Building on fieldwork carried out in schools in Belgium and in the DR Congo, this presentation aims to empirically and theoretically explore some of the characteristics of scholastic presentations of the lifeworld. At schools, the lifeworld (understood with Stiegler (2010) as the world as it appears during its disappearing) is presented to students in a new form: through a particular operation, the everyday lifeworld is transformed and re-presented at school so that it becomes ‘fit for teaching’ (the literal translation of the Greek word didactikos). This contribution focusses on the relationship between scholastic presentations and their ‘worldly counterparts’ and it will do so by exploring two movements. 

First movement: from world to classroom. Different scholars have written about the ‘gap’ between everyday lifeworld and scholastic (re)presentation. Mollenhauer (2014: 20-21), when discussing Comenius’ Orbis Pictus, observed that through the educational sphere of the school, cultures ‘filter’ and ‘slow down’ the full force of adult realities by artificially re-presenting the world to children: the seamless lifeworld is cut into different topics and themes in order to turn (an aspect of) the world into a topic that can be discussed. Related, Masschelein and Simons (2019: 21) have discussed the artificial and hyperfunctionalized nature of scholastic (re)presentations of life world actions, activities, and practices and they have conceptualized school material as ‘suspended’ and ‘profanated’ (see Masschelein and Simons 2013). And drawing on Auroux (1994) and Stiegler (2010), Vlieghe and Zamojski (2019: 138) observe that at schools, the world is ‘grammatized’ and introduced in the form of discrete elements that in themselves have no meaning. This presentation empirically examines how (i.e., through what gestures, images, words, ways of speaking) the world is presented in the classroom, and by doing so, it provides an insight in how the lifeworld is transformed in order to be made ‘fit for teaching’.

Second movement: from classroom to world. If we can indeed observe an artificial gap between scholastic (re)presentations and their ‘worldly counterparts’, how to conceive of the connection between the two? Mollenhauer, for example, has argued that cultural objects (like scholastic (re)presentations) are encoded depictions of a particular worldview. Children, then, should acquire an ‘aesthetic literacy’ (Weiss 2018): an ability to decode and situate cultural objects within a (historically/socially) determined field of meaning and students should become aware that the world presented at school is not the ‘real world’ but only a perspective on that world (see Masschelein 2014 for a response to this). A second perspective considers scholastic (re)presentations of the (life)world as useful tools to adequately prepare students for participation in the labor market. The most recent policy document of the Flemish minister of education, for example, states that the didactic material used in the classroom should be attuned to the material and equipment used in the labor market. Accordingly, efforts should be made to decrease the artificial gap between scholastic (re)presentation and the ‘real world’. 

Instead of urging children to become aware of the situated nature of scholastic (re)presentations, or instead of criticizing them for being too far removed from the ‘real world’, this contribution explores a third perspective and pays attention to those aspects that are meaningful and valuable about the gap between world and scholastic (re)presentation. Drawing on the work of Agamben (1993) and Fink (2016), it will approach scholastic presentations of the world as play-things, that is: not as tools that serve an external end goal (an acquired literacy, or participation on the labor market), but as miniaturized and essentialized materials that allow for students to establish a new relationship with the world. 

This contribution presents material that was gathered on fieldwork in schools in Belgium and the DR Congo. In each country, three schools were visited for three weeks, and audio- and video recordings of a range of different classroom situations were made. Whereas video recordings of entire classroom situations are often used to disentangle and explain the many interactions that shape and take place in the classroom, this research instead only recorded the actions and gestures in certain predefined and limited areas of the classroom (a desk, blackboard, notebook…). A disciplined and restricted usage of the camera forces the researcher to not so much explain classroom actions and gestures by situating them within a causal cascade (thus inspiring the researcher to search for a root impetus or cause, leading them away from the actual action or gesture), but by eliminating a large part of the classroom, it instead allows for a close attendance to action. The collected video-material, then, should not be considered as a ‘negative reality’ (a mirrored reality, a counter-image characterized by a lack or a not-presence of ‘the real’), but instead as a new reality that needs no outside or ‘real’ counterpart, and as such, the camera capturing only a small and predefined part of the classroom, makes attentive to the everyday gestures of the classroom and it allows researchers to look directly at actions and gestures without having to assess them against the background of intentions, histories, future projects, explanations. The collected video material is trans-scribed and presented in ethnographical vignettes. Through two vignettes of classroom situations (one from Belgium, one from DR Congo), this presentation aims to give an empirical insight in how (i.e., through what gestures, images, pictures, words, ways of speaking, movements, objects…) the world is made present in the classroom. The vignettes are considered as ‘material to think with’, as material that allows to pay attention to what happens when the old generation (teachers and scholastic (re)presentations) presents the world to the new generation (see Arendt 2019). The (conceptual) analysis, then, first and foremost starts from the observed classroom interactions. Far from trying to apply an analytical framework on the observed realities, the philosophical analysis will be rooted in the observed actions and gestures, and as such, this presentation can be considered as a contribution to the field of empirical philosophy (Mol 2021; see also Ingold 2018).

Because a part of the empirical work is still to be done, it is impossible to fully anticipate the outcomes of this inquiry. The presentation will, however, make a case for a pedagogical perspective on how scholastic presentations of the lifeworld are employed in the classroom: instead of considering them as tools that stand in the service of a predefined outcome or end goal (and instead of criticizing them for being too far removed from ‘the real world’), it will argue for a perspective that pays attention to the possible playful (ludic) characteristics of these scholastic presentations. That is, a perspective that pays attention to: (1) the qualities of scholastic presentations to turn (aspects of) the world into a ‘toy’ or a plaything. In the plaything, the whole is concentrated in a single thing (Fink 2016) – the transformation of a thing into a plaything, not unlike the transformation of a ‘worldly thing’ into a ‘scholastic presentation’, can be considered as an essentialization of that thing (see also Agamben 1993 on miniaturization); (2) the many ways in which scholastic presentations are employed in the classroom (without assessing these actions, gestures… against an outcome or a project); (3) the qualities of scholastic presentations to bring about a separate and delineated time/space of play with the world in which any striving for a goal external to the play itself is suspended (Huizinga 1997: 72); (4) how, through scholastic engagements with play-things, children might begin anew with the world.

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