Provocations: Sylvia Ashton-Warner and Excitability in Education

Abstract

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.