Insignificant Stories: The Burden of Feeling Unhinged and Uncanny in Detours of Teaching, Learning and Reading
Bibliographic record
Abstract
By setting foot back in the space of school, teachers stage a return that is necessarily uncanny, encountering a strangeness that is nonetheless known, intimate and familiar. Through positing the notion of a "burden of feeling," this article theorizes the psychoanalytic concept of the uncanny, as a way to think through the narrative difficulties inherent in interpreting the variously psychical, historical and sensual influences of our personal educational experiences. Since we are here dealing—as in literature—with the inescapable singularity of experience, I intersperse a number of my own memories of teaching and schooling throughout this article, in the hopes of productively framing our understanding of educational spaces—spaces of reading and interpretation always—as necessarily unhinged and uncanny. In this framing, I also argue for the importance of telling insignificant stories, and that rather than insinuating a method that looks to the obviously memorable and notable, I propose a practice of looking instead to the trivial and the typically forgotten. As a methodological practice, this article employs—in part—a multimodal strategy of strange juxtaposition, drawing attention to the spaces between words, and upsetting the framings of traditional narrative. The images that are interspersed throughout this piece suggest the pursual of a reading that lets itself stray, and that requests of the reader an imaginative and a collaborative interpretive practice.Keywords: teaching; education and psychoanalysis; teacher identity; the uncanny; educational memories
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".