therapist's role as 
a participant and observer.  He also outlines the semantic confusion, 
conceptual difficulties, counter transferential difficulties and 
technical misuses of empathy in psychotherapy.  The essential 
corrective to these misuses is the therapist's capacity to oscillate 
between the intrapsychic and the interpersonal experience.  In this 
subtle, dynamic and essential therapeutic function the therapist's 
intrapsychic experience is data - gathering, or informed, affectively 
charged observation of both self-states and the other's subjective 
experience.  The interpersonal empathic response requires an ability to 
take into account that intrapsychic experience while predicting the 
most empathically appropriate response in terms of understanding the 
client and the role of therapy.

In psychotherapeutic terms the task of being empathically responsive is 
especially complex.  Guided by empathic attunement, the therapist's 
capacity for introspection and sensitivity to the state of the 
therapeutic alliance functions to soothe the client's feeling state, 
and/or to stimulate awareness of masked feelings, in the expectation 
that understanding and explaining can then be effectively developed.  
In educational settings, the teacher's empathic awareness can also be 
an effective precursor to understanding and explaining.  In such 
settings, the nature of empathy remains fairly constant, but its 
realisation has to be modified for very obvious contextual differences 
between mother - child learning situations, school contexts and between 
the intimacy of psychotherapeutic settings.

Educators in classrooms of twenty or thirty individuals might well envy 
mothers and therapists their rather more conducive learning and 
relating environments.  Nonetheless, even with the necessary 
modifications to expected outcomes determined by the realities of 
classrooms, empathy can be a powerful tool in human learning.  To pick 
up again on Stern's (1985) RIGS, mentioned above, part of learning in 
normal development involves modifications to those generalised 
interactions laid down unconsciously and consciously throughout early 
childhood and life.  The Piagetian notion that learning is a process of 
increased cognitive differentiation, now needs to be partnered with a 
concept of learning as also a process of increased affective 
differentiation through psychodynamic teaching and learning.  The 
process of psychodynamic pedagogy has been symbolised as a spiral 
(Arnold, 1991) in order to conceptualise the self generating dynamic of 
such pedagogy.


The Nature of Psychodynamic Pedagogy

While it is clear that teachers have a different role in being empathic 
in classrooms to therapists in a consulting room, the experience of 
understanding where students are coming from in order to pose questions 
or make explanations or design tasks is not so different in form.

At the heart of the psychodynamic and empathic model advocated here is 
a principle that teachers can engage students in a dynamic exploration 
of thought and feeling, leading to increased differentiation of both: 
thought becomes increasingly more complex and feelings become more 
accessible and finely tuned.  Their expression in languages, spoken and 
written, movement (enactment, physicalisation) and symbolisation 
(aesthetic artefacts) can record moments of insight and points in 

development, concomitantly with stimulating further though and feeling. 
 Elsewhere I have argued that while authentic learning can be an 
affect-arousing experience, it can also be spiralling in nature 
(Arnold, 1991a:13 - 32).

Empathic teaching creates a milieu within which the teacher's 
non-judgmental, accepting, and validating stance allows affects, 
emotional states and cognitive understandings to be expressed, explored 
and modulated.  The teacher's purpose is to be empathic in order to 
facilitate the kinds of powerful learning about the world and mastery 
of skills which occurs in early infancy and beyond.  Empathic learning 
contexts can promote shifts in affects and cognitive states which 
enlarge our awareness of life's possibilities.  Furthermore, empathic 
teaching subtly encourages students to be at the centre of their 
learning; not to remain self-centred in the pejorative sense, but to 
recognise the developmental potential for learning through engagement 
with others and the world of relationships, knowledge and culture.  The 
RIGS, Stern (1985), postulates from his early infant studies signal a 
powerful link between affect and the development of reflective thought. 
 If an infant has experienced sufficient empathic responsiveness from a 
mother and significant others, he/she is likely to see the world as 
relatively safe and benign - in the absence of evidence to the 
contrary, and therefore likely to tolerate the uncertainties of 
exploratory learning.  It is a tenet of empathic responsiveness that if 
feeling states are validated first then explaining and understanding 
can follow more effectively.

The idea of teachers encouraging students' imaginative responses to 
learning by finding relevant contact points is now an orthodoxy in 
child centred pedagogy, but imaginative responses can involve a number 
of cognitive strategies such as visualisation, hypothesising, 
re-conceptualizing, speculating, lateral thinking and problem-solving.  
Empathic approaches to learning are based on the feeling and cognitive 
responses humans have to various situations.  When these responses are 
aroused, an empathically attuned teacher can modulate them in a number 
of ways which encourage a dynamic between affect and cognition.  It is 
this dynamic (reciprocal engagement) between them which is central to 
psychodynamic pedagogy.

Clearly, not all learning could be called psychodynamic.  Rote learning 
probably involves little dynamic interplay between thinking and 
feeling, and certainly instinctual behaviour and habitual behaviour are 
rarely psychodynamic.  However, many situations involve psychodynamics. 
 For example, driving a car might be an habitual or learned behaviour 
until a change such as driving a different car or a sudden road 
emergency means that one's actions become highly conscious and feelings 
of apprehension or fear surface.  When that shift occurs, there is 
usually some reflection and awareness of the differences between past 
and present experiences.  An intrasubjective monologue might occur in 
which we talk to ourselves to make sense of changed circumstances.  For 
example, we might think, `I never realised before how awkward the 
steering was on my old car' or `I really should drive more carefully on 
this road' and so on.  In a moderately significant learning experience 
there may be little need for discussions with others, or for the 
soothing of feelings aroused by the experience through an 
intra-subjective monologue.  However, when existing personal constructs 
(Kelly, 1955) or ways of construing the world are disturbed or 
disconfirmed, there may be the potential for powerful learning to occur 
and the experience could arouse strong feelings.  In dealing with such 
experiences, psychodynamic processes come into play.  Thoughts and 
feelings interact intrasubjectively, and inter-subjectively if others 
are involved, to expand the self/other dynamic here.  If the process of 

denial is evoked effectively, then the experience may be repressed; if 
it is dealt with as a learning experience then through reflection and 
introspection, whereby the thoughts and feelings are worked through to 
a tolerable degree, shifts in self-awareness and world-awareness can 
occur.

Psychodynamic pedagogy focuses on the individual though clearly 
powerfully significant learning occurs as individuals interact with 
others.  The learning of language as an obvious example.  When we 
acknowledge, however, that others have their own thoughts and feelings 
influencing their interactive responses, the complexity of pedagogy 
becomes apparent.  By centring the individual at the core of 
psychodynamic processes, socialising influences upon individuals are 
not denied.  Rather, they are regarded as undeniably a part of the 
human developmental process, especially in the function of mirroring, 
whereby others' responses to us influence our self-perceptions.  In 
this psychodynamic model, the way an infant records psychically, for 
example, early socialising experiences, will depend very much on the 
feeling states experienced in the process of being socialised.  And 
those feeling states and their intensity can be highly variable.


Teaching in an Empathic Mode

Although teachers can use questioning for all kinds of purposes it is 
regarded primarily as an effective way of developing cognitive skills 
and concept understanding.  In that primary function, nonetheless, 
questions need to be structured empathically so that they achieve a 
desirable affective - cognitive dynamic.  It is worth considering how 
this might be done.

¥An empathic teacher will choose questions which may serve a number of 
functions at different times.  They may validate, soothe, seek 
amplification, encourage curiosity or promote lateral thinking.  They 
will be phrased in a non-confronting way so that students can respond 
in general, non-disclosing ways if they so choose.  It is attuned 
teachers who can successfully `scaffold' learning through the 
structures they build into work with students (Vygotsky, 1978).

¥Empathic teachers will listen rather than just hear, picking up 
nuances in students' tone of voice, and recognising how to modulate 
their own voices appropriately.  It could be useful to have students 
sub-text our own dialogue as teachers to determine whether the meanings 
they heard were those we intended.

¥Empathic teacher will feel comfortable with their own feelings, 
however powerful or disconcerting they might be.  As well, that teacher 
will know when it is appropriate to disclose or express such feelings 
and when decorum dictates they should be concealed.  Johnstone 
(1981:17) touches on the issue of emotions in learning contexts in a 
poignant anecdote:

`One day, when I was eighteen, I was reading a book and I began to 
 weep.  I was astounded.  I'd had no idea that literature could affect 
 me in such a way.  If I'd have wept over a poem in class the teacher 
 would have been appalled.  I realised that my school had been teaching 
 me not  to respond'.

Would things be different now, even in child-centred classrooms?  
Johnstone (1981:15) also cites an incident where a psychotic girl was 
invited by a teacher to `look at the pretty flower, Betty'.  In 
raptures Betty said `All the flowers are beautiful'.  In a blocking 

response the teacher replied `but this flower is especially beautiful'. 
 At that Betty rolled on the ground screaming.  She responded to the 
destructiveness of the teacher's well-meant but unempathic response 
through which the teacher unfortunately indicated to Betty that 
classification was more important that emotional attunement.

¥An empathic teacher will take heart from the knowledge that human 
beings are quite robust psychically (all the more so for having 
empathically attuned parents/care-givers) and knows that failures in 
empathy are inevitable and rarely catastrophic.  Furthermore, empathic 
teachers will forgive themselves such failures, recognising too that 
students are also more ready to learn from (and forgive) those teachers 
whom they recognise as empathically attuned or who have their interests 
at heart.  By the same token, empathic teachers will set appropriate 
boundaries on their own time and availability so they do not risk 
emotional exhaustion or `burn out'.

From the theoretical outline above, the concepts, principles and 
outcomes of psychodynamic pedagogy can be summarised as follows:

CONCEPTS

*empathy/empathic attunement

*mirroring of affects and thoughts by significant others, signalled by:

*attuned attention
*postural alignment
*eye contact
*repetition of words/phrases
*requests for elaborations

*Representations of Internalised experiences Generalised (RIGs)

*integration and increased differentiation and expression of thoughts 
and feelings

*dynamism/spiralism

*inspiration/enthusiasm - teachers and learners need to be committed to 
the learning experiences

*mobilisation of inter/intra-subjective dialogues


PRINCIPLES

*Affect and cognition exists in a dynamic relationship in learning 
contexts and both need to be engaged.

*The dynamic between affect and cognition can enhance learning through 
a process of modification of prior experiences and a process of 
differentiation.

*Educators need empathic understanding and attunement to teach 
psychodynamically.


OUTCOMES

*It needs to be acknowledged that unconscious thoughts and feelings can 
influence behaviour.


*The nature of the content involved in learning is a significant 
variable in the relative strengths of the affect/cognition dynamic.

*Mirroring of the affect and cognition involved in pedagogy by 
educators enhances learning.

*Scaffolding of cognition is one process by which educators put into 
effect their empathic attunement (or ZPD in Vygotsky's terms).

*Modulating (escalating or soothing) feelings is another process.

*As a result of psychodynamic pedagogy learners become increasingly 
independent of external validation, and draw more on their internalised 
self-directing, self-affirmating, unconscious-tapping repertoire of 
maturing processes.

*Psychodynamic learning engages learners in reflection involving 
inter/intra-subjective dialogue.

In one of the teacher education courses in the Bachelor in Education 
(Secondary) programme at the University of Sydney, work is in progress 
to evaluate the effectiveness of psychodynamic pedagogy using drama 
enactments across the curriculum for the development of 
student-teachers' competence in classrooms.  Qualitative responses from 
student teachers are encouraging and further analyses will be 
undertaken of students' reflective journals.  Such journals can enhance 
psychodynamic pedagogy and provide insights for research (Arnold, 
1993a) because if appropriately structured, they can encourage students 
to acknowledge the dynamic between thought and feeling in their own 
learning and they can encourage students to differentiate their 
thoughts and feelings.  Such reflective writing can provide both a 
stimulus for cognitive development (Arnold, 1991) and a means for the 
measurement of the effectiveness of psychodynamic pedagogy.  It is 
proposed to extend the implications of this work in progress more fully 
into teacher education, drama in education, English education and 
gifted education.

In attempting to understand the very complex processes involved in 
pedagogy it may be helpful to reflect upon the experience of looking at 
computer images which generate abstract fields of colour.  Publishing 
houses are currently promoting books and posters of such images* .  The 
reader/viewer has to stare at these seemingly abstract images until a 
three dimensional image appears.  The process of staring at these 
images is frustrating at first, and one's credulity is severely tested 
but if you allow yourself to follow the instructions, to `let the image 
come to you', magically, it seems, the picture develops dimension.  You 
perceive depth, perspective and a clearly foreground image.  There is, 
no doubt, a complex physiological explanation for this phenomenon.  
What is particularly relevant to pedagogy and the development of theory 
are the psychological dynamics involved in the processes of trying to 
perceive dimension in the picture.  Belief, disbelief, hope, despair, 
confidence, determination, anxiety, help from others and memories of 
past learning experiences all have a part in the process.  Just as they 
do in most occasions when we try to develop new ways of looking at the 
world.


Psychodynamics as development

The claim that this approach to teaching and learning is 
developmentally sound rests on a number of arguments about the nature 

of human learning. If we consider the extraordinary kinds and quantity 
of learning which occurs in the first five years of life, it has to be 
acknowledged that non-formal learning (that is, what happens in the 
family and play-group) must be based on some intuitively sound 
principles. Positive feedback and mirroring, enthusiasm of the learner, 
modelling by adults, patience with failure and encouragement to 
practice are just some of the characteristics of much informal positive 
learning. Consistent with the principles of psychodynamic pedagogy is 
the hypothesis that learning in early childhood had a strong affective 
underpinning for the infant/child. That effective underpinning would be 
variable in intensity and duration according to individual 
circumstances, but one could conjecture that a constant factor might be 
the pleasure the infant experienced in a sense of mastery or 
achievement. Presumably, learning has intrinsic psychological rewards 
of an affective, as well as a cognitive nature, alongside the social 
benefits. Certain milestones in an infant's development like standing, 
talking and impulse control are rich with psychological rewards which 
become the basis for the infant's self-esteem. Mindful of these early 
childhood experiences, psychodynamic pedagogy looks to build upon the 
largely unconscious affective foundations which are a powerful part of 
early learning. Piaget's concept of development as increased 
differentiation, can apply to affective development also. In such an 
application it would be argued that increased ability to recognise 
feelings and to verbalise or express them in increasingly more 
differentiated ways would be a measure of development.  Hence the need 
to become aware of the influence of RIGS on our behaviour, in order to 
modify and differentiate them. That is, to short circuit the 
unconscious, generalising habit which, in some circumstances, thwarts 
development. In such processes there is potential for a dynamic between 
affect and cognition to be realised and elaborated, in the interests of 
enrichment and development.


Research issues

It is timely to put these theoretical propositions to the test by 
conducting empirical and qualitative research.  My work in writing 
research (Arnold, 1991a) which demonstrated that students taught 
writing in psychodynamic ways became better thinkers, needs further 
development.  The nature of efficacy of empathic teaching deserves 
further scrutiny.  The subjects for a well planned research project 
will be found among empathic teachers and teacher educators and several 
researchers presenting at this symposium can elaborate their own work.


A research project analysing and critiquing the relationship between 
psychodynamic pedagogy such can occur in drama enactment work, and the 
kinds of reflections appropriate for student journals might well 
highlight the way feeling and thought can interact dynamically to 
deepen understanding.  Interactive experiences can be shaped in new 
ways when they are written about and reflected upon.

Similarly, the role of psychodynamic pedagogy in enhancing literacy 
development, particularly reading, merits attention.  Maza's work 
(1996) on psychodynamic pedagogy in deaf education, Nicolson's (1996) 
on her work in a juvenile justice setting, Fritz's (1996) work in 
design and technology, Hughes' (1996) on the nature of psychodynamic 
pedagogy, Kitson's (1996) on literacy development and Bechervaise's 
(1996) and Wearring's (1996) offer promising advances.

While the focus of pedagogy is commonly upon teacher-students 
interactions, there are possibilities for effective teaching and 

learning between peers.  Psychodynamic pedagogy encourages students to 
teach and learn cooperatively, and accelerates their learning (Arnold, 
1991a).  It is likely that such pedagogy taps the tacit abilities to 
which Polanyi (1958, 1959, 1969) alerted us.  As alluded to earlier, 
psychodynamic pedagogy has a place in teacher education, and across the 
curriculum.  Research into its effectiveness across these areas could 
be very fruitful.


Conclusion

The primary reason for arguing for psychodynamic pedagogy is that is 
does seem to tap tacit abilities in students, thus enabling teachers to 
focus on developmental methods rather than upon primary motivation.  
Students are enthusiastic about methods which are pleasurable, 
enhancing and effective.  Teachers working in empathic and affective 
ways are themselves energised, rather than enervated.  Thinking and 
learning become internalised and personalised when they occur in 
harmonious social contexts which engage the right and left side of the 
brain.

A psychodynamic theory is active, expressive, student centred, creative 
and imaginative, and may involve symbolic activities like drawing, 
movement, drama, model-making and play activities, alone and with 
others.  Ideally, such an approach will not necessarily become less 
creative and more formal as students move up the secondary school but 
will continue to encourage the development of both creative and 
analytic abilities.  In a dynamic and interactive classroom the teacher 
will encourage exploration and self-expression through various symbolic 
and expressive experiences in the belief that students have the ability 
and the need to make sense of their world through a range of learning 
experiences.  At the same time the teacher will have a well-developed 
working model of what constitutes affective and cognitive development 
and will be able to structure experiences in ways which promote that 
development.  The teacher will also be a model of a well-integrated, 
creative and analytic mind.

It is generally not acknowledged that the interactive classroom can 
provide the teacher, as well as the students, with opportunities for 
imaginative explorations of formal and informal texts and human 
interactions, together with opportunities for self-reflection and 
cognitive development.  The teacher's responsibility is to structure 
developmental activities which increase the students' awareness and 
understanding, to provide an adult, responsive, constructive audience 
for their work, along with the audiences provided by their peers, and 
to clarify with them the kinds of thinking, language and creative 
abilities they may have demonstrated in their work.  The teacher needs 
to be engaged with students some times and appropriately disengaged 
other times in order to analyse sensitively what is happening in the 
classroom and what needs restructuring.  Such a balanced, demanding 
role for the teacher requires, at the very least, insight, 
well-developed personal language skills, empathy, flexibility and a 
capacity to engage students in undertaking and analysing knowledge, 
ideas, issues and classroom interactions.  One of the many advantages 
of an interactive classroom, however, is that the teacher can involve 
students in perceiving, analysing, reflecting and commenting upon that 
they hear, see, feel and think as they engage in classroom activities.  
The classroom can therefore become a workshop for real life and a safe 
environment for experimentation and risk-taking.

Psychodynamic pedagogy rests on a belief that our psychic templates 
influence our behaviour and ways of making sense of experience rather 

more powerfully than our social experiences.  In other words, the 
psychic experiences filter the social and pedagogical ones.  This is 
the challenge and articulation of this paper.

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