Diving for Pearls. Thoughts on Pedagogical Practice and Theory

In this paper, the notion of pearl diving as a metaphor for historical methodology is explored as a possible conceptual contribution to pedagogical thinking and practice. Pearl diving in the thinking of Hannah Arendt and Walter Benjamin refers to a process of bringing to life and coming to terms with a fragmented past, and requires of the thinker a form of Homeric impartiality. This they contrast with the processual and functional modern understanding of historiography, where events and things are subsumed by a causal linearity. According to Arendt and Benjamin, our past cannot be understood as though in one piece, but should rather be engaged as fragmented and crystallised into events—or pearls—which can be retrieved and can help us to illuminate our past and to understand our present. This paper considers what such an approach would entail for pedagogical theory and practice, as well as for the work of the pedagogical thinker and the teacher.     

Growing Roots and Becoming Interested: Teaching about the World through Exemplarity

The discussion of the power of the teacher's voice is raging again in light of the standardisation of education and the emergence of testing as the new regime of truth in educational processes. In confrontation with this paradigm, Jasinki and Lewis have raised pertinent questions regarding the role of language and the voice of the teacher. By highlighting what they coin the time of ritualised learning they expose how even when the teacher becomes almost surplus in the face of standardised curriculum and adaptive testing, there is a reproductive power being ‘cursed’ at our children. By introducing the notion of communities of infancy, Jasinski and Lewis point to another way of conceptualising learning and education, where the teacher portrays love for the children and not the truth about the world. In this article, I will argue that even in their very enticing argumentation for speaking silence, something goes missing. What goes missing is the quintessential component of the school, namely the world as it is ‘handed over’ to the children. By turning to a perhaps unlikely couple in the form of Hannah Arendt and Martin Wagenschein I will attempt to complement the framework of Jasinski and Lewis with a world that can be spoken about by teachers and students. Through a re-introduction of the notion of exemplarity I will present a didactic framework where the teacher's voice does not become a curse, but retains the possibility of representing a world to the children in the activity of schooling.