Session Information
ERG SES B 02, Didactics
Parallel Paper Session
Contribution
The conference theme suggests that none should be excluded from education, freedom and development. Yet the performative dimension of a pedagogical interaction can operate to divide and exclude. How might this be circumvented? A number of educational theorists across Europe have sought to un-tether both the ideal of freedom and the outcome of pedagogical interaction from pre-determined destination, arguing instead (by drawing on, for example, Arendt, Levinas or Derrida) for an orientation towards responsibility, otherness and the coming of the new. This paper takes this thinking further by approaching this presencing of the new through the unmediated and pre-linguistic relationship of self / other/ environment afforded by kinaesthetic experience, and asks whether this re-sensing of the dynamics of pedagogical encounter might open up a new, and less divisive, way of thinking about the relationship between education, development and freedom.
Three provocations raised by kinaesthetic experience are identified as relevant to the coming into presence of a previously unseen subjectivity. Firstly, the kinaesthetic is irreducibly a first person experience and cannot be reduced to a third person interpretation of it. Thus a teacher can neither pre-determine, nor act as source of validation for, the student's discoveries. Secondly, attunement to kinaesthetic experience is dependent on attentive non-doing rather than directed fixing, with change actualized through attention rather than intention and this challenges expectations of student response. Thirdly, kinaesthetic sensation is always relational to the environment and to the moment, it is always in the here and in the now, neither of which are delimited by corporeal boundaries. As such, the singular subjectivity that comes to presence through kinaesthetic attentiveness is simultaneously a lived reality of an emergent intersubjectivity, a doubleness I language as 'becoming transparent'.
These provocations unsettle the boundaries of responsibility for both teacher and student by allowing for a conception of pedagogical encounter in which we are no longer cast as separate from the other who has to be let be. The paper draws on Deleuze's dynamic of actualization and counter-actualization in an event, and on Derrida's "impossible" hospitality to explore how this subtle shift of emphasis from responding to (the "other" of teacher or student or curriculum content) to attending to our changing relationship with (the "other" of teacher or student or curriculum content) renders the relationship between student, teacher and curriculum multidirectional in a movement that avoids re-inscribing hierarchical norms.
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
Arendt, H. (1977). The crisis in education (tr. D. Lindley) in Between past and future. New York: Penguin . Barad, K. (2003). Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28 (3). Biesta, G.J.J. (2001). Preparing for the incalculabe: deconstruction, justice, and the question of education In Biesta G.J.J. & Egea-Kuhne, D. (Eds.). Derrida & Education. London: Routledge. 32 -54 Biesta, G.J.J. (2006)Beyond Learning :Democratic education for a human future. Boulder, Co. : Paradigm. Biesta, G.(2008). Pedagogy with empty hands: Levinas education and the question of being human in Levinas and Education: At the intersection of faith and reason, Denise Egea Kuehne (ed). 198 - 210 Biesta, G,J.J. (2009a).Good education in an age of measurement: on the need to reconnect with the question of purpose in education, Educational Assessment Evaluation and Accountability 21:33–46 Derrida, J. (2002). Hostipitality in Acts of Religion, (Anidjar, G. ed.). New York and London : Routledge, p358-420 Derrida, J. (2005a). Justices, trans (P. Kaufman Trans.). Critical inquiry, 31 (3), 689 - 721. Derrida, J., & Dufourmantelle, A. (2000). Of hospitality, (tr.Bowlby) Stanford: Stanford University Press. Deleuze, G. (1990) The logic of sense. (tr. M. Lester and C. Stivale)London: Athlone Press Deleuze, G. (1994). Difference and Repetition. (tr. P. Patton). London: Continuum. Edgoose, J. (2001). Just decide! Derrida and the ethical aporias of education. In Biesta G.J.J. & Egea-Kuhne, D. (Eds.). Derrida & Education. London: Routledge. 119 -133. Vansieleghem, N. (2009). Children in public or 'public children': An alternative to constructing ones life, Journal of Philosophy of Education, 43. (1). 101 -118 Vansieleghem, N. (2011). ‘Nobody Knows’: On education and (in)humanity. Paper presented at PESGB conference, 2nd April 2011. Oxford: Philosophy of education Society of Great Britain.
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