Conference Agenda

A workshop tailored for post-doctoral from all networks and communities.

Postdoctoral scholars face the demanding task of crafting an impactful academic portfolio within a limited timeframe. Achieving success during this pivotal stage frequently hinges on securing financial resources for research endeavors. However, many researchers encounter challenges when it comes to fundraising.

To assist researchers in navigating this phase, EERA Network 28 invites you to participate in a three-hours workshop focusing on the essentials of fundraising as a means of personal leverage in academic careers. The workshop, especially addressed to post-doc researchers, aims to present and discuss the essential elements for growth inherent in the postdoctoral/early career research phase and life.

Workshop program:

9:45-10:30
Opening, introduction, getting to know each other, sharing in groups

10:30-11:00
Academic career: from postdoctoral student to researcher, how to build an optimal portfolio for academic advancement and how to deal with years without publications.
Guest speaker: Professor Gad Yair, who will talk about the "lean years" in his career and tips for coping.

11:00-11:45
Fundraising as a tool for personal leverage in academic careers.
Guest speaker: Professor Miri Yamini, who won ERC 2024.

Join us for a deeper understanding of how fundraising can not only finance your research but also enhance your professional standing and unlock new opportunities.

Like the entire education sector, the field of early childhood education and care is also subject to constant change, which is linked to overall social - global - change processes (see Lehner, Fürstaller 2021; Betz et al. 2017). Individualization, economization, digitalization and globalization are just some of the buzzwords that come to mind here. The demands and challenges faced by educational professionals working with children and families have changed significantly as a result. Relationships and interactions are increasingly being shifted to the digital space, where they are staged and dissociated. The strong shift of childhood into the institutional context has made parents feel insecure in their parenthood. Economization is widening the gap between rich and poor, both within and beyond national borders. Plurality offers many freedoms, but also risky opportunities, because it means that points of orientation and things that used to work are being lost. Such a loss is further exacerbated psychodynamically and psychosocially by the current crises, especially those surrounding the war.

In any case, the developments cited here as examples give rise to (new) uncertainties that are accompanied by uncertainty, powerlessness and discomfort on an unconscious level, but mask themselves as certainties on a manifest level - e.g. in the form of hegemonic claims, populism and social divisions (cf. Klug et al. 2021). Such masking can also be found in pedagogical practice, which must be unmasked through an exploratory and understanding approach. This is an important aspect for pedagogical practice and therefore raises questions for the training and further education of educators: How can teaching succeed in being able to think uncertainties (and discomfort)? How can prospective educators be accompanied in their learning and educational processes in such a way that "responsible action under the conditions of structural uncertainty" (Rabe-Kleberg 2020: 29) becomes possible?
Against the background of these questions, the paper develops the thesis and, with reference to psychoanalytical reference theories, discusses the significance that can be attributed to the group here.

The educational discourse on uncertainty often conveys an undifferentiated view of uncertainty in educational contexts. According to this view, people working in pedagogical fields are constantly confronted with uncertainty. In connection with this, the impression is created that training and further education can at best prepare for this phenomenon, but can hardly influence it beyond that. The reference to psychoanalysis seems to further increase the sense of uncertainty.

The lecture will examine the question of how a differentiated theory of uncertainty in pedagogical contexts can be conceptualised and subsequently developed with reference to psychoanalytical basic assumptions and empirical findings.

My PhD research deals with professionalisation of nursing student as a time caled ‘Professional Adolescence’. In this context, I was led to consider what happens for these students in their approach to patients’ death. To become a nurse, students learn in hospital where they experience unprecedented situations. Those new situations can be difficult, particularly when students are confronted with the death of patients. The heart of nursing work lies in the link that is created between the carer and the patient, which is known as the carer-patient relationship. Students are often very involved in this relationship, which can generate emotions for which they are not prepared. What’s more, care institutions don’t seem to give a lot place to the expression of affects in the professionalisation of nursing students. Mej Hibold (2019) has examined the professionalisation of early childhood professionals in France. They are forbidden to express their feelings towards the children, because this is considered unprofessional and the expression of affects is relegated to the private sphere. This kind of injunction to ‘be professional’ can be found among French nurses. The idea of ‘leaving your emotions in the cloakroom’ when you put on your professional uniform has been passed on from generation to generation of nurses. When emotions are considered, it is most often in terms of developing ‘emotional skills’, sometimes through procedural work. (Donnaint, Gagnayre, Marchand, 2015).

My research is situated in the field of ‘Education and Psychoanalysis’ and more specifically in a ‘clinical approach psychoanalytically orientated in Education and training’ (Blanchard-Laville, Chaussecourte, Hatchuel & Pechberty, 2005). I used clinical research interviews (Yelnik, 2005) with student nurses to explore their training as a period of ‘professional adolescence’. Particularly, this is a concept studied by Louis-Marie Bossard, a French researcher for future teachers (Bossard, 2000, 2001, 2004). Professional adolescence aims to understand the psychic processes at work in the transition from the student situation to professional situation, by analogy with those characteristic of adolescence.

During these interviews, the students talk, among other things, about their approach to death, which they had never come into contact with before their placements in care settings. The clinical analysis of their discourse (Chaussecourte, 2023) leads me to wonder how the uncertainty generated by the confrontation with death says something about the ‘professional adolescence’ of these students. The impossibility of anticipating a situation that has never arisen in the past, but which is certain to happen during the placements, puts the students' imaginations to work, which is very anxiety-provoking. During their training, when they have cared for patients right up to the end of life, the patient's death remains uncertain if they have not observed it themselves : for death to exist, students must be living witnesses to it. The discourse of carers is not enough to make it real. Finally, the approach of death makes the nursing profession very difficult, and one of the students chose to continue at school after graduation. She has decided to stay on as a student because practising nursing makes her future life too unpredictable. She needs more time to become a professional.

The Covid-19 pandemic and the associated government measures to contain the spread of the virus, in the form of curfews, the suppression of gatherings, social distancing and the switch to distance learning and generally digital formats in schools, universities, other educational institutions and out-of-school youth work, have led to a significant reduction in social contact. This enforced social distancing, combined with the absence or reduction of physical contact and interpersonal encounters, has led and continues to lead to a reduced sense of well-being, in addition to the general uncertainty caused by the epidemic and individual frustration, anxiety, aggression and varying degrees of loss of control, certainty, and autonomy.

Since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, the question of the challenges and uncertainties faced especially by young people has received considerable media attention. In Austria, this mainly concerns the results of the WHO HBSC study (see ORF.at 20/23), which shows an increase in mental health problems among adolescents. Various coping strategies are designed to maintain or restore mental balance. These are discussed by August Ruhs (2020), for example, on the basis of a three-step sequence of frustration, aggression and regression, by Marianne Leu zinger-Bohleber (2020) with reference to regression and omnipotent denial, or by Ingo Jungclaussen (2020) with reference to individual suffering according to personality structure. However, while the measures ordered to curb the Covid-19 pandemic sometimes place massive restrictions on young people's education, social interactions, space and leisure activities, digital game worlds offer a wide range of opportunities for experience and interaction.

Against this background, studies on the consumption of games by young people show that the amount of time spent playing games has increased since the pandemic (Yougov 2020). There has also been an increase in the diagnosis of young people with a computer game addiction (DAK 2020). In psychoanalytic-pedagogical terms, the results of these studies raise the question of the significance and function of young people's gaming in times of uncertainty and crisis. In this sense, the aim of the present paper is a critical discussion of digital role-playing games from a psychoanalytical and educational perspective as a possible strategy for coping with uncertainty. Due to their interactive structure, the simultaneous interaction and networking of several players, digital role-playing games are a particularly worthwhile object of research. Agency, digital relationships, and escapism can provide potential relief for gamers, especially during uncertain times. However, this can only compensate to a limited extent for the lack of physical interpersonal relationships, as is discussed in this paper.

The "Ich Zocke"/"I am gaming" study, initiated at the Department of Psychoanalysis and Education at the University of Vienna, aims to answer the above stated questions. In the summer of 2021, still at the height of COVID, a total of 15 young people between the ages of 11 and 21 were interviewed using a combination of narrative and problem-centred interviews about their experiences of the pandemic in relation to their gaming. Another survey was carried out in the winter of 2023, and will be followed up in 2024.

The planned paper will present the results of this study, focusing on the function and importance of games for adolescents in dealing with uncertainty.

This paper presentation introduces a study that connects Herbert Marcuse's (1955) Freudian theory of civilization with the concept of powerful knowledge developed by Michael Young and Johan Muller (see Niemelä, 2021; Young & Muller, 2016). The main idea of the paper is to build an interpretation of Young and Muller’s (2010) model of the three educational scenarios and the concept of powerful knowledge as the key idea of the third scenario through Marcuse’s Freudian concepts. This study asks: how Marcuse's concept of surplus-repression helps to identify the limitations and potentials of powerful knowledge?

Herbert Marcuse, a social philosopher and a member of the Frankfurt School, spent his entire career searching for an answer to the question of how human free self-realization is possible in a society organised through the principles of the conforming and alienating capitalist mode of production. Thus, hope is intrinsic to Marcuse’s philosophy, but not without considering its conditions.

Early Marcuse drew significantly from Martin Heidegger’s fundamental ontology, in which being here (Dasein) means first and foremost an alienated coexistence immersed in social everydayness (Heidegger, 1978). Later, Marcuse (1955; see Niemelä, 2023) applied Sigmund Freud's (2002) theory of civilization, which is pessimistic in describing the development of civilization as an inevitable deepening of the repression of the instincts. However, Marcuse criticized Freud's theory for not considering the potentially liberating developments unleashed by the capitalist accumulation. Marcuse saw that the material wealth created through capitalist production has generated objective conditions for “pacification of existence” (Marcuse, 1991).

Marcuse adheres to Freud's assumption that the repression of instincts, for example by postponing gratification, is a prerequisite for the existence of an organized society. However, Marcuse develops the concept of "surplus-repression" to describe the repression of instincts, which stems from a certain historical form of society, and is therefore not necessary. In a competitive capitalist society, surplus-repression is the outcome of the collective reality principle that Marcuse named the "performance principle".

In contemporary education, the performance principle manifests itself especially in the popularity of competency-based education. Since society is considered to be in a state of rapid change, and the future needs of the capitalist production of value are uncertain, studying quickly outdated (sic.) knowledge is deemed as old-fashioned and not useful. Instead, it makes sense to develop competencies that can be flexibly used in constantly changing situations (Buddeberg & Hornberg, 2017; see Rosa, 2013). Young and Muller (2016) have criticized competence-based education for neglecting the role of knowledge in education and presented powerful knowledge as an idea to explain why access to truthful knowledge is in the heart of educational equality.

Young and Muller (2010) have created an ideal-typical model of three educational scenarios for the future, of which I make a Marcusian interpretation. The model describes two scenarios that represent the existing schooling, and a third one as a favourable path towards the future: 1) a modern knowledge-centred school where the truths of those in power are studied, 2) a post-modern learner-centred school with the focus on competencies, 3) a school that tries to expand the worldviews of new generations with powerful knowledge.

Bringing Young and Muller together with Marcuse allows to put the idea of powerful knowledge to a broader societal context from which is has been distanced. It helps to clarify the meaning of the three scenarios and powerful knowledge. The first scenario is represented as a civilization, where surplus-repression is produced with direct, and in the second scenario through indirect domination in accordance with the performance principle. In turn, the third scenario is reformulated as a struggle against surplus-repression with the powers of knowledge.

The use of experiential collaborative learning (ECL) activities is growing in higher education (HE) across Europe. Not least as a response to the need of transdisciplinary approaches to solving complex societal and environmental problems. The university-wide compulsory course “Experts in Teamwork” (EiT) at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), constitutes one example which has inspired other HE institutions (e.g. Nordplus, 2022 and ENHANCE, 2023). In EiT master level students work in project teams to increase their collaborative skills. They are expected to reflect on and develop their group process alongside the project work. Learning assistants (LA) support the students through group facilitation and receive support themselves from teaching assistants (TA) with training aimed at enhancing their interpersonal awareness. The focus of this paper is on how TAs experience increased intra- and intersubjective awareness as helpful when supporting the LAs.

In experiential collaborative learning contexts where students are expected to pay attention to interpersonal relations within a team, their thoughts, emotions, actions and reflections make up the source of mutual learning in the team (Kolb, 2014; Veine et al., 2020). From a psychoanalytic perspective, French (1997) argues that learning situations provoke anxiety by fundamentally exposing the learner to her own and others’ evaluations, and that this exposure anxiety may intensify in an experiential collaborative learning context. Students in such learning contexts will likely need support to be able to mitigate the possibly inhibiting effects anxiety has on learning (French, 1997; Schein, 1993).

One way of supporting groups’ learning, is through facilitation (Hogan, 2002). A facilitator may act as a container for a group’s anxiety, without stripping them of their autonomy (McClure, 2005). Literature on facilitation emphasizes the need for facilitators to have knowledge of their own emotions and defenses to better understand the behaviors and emotions of others (Andreasen et al., 2020; Hogan, 2005). We assume that the same self-understanding is of significance when facilitating in an experiential collaborative learning context. This perspective is, however, lacking in literature on experiential learning in HE.

In the case of EiT, some LAs experience that they are not sufficiently prepared for all aspects of their job, despite having received practical training in group facilitation (Veine et al., 2023). Their uncertainty may activate unconscious thoughts, feelings, and action patterns, making it hard for the TAs to relate to, and understand, the different ways LAs act and react as group facilitators. This challenge makes it relevant for the TAs to be more aware of unconscious responses.

Included in the TA training in EiT is a 3 full-day self-reflection seminar designed to increase the TAs’ awareness of self and others as well as build psychological safety among the TAs. We will present narratives based on the TAs’ understanding of the relevance of the self-reflection seminar to their task of supporting the LAs in EiT. Through thematic narrative analysis we explore their stories about the outcome of their training by asking:

• In what ways, if any, do the TAs experience the self-reflection seminar as contributing to a) enhanced understanding and awareness of themselves; b) increased awareness about their relations to others; and c) their capacity to fulfill their TA tasks?

This study contributes new knowledge on how TAs benefit from training aimed at increasing their understanding of themselves and others. This broadens the understanding of students as teachers, investigating the significance of exploring personal stories in an ECL context. Our study is a starting point for more research on the value of intra- and intersubjective awareness in the context of experiential collaborative learning.

This research study aims to investigate how the adolescent search for meaning in their lives can be facilitated through a narrative-hermeneutical-developmental pedagogical approach applied to humanistic subjects like Personal, Social and Career Development (PSCD), Media Literacy Education (MLE), and Religious Education (RE). In turn, such a search for meaning can potentially reduce significantly the uncertainty of adolescents into hope, and transform their vulnerability into strength and resilience that transpire from a sense of wellbeing, including spiritual wellbeing.

The narrative-hermeneutical approach to teaching and learning, that is being explored, seeks to nurture the re-configuration and re-imagination of life experiences, shared in a classroom context. The research is embedded in professional and pedagogical practice, employing a multimodal ethnographic approach that transpires from a hermeneutical ontology and epistemology. Moreover, it utilises individual experiences within various socio-cultural contexts that are offered by digital multimodality in both the final students’ productions and the process leading to them. Through its emphasis on the application of multimodality to students’ tasks and digital productions/artefacts created, the ethnographic approach taken makes the collection of rich data from a variety of sources and techniques possible: workshop seminars, focus groups, semi-structured in-depth interviews, and the student participants’ multimodal productions.

The research questions that this study will explore are the following:

• How can uncertainty and vulnerability during adolescence be transformed into a sense of hope and a source of strength and resilience, respectively, through educational spaces that provide opportunities for meaning-making?
• How can such a transformation occur through a narrative-hermeneutical-developmental approach to pedagogy that is facilitated by creative digital technologies?

The theoretical framework of this study will be inspired simulataneously by Paul Ricoeur's narrative-hermeneutical philosophical framework, Robert Kegan's model of adolescent development, and Charles Taylor's understanding of morality in education.

As this research study strives to achieve such aims and address such questions, it will also seek to explore cross-curricular initiatives that create educational spaces for various subjects to come together and address some of their learning outcomes more effectively. The results of this study can also, potentially, enlighten educators on how to make assessment for, of and as learning, more meaningful and conducive to deep critical reflection and self-reflexivity.

The Paper highlights the connection between Sigmund Freud and Franz Brentano, emphasizing Brentano's epistemological influence on Freud (Barclay, 1971; Jones, 1960; Schwediauer, 2005). This connection introduced Freud to empirical and analytical phenomenalism, which led to his early acknowledgment, as early as 1898, of phenomena existing 'beyond consciousness' (Freud, 1950). This concept is one of Freud's oldest theoretical foundations, describing the 'psychologically alive' as a dynamic event and a 'play of forces'. In Freud's ideas, one can find Brentano's theory of intentionality (Brentano, 1924), which also appears in the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl – a student of Brentano – as well as in the works of Alfred Adler and Viktor Frankl, a student of Adler (Frankl, 1938). Notably, Brentano's concept of intentionality is also present in Karl Bühler's theory of signs (Bühler, 1927), who critically and constructively engaged with Freud's theories. The article aims to elucidate these connections on the foundation of intentionality, including its application in semiotics, and explore the phenomenon of uncertainty, demonstrating its impact on various theories regarding unpredictability and unforeseeability through theoretical considerations.

Intentionality is the basis of a theory of psychic relations, particularly characterized by entanglements and conflicts, as evidenced in the theoretical approaches of Freud, Adler, Frankl, Husserl, and Bühler. Freud's concept of psychic phenomena and the methodology in research align closely with the methodologies proposed by his teacher Brentano (Barclay, 1959; Gay, 1989). Freud himself stated, "the true beginning of scientific activity consists rather in describing phenomena and then in proceeding to group, classify and correlate them" (Freud, 1915, p. 117), a method typical of Brentano's understanding of science.

Brentano's influence extends beyond phenomenology to Gestalt theory, providing insights into phenomena 'beyond consciousness' through uncertainties in perception, according to Bühler (1927). Brentano's approach is particularly noted for highlighting the phenomenon of 'intentionality' (Brentano, 1874, p. 306), encompassing actions like 'I am uncertain' and 'my uncertainty'. As Charlotte Bühler (1971, p. 380) notes, "Intentionality implies both a person's focusing on a subject [object] which means or signifies something to him as well as a person's directing himself toward this subject [object]". Brentano believed that for any meaningful guidance, it is essential to focus on those situations and experiences. Intentionality involves an emergence, a connection, and a fading away in real experiences grounded in imaginations and concepts, judgments, and emotional phenomena such as acts of will, sensations, and feelings. The article will explore the origins of intentionality and attempt to demonstrate its significance for various theories and their conception of Uncertainty.

Since work situations in the fields of education and psychoanalysis are characterised by complexity, uncertainty, instability, uniqueness and an urgency to make decisions (Schön, 1983; Buchholz, 2006), the question of how to deal professionally with related challenges arises both in reflections among psychosocial practitioners as well as in academic discourse. One particular aspect of this topic relates to the question of how the ability to refer to scientific theories and concepts in understanding, decision-making and further action can be helpful in dealing with uncertainties in psychosocial practice situations.

Even if the reference to scientific theories can sometimes grant professionals a certain degree of security, relevant publications from a psychoanalytical perspective (Zwiebel, 2013; Datler, 2016) and in accordance with literature on pedagogical professionalism (Helsper, Hörster & Kade, 2003; Rottländer & Roters, 2008) point to the conviction that it would be illusory to think that the orientation to theories or concepts could lead to the fundamental elimination of the moment of uncertainty in processes of psychosocial practice.

While an overly narrow theoretical orientation in the form of 'clinging' to scientific theories may serve the attempt to completely devote the specificity of individual situations to certain theories, as it were, this hardly enhances the quality of professional practice.

Rather, theories and concepts come into focus that take account of the complexity and instability or dynamics of psychosocial processes and help psychosocial professionals to understand that and why the experience of uncertainty in various psychosocial situations is unavoidable in different intensities and colors.

To explore this furthermore, we will analyse empirical interview material that was conducted within TheoPrax, a research project of the Research Unit Psychoanalysis and Education at the University of Vienna, in order to consider in what way certain theories and concepts gain significance in the course of a person’s biography for dealing with uncertainty in psychosocial work situations. In my planned workshop, the exemplary analysis of an interview with a teacher and a psychoanalytically oriented counselling teacher will show that the individual biographical context and certain experiences of engaging with theory have each led to a characteristic way of dealing with uncertainty.

The following research questions are addressed:

1. Which theories and concepts seem to have become important for Mr M. and Mrs D.? What experiences of engaging with these theories and concepts do they describe in a narrative interview?

2. In what way do these theories and concepts seem to have become helpful for working with their students/clients and dealing with uncertainties in psychosocial work situations?

3. Which biographically related experiences and which inner-psychic forms of processing these experiences seem to have had what influence on the theoretical orientation of Mr M. and Mrs D.?

Adolescence is an emblematic time of testing uncertainty. Bodily transformations in fact cause a chain of destabilization which re-engages the subjective position and blurs the benchmarks established in childhood (Gutton, 1996). The child knows that his body will transform, nevertheless the arrival of puberty surprises and requires a psychological elaboration (Deutsch, 1996). The illusion of childhood, with its dream of omnipotence and access to flawless happiness, is undermined by the experiences of life. In correlation with these upheavals, the guarantee of knowledge of the Other, represented by the adult, is shattered. Its reliability becomes doubtful, while its flaws become more noticeable. However, the certainties of childhood regarding values, the validity of rules or customs, and even about one's own place within the community begin to fade away. Back to/confronted with to the question of “Who am I?” the adolescent is consequently no longer assured of his future prospects, in a world still marked by multiple crises.

Yet, it is precisely and paradoxically at this moment of characterized confusion, marked by a loss of internal and external reference points, that the adolescent must make fundamental choices that will shape their future in social and emotional aspects. At times gripped by anxiety, they may seek refuge in their daydreams to cope with the instability they experience, before being able to overcome it (Ikiz & Houssier, 2021), to open up to encounters, to construct their future (Lacan, 1974). For this time of psychological disorganization induces a reorganization. Ultimately, adolescence leads to grappling with the inherent uncertainty that is part of our condition as suject. The construction of the orientation project offers an opportunity to initially experiment with ways of envisioning oneself in the future, then to act on one's choices to affirm one's desire and rediscover a form of identity in which to recognize oneself and be recognized by others (Méloni, 2023).
Nevertheless, studies on educational and professional guidance, such as the guidance policies of different countries within the European community (France, UK, Italy...) or beyond, in the West, in Latin America and North Africa in particular, primarily focus on the choice made or to be made. Staying closely attuned to social reality, they underestimate the implications of the adolescent journey in the choice of their orientation on one's mental health (Méloni, 2016). The guidance education is understood as the learning of identifying educational paths, careers, as well as understanding one's personality traits, preferences, and the development of decision-making processes etc. The uncertainty of adolescence thus seems destined to be mastered before being genuinely heard, without the adolescent finding a space for listening.
The adolescent's tumult, their fragility, the risks they face or pose often preoccupy adults. While educational spaces serve as a privileged scene for the expression of their inner life (Karray, 2022), the psycological resonance of concrete educational situations, such as orientation milestones, struggles to be heard.
Recognizing this gap between the increasing experience of uncertainty for adolescents during moments of career choices and the tendency of orientation policies to limit the spaces where the uncertainty could be addressed, this paper will offer a reflection from the perspectives of teachers responsible for guiding the orientation process. How, when they encounter daily situations that challenge the predictability expected by guidance policies, do they approach the question of guidance with adolescents who are inevitably subjected to the principle of uncertainty?

In a complex society in crisis, the teaching profession has become more difficult and challenging.

1. The problem

Indiscipline, provocation, physical abuse, student inattention, adolescent depression, learning disabilities, bullying, various phobias and dropping out of school are symptoms that teachers are increasingly confronted with. This is particularly frightening for young teachers.

Teachers may experience a range of emotions such as aggression, fear, sadness/depression, jealousy or guilt. Sometimes they manage to suppress their questions and their suffering. In doing so, they repeatedly place themselves and possibly their pupils in agonising situations. Pushed by the death drive, they find themselves in a (self)destructive dynamic. Articulation with the life instinct becomes less and less successful.

Nevertheless, they feel that they lack a perspective, a word, a way of dealing with a lack. (Menard) They search for ways to deal with their questions, their suffering and their powerlessness.

2. A psychoanalytic view

The traumatising encounters evoke "fright" and confront the protagonists with the

with the "uncanny", as an encounter with the familiar in themselves (Freud) or, as Lacan says, with the "lack of lack".

Insofar as for Lacan (1986) the subject is structurally constituted on the basis of discourses and the desire of the other, we are all confronted with the desire and the enjoyment of the other, in the area of imaginary, symbolic and real. Again and again, we are confronted with the question "Che vuoi": what does the other want from me? Confronted with the different others, pupils ask themselves what this society, parents, teachers colleagues desire from them. The result can be anxiety, other affects and various symptoms.

Due to our constitution as subjects by the Other, the teachers' discomfort in such cases is also caused by their initially unconscious knowledge of their possible involvement in the processes that lead pupils to symptoms and acting outs of violence. This brings with it a feeling of eeriness and anxiety.

1. The psychoanalytic approach

With his psychoanalytic approach, Freud found a way to trace the singular patterns of the suffering subjects through the "talking cure" in order to deconstruct phantasms, to partially give meaning to the symptoms and to allow the subject to construct previously missing perspectives on the real.

My hypothesis:

It is precisely the confrontation with the not immediately symbolisable real, the uncanny and the unconscious knowledge, that makes the teacher aware that he is on the level of the unconscious and as a represent of the “other”, thus said involved in the dynamic of the situation, a part of the process. So, he must take his part of responsibility for the situation and not simply approach it as a "master" (Brown,2006) from a neutral, "pedagogical-scientific" position. (Zizek, 1998)

Working through such frightening situations enables him to develop a freer view on the situation. This is the basic prerequisite for the pupil to be able to deconstruct fears and phantasms around "Che vuoi".

4. A setting

Building on Freud, psychoanalysts such as Balint, Kaës, Blanchard-Laville (2013) and many colleagues from Cliopsy (Geffard,2018) have organized groups to help professionals verbalize their suffering and problems in a way they have not done before. I offer and research such settings.

At the research level, the aim is to analyse

• Which transformative processes (Koller, Wultange) have been initiated in the setting, which have not and why,

• Whether the hypothesis of the awareness of the teacher's as “one other” has been always involved in the complex situation. To what extent does the participing teachers feel implicated and co-responsible for creating an atmosphere in which a dynamic of desire can unfold instead of a dynamic of destructive pleasure?

Why are we, academics, supposed to critique? Why do our students – in-service or would-be teachers – assume that we, teacher educators, should take on the mantle of being the all-knowing experts, who should voice and critique on their behalf, against the existing order of things? In this provocative essay, I work through the idea of ‘critique’ in the scene of teacher education, through the Lacanian psychoanalytical concept of ‘subject supposed to know’ (Lacan 1978, 230). Data come from free associative interviews with demoralised teachers in my previous research project.

Lacan coined this notion of the ‘subject supposed to know’ as an operative principle of transference. Critique is full of transference, between the analysand and analyst, cathected with affects, in which ‘feelings, relationships, signifiers or discursive categories are repeated within present interactions’ so that ‘our responses in the present can be understood as repetitions of significant relations or discourses’ (Lapping 2011, 3).

The proposed essay is a discussion about the psychic aspect of critique, its unconscious and desires, illustrating why the pedagogical relationship of critique resembles the couch in the consulting room where the analysand and the analyst interact, floating between transference and counter-transference. It is also built on some growing body of theoretical papers that draws on psychoanalytical approaches to understanding education, on various themes, such as teaching practice (Britzman 2013); education policy (Clarke 2020); the desire of and in research (Lapping 2013; Tuck 2010); teacher agency (Phelan and Rüsselbæk Hansen 2018); and despair and ethics (Carusi 2022).

A core focus in Organizational Education is on organizational learning (Göhlich et al., 2018). We believe, that to understand learning in, by and between organizations it is also of significance to understand the dynamics of organizational routines (Becker, 2018; Kallemeyn, 2014). Early conceptualizations of organizational routines have concentrated on members following rules or standard operating procedures allowing organizations to cope with uncertainty and enable effective decision-making. As Elkjær (2018, p. 156) says about this position on learning through routines: “These standardized procedures are a central element in organizational learning, because it is through the search for solutions to problems that the standardized procedures may change and make ways for new routines. It is when organizations are able to rely on their routines without initiating search and learning processes that the organization has learned”. For more than 20 years there has been a development in the research field now described as Routine Dynamics. Many researchers in this tradition build on practice theory and process theory (Feldman et al., 2021; Howard-Grenville & Rerup, 2016). It is still limited how much the insights from Routine Dynamics have been applied in educational research in general and in research on educational organizations more specific, but we find some great potentials here (Merki et al., 2023; Wolthuis et al., 2022). The purpose of our paper is to discuss this potential applied to the understanding of how a national network of science teacher educators between different organizations is emerging and stabilizing. The creation of routines can be viewed as a “quest for certainty” or a way to manage and absorb the uncertainties emerging between organizations. Organizational routines establish expectations and anticipations for future actions (Feldman et al., 2022). Routines are dynamic and ongoing accomplishments. When routines break down or the unexpected happens members of the organization find ways to make sense of the situation in their performances and recreate the routines. We find it especially interesting to understand how this kind of organizing and coordination of such complex educational networks is done in practice.

The background of the paper is a 4-year longitudinal study (2023-2026) of an emerging interorganizational network of professional learning communities (PLCs) in the field of science teacher education in Denmark called Naturfagsakademiet (NAFA) (English translation: Danish Academy of Natural Sciences: https://nafa.nu/about-nafa/ ).The main objective of NAFA is to enhance knowledge sharing and knowledge creation among science teaching professionals at different educational levels, both teacher education and primary and lower secondary schools. A central part of this is the organizing of national and local PLCs at all the teacher education institutions on the six university colleges in Denmark. In NAFA a PLC is defined as a committed and systematic inquiring community between a group of educators, who share experiences and knowledge from practice through inquiry and reflective dialogues centered on students’ learning. We will use NAFA as a case to investigate the role of routines in managing uncertainties in network collaboration using concepts from Routine Dynamics as analytical lenses. The research question we want to explore in this paper is:

How can the application of concepts from Routine Dynamics contribute to the analysis and understanding of the management of uncertainties between educational organizations?

Since 2002 the UK government has pursued a policy of granting ‘academy’ status to state-funded schools in England to become independent and free of local authority (LA) control. The original idea, formulated by the New Labour government elected in 1997, was to improve the quality of schools in deprived urban areas by establishing academies answerable directly to the Secretary of State for Education. Although there had been previous attempts to liberate state-funded schools from local government, notably the establishment of Grant Maintained Schools by the Education Reform Act 1988, LAs remained in control of governance. The notion of an ‘academy’ broke that mould and gave licence for alternative modes of provision and governance.

Academies are established as charitable (not-for-profit) companies, limited by guarantee, with a stated intent to be independent and autonomous. Each academy’ s governance structure included Members (who act in a similar way to the shareholders of a company and invested with the power to change the name of the company or wind it up). It is the role of members to endorse and safeguard the trust’s Memorandum of Association, to have an overview of the governance arrangements, to appoint other members and to add or remove trustees from the trust board. ‘Trustee’ is the name given to a member of the board of directors with responsibility for directing the trust’s affairs, for ensuring that it is solvent, well-run and delivering the expected charitable outcomes. The day-to-day management of an academy was to be conducted by the headteacher and their senior management team.

Despite concerted efforts to promote this policy through three successive Labour governments, there were only 207 academies in England in 2010 at the time a new coalition government was elected. The incoming Secretary of State for Education, Michael Gove, was determined to end the latent power of LAs and sanctioned academisation as a fundamental principle of state-funded schooling. Rapid growth followed and by November 2023 there were 10,553 open academies, a total which included Free Schools, Studio Schools, University Technical Colleges, Special Schools and Pupil Referral Units (DfE, 2023).

The academisation process made a substantive shift during the following years away from single academy trusts to the establishment of multi-academy trusts (MATs) which lead groups of academies. Within MATs one academy trust is responsible for a master funding agreement, typically with a supplemental funding agreement for each academy. MATs have subsequently become a core feature of policy for state-funded school provision in England with governmental ambition still set at full academisation of the school systems, ideally by 2030. By November 2023 there were 1178 MATs, the vast majority of which have over three schools/settings, which manage 89 per cent of all academies.

One consequence of this process is a radical change in the relationships between stakeholders. Academies in MATs no longer have the right a governing body as the legal decision-making forum which is representative of their locality, headteachers are no longer the key actor on individual academy resources and practices and the influence of the local authority has been severely curtailed. Prior to 2002 each state-funded school In England was required to have its own governing body which demonstrated a balance between LEAs, parents and the teacher workforce. Their devolved budget from the local authority at that time included most recurrent expenditure, including staffing. The MAT now has total control over governance, with trustees determining policy and resource allocation. The reality if often not so stark, however, with most MATs having democratic approaches to individual academy provision. Nevertheless, relationships and the roles have been fundamentally changed.

This is a meeting for the Link Convenors and Co-convenors of NW 21.

My proposal deals with the issue of uncertainty not in terms of its societal aspect, heightened by the socio-political contexts to which subjects are submitted, but as the precariousness inherent in the subject's perpetual psychological task of keeping the internal and external worlds in continuous motion. So it's more a question of 'dealing with' uncertainty, of working on the ability to accept doubt, surprise and the unforeseen despite the challenge it can represent for narcissism. In fact, the over-emotional injunctions that teachers may be subjected to in a professional situation sometimes weaken the very structure of their narcissism - based on "a certain image that the subject acquires of himself on the model of others" and which founds the ego as a "psychic unity" (Laplanche and Pontalis, 1981). This feeling of perpetual imbalance, which the clinical position based on a psychoanalytical orientation may seem to maintain for the subject-teacher, would paradoxically be a source of reassurance and construction of a certain internal security ensured by the work of psychic elaboration in the work of thought that uncertainty imposes.

Keeping thought moving requires doubt, uncertainty and imbalance, so that thought is creative and not inward-looking. Janine Puget said: « tenemos que aprender a vivir en un desequilibrio permanente » (Puget, 2020). In the field of secondary education, the observation of practice analysis groups conducted in group settings in which writing and reading aloud are used, leads me to conceive that making sense, based on the linking of experiences and secondarised thoughts, is made possible by the 'containing function' (Bion, 1962) provided by the members of the group in their psychological and physical dimensions. The psychic support provided by the group seems to offer the teachers who take part in these schemes an affirmation of their subjectivity as well as a legitimisation of their pedagogical action through the ability to welcome the unexpected and to 'remain open' within their class. It is by becoming aware of the unconscious movements and transfers that drive them within the class groups that this work of elaboration can be established, and also by the stability that the group of teachers brings to each of its members.

"Lo vincular", the "psychoanalysis of the link" - as conceptualised by Puget and Berenstein - makes it possible to observe what "is between" and to think of groups as psychic spaces that provide the subject with possible stability. Jeanine Puget explains: "Parto de la idea de que lo común, que nos hace miembros momentáneos de una situación, se crea y recrea sin cesar, pero los sujetos suelen tener la ilusión de que la pertenencia conlleva un para siempre que les aseguraría un lugar en el mundo en cuanto sujetos sociales. (...) La ilusión es la de construir conjuntos duraderos, basados en contratos inamovibles y en la armoniosa conjunción de las diferencias" (Puget, 2015).

For the teachers, these practice analysis groups are breathing spaces - where they can look back on experiences that are often enigmatic, sometimes painful - and they are times for elaboration, where the group becomes a psychic support that underpins, in that it connects the subjects while providing this function of "illusion de pertenencia" that facilitates the expression of subjectivity. This is built on the sharing of stories, metaphors and words, which often reflect the experiences of the group with the pupils, which resonate in the experience within the group of teachers: the "between" - which the group generates - generates a creative potential that invites us to move forward with others, inhabiting different spaces at the same time.

When asking early childhood teachers to describe specific work situations with children in kindergarten, they often talk about situations, where they have to deal with different aspects of uncertainty. They talk for example about everyday microtransitions like going outside into the garden with 25 3-three-year-olds – having the task to help all of them getting into their shoes and jackets quickly. Other early childhood teachers describe for example situations when the whole group of children sits together to sing a song. And suddenly a child starts getting quite wild and aggressive, boxing other children and taking their toys away. Or one can think of settling-in-processes – when the little ones start attending kindergarten for the first time and all the emotions that go along with this experience. One cannot predict how an individual child or a group of children will act or react in such complex and dynamic situations. How can kindergarten teachers deal with such everyday working situations – highly characterized by aspects of uncertainty?

Against this background we want to pick up on considerations formulated in the Network 21 special call that every pedagogical encounter remains unpredictable and one has to deal with the lack of certainty. This in mind, it becomes clear that all our knowledge can hardly help us avoid experiencing uncertainty and accompanying feelings like anxiety, frustration, maybe even anger and shame (Puget 2020). In our paper we will focus on early childhood teachers, how they experience situations of uncertainty in their everyday work and how such experiences affect their professional work. Therefor, we want to discuss the following research question: Which practice-governing moments on part of early childhood teachers are decisive for shaping their relationships with small children in situations of uncertainty?

Practice-governing moments are understood as those inner-psychic conditions that are decisive for the way a person acts in a certain situation. Focused on the context of the work of early childhood teachers, practice-governing moments are understood as those inner psychic conditions that are decisive for how early childhood teachers act and shape relationships in specific situations in which they are faced with the task of acting professionally (Datler, Trunkenpolz, 2009).

With reference to psychoanalytical theories, it is assumed that the formation of practice-governing moments is based on a complex interplay of sensory perceptions, affects and cognitive processes that permanently cause people to make decisions in a conscious and unconscious manner under the aspect of affect regulation. In this context “emotional processes are particularly important because people strive to bring about, stabilize or increase pleasant emotional states in the best possible way and to eliminate, alleviate or prevent the occurrence of unpleasant emotional states” (Datler, Wininger, 2019, 359). These basic psychoanalytical assumptions underline that not only aspects of experience, that can be verbalized, guide professional work. Similar considerations are also taken up in works on implicit knowledge. Neuweg (2020, 299) understands implicit knowledge as a type of knowledge that is rather expressed in behavior in the broadest sense, without the person acting being able to express this knowledge fully and adequately in words. Actions based on implicit knowledge have an intuitive character and a high degree of flexibility, in which the execution of a task comes to the fore and explicit, verbally formalized thinking about it loses importance. In the work context, this enables a sensitive response to specific situations with increasing professional experience, while planned, rule-based action gradually diminishes. In contrast to the concept of implicit knowledge, the desire for affect regulation is given central importance in connection with the concept of practice-governing moments.

Mentalization, understood as a human ability, plays a decisive role in the regulation of impulses and emotions, the promotion of the ability to reflect and social learning (Kirsch et al., 2024). This ability develops from childhood onwards through relationship experiences over the entire lifespan. An understanding of psychological processes arises when pedagogues perceive a child as an individual subject with their own intentions, feelings and motivations, i.e. mentalize them. Severe or prolonged stress in childhood can temporarily or permanently impair the ability to mentalize. The connection between mentalization and insecurity is outlined theoretically at the beginning.

Mentalizing relationship experiences can improve people's ability to mentalize and support the maintenance of mental health, cognitive and socio-emotional learning and social interaction. This is why mentalization also plays an important role in curative education (Schwarzer et al., 2023). Mentalization-based pedagogy is an innovative research approach whose basic assumption is that successful processes and interactions in the interaction between learners and teachers can be understood in terms of mentalization. This means that emotions, understanding, socio-cognitive learning and pedagogical relationships take centre stage and that dealing with uncertainty can be practised.

Competence-oriented (Baumert & Kunter, 2006) and professional biographicalunderstandings of professionalism emphasise the importance of individual characteristics of the teacher as adecisive prerequisite for successful pedagogical action. In particular, the teacher'sability to form relationships with the pupils seems to play a central role with regardto learning gains and development processes (Hamre & Pianta, 2001; Hattie, 2008). Mentalization theory (Fonagy, Gergely,Jurist & Target, 2002) is a relationship-based theory of developmental psychology, which in turn can provide important impetus for shaping relationships in childhood and adolescence. Mentalization describes the attachment dyad as a training and experiential space in which the ability to perceive and consider the psychological constitution in oneself andothers is developed (Taubner, 2015). The Mentalizing approach is of keyimportance for the shaping of interpersonal relationships in childhood, adolescence and adulthood - and this prove to be relevant for the pedagogical context in which educators shape relationships with children and adolescents on a daily basis.(Schwarzer, Link, Behringer & Turner, 2023).

The DFG research network MentEd aimed to apply this clinical approach to pedagogy and, after funding from 2016 to January 2020, established partnerships and collaboration with UCL. ERASMUS+ Strategic Partnership is currently facilitating practical-level transfer and training of educational specialists, impacting the professionalization of pedagogy.

The MentEd.ch project, funded by Movetia, adapts mentalization-based pedagogy in Swiss special needs education. Supported by an established network, the University of Teacher Education integrates it into the curriculum. Following successful funding phases, the project contributes to the quality and innovation of the Swiss education system. The transnational knowledge transfer focuses on professionalizing multipliers, ensuring sustainable dissemination of teaching materials, implementation options, and evaluation results beyond the funding period.

This paper discusses the current state of research based on empirical study results on the teaching of mentalization skills and the development, implementation and evaluation of a model curriculum for mentalization training for educational professionals. The structure with learning units, supervision, teaching materials, educational films and evaluation facilitates integration into university teaching.

In this paper, we focus on the following research question:
Which dimension of mentalization can be hermeneutically reconstructed in the interviews regarding the educational films?
In how far are situations in the educational films discussed in the tension between security and insecurity in pedagogical relationships?
Which interactions and sequences in the educational film are described by the participants as supporting and hindering mentalization?

We propose to reflect on the temporal dimension of the teaching experience, taking as our starting point the apparent paradox of a form of teaching that common sense leads us to consider as future-oriented ; in a context where our political commitments and a certain realism about the state of the world, from its tendencies towards fascization to its ongoing ecological destruction, place us in a difficult if not impossible projection towards a locked future. In this sense, educational spaces can echo the retrospectively premonitory slogan "no future" (Guesde, 2022).

We will question some of the “self-evident” aspects of pedagogy as a means of "transmission". One of those “self-evident” aspects is the idea that the classroom confronts: the past (the transmitted knowledge) ; the present (where pedagogy is a transformative time, more than an area of coexistences and becomings, (Deleuze and Guattari, 1980)) ; and the future (where the commitment to teaching is based on kinds of bets and debts, where knowledge is transmitted as a potential in the future of a student which we are trying to influence).

Revisiting Freud's quote in the Network 21 special call: '[...] education has to find its way between the Scylla of non-interference and the Charybdis of frustration.' (Freud, 1933), we will question the Scylla of non-interference by asking whether the latter should be interpreted as an absence of deliberate intervention or as a non-encounter. Indeed, if all encounters are interferences, Freud's quote seems to indicate a particular danger in education, if it "does not interfere", the center of this statement being the child as an object on which education does or does not interfere (Scylla), which is frustrated (Charybdis) or not. Now, from a more reciprocal perspective of education, we will be asking what reciprocal effects the encounter between students and teachers can have, when pedagogical devices undermine (without ever totally eradicating) the centrality of the teacher figure and his authority.

As we develop our pedagogical practices at university in France, with students in educational sciences, gender studies, future or current social workers, caregivers (some of whom are resuming their training), future teachers and educational team supervisors, we are also part of a pedagogical tradition that we might call "libertarian” (i.e. anti-authoritarian and cooperative), or at least one that questions power dynamics within the teaching situation, without excluding the unconscious dimension at play for each person involved (with reference, also, to institutional pedagogy).

Based on this reflexively analyzed "radical" position, we will try to imagine a “clinic of multiple links”, that could escape, at least partially, the canons of the educational bond. This epistemological openness to theories of multiplicity could open up a further subversive breach, following that made by works that recognize the unconscious dimension of pedagogy, as stricken with ambivalence, uncertainty and non-control.

This multiplicity is not programmatic, nor a rehash of an inherited past, but actualized in a moment and space, through an encounter.

Taking from queer feminist theories of multiplicity and interconnected modes of existence (Haraway, 2016), and their thoughts on non-filial and mutual temporalities and connexions, we will attempt to question what can be generated in pedagogical space when we move from certain normative readings of the students' projective failure or narrative non-affiliation (of a non-reiteration interpreted as non-affiliation). Rather than adopting a moral reading of the breakdown of meaning or of intergenerational ruptures, could we not question the "no future" that may resonate in educational spaces as a challenge to traditional narratives combining an overhanging past and an ideology of progress (Benjamin, 1940, 2023), leading us to consider other ways of investing temporalities, and therefore, narratives?

Networks hold a meeting during ECER. All interested are welcome.