What are the barriers and obstacles to adults learning? What makes the process of adult learning so fragile? And what exactly do we mean by Fragile Learning? This book addresses these questions in two ways. In Part One, it looks at challenges to learning, examining issues such as language invention in a maximum security prison, geography and bad technology, and pedagogic fragility in Higher Education. Through a psychoanalytic lens, Fragile Learning examines authorial illness and the process of slow recovery as a tool for reflective learning, and explores ethical issues in problem-based learning. The second part of the book deals specifically with the problem of online anxiety. From cyberbullying to Internet boredom, the book asks what the implications for educational design in our contemporary world might be. It compares education programmes that insist on the Internet and those that completely ban it, while exploring conflict, virtual weapons and the role of the online personal tutor.

This book provides a basic understanding of democratic citizenship through use of case studies. These case studies illustrate the extent to which ordinary citizens are controlling their common future. The book provides theoretical and evidence based findings on the complexities of citizenship in a capitalistic-republican setting. It offers new theoretical frameworks on reparation and democratic citizenship.

The book is about the joys and frustrations of lifelong learning, and about what drives us to learn as we move through our years. It follows the life-in-learning, from birth to death, of a character that the reader is invited to create. It examines many of life's important themes-a response to overwhelming choice, the instinct of self-protection-as they apply to a person's learning journey. Using a variety of psychoanalytic and philosophical lenses, and using the Psychic River as a metaphor, the text asks the question of what it means "to learn" and "to teach". It investigates factors that might break the fragile process of learning, and explores the complex motivations behind returning to learning. The book is of interest to educators and learners, to psychoanalysts and analysands, and to anyone who has ever wondered what drives us to learn or teach.

What is care? The Care Factory consists of six essays, each of which is an invitation to the reader to form an opinion on what care happens to be. Each chapter looks at care in a different setting, and a variety of psychoanalytic frameworks are employed on which to hang arguments. The eponymous first chapter investigates undergraduate courses in nursing and midwifery that have care on the syllabus. Is it possible to teach care? What if the person teaching care is not someone who cares?The second chapter is `Banquet of Crumbs'. If care can be experienced in any setting and at any time, is there anything that happens to those who care that we might regard as generic? What does caring do to the practitioners who care? The focus of `The Breaking of Wings' is prisons and secure settings for children and adolescents. How do such institutions endorse and exhibit care? In `Nostalgia's Engine', the focus is on the care generated by successful group assimilation and the manufacture of nostalgia. Using the example of the punk movement of the 1970s, this chapter describes how organisations offer their participants communities of care, irrespective of their outward appearance of hostility.`Caring for Our Creations' is about writing, and about one's responsibilities for what one drafts into existence. This chapter is not so much about a narrative of care as the care of a narrative. Finally, `Take Care: A Coda' represents a lesson on how one cares for oneself in an atmosphere of tension and bereavement anxiety.