Phenomenology and Educational Theory in Conversation

Back to Education Itself

Patrick Howard, Tone Saevi, Andrew Foran, Gert Biesta, Patrick Howard, Tone Saevi, Andrew Foran, Gert Biesta

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367209889
• eBook ISBN: 9780429559716
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Phenomenology and Educational Theory in Conversation challenges the abstract-technical understanding of education to orient the reader to the importance of relationality, intersubjectivity, and otherness to renew and reclaim the educational project.

This book treats education as a matter of existence, relationality, and common human concerns. It offers readers an alternative language to reveal and challenge the humanistic encounters that often disappear in the shadows of neoliberalism. The phenomenologists, and educational theorists featured here, offer insights that connect fully and concretely with the everyday lives of educators and students. They offer another language by which to understand education that is counter to the objectifying, instrumentalist language prevalent in neoliberal discourse.

This book will be of great interest for academics, researchers, and post-graduate students in the fields of pedagogy, phenomenology, educational theory, and progressive education.

Part 1
On education

The phenomenon of education reconsidered

Gert Biesta

It may seem obvious for a book on education to start with a section on education and, for a book that seeks to bring education and phenomenology into conversation, to start with a section on the phenomenon of education. Some may argue that this is actually not needed, because education is such a widespread and omnipresent phenomenon that we already know what it is, and that from there we should swiftly move to the study of education rather than focusing on the phenomenon that is supposed to be studied. Others may argue that a book on education should not pay that much attention to education, because what really matters nowadays is not education but learning.

The first line of argument will be familiar to readers in the English-speaking world and in countries influenced by developments there, because in the English-speaking world the study of education, at universities, colleges, and other institutions, is generally seen as a multi-disciplinary effort that has “education” as its object (see Biesta 2011). In those countries and settings, therefore, the psychology of education, the sociology of education, the philosophy of education, and the history of education have become established ways to conduct the study of education. While these approaches have generated and are continuing to generate interesting insights, the question that is often “forgotten” is what education “itself” is actually about or, to put it differently, what kind of assumptions need to come into play before education can actually become an object of study.

Even if one is able to find a school, college or university – which may have become more of a challenge nowadays given the way in which schools, hospitals, prisons, shops, and office blocks have become almost indistinguishable from each other; they all seem to be based on a similar architectural grammar – there is still the question what one would focus on, and why, if one has the intention to study the education happening in those buildings. Should the focus be on teachers and, if so, how can they be identified? Or on students? Would it be relevant to include janitors? Should the building itself be brought in as an educational actor? Is everything that teachers do educationally relevant? Such questions show that the study of education cannot skip over the question of education itself and, more specifically, the question of the phenomenon of education.

Yet here the second line of thought comes to the fore, as many nowadays would argue and do actually argue that education is all about learners and their learning. The “learnification” (Biesta 2010) of educational discourse and practice has indeed been hailed by some as a liberating paradigm shift (see, for example, Barr and Tagg 1995) that has helped education and educators to focus on what really should matter in education. That this shift is seen as liberating is particularly due to a prevalent but nonetheless misleading idea that education can only be enacted as a process in which teachers control students, where teachers and their teaching are seen as the major culprit and the turn towards learners and their learning as an emancipatory “escape” from this set-up.

While it cannot be denied that people can learn and do learn, the simple fact that people can do so and will do so without education and without the efforts from educators already indicates that learning is not enough if we wish to capture what education is about. One might say that it only takes one to learn, but that it takes two for education to happen: an educator and what in some languages, but not that often in English, is referred to as an “educandus,” that is, the one being educated or receiving education. What the “educandus” is supposed to do with the education that is directed at him or her, what the relationship between educator and educandus actually is and is about, whether these are necessarily relationships between human beings or whether other actors can come into play, how intentional or not the actions of educator and educandus are or should be, what the purposes are that should “frame” the interaction, are all questions that need to be asked in order to begin to get a sense of the phenomenon of education, particularly when we acknowledge that this phenomenon “occurs,” so we might say, beyond learning (Biesta 2006).

All this is not helped by the fact that the English word “education” carries an ambivalence with it, as it can refer to a process, to an (intentional) activity, to a practice, and to an institution, to name but a few options. It is particularly the difference between education as process and education as (intentional) activity that matters here, because when we use the word education to refer to a process, it is quite easy to claim or suggest that this is essential to a process of learning. Bearing in mind, therefore, that education can also refer to an intentional activity – something an educator does – it becomes possible to see a difference between education and learning and thus to raise different questions about the phenomenon of education itself.

It is for all these reasons, then, that this book opens with four chapters that seek to focus on the phenomenon of education, providing some groundwork against which other contributions in this collection can be read. Gert Biesta opens this section with a chapter on the “givenness of teaching,” in order to move closer to an “encounter” with the educational phenomenon. He does this against the background of the recent turn in educational theory and practice towards the language of learning and towards the practice of learning, where the learner has been put in the centre of the educational endeavour and the teacher has been moved sideways. In his contribution he argues that the educational phenomenon cannot be captured in terms of learning but needs a notion of teaching and, more specifically, a notion of teaching that stands on itself and cannot be reduced to or deduced from learning; a notion of teaching, therefore, as something that is radically given. In his chapter he tries to argue why this is so and why this matters educationally. In his discussion on the work of Jean-Luc Marion he also shows why the question of the givenness of teaching goes to the heart of phenomenology itself so that, through the exploration of the givenness of teaching, we may actually come closer to an encounter with the educational phenomenon itself.

Scott Webster’s contribution, “Uncovering what educators desire through Kierkegaard’s loving phenomenology,” situates the discussion with the impact of neoliberalism on contemporary educational practices; an impact, as he argues, that actively marginalizes education and opposes democracy. The expansion of the neoliberal agenda is not only being achieved by authoritative top-down policies being imposed upon educational institutions, but the agenda is also being furthered through educators themselves, perhaps unknowingly. As with all ideologies, neoliberalism can be embodied, and demonstrated by those who willingly enact reform requirements with their incentives, desiring to attain personal advantages and rewards for successfully doing so. By drawing primarily on Kierkegaard’s understanding of phenomenology as repetition, involving love as a way-of-being, Webster argues that his insights can be utilized to confront any inadvertent self-interested ontology of homo economicus which may have become embodied by educators.

Joris Vlieghe and Piotr Zamojski continue the discussion with a further attempt at “approaching education on its own terms,” as they put it in the title of their chapter, offering a phenomenological analysis. Vlieghe and Zamojski follow Hannah Arendt in her attempt to address the central question in philosophy of education: What is the essence of education? Put in more phenomenological terms this question reads: what exactly does it mean to educate and to be educated? They show that this question can be approached from two radically different and mutually opposed perspectives, and that it makes an immense difference which side one takes. The opposition, so they argue, is one between transcendence and immanence – a distinction they explore through the work of Giorgio Agamben. Although the transcendent perspective is today the most dominant, Vlieghe and Zamojski suggest that phenomenology can help to counter this dominant (meta)theoretical position that regards education merely as a means. In relation to this, they make an attempt at fleshing out what it would mean to approach education from a purely immanent perspective, which they briefly illustrate through a discussion of three essential educational issues: schooling, freedom, and love for the world.

Andrew Foran, in his chapter on “Pedagogical Practice,” concludes the first section of the book. Taking his starting point in the observation that hundreds of years of institutionalized education have solidified a global hold on how children and young people are schooled, he argues that this comparative and competitive educative process has impacted significantly on the teacher’s world, absorbing educators by everydayness in competing professionalized tensions and pressures of standardization. He shows that teacher education in Canada has tended to ignore pedagogical practices in teacher preparation in favour of government initiatives that promote the value of testing scores and government-controlled curricula. For the last 25 years, teacher education thus has shifted from building a practice on relational encounters with pupils to that of being a manager directing learning services. As a result, teachers are largely ignoring the personal and non-professional significance implied in the term “pedagogy.” By reviving a pedagogical practice in teacher education, and exploring the lived experiences of teachers, phenomenology can position pedagogical priorities over social and psychological norms and academic outcomes, precisely because a phenomenological examination will challenge an outcomes-based and assessment driven education that is not oriented to an open future for the child but forecloses on multiple possibilities by insisting on pre-established criteria, percentiles, and performance norms. In his chapter he focuses on what many teachers still will claim as essential in the educational exchange – pedagogy – namely the value of relationality between teachers and pupils.

References

• Barr, R.B. and Tagg, J., 1995. From teaching to learning: A new paradigm for undergraduate education. Change (Nov/Dec), 13–25.
• Biesta, G.J.J., 2006. Beyond learning. Democratic education for a human future. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers.
• Biesta, G.J.J., 2010. Good education in an age of measurement: Ethics, politics, democracy. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers.
• Biesta, G.J.J., 2011. Disciplines and theory in the academic study of education: A Comparative Analysis of the Anglo-American and continental construction of the field. Pedagogy, Culture and Society, 19 (2), 175–192.

Chapter 1
On the givenness of teaching

Encountering the educational phenomenon

Gert Biesta

Introduction

When, about ten years ago, I coined the word ‘learnification’ (see Biesta 2009), it was first of all to denote the problematic impact of the rise of the ‘new language of learning’ on the discourse and practice of education. My main concern at the time was that the emergence of notions such as ‘learner,’ ‘learning environment,’ facilitator of learning’ and ‘lifelong learning’ were all referring to education in terms of learning, without asking what the learning was about and, more importantly, what it was supposed to be for. It was particularly the absence of a vigorous debate about the purpose of education that worried me most. It prompted me to propose that education should always be concerned with and orientated towards three domains of purpose, which I referred to as qualification, socialisation and subjectification respectively.

I think that, ten years on, the learnification-thesis still stands.¹ Talk about learning is still rife in educational circles, new expressions such as ‘deep learning,’ ‘brain-based learning’ and ‘machine learning’ have entered the conversation, and policy makers continue to produce remarkable sentences such as that schools should “deliver at least one year’s growth in learning for every student every year.”² While there is evidence of a growing interest in the question of the purpose(s) of education (see, e.g., Hattie and Nepper Larsen 2020. Onderwijsraad 2016), much of what can be found in policy, research and practice continues to have a rather one-dimensional focus on learning, also due to the dominance of the frameworks promoted by the global education measurement industry.

There was, however, a further dimension to the learnification-thesis which was less prominent in my initial argument but which, over the past decade, has become an important strand in my thinking, writing and teaching. The key point here is the insight that teaching (and the whole spectrum of intentional educational endeavours more generally) should not necessarily result in learning, which also means that teaching should not necessarily aim at learning. The idea, in other words, is that there is more to teaching than learning, just as there is more to education than learning. In order to bring this ‘more’ to the fore, it is important to ‘free’ teaching from learning (Biesta 2015). I found helpful suggestions for exploring this dimension of the learnification-thesis in work from American analytic philosophy of education which, interestingly, largely predated the rise of the new language of learning.

The most explicit position here was taken by Paul Komisar who argued that “learning is not what the ‘teacher’ intends to produce” (Komisar 1968, p. 183) but that the intention of teaching might better be captured in terms of the ‘awareness’ of an ‘auditor’ – not a learner or student for Komisar – “who is successfully becoming aware of the point of the act [of teaching]” (Komisar 1968, p. 191; emphasis in original). And this awareness may cover a whole range of different responses, of which learning is only one possibility, but neither the sole nor the only destination. One important reason for creating a distance between teaching and learning has to do with the fact that there is more to life than learning. There is a range of ways in which human beings exist and the task of education should rather be about opening up this range of ‘existential possibilities’ (Biesta 2015) for our students, rather than only providing them with the position of the learner. The point here is also political, particularly with reference to attempts by policy makers and politicians to force people into ‘the learning position,’ most notably through the ‘politics’ of lifelong learning (see Biesta 2018).

It is against this background that, in recent years, I have started to make an explicit case for the re dis covery of teaching, which I also see as a recovery of teaching (Biesta 2017a). This is partly in order to restore teaching to its proper place in the educational endeavour – to give teaching back to education³ (Biesta 2012) – and not see it as something outdated and of the past that we should be embarrassed about. And it is partly in order to highlight that what is distinctive about education is not the phenomenon of learning – which, after all, can also happen outside of education and can occur without teaching – but precisely the presence of and the encounter with teaching. Whereas learning is accidental to education, teaching, so I wish to suggest, is essential to education, albeit that the question what teaching is and how it might or should be enacted does, of course, need careful considerati...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction to book
• PART 1 On education: the phenomenon of education reconsidered
• PART 2 Children, adults, voice and agency: on the problem of seeing education from children’s perspective
• PART 3 The existentials – lived time, body, space, and relations
• PART 4 To have been educated
• Index