The Meaning of Otherness in Education

Stakes, Forms, Process, Thoughts and Transfers

Muriel Briançon

• Publisher: Wiley-ISTE
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781786303929
• eBook ISBN:
  9781119644262
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Theory & Practice

The notion of otherness, often misused, requires important conceptualization work in order for it to be considered in all of its forms, and not simply reduced to the account of others. Although otherness certainly questions the link to the other (relation), it also questions the link to the self (reflexivity) and the link to knowledge (epistemology). Being tridimensional, the process of otherness is a paradox, the meaning of which can only be drawn thanks to ethics, psychoanalytical orientation and the history of philosophical ideas.

This book, which relates to philosophy of education, seeks to explain the problematic notion of otherness, the desire for which is specific to humankind. It examines how otherness questions the limits of knowledge, transmission and language, and argues that it is in fact a value, a tool and practice for all the actors involved in the relationship between education, knowledge and care.

PART 1
Issues, Forms and Processes of Otherness

Introduction to Part 1

The first part of this book aims to answer the question “why?”

Chapter 1 questions the issues of otherness that are problematic in education and training. Indeed, this term proliferates so much and so well in the human sciences and in the educational field that its meaning is more than uncertain. Its Greek and Latin etymologies reveal its polysemy but also the semantic losses suffered by this term during its history. At school, otherness is present everywhere: in intercultural education, the inclusion of disability, the student’s relationship with knowledge and the desire to know, didactic encounters and the pedagogical relationship, in particular. This otherness, which may be responsible for the deep unease of teachers, also gives rise more generally to the training needs expressed by many relationship and knowledge professionals. Finally, phenomena related to the desire for otherness are also evident in adult education. Increasingly mediatized¹ but also highly controversial at the theoretical level, otherness appears as a new and lively issue in the educational sciences. Apart from our compelling and personal need to write, why take up what appears to be an absurd challenge: to teach, educate and train for otherness?

The answer to this question lies in the conceptualization of Otherness, first in three fixed forms and then as a dynamic process. In Chapter 2, our philosophical approach constructs the external, internal and epistemological forms of Otherness, since it is discovered just as well in the relationship with others, in the relationship with oneself and in the relationship with knowledge. External otherness will be embodied in the face of others between conflict and encounter. The inner otherness will be discovered in time, the voice of the alienated consciousness and in the unconscious. Epistemological otherness will hesitate between an unspeakable full or empty space whose origins date back to Greek thought. Chapter 3 will then propose to bring together, model and schematize these three complementary forms under the three-dimensional concept of teaching Otherness after having experienced that each of them teaches important things during a sometimes risky process of cultivating knowledge.

It is because Otherness teaches something essential to the human being that it has a role to play in the educational sciences.

1 There has been an acceleration of this media coverage since the Charlie Hebdo attacks in January 2015. See for example Charlie Hebdo no. 1185 of April 8, 2015, p. 3.

1
The Stakes of a Problematic Otherness

Otherness was not a very common term until recently. For a long time it was confined to written and precious use. But over the past 20 years, publications on otherness have multiplied, both in research in the human sciences and in the daily press. Listing the uses of this popular term is not an easy task because it proliferates in a dispersed manner. The recounting of etymology will be necessary and will show that the term has suffered semantic losses. Then, we will try to identify the issues of otherness in school and adult education. In our opinion, this mediatized but also theoretically very controversial notion is a new and prolific question in the educational sciences.

1.1. A fashionable notion but very dispersed

Otherness has become an essential notion in the humanities and social sciences, where the term is used in an inflationary and heterogeneous way (Briançon et al. 2013). This polysemous term appears more and more but is never truly defined. Its etymology allows this untimely use. A term that has been slowly introduced into our vocabulary but continues to be omnipresent, otherness is not conceptualized in such a way as to allow a rapprochement between all its manifestations.

1.1.1. The proliferation of a polysemous term

Let us provide a brief overview of the use of the term “otherness” in the human and social sciences and then in the educational sciences.

1.1.1.1. In the humanities and social sciences

The term “otherness” is proliferating in the humanities and social sciences. But what otherness and which otherness are we talking about? Or as those from Quebec say: Quel Autre (Which Other?) (Ouellet and Harel 2007). This is obviously the fundamental question. Otherness lends itself to all uses. Our first non-exhaustive overview of the multiple uses of this term is: would otherness be a fact, a form of life, a phenomenon, a theme, a sensitivity, a behavior or an experience (Ouellet 2007)? A shifting terrain, an obligatory link between separation and relationship, or a retracted power that wanders between its pronouns (Bailly 2007)? A bodily and morphological, scandalous and unjust limit, or limits of the power to act and the will, the “I can” (Audi 2007)? The rejection of the other enemy excluded from philia, the fiction of the “all others” or the infinite and unconditional welcome of “any other” (Leroux 2007)? Is this the origin of anguish (Bucher 2007)? A new tourism, a commodity, or astonishment of the event (Méchoulan 2007)? An indomitable animal in novels or the very essence of writing? (Asselin 2007)? A “home” experienced as an unstable compromise between familiarity and strangeness that is poetically expressed (Villain 2007)? A terra incognita of the truth of the other monstrous and enigmatic, a common horizon or mutual trial and error (Vidal 2007)? The threshold of a hospital world or an opening arrangement and the deal of a moment (Tremblay 2007)? Another difficult concept to listen to and especially to hear about (Wall 2007)? A figure incarnated in the field of art by Dionysus, a masked god who is both foreign and strange, born twice and who must be recognized again (Uzel 2007)? A gap in literature between the truth of autobiographies and the plausibility or fiction of narratives in the case of extreme events such as the Shoah for example (Prstojevic 2007)? In translationology, the author, the other translators, the reader or the multiplicity of possible translations (Nouss 2007), the unfaithful translation or the untranslatable (Simon 2007)? A disciplinary theory about the other or a transtheoretical term to be used to “create worlds” (Popelard 2007)? Another object in the mapping of a theater of operations, missing or absent subjectivities, uninhabited and wild places (Harel 2007)? This extremely heterogeneous Quebec catalog, a true patchwork of what can be found in the human sciences on otherness, perfectly illustrates the multiple and disparate uses of this unclassifiable term. Let us note in passing that we have written “uses” and not “definitions”, because otherness is most of the time used without ever being defined.

In France, in 10 years, the human sciences have gone from an otherness synonymous with that of the other to a multiple and dispersed otherness. In 1998, the book Altérités: entre visible et invisible, edited by philosophy professor J.-F. Rey, proposed a typology of the other: an eight-month-old baby’s understanding of his mother’s face, the alter ego, the enemy, the stranger we welcome, the neighbor. This vision of otherness logically led to a reflection on human rights, secularism, citizenship, the integration of immigrants, tolerance and racism. Ten years later, we see that we are no longer left behind in terms of the breakdown of otherness. Various colloquia are now struggling to gather fragmented, very different and sometimes irreconcilable points of view. The 2007 Figures de l’Autre symposium organized by Jacques Ardoino and Georges Bertin brought together epistemological, anthropological, artistic, literary, psychoanalytical, educational, economic, political, philosophical and professional perspectives, constituting a real ballad in the imagination of otherness and alteration. Another conference, Altérité et Aliénation, organized by Guillaume Seydoux and Laurent Husson in 2009, confronted psychoanalytical alienation, forms of religious otherness, clashes of civilizations, fiction, poetic otherness and temporality. The observation is clear: the notion of otherness is nowadays dispersed, disintegrated; although the latter term suggests that otherness would once have known unity. However, as we will see later, nothing is less certain.

Thus, the Figures de l’Autre (Ardoino and Bertin 2010) reflects on an other that would be used by the human sciences in every possible way, all of them undoubtedly relevant but without any link between them. First of all, the other man would be the non-human, the animal, which paradoxically would make it possible to meet the other human animal outside oneself but also within oneself (Gouabaut 2010). But the other would also be the foreigner with an Arab identity, the one who is excluded from lineage or the one who is foreign to the Arabic language, who becomes a non-Muslim, who can be accepted or rejected or even dehumanized (Al Karjousli 2010...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART 1: Issues, Forms and Processes of Otherness
• PART 2: Thoughts About Otherness
• PART 3: Transfers of Otherness in the Educational Sciences
• Conclusion
• Postface
• References
• Index of Names
• Index of Notions
• End User License Agreement