A figural education with Lyotard

Educational Theory, 1994

This essay will focus mainly on thework of the continental fldneurof postmodern spaces and the society of the spectacle, Jean FranFois Lyotard. It is concerned with a rethinking of some aspects of the project that has come to be known as "critical pedagogy" -a nascent disciplinary trajectory within education that has its roots in Marxian analyses of class but which has recently made efforts at appropriating deconstructive readings of discursive formations and certain strands of poststructuralist and postmodern critique. In order to explore Lyotard's potential contribution to critical pedagogy it is first of all necessary to briefly locate some of the central features of critical pedagogy within the current crisis of radical politics. A discussion of Lyotard's work in relation to the themes of work, agency, difference, and democracy will follow.

Brill, 2021

The first monograph on Lyotard and education engages Lyotard's work through different pedagogical modes of reading, writing, voicing, and listening, revealing crucial educational, political, aesthetic, and epistemological distinctions between knowledge and thinking.

It is not uncommon to hear within education circles today that we should, in the words of Lyotard, hold incredulity toward metanarratives. This paper shows that Lyotard’s call for incredulity toward metanarratives is incoherent because Lyotard’s claims presuppose a subterranean metanarrative of his own. In The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1984), Lyotard smuggles in implicit categories of ontology, epistemology, ethics, anthropology and a telos of war against metanarratives. Because of the incoherence of this position, philosophers of education, teacher educators, doctoral students, etc. should not repeat his claim in a way that suggests we are done with metanarratives or that they are all false and, therefore, should not be given credulity. Further, it seems that at the very least we should remain agnostic to the possibilities of metanarratives being able to give structure and meaning to our beliefs and experiences. And we might even offer up a vision of education which encourages students to seek out truth and a coherent and just metanarrative.

Childhood Philosophy, 2015

Jean-François Lyotard's description of the philosopher uses a metaphor comparing the philosopher to the child. This article traces the use of the child metaphor in relation to philosophy throughout Lyotard's work. In general, the historical problem with philosophy for Lyotard is that it has been understood as involving maturity, mastery, and adulthood. While the stereotype of the wise philosopher might suggest a mature expert who knows all, Lyotard rejects this view. For Lyotard, the philosopher is the child who seeks answers, but cannot master them. The wisdom of the philosopher is similar to Socrates' wisdom, in that he is wise because he knows the limitations of his knowledge and does not presume to be a master. Furthermore, the philosopher is the one who listens for what has not yet been articulated and says something new. Philosophical language does not merely report or observe, but it creates expressions of what is new by becoming attuned to something latent in the world (WP 95). Therefore, the answers will not be mastered, comprehensive, or settled for good. In Lyotard's later work, the mode or method of philosophy is closer to reflective judgment because the issues it examines are open to further discussion. Lyotard's linking of philosophy with childhood helps avoid an understanding of philosophy grounded in technological rationality in which practical mastery is the goal. Understanding the world exclusively through the categories of means leading to ends, assumes definitive answers, mastery, and expertise. Though many understandings of philosophy stress the practical knowledge conclusively obtained or strive for mastery, Lyotard sees these forces as enemies to philosophical thought, which requires more openness to childhood. Consequently, philosophy is fully political by providing a small voice against the loud and overwhelming push toward practicality, efficiency, and the discourse of capitalism.

Developing Teaching and Learning in Africa (Book), 2020

The complex discourses of decolonising education in Africa continue in as many conscientious citizens still lay their hopes on the doors of educational institutions to solve the ills of the African societies. Since the advent of colonisation, African education has been in search of relevance and meaning even though colonial damage has grown immensely over decades; this makes it challenging to obliterate colonialism. With the epistemic violence, that has been a sine qua non of colonial and apartheid education-African education was always accompanied by deAfricanisation, deculturalisation, dehumanisation and distortions to misrepresent the truth. All these are concepts discussed in a number of ways in this volume. To redress many anomalies that came up because of colonisation, progressive educators speak of a dialogic education to confront cognitive injustice in learning sites. In his seminal work, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Freire (1970) emphasises the need for education to be a dialogue rather than follow a banking model or approach where teachers' sole viewpoint is fact. Freire's dialogic teaching reduces learner withdrawal and teacher talk in the classroom; dialogue calls for a teacher's skill of intervention and tact of restraint "so that the verbal density of a trained intellectual does not silence the verbal styles of unscholastic students" (Shor, 1987:23). Shih (2018) explicates the premise of Freire's dialogue under a few themes that include; (i) each person having the right to speak, (ii) the fact that dialogue cannot be an act of one person, (iii) the idea that dialogue is not hostile and polemical argument, (iv) humility, (v) love, (vi) hope, critical thinking, and (vii) faith. The search for a decolonised system of education is a search for critical education that is not only dialogic but relevant to the entire continent of Africa as well. Various chapters in this book demonstrate revolutionary forms of introducing decolonised models that should transform traditional learning sites that use the West as the sole benchmark for knowledge generation. Additionally, decolonised education is opposed to the unbending methodological paradigms of traditional learning sites that use the West as the exclusive vessel for knowledge or the centre. Decolonised systems seek to decentre the Western knowledges without marginalising them. In his book, Moving the Centre, Ngugi Wa Thiongo (1993) argues a need to move the centre in two ways-between nations as well as within nations. Wa Thiongo maintains that this is the basis of liberating world cultures from aspects such as class, race, and gender. Moving the centre between nations implies that the centre will be moved from its assumed position in the West to a multiplicity of spheres in all the cultures of the world. Furthermore, moving the centre within nation means moving away from all minority groupings to a centre situated among the working-class people and where equality is supreme.

Ethics and Education, 2014

Educação & Realidade

This article proposes to establish a zone of indiscernibility between the domains of art and education. To do so, it confronts documents related to both legislation and educational research, with some gestures performed by the artist Nelson Leirner in a situation of pedagogical ambience, highlighting the problem of the demand for meaning. It evokes analytical procedures operated in three texts by Michel Foucault. His company allows taking representation as an operation that would go beyond the mere act of representing as re-presenting the truth. Such way of taking representation, in a performative one, leads to the forge of the exile as a methodological strategy for investigating practices, in their unique modes of operation and effects.

2018

Teaching Magical Thinking: Notes towards a Burroughsian Pedagogy 184 Allan Johnston * * * "We don't need no education," Pink Floyd famously sings in the rock opera The Wall; "We don't need no thought control." The themes implied in these lines -issues concerning the role of the professor or teacher, the value of freedom in education, the importance of the concept of the individual, the treatment of education as a commodity -recur in the essays and articles collected in this volume. Thus we read of the representation of the authoritative voice in the fictional education of Harry Potter, the attempt to establish a language that allows inclusion of the non-human world in human communication, the evolution of the concept of the autonomous individual in representative democracies, and the search for the mythic, the magical, and the transcendent in educational systems. Discussions of the role of freedom and entertainment in education also come to the fore. Representations and misrepresentations and the political positions that underlie them are featured. These articles, then, explore a range of subjects, moving from the Age of Reason to concepts and beliefs of the New Age. If the mix seems eclectic, it is; yet throughout these essays the power of education to "educe," in the sense both of bringing out the latent and of inferring, recurs. As a guide, the educator does not provide information, but assists the student in finding his or her own knowledge and insight. Communication is key, no matter what the discipline. The educator, our writers continually stress, must lead students to discovery, to finding their own meanings, be it through the authority of the voice (as, Babich contends, is the case for the character Severus Snape of the Harry Potter movies, played by Alan Rickman), or through attention to the boundaries of freedom in the classroom, as viii the papers by Wenneborg and by Miller and Bourgeois suggest. Or perhaps discovery occurs in the structural formation of the child in ways that encourages integration or integrality through the inclusion of the mythic and the magical as valid realms of experience, areas that are explored in the studies by Mitchell, Falk, and A. Johnston. Approaches that surpass direct focus on the anthropocentric are central to the critique of Humanism in the paper by Börebäck and Schwieler, while the papers by Bulle and G. Johnston look to the Enlightenment either to trace the evolution of the concept of the individual (Bulle) or to explore how the writings of one of the key figures of the Age of Reason, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, are understood, and too often misunderstood, in the context of a cultural matrix that tries to assert its dominant, politicized worldview. Thus in the movement from New Age or magical to hegemonic cultural forces, questions arise such as, 'What role does the character of the teacher play in the child's education?' 'What degree of educational freedom should be granted to the pupil?' 'How can we interact with the world in ways that do not automatically implicate us in anthropomorphism or focus exclusively on rationalism, excluding both nature and the underlying processes that define the realms of myth and magic?' 'Should these realms be re-examined?' Such questions circulate in these works, and give us a "handle" on ways to approach education. We hope that considering today's extraverted, goal-oriented world, the essays presented here will lead you to reflect even more on the purpose, fate, and future of education, and on its need to foster in both the student and the educator a universal recognition of the basic skills that encourage communication and accuracy in learning and understanding, not solely as a means to or a goal of production, but as a way of encouraging constant discovery and recognition of the state of being of the individual and of the collective self as both work to enhance and inform each other. The variety of topics addressed in the essays included in this issue of JPSE reflects the quality and diversity of the approaches we would like to consider in future volumes. Should you have any questions or be

Educational Theory, 1994

Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 2021

Education can transform our cognitive world. Recent use of enactivist and enactivist-friendly work to propose understanding transformational learning in terms of affective reframing is a promising first step to understanding how we can have or inculcate transformational learning in different ways without relying on meta-cognition. Building on this work, I argue that to fully capture the kind of perspectival changes that occur in transformational learning we need to further distinguish between ways of reorienting one's perspective, and I specify why different ways are differently valuable. I propose that recent approaches to Confucian ritual provide a clue to what is missing in characterisations of perspective transformation and the resultant transformed perspective. I argue that focussing on ritualised interpersonal interactions (as-iffing-the-other) provides a further clue as to what's missing from a mere appeal to the ritual-based inculcation of new perspectives, namely the kind of lightness and flexibility that some ritualised interactions encourage participants to have, and the deepening of perspective associated with that lightness. I argue that a case study of a project implementing a highly ritualised philosophical practice with prisoners in Scotland shows how these constraints, seemingly paradoxically, function so as to actually deepen the perspectival spaces of those agents. This case study provides a proof of concept for the proposal that certain forms of ritual engagement can reliably bring about the kind of transformation of perspective that is the target phenomenon of transformative learning theory. Stapleton, M. Enacting education. Phenom Cogn Sci (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-020-09672-4