Learner, student, speaker:
Why it matters how we call those we teach.
Gert Biesta
School of education
University of Stirling
“A learner is not a shedhand or barrower, but
a budding shearer who has not yet shorn
5,000 sheep (10,000 in Queensland).”
(Gunn 1965, p.35)
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LEARNER
the rise of the ‘new language of learning’
an emancipatory shift?
↓
the learner as ‘not yet’
weak construction of the learner
strong construction of the learner
explanation: “a means to reduce the situation of inequality where those
who know nothing are in relation with those who know” /
“to explain is to demonstrate an incapacity” /
the learner as the product of the ‘explicative order’
the learner as lifelong learner?
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STUDENT
Is it possible to engage in education in such a way
that it emancipates rather than stultifies?
Is it possible to teach without explanation?
↓
Joseph Jacotot – The ignorant schoolmaster
students learned without a master explicator,
not without a master;
teaching without communication:
not: intelligence to intelligence, but: will to will
emancipation takes place when an intelligence obeys only itself,
even while the will obeys another will
emancipatory education:
the act of revealing an intelligence to itself
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emancipation is not something “given by scholars, by their explications at
the level of the people’s intelligence” –
emancipation is always “emancipation seized”
“The emancipatory teacher’s call forbids the supposed ignorant the
satisfaction ... of admitting that one is incapable of knowing more.”
(
option 1
critical pedagogy
truth
schoolmaster
option 2
Freire
truth
no schoolmaster
option 3
Ranciere
no truth
schoolmaster
)
The one who is the subject of education is summoned to study.
↓
A STUDENT
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SPEAKER
not a psychology, not a theory of ‘teaching and learning’,
not a form of constructivism or self-regulated learning,
not a new pedagogy
but ‘a different route’: that of liberty
Who can speak?
not the capacity of speech,
but: who is ‘allowed’ to speak
noise → education → voice?
does the teacher need to explain what the noises of the students mean?
a ‘distribution of the sensible’ in which some sound exist as noise and
other sound exist as voice
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police or police order (‘la police,’ ‘l’ordre policier’)
↓
an order “of the visible and the sayable that sees that a particular activity
is visible and another is not, that this speech is understood as discourse
and another as noise”
politics (la politique)
↓
A mode of expression that undoes the perceptible divisions of the police
order by implementing a basically heterogeneous assumption, that of a
part of those who have no part, an assumption that, at the end of the day,
itself demonstrates the sheer contingency of the order [and] the equality
of any speaking being with any other speaking being.
an interruption of the existing order with reference to the idea of equality
↓
dissensus
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subjectification
↓
“the production through a series of actions of a body and a capacity for
enunciation not previously identifiable within a given field of experience,
whose identification is thus part of the reconfiguration of the field of
experience”
subjectification, not identification
subjectivity, not identity
subjectification: a supplement to the existing order
coming to speech
[1] identification
[2] subjectification
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DISCUSSION
a learner cannot (yet) speak
(noise → education → speech)
a student can learn without explanation
(will to will, not intelligence to intelligence)
student a: studies the explanations of others
student b: follows her own ‘orbit’
a speaker is the one who already speaks
“Equality is not given, nor is it claimed; it is practised, it is verified.”
But it can only appear as “an absurdity”.
↓
equality and inequality are “two axioms by which education operates”
The point is not to prove the equality of intelligence of all human beings,
but seeing “what can be done under that supposition.”
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CODA
the explicative order is both an educational logic and a social logic:
“progress”
[perhaps Ranciere’s writings are more a critique of the social logic than of
the educational logic: ‘The world is not a school’]
“There is no social emancipation, and no emancipatory school”
(“only an individual can emancipate an individual”)
the explicative order cannot be replaced by an emancipatory order
the suggestion to refer to our students as speakers therefore does not
inaugurate a new pedagogy or a new system of schooling
↓
it provides a different starting point,
not a different conclusion
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THANK YOU
gert.biesta@stir.ac.uk
www.gertbiesta.com
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