“Oh God! May I be alive when I die,” Winnicott writes in his unfinished autobiography. Might we, as psychosocial scholars and educators, be alive when we teach? What is it that makes us feel alive in the classroom? And how might we make sense of this feeling in the context of what we know all-too-well: the myriad institutional pressures that deprive us of life?

This roundtable is a call to articulate, express, or otherwise get in touch with the process, felt-sense, or even fantasy of feeling alive in the classroom.

This is not to suggest that aliveness is a desirable state. Indeed, feeling alive to the pain and suffering of self and others is just as possible, maybe more so, as feeling a sense of joy or spontaneity. What happens when we encounter moments in teaching/learning that might be experienced as frightening, alienating, or suffocating? Beyond that, what happens when we are alive to what we don’t know, and how do we survive this in the presence of our students?

From a psychosocial perspective, aliveness seems to require mobilization of dynamics that are always there, yet through an experience of aliveness, shift in some way. We liken this to a gestalt figure-ground shift where the ideas we are teaching/learning find play in the relational dynamics we are experiencing. As a result, we may begin to feel ideas, know them “in our bones” as Winnicott might say, and leave the encounter more enriched, more alive, and less compliant. Perhaps in aliveness the split between thinking and feeling gets worked through, and participants come away with a greater sense of feeling real.

This roundtable addresses the conference theme by tapping into the elusive and contestable, yet vital experience of aliveness.Through this, we hope to stimulate discussion on psychosocial approaches to education.