Session Information
13 SES 05 B, Education and Transition
Paper Session
Contribution
There is no transition without education (I use the term in the German sense of “Erziehung”) as education is everywhere: before and during as well as after transitions. From this point of view education – invented by evolution in form of an institutionalized ‘flexible response” in regard of developmental tasks in different dimensions – can be understood in serving as one main component of something one might call “transition-management”.
In the broadest sense transition means the movement or change from one state, condition, form, style or place to another. In this respect education as a human communicative practice functions as a kind of interface or mediation because it finds itself always ‘in between’: between parents and children, between teachers and pupils, between society and individuals, between collective memory and subjective consciousness, between being-able-to and not-being-able-to, between knowing and not-knowing or – to put it educationally and in a general way – between learning tasks and learning abilities.
This place of “in between” is often no comfortable situation neither in the daily pedagogical practice nor in the field of educational theorizing and research. The main reason for this difficulty derives from the fact that intentions have to be transformed into (more or less) effective pedagogical operations. And the pedagogical relation is far away from being a linear one. Therefore the pedagogical challenge consists in the ability to communicate effectively in a non-linear relationship.
It is precisely this point of view which Kant probably had in mind when in 1803 (in: Über Pädagogik) he had formulated the basic challenge of all pedagogical efforts in the clearest way possible pointing to the 'mechanisms in the art of education which have to be transformed into the language of science'. In terms of modern theory Kant’s dictum suggests to construct educational theory from a bottom-up-perspective, so to say from what can be realized by means of and throughout pedagogical communication.
This Kantian Problem is in the centre of my paper which consists of two parts:
In the first part I will shortly outline a perspective which is based on evolution-theory and modern culturally related developmental psychology. In resent years a lot of empirical research had been done in order to better understand the evolutionary shift from apes to babies concerning their cognitive abilities. In this context the Hungarian researcher Gergely had developed his concept of “natural pedagogy”. By his empirical findings he succeeds to demonstrate clearly that there is a “natural” form of pedagogy which can be regarded as the blueprint for any (artificial) educational effort. “Natural Pedagogy” provides education with a specific cognitive operating system, delivering human beings with a special form of communication which is the basis for any “non-natural-pedagogy” which will follow later in the life-circle.
In the second part of the paper I will profit from a new development in German “Allgemeine Pädagogik” which is called “Operative Pedagogy” putting the “pointing structure of education” in the middle of theoretical interests. This wing of theory is mainly based on Herbartian concepts and tries to clarify the relation between the varieties of pointing efforts and individual learning interconnected by forms of articulation. This is – at least in my view – the fundamental educational transition and one way to answer to the Kantian question concerning the “mechanisms” in education as a kind of soft technology to bring together collective memory and individual mind in order to make future possible.
As different as all concepts of education across Europe might be all educational theory has a common “cross-national” phenomenological basis. To bring back this point of view into our reflexive memory is one of the intentions of this paper.
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
Berdelmann, K. & Fuhr, Th. (Hrsg.) (2009). Operative Pädagogik. Grundlegung, Anschlüsse, Diskussion. Paderborn: Schöningh. Berg, K. van den & Gumbrecht, H.U. (Hrsg.). (2010). Politik des Zeigens. München: Fink. Boehm, G., Egenhofer, S. & Spies, Chr. (Hrsg.). (2010). Zeigen. Die Rhetorik des Sichtbaren. München: Fink. Gergely, G. (2007), Learning ‚About’ Versus Learning ‚From’ Other Minds. Natural Pedagogy and Its Implications, in: P. Carruthers, St. Laurence, St. Stich (eds.), The Innate Mind. Vol. 3: Foundations and the Future, Oxford (University Press) Gfrereis, H. & Lepper, M. (2007). Deixis – Vom Denken mit dem Zeigefinger. Göttingen: Wallstein. Herbart, J. F.: Allgemeine Pädagogik aus dem Zweck der Erziehung abgeleitet (1806), in: Sämtliche Werke, Bd. II, zuerst 1887, Neudruck Aalen 1989. Illeris, K. (2008). How We learn. Learning and non-learning in school and beyond. London, New York: Routledge. Kant, Immanuel: Über Pädagogik, in: Ders.: Schriften zur Anthropologie, Geschichtsphilosophie, Politik und Pädagogik 2. Herausgegeben von Wilhelm Weischedel. Werkausgabe Band XII. Frankfurt/Main (Suhrkamp) 1978, S.691-761. Kraft, V. (2014), Constants of Education, in: M. Papastephanou (Ed.): Philosophical Perspectives on Compulsory Education. Dordrecht/Heidelberg/London/New York (Springer), S.11-21. Kraft, V. (2009a), Pädagogisches Selbstbewusstsein. Studien zum Konzept des Pädagogischen Selbst, Paderborn, Schöningh. Luhmann N. (1991), Das Kind als Medium der Erziehung, “Z.f.Päd.” vol. 37, pp. 19-40. Prange K. (2005), Die Zeigestruktur der Erziehung. Grundriss der Operativen Pädagogik, Paderborn, Schöningh. Prange K. e Strobel-Eisele G. (2006), Die Formen des pädagogischen Handelns. Eine Einführung, Stuttgart, Kohlhammer. Sünkel W. (1996), Phänomenologie des Unterrichts: Grundriss der theoretischen Didaktik, Weinheim-München, Juventa. Tomasello M. (2002), Die kulturelle Entwicklung des menschlichen Denkens: Zur Evolution der Kognition, Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp. Tomasello, M. (2008), Why donʼt apes point? In R. Eckardt, G. Jäger & T. Veenstra (a cura di) (2008), Variation, Selection, Development. Probing the Evolutionary Model of Language Change, Berlin, Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 375-394. Tomasello M. (2009), Die Ursprünge der menschlichen Kommunikation, Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp.
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