Conference Agenda

For drawings or story-telling, Jung (1959) emphasized the importance of “over time” rather than just analyzing one or two pictures or stories during the therapeutic sessions. Allan (1988) indicated that “the time-place variables act as a sanctuary space, a time out of ordinary time, which, together with a positive therapeutic alliance, fosters psychological growth and transformation” (p.21). Thus, from a Jungian perspective, the present study explored the serial stories produced or expressed from clay creation in the process of expressive art therapy for novice school teachers in Taiwan. Data were collected using semi-structured in-depth interviews with a group of six participants who were novice school teachers and met troubled by their emotional disorders. Facing a future career, they felt a high level of anxiety and uncertainty. A Jungian approach to expressive art therapy program was made up of six sessions (2 hours per session). During the process of clay creation, each participant chose one of the four elements of the universe, earth, water, wind, and fire as the basis of active imagination to create their own stories. Then, the participants in pairs co-created new serial stories and expanded the symbols of their inner worlds. The study found that there were five aspects. First, the process of clay creation facilitated the emergence of the inner world and allowed the imagination to express itself freely through art creation without being restricted by self-criticism. Second, the visualization of three-dimensional creation helped participants to recognize the feelings and thoughts which have long been hidden and neglected, and they had further opportunity to engage in self-dialogues, their inner voices then being honored by telling their own stories. Third, Taiwanese family culture expects "making ancestors proud", which leads to participants' high anxiety about their future and self-doubts about whether they can achieve it. Fourth, Taiwanese culture places great emphasis on "filial piety", which brings about the dilemma—of whether to obey the family's expectations or to go independently toward their own goals. Fifth, the serial story co-created by the participants combine different thoughts, together they transform difficulties into opportunities, and finally overcome one’s inner contradictions, anxieties, and conflicts. The present study highlights that ”symbol formation” is the natural language of inner expression, and with the help of expressive art therapy, we can further understand symbols through “Active Imagination”.

Verbal communication is one aspect of language education in German elementary curriculums. Elementary students are supposed to learn linguistic practices that ultimately allow them to participate in all communicative areas of society. Therefore, language teaching in school builds on the communicative practices that students experience at home and outside of school (Becker-Mrotzek, 2009).

Due to ongoing migration, there is a growing language diversity among elementary school students in Germany and dealing with this is a key challenge for language teachers (McElvany et al., 2013). Teachers’ are supposed to create inclusive language-learning environments that appreciate this language diversity, are adapted to students’ individual needs and allow all students to achieve desired language learning goals. Teachers create such an inclusive environment mainly through their speech and dialogue with the students. They provide tasks and activities that allow all students to participate and offer instructional and emotional support when it seems necessary and appropriate to help students overcome certain learning barriers (Naugk et al., 2016).

During such language lessons, teachers and students frequently make verbal errors. Such errors are an important diagnostic indicator for the assessment of the students' linguistic competence and for the selection of individual language teaching strategies (Schiefele et al., 2019). According to Kleppin (1997), a linguistic error refers to a violation of formal grammatical rules, informal rules or specific social norms. The definition of an error is always very much dependent on the situation and is usually subject to the judgment of the teacher. Verbal errors also provide individual learning opportunities for the students. To help students learn from their errors, teachers’ should give students an immediate corrective feedback (Lüdtke & Stitzinger, 2017). However, corrective feedback can also expose students’ failure and impair their sense of belonging and the inclusive climate in the classroom. Therefore, the timing and wording of the corrective feedback and the corresponding interpretation of the respective student is critical for the maintenance of inclusive language learning environments.

The teacher’s corrective feedback can have an explicit and often an implicit meaning, which can trigger different emotions. From a psychoanalytical perspective (Hierdeis, 2016), the implicit or unconscious meaning of a teacher’s corrective feedback refers to unspoken expectations, wishes, desires and motivations towards the students and the lesson. At the same time, a student’s interpretation of the corrective feedback is affected by previous experiences with the teacher and relational dynamics between the student and his parents. Students also project parental desires and wishes onto the teachers and possibly respond to criticism in the same ways as they respond to deprivation of parental affection. Therefore, the unconscious meaning and meaning making of a corrective feedback is of special importance with regard to the learning outcomes of the corrective feedback and the students’ experience of the inclusive classroom community.

However, little is known about possible implicit meanings of a corrective feedback and students’ emotional responses to it. In the light of this research gap, the presented study explored the corrective feedbacks of a teacher in a diverse elementary German language classroom and the corresponding emotional student responses, with a specific focus on unconscious meanings and dynamics. The results highlight, that even minor connotations of a corrective feedback can trigger certain unconscious relational dynamics that result in very negative emotional student responses and potentially exclude minority students from the classroom community. Further implications for the implementation of corrective feedbacks and possible teacher training measures are discussed.

Teachers have to take into account the diversity of their students, and this requires recognition of the uniqueness of each individual. This reality seems to be even stronger for foreign language teachers who organise exchanges between students and offer them to open up to alterity through the teaching of the language-culture.

In a group interview with secondary school students, I was able to observe the extent to which cultural representations of the foreign other and the « linguistic imaginary » (Houdebine, 1997) are still very active for the students considering European languages. German, English and Spanish bear for them the traces of European socio-historical experiences (wars, migrations, etc.) transmitted through the generations in silences and stories and in the presence of these languages and cultural objects in their immediate environment (Pujol Berché & Díaz, 2018). Similarly, travelling from France to Spain is central to the discourse of students for whom the world of their border neighbour becomes an idealised elsewhere.

So, we can ask how foreign language teachers manage to involve students in this opening up to cultural diversity. Is it their didactic proposals based on European works or cultural events related to the language taught that make this easier ? Is it the intercultural work that takes into account the cultural diversity of their students with a migrant background that makes this possible? Or is it essentially the teacher's ability to welcome the alterity of each student that contributes to this opening?

Within the framework of a "research with" (Dubois & Kattar, 2017) inspired by the monographic writing devices proposed in Institutional Pedagogy (Vazquez & Oury, 1971), Spanish teachers were able to work on their ability to open a space between themselves and the individual students and to accept their powerlessness in the face of the radical alterity within the group entity. This position implies respect for the student's desire, which can be expressed through his or her involvement or lack of desire to learn. Also, in an ambivalent movement that oscillates between "individuation" and "indifferentiation" for the group, foreign language teachers must work to "deal with" the forces of unbinding and partially "alphabetize" the active instinct (Bion, 1962) in the groups.

In one of the texts produced in this group elaboration device, one of the teachers describes her experience of the post-lockdown back-to-school in September 2021 in a text entitled "Rentrée masquée". This title introduces us to the context of Covid-19 and its consequences on the teachers' professional practice, but at the same time it leaves us with the idea of a hidden face, a covered identity, a carnival or a masked ball... Faced with the emotions that arise in class, the teacher expresses the desire to "de-clutter" the student from what "comes from outside", which could perhaps refer to a desire to remove the transference, to smooth out the exchanges and to avoid conflict beyond the desire to free up psychic space for the group that she asserts. This could correspond to a desire to make the negative disappear, but as Eugène Enriquez writes, "the negative has two faces: that of destruction, a sign of hatred for the living form, and that of the destruction of unity-identity, a sign of love for variety" (Enriquez, 1987, p. 94). This acceptance of 'variety' would thus be based on the ability to renounce fusion, to move away from identifications and to analyse transference, in order to accept the alterity of the other at the same time as one's own subjectivity.