No twentieth-century woman/teacher has provoked as much interest and perplexity as Sylvia Ashton-Warner (1908-1984). Her life reveals the fascinating dilemmas of classroom erotics, the dangers of intimacy in teaching and learning, the difficult and ambiguous nature of post-heterosexual attachments in women’s biographies, and the powerful fantasy that the objects of teaching lives are other than our own teaching selves. Provocations: Sylvia Ashton-Warner and Excitability in Education provides a groundbreaking and timely feminist re-visioning of Ashton-Warner. This book speaks not only to her enigmatic survivals, but also to education’s own submission to excitability and provocation.

The Editors: Judith P. Robertson is Professor of Education at the University of Ottawa. Her published work extends and deepens the methods of analysis brought to literary pedagogy. She received her Ph.D. in education from the University of Toronto (OISE). Along with questions of ethical practice, Robertson utilizes psychoanalytic theory to address culture, its symbolic expression in literature, and the response of readers to their experience and their rediscovery of it in texts. Her work on children’s literature, literatures of historical trauma, and screenplay pedagogy appears in leading international journals in the fields of education, cultural studies, and literary pedagogy. Cathryn McConaghy is Associate Professor of Education at the University of New England, Australia. She received her Ph.D. in Indigenous education from The University of Queensland. Her research in the social psychoanalytics of education in difficult contexts has appeared in leading international journals. Her previous book, Rethinking Indigenous Education (2000), presents a groundbreaking postcolonial/feminist reading of the legitimating conditions of colonial education.