Jacques Rancière’s Lesson on the Lesson

Abstract

This article examines the significance of Jacques Rancière’s work on pedagogy, and argues that to make sense of Rancière’s ‘lesson on the lesson’ one must do more but also less than merely explicate Rancière’s texts. It steadfastly refuses to draw out the lessons of Rancière’s writings in the manner of a series of morals, precepts or rules. Rather, it is committed to thinking through the ‘lessons’ of Rancière in another sense. Above all, Rancière wants to ‘teach’ his readers something absolutely crucial about teaching. In making this claim the article emphasizes the extent to which Rancière advocates an utterly radical pedagogy, one that completely reconceives all the central elements of ‘schooling’, including teacher, student, intelligence and knowledge. Rancière thinks it possible to teach without knowing; he believes that the best schoolmasters can operate not on the assumption of their expertise, but on the equality of intelligence; and this means ultimately that Rancière contends that we can ‘teach what we do not know’. The best schoolmasters are ignorant schoolmasters. Rancière’s radical pedagogy depends upon, just as it consistently advances, a thoroughgoing resistance to a certain form of epistemological and ontological mastery. The rejection of mastery—of schoolmasters who would know it all, and convey this knowing to their students—forms the very backbone of all of Rancière’s writings and critical investigations. This is the chief reason why Rancière is, in a way, always talking about pedagogy, even when his subject matter appears to be something else entirely.     

Emancipatory or instrumental? Students’ and teachers’ perceptions of the implementation of the EcoSchool program

Abstract

We present findings of a mixed method evaluation study of the EcoSchool program in the Czech Republic. The innovativeness of this study is its specific focus on implementation strategies rather than learning outcomes. Using data from 148 students and 65 teachers from 54 different schools involved in the program, we investigated perceptions about the nature of the implementation and the impact of the approach on students’ and teachers’ feelings of ownership of success, loss of meaning of the program, or satisfaction with their participation in the EcoSchool program. The findings support the relevance of the emancipatory approach: students’ perceived participation predicts both their satisfaction with the program and perceived ownership of the success of their EcoTeams. Unexpectedly, the study also found that another factor predicting the program’s effectiveness is the level of students’ control over nonparticipating students.     

Rethinking emancipation with Freire and Rancière: A plea for a thing-centred pedagogy

Abstract

In this article, I critically engage with a vital assumption behind the work of Paulo Freire, and more generally behind any critical pedagogy, viz. the belief that education is fundamentally about emancipation. My main goal is to conceive of a contemporary critical pedagogy which stays true to the original inspiration of Freire’s work, but which at the same time takes it in a new direction. More precisely, I confront Freire with Jacques Rancière. Not only is the latter’s work on education fully predicated on the idea of emancipation. For both Freire and Rancière, literacy initiation practice can be seen as an archetypical model for understanding the emancipatory moment in education. For both, educational practices are never neutral, as they decide to a great extent on the fate of our common world. Reflecting on similarities and differences in both their positions, I will propose to conceive of critical pedagogy in terms of a thing-centred pedagogy. As such, I take a clear position in the discussion between teacher- and student-centred approaches. According to Rancière, it is the full devotion to a ‘thing’, i.e. to a subject matter we study, which makes emancipation possible. Over and against Freire’s defense of emancipatory education, I highlight with Rancière the importance of educational emancipation.     

Book reviews

Jacques Rancière remains neglected within educational debates. In this paper I examine the potential of his philosophies for enacting critical interventions in relation to contemporary (higher) educational concerns. Rancière argues against the progressive temporality of pedagogic relations and provides an alternative thesis that equality is a point of departure for social and pedagogic encounters. He also emphasises the importance of aesthetics and the ‘distribution of the sensible’ as a mechanism for understanding who is un/able to be seen, speak and produce knowledge. These arguments are examined through an analysis of two research-based art installations: Sociologists Talking (2008, 2009) and The Idea of a University (2010). I consider the potential for ‘alternative’ forms of knowledge production and communication to enact different pedagogic methods and re/distribute the sensory spaces in which research and teaching take place.     

儒家思想和古希腊哲学中教育理念的比较

中国儒家思想和以柏拉图、亚里士多德为代表的古希腊哲学对东西方文明的发展分别产生过巨大而深远的影响。而这两者都有比较完善的关于教育的思想内容。以这两个思想体系的相同和不同点作为基础,对两者在教育的目标、内容等方面进行比较,以分析它们在教育思想方面的异同。     

A posthuman pedagogy with Rancière and Bateson

In recent years, conversations about posthumanism have been gradually moving into the field of education. This article contributes to the growing efforts to develop a posthumanist theory of education. The theoretical inspiration for the article comes from the writings of Jacques Rancière and Gregory Bateson. In both thinkers, the figure of the liberal humanist subject gives way to a deeper and more provocative sense of inter-subjectivity, indeed, intra-subjectivity. Taken together, Rancière’s and Bateson’s ideas hit a blind spot in contemporary educational discourse, particularly in relation to the rise of personalisation as a popular concept in practice and policy. This article juxtaposes the personalised learning movement with the increasingly common image of the vulnerable self/student to highlight the complexity of defining and locating the source of subjectivity, or one’s ‘will to learn’. Rancière’s and Bateson’s ideas are put into conversation to generate alternative approaches to the current conceptions of student-centred pedagogy.     

Reflections on the emancipatory potential of vocational education and training practices: Freire and Rancière in dialogue

This paper focuses on the issue of emancipation in education practices in general and in vocational education and training (VET) in particular. The principal aim is to contribute to the discussion of particular traditions of emancipation in education in connection with VET practices. The exploration of ongoing educational debates on VET policy-making and the issue of emancipation in VET reveals that, ultimately, emancipation in VET is understood as a specific function for socio-economic integration. The paper discusses this functionalist orientation and contrasts it with a vision on emancipation as a feature of an educational process rather than an educational outcome. Freire's and Rancière's core concepts of emancipation guide the discussion regarding the latter interpretation of emancipation in VET practices.     

Educational technology: a presupposition of equality?

The work of philosopher Jacques Rancière is used conceptually and methodologically to frame an exploration of the driving interests in educational technology policy and the sanctioning of particular discursive constructions of pedagogy that result. In line with Rancière’s thinking, the starting point for this analysis is that of equality – that people are legally, morally, intellectually, and in their everyday practices discursively equal. The use of Rancière’s concepts, demos, police, and politics, to analyse three educational technology policies internationally shows that teachers are positioned within these policies as discursively unequal, and as intellectually inferior, not only in terms of technology expertise, but crucially as pedagogues. This positioning has important implications for teachers and teacher education. Teachers are capable of recognising and critiquing inequality, and this article makes a case for an act of politics that aims to reconfigure allocated identities and power imbalances in the educational technology order.     

Emancipation,equality and education: Rancière's critique of Bourdieu and the question of performativity

Jacques Rancière's work has had significant impact in philosophy and literary theory, but remains largely undiscussed in the field of education. This article is a review of the relevance of Rancière's work to education research. Rancière's argument about education emerges from his critique of Bourdieu, which states that Bourdieu reinforces inequality by presuming it as the starting point of his analysis. What is at stake is the question of performativity, and the means by which discourse has effects. This debate has implications for considering the basis of claims to truth in literary and social science discourse. Parallels are drawn between Judith Butler's and Rancière's portrayal of the relationship between discourse and subjection, as well as their attention to discursive ‘imitation’ in making inequality representable. The article concludes with a discussion of the problematic which Rancière's work suggests for education research.     

情感教育在苏轼作品教学中的体现

情感教育是语文教育的重要内容,情感教学关注教育过程中学生的思想态度、情绪、情感发展,以促使学生的个体身心健康发展。语文教学中有大量文质兼美的古诗文,苏轼的诗词是其重要的代表。文章通过分析苏轼作品中蕴含的情感教育因素,使学生在古诗文的情感熏陶中感受中华优秀的思想文化,提升学生的思想境界及审美能力,健全学生人格,使学生拥有健康丰富的情感。     

Of Slumdogs and Schoolmasters: Jacotot,Rancière and Mitra on self-organized learning

Abstract

This article argues that the concept and practice of ‘self-organized learning’, as pioneered by Sugata Mitra (and his team) in the ‘Hole-in-the-Wall’ experiments (1999–2005) that inspired the novel Q & A (2006) and the resulting movie, Slumdog millionaire (2008) bear direct, but not uncritical comparison with Jacques Rancière’s account of ‘universal teaching’ discovered by maverick nineteenth century French pedagogue Joseph Jacotot. In both cases, it is argued, there is a deliberate dissociation of two functions of ‘teaching’ that are often conflated: knowledge and mastery. Mitra’s development of computer-mediated learning among the supposedly ‘ignorant’ of India’s slums, and Rancière’s insistence on equality as a presupposition rather than a goal, both emphasize the agency of the student at the centre of learning, but in ways that displace both established pedagogical methods of ‘explication’ and the neoliberal ideology of ‘schooling’ as the harmonizing of individual and social functions of education.     

人神共舞:莎士比亚喜剧对古希腊神话的传承

莎士比亚喜剧汲取了古希腊神话的养分,大量的古希腊神话因子通过故事类型、主题类型、人物类型在剧中显现。莎翁喜剧与古希腊神话一样,是人性与神性的合璧,表达了世俗与神圣并置、狂欢与理性并置的人神观念。     

基督教产生的历史文化背景

基督教的产生和发展有复杂的历史化背景。罗马帝国境内犹太人与希腊人的密切化关系成为“庸俗化了的”希腊哲学向东方神学过渡的条件之一;随着罗马帝国精神危机的到来,犹太教开始向基督教过渡。基督教虽然在希腊化背景下产生,但其形成主要是与古希腊哲学有密切的关系,并最终从罗马帝国的一种亚化地位上升为帝国的国教。