
Peter
Taubman, Ed. D.
Associate Professor
Adolescence Education
On Leave until Spring 2011
Room 2107 James
2900 Bedford Avenue
Brooklyn, NY 11210
718-951- 5000 (2182)
ptaubman@brooklyn.cuny.edu
My
scholarly work over the years has focused primarily on how teachers’ and
students’ psycho/social identities are constructed in schools and in
educational discourses and how these identities affect teaching and
learning. Two decades ago I used the work of Michel Foucault to map how
gender and sexuality were discursively constructed in feminist and
educational discourses. That initial focus on gender and genealogical
analysis evolved into an analysis of racial identities, multicultural
discourses and the way various social and psychic identities crystallize and
disaggregate in classrooms. Continuing to be intrigued
by the question of how who we are affects how we teach and learn, I came to find in certain schools of
psychoanalysis a way to talk about the personal and the social without
collapsing one onto the other. For a long time I looked at the psycho/social
identities of students and teachers in high schools through the lens of
psychoanalysis and post-structuralism. Indeed, perhaps my greatest scholarly
contributions have been to introduce the work of Michel Foucault and Jacques
Lacan to the field of Curriculum (see Pinar, W. “The Reconceptualization
of Curriculum Studies: A Personal Perspective,” Journal of Curriculum
and Supervision, 1988, 3[2], 157-167 ), and to provide models for
working autobiographically that incorporate the challenges postmodernism
posed to notions of the self, and the challenges identity politics posed to
Foucauldian and Lacanian analyses.
In the last few years I have increasingly
grounded my work in the context of urban high schools. My work with student
teachers and in developing the Bushwick School for Social Justice has turned
my writing to what I see as the pressing issues in urban education: the
blind acceptance of segregated schools; the corporatization of schools and
discourses on education; the local, state and federal efforts to keep
teachers, students and schools of education under surveillance, and the
remaining but fragile possibilities of creating vibrant and aesthetically
rich communities where teachers, students and parents are nurtured and
challenged.
While
I have devoted considerable time to writing, my real vocation has been
teaching. It is there I have found my greatest satisfaction. My current
administrative duties prevent me from teaching at Brooklyn College, but I
have arranged my schedule such that I am teaching an after-school course on
acting at BSSJ. My continued involvement in Day of the Poet, and annual
event I began seven years ago for Brooklyn’s high school students also
keeps me involved in the lives of our city’s youth. Overall, I would say
my greatest contribution to my students has been that I have invited them to
see the world and their lives a little differently, not only through the
disciplines of English and education, but mainly by offering a style of
teaching that engages the hurly-burly, visceral, here-and-now of the
classroom, shapes it into questions and offers it back to students as
opportunities for conversation, creation and intellectual pleasure.
Curriculum
Vitae