The Posthuman Child

Educational transformation through philosophy with picturebooks

Karin Murris

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317511687
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The Posthuman Child combats institutionalised ageist practices in primary, early childhood and teacher education. Grounded in a critical posthumanist perspective on the purpose of education, it provides a genealogy of psychology, sociology and philosophy of childhood in which dominant figurations of child and childhood are exposed as positioning child as epistemically and ontologically inferior. Entangled throughout this book are practical and theorised examples of philosophical work with student teachers, teachers, other practitioners and children (aged 3-11) from South Africa and Britain. These engage arguments about how children are routinely marginalised, discriminated against and denied, especially when the child is also female, black, lives in poverty and whose home language is not English. The book makes a distinctive contribution to the decolonisation of childhood discourses.

Underpinned by good quality picturebooks and other striking images, the book's radical proposal for transformation is to reconfigure the child as rich, resourceful and resilient through relationships with (non) human others, and explores the implications for literary and literacy education, teacher education, curriculum construction, implementation and assessment. It is essential reading for all who research, work and live with children.

Part I A posthumanist philosophical orientation

DOI: 10.4324/9781315718002-2

Chapter 2 The labyrinth

Enacting all three aims of teacher education

DOI: 10.4324/9781315718002-3

Any educational programme needs to include a philosophical justification for its priorities in terms of content. What are the core subjects to be included and what are the aims of education¹ that underpin such a proposal? In this context the writings of contemporary philosopher of education, Gert Biesta, are inspiring. I have used his three aims of education previously (Murris and Verbeek, 2014) to conceptualise the subject childhood studies as a compulsory core subject in initial teacher education. In this chapter I build on my earlier work and read diffractively Karen Barad’s relational materialism and Biesta’s three aims of education ‘through one another’ (Barad, 2007). The new insights that emerge include how a relational materialist interpretation of Biesta’s ‘subjectification’ informs the pedagogies I propose for a posthumanist early childhood education. This chapter serves as a justification for the particular childhood studies course I teach, as described and argued for in this book. After outlining the ‘why’ and the ‘how’ of my childhood studies course, I give an overview of the book and suggest how it could be used in teacher education. I then invite readers to enter the ‘labyrinth’.

The aims of (teacher) education

Gert Biesta argues that education works in three domains and has three concurrent, overlapping purposes or aims² (Biesta, 2010, 2014). For Biesta, the art of teaching is to find the right balance between these three aims, which cannot be predicted or controlled, and which involve risk-taking (Biesta, 2014, p. 147). Education, he argues, should concern itself not only with schooling or qualification, but also with socialisation and what he calls ‘subjectification’. So, what is the difference between the three aims he proposes as applied to teacher education?

Institutions that prepare teachers need to ensure that students are qualified, that they are equipped with the right kind of knowledge, skills and dispositions to teach children (‘qualification’). They also need to ensure that ‘newcomers’ to the profession are familiarised with the values and traditions that enable student teachers to live and work within existing educational practices, and to learn how to behave in ways teachers are expected to do (‘socialisation’) (Biesta, 2014, p. 128). Educationalists differ in their opinions as to whether teacher education should include more than these two, but Biesta enriches this debate by offering an important third aim, ‘subjectification’, which relates to how education impacts on the person. Although each aim of education is legitimate, Biesta does prioritise them, and regards the third, ‘subjectification’ as fundamental for education. It is on this basis that questions about knowledge, skills and dispositions, competence and evidence can be asked. To appreciate this prioritisation, I unpack further what he means by ‘subjectification’ and examine the kind of subjectivity it assumes.

Subjectification

Education’s aim of socialisation is different from that of subjectification, but is easily confused with it (Biesta, 2014, p. 129). The former is about becoming part of an existing order and the creation of an identity through identification with that order. Subjectification, on the other hand, is guided by freedom and is about existence ‘outside’ such orders (Biesta, 2012, p. 13). It is about the formation and transformation of students and teachers into ‘subjects’ (Biesta, 2010, p. 21), by which Biesta means that teachers, and ultimately the children they teach, are coming into presence as individuals, as independent agents actively shaping society.

However, this cannot be done in isolation; especially in his later work, Biesta (2014) extends his existential and relational take on subjectivity to include Hannah Arendt’s notion of action. Each person’s ‘coming into presence’ depends on how their beginnings are taken up by others, and, importantly, he adds: ‘the ways in which others take up my beginnings are radically beyond my control’ (Biesta, 1994, p. 143). As others have the freedom to take up a subject’s beginnings as they wish, a subject’s coming into world is always shaped by the actions of others. He explains the educational implication:

… the responsibility of the educator can never only be directed towards individuals – individual children – and their ‘coming into presence’ but also needs to be directed to the maintenance of a space in which, as Arendt puts it, ‘freedom can appear.’ It is, therefore, a double responsibility: for the child and for the world.

Biesta, 2014, p. 144

So, plurality and difference are necessary conditions for the event of subjectivity. Difference is not perceived by Biesta as comparing subjects with one another (which would be ‘uniqueness-as-difference’). Inspired by philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, he proposes ‘uniqueness-as-irreplaceability’ (Biesta, 2014, p. 144). Importantly, ‘uniqueness’ for Biesta is not a property, essence or quality of an individual, but manifests itself in the relationship with others. Others are necessary for uniqueness to be articulated, for a subject to become singular in an ethical sense. Biesta makes no epistemological or ontological claims about what the subject is (Biesta, 2014, p. 145).

This subject also ‘has’ a voice of the ‘stranger’ (Biesta, 2006). Drawing on Bauman, he explains that the stranger is not a ‘natural category’, but is produced by ‘a specific construction of what is own, proper, familiar, rational’ (Biesta, 2006, p. 59). Children or teachers, for instance, acquire a voice, are able to speak, when they become a member of the rational community, and what they say is according to the rules and principles of the rational discourse of the community they represent, that is, ‘what certain groups hold rational knowledge to be’ (Biesta, 2006, p. 57). What this means is that what is said by this particular speaker in this particular voice is ‘inessential’ (Biesta drawing on Lingis, 2006, p. 58). People speak only with their own voice when they are outside the rational community (Biesta, 2010, p. 88). Importantly, Biesta is not saying that the voice of the excluded other should always be celebrated because it is other or strange, but simply the need to be aware that ‘what counts as strange depends on what counts as familiar’ (Biesta, 2006, p. 59).

For Biesta, the aim of education should not be a mere focusing on the acquisition of knowledge, or a process of socialisation into an existing order, but to speak with one’s own voice and to bring something new into the world. He explains:

membership of the rational community gives people a voice. It enables them to speak, but it is speech in the capacity of their membership of the rational community. This means that the voice by which they speak in this capacity is a representative voice. This means, however, that the thing that matters when they speak is what is said. But how it is said and, more importantly, who is saying it is immaterial as long as what is said (and done) ‘makes sense’. This, in turn, means that when I speak in this capacity I do not speak with my own voice but with the common voice of the community I represent. When I speak in this capacity we are, therefore, interchangeable.

Biesta, 2010, p. 87; my italics

The rational community, in other words, affords individuals a particular kind of communication, one that is depersonalised and representational; it does not matter who speaks. In contrast, ‘subjectification’ as an aim of teacher education is about speaking with one’s ‘own’ unique-as-irreplaceable voice, and bringing something new into the world. Perhaps an example in academia would be that we often socialise students into speaking with a representative voice, with the ‘common voice of the community’, for example, by asking them to reflect back or ‘internalise’ developmental or social constructivist learning theories as truths, rather than as philosophies of education that can be critiqued. The same holds for certain poststructuralists’ claims to knowledge about how race, gender and class construct subjectivities (forms of ‘socialisation’ in this framework, not subjectification; see Chapter 10). However, how helpful is it to make such a hard distinction between socialisation and subjectification as if one excludes the other? It is helpful though to explicitly address subjectification. How can a course in teacher education also bring about subjectification? I understand Biesta as saying that subjectification is not an outcome, or a thing to be produced, an essence or identity, but an event.

Educational action is not guided by what a student might become; as teacher educators we should show ‘an interest in that which announces itself as a new beginning, as newness, as natality, to use Arendt’s term’ (Biesta, 2014, p. 143). Teaching is not a quality or something a person possesses; it emerges only in an encounter with the other, because a teacher can never control the ‘impact’ her/his activities have on her/his students (Biesta, 2014, pp. 54, 56).³ Or, as we have seen above, he/she cannot control how others take up her beginnings. So what could this look like in practice?

Subjectification has to do with acting in a public space (Biesta 2006, p. 61), taking responsibility for our actions and making wise educational judgements. For Biesta, making such judgements is at the heart of what teachers in the classroom do – usually in the heat of the moment. How then does the student teacher transform towards making wise educational decisions? I first consider Biesta’s propositions about this, and then read his ideas diffractively through Karen Barad’s relational materialism.

Biesta (2013) argues that we can develop the ability to make wise (virtuous) educational decisions only by doing it. Teachers make situated judgements about what is educationally desirable in each of the three educational aims. This cannot be handed out in lectures as templates or prescribed through textbooks. The teacher’s role, for Biesta,⁴ is that of a person who mediates in any concrete moment between child and curriculum when making practical judgements.⁵ It follows, therefore, that especially in the foundation phase and primary education, knowledge about the child is critical (for example, knowledge about what a child can be expected to achieve in terms of, for example, reasoning, morality, subject knowledge acquisition). But, as Biesta (2014, p. 142) insists, such childhood education should not be in terms of ‘a truth about what the child is and what the child must become’ (e.g. autonomous, rational).

As we will see in chapters 4 and 5, such claims to knowledge about child have been deconstructed (e.g. Burman, 2008a) and reconstructed (e.g. Lenz Taguchi, 2010) in the last two decades from a philosophical (Matthews, 1994; Kohan, 2002, 2015; Haynes and Murris, 2012; Kennedy, 2013), sociological (Dahlberg, Moss and Pence, 1999/2013), cultural-historical, postmodern, poststructuralist and feminist perspective (Nolan and Kilderry, 2010, p. 108). If we take such contestations seriously, we need to foreground pedagogy and knowledge of child and childhood in teacher education.⁶

Reading subjectification diffractively

The methodological shift from ‘reflection’ to ‘diffraction’ is inspired by Karen Barad’s relational materialism.⁷ When reading Biesta’s notion of subjectification diffractively, new insights are produced that help to construct a curriculum that disrupts current discriminatory (ageist) practices. Biesta’s relational subjectivity sketched above involves surrendering the idea that indiv...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures and tables
• Introduction by Peter Moss
• Acknowledgements
• PART I A posthumanist philosophical orientation
• PART II Posthumanist intra-active pedagogies
• References
• Index