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This paper emerges from an ongoing, three-year qualitative study of how adolescents, teachers, and peer sexual health educators interpret the language of abstinence and represent the emotional meanings that enliven sexuality and sexual health. The paper demonstrates how conflicts of thinking and relationality emerge from aesthetic narratives about adolescent sexuality found in a short film. Aesthetic problems of representing sexuality, subjectivity, and emotional significance found in focus group data are brought to a discussion of some methodological dilemmas of conducting research on the emotional contexts of sexual health education. Drawing on psychoanalytic theories of thinking and symbolization, this paper considers how aesthetic encounters with film may enable researchers and educators to explore the hidden investments and evasive maneuvers that structure conversations about sexuality and emotional life.

This article explores how a curriculum of film becomes organized by the teacher's worries about what film may open up in class. The author focuses on her own worries about showing Gus Van Sant's (2003) film, "Elephant," an elliptical and dreamlike study of the murders in 1999 of twelve students and a teacher at Columbine High School, to a class of teacher candidates. The course, entitled "The Adolescent and the Teacher," was designed to explore theories of adolescent development and representations of adolescent experience. By refusing to explain the Columbine murders or suggest how the lessons of the past may become a prophylactic against future repetitions, the author hoped that the film would help students to think about school violence outside of the usual discourses of safety and prevention. The author's reading of "Elephant" focuses on three dimensions of time: the ethnographic present of representation (the details and rhythms of an ordinary day at high school), the uncanny (the role of repetition and anxiety in the narrative), and the possibility of reparative reading (a belated study of the nature of perception). Close attention is paid to how the troubling history recounted in the film and the problem of engaging in a reading of the film come into conflict. This article raises some dilemmas of staging encounters with representations of social violence in teacher education: the teacher's anxiety, the pedagogical problem of insignificance, and the aesthetic possibilities of repairing meaning. As teachers begin to understand how their anxiety is telegraphed through curriculum, they may then learn to read students' responses to curricular texts, and their own responses, as aesthetic representations of the self. (Contains 6 notes.)

The authors reflect on some challenges, opportunities, and lessons learned in the process of planning and implementing an artistic investigation of physical space in a public high school in Chicago. This article is the result of conversations between a student teacher and a preservice teacher educator working in collaboration. Our definition of 'divides' includes both the sense in which divides function as obstacles, barriers, and/or forms of constraint, and also productively as opportunities to navigate and work through tensions between opposites. Working with the psychoanalytic concept of potential space, we suggest how students, art teachers, and teacher educators might make use of the tensions in-between divides as a resource for our conversations, teaching experiments, and school-based art projects. The article combines theory and practice to propose a way of thinking about the subject of art teacher preparation, or the teacher candidate, as learning to navigate the divide between her fantasies of teaching, and the realities of classroom life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author focuses on the film "The Andre Show," directed by Beverly Peterson. She cites that the film stages an encounter with the incoherent, with the experiences of loss, loneliness and mourning of learning from acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS). She cites that the crisis of social responsibility that continues to surround the pandemic is the focus of the film. The two related dilemmas of care that were staged in the film are explained.