_ love & eros in education: an imaginary conference -- 2008

Lately, it seems like all our conversations on the arts and learning circle around ideas about love, eros, sexuality, and the ways in which our ideas about love -- falling in love -- loving our students -- loving ideas -- loving the future -- love as care -- love as compassion -- love as power -- love as god -- love as eros -- impacts the way we teach and learn.

This imaginary conference is a call to make love a real and central force in the transformation of education, with artists and the arts as the pulse beat of this evolution. We will gathering readings, clips, stories, theories, wallpapers, stones, songs, snippets, scraps, heaps, hordes of thinking and feeling about love & eros in education.

Where does love appear in teaching and learning?
How does love transform relationships between teachers and learners?
In what ways does love motivate learners to learn?
How are lovers like teachers and learners? Whic one are you? According to whom?
How does sexuality and the repression of sexual feeling and desire impact the culture of schools and communities?
How does sex, love, and eros get legislated by the institution of schooling?
Why are we so afraid to talk about and its role in teaching and learning?
What does it mean to fall in love with our students, ourselves, our teachers?
How are we defining love here to encompass care, empathy, compassion, desire, passion, trust, and care?
What have we learned about relationships that directly apply to our lives as teachers and learners?

Let's keep asking these questions and more, and let's keep gathering the voices, thinkers, feelers, makers, and do-ers, and questioners who have lovingly responded to these questions and more.

-- Amanda

Love and Eros in Education: An Imaginary Conference Blog