Session Information
13 SES 05 A, Teacher and Teaching
Paper Session
Contribution
This paper explores the relation between teaching as attention formation and curiosity. The overall purpose is to promote a notion of the teacher as a guardian of the boundary between the reasonable and the unreasonable, especially in relation to the students’ exploration of the unknown.
The importance of attention has been more or less a general theme within the history of educational thinking. In relation to this theme, the practice of teaching can be regarded as an activity of showing and pointing out in order for someone to act, re-act or change in certain ways. To Jacques Rancière (1999), this notion of teaching can be problematic since it is often connected to the use of explications and representations through which the student becomes a passive spectator. As a spectator the student is taught his or her own inability, something that confirms an inequality between the teacher and the student. However, to Rancière there is another way to approach the problematic relation between teaching and spectatorship. With Rancière's notion of an emancipated spectatorship, teaching can turn into a community of spectators that sets up a specific distribution of the sensible where different worlds and world-views are shared and disputed. Each view adds to and disturbs this distribution and makes it into a contingent reality where things, utterances and appearances belong to everyone to translate through the use of attention. According to Tyson E. Lewis it is the curiosity of the students that makes this event possible. This occurs when a subject is called into presence in a disruptive fissure in what, before this event, seemed to be the realm of the sensible. This enables the subject to stumble into a void where s-/he is provoked to see for her-/himself and to execute her/his attention through the power of curiosity.
Curiosity is not something that lends its power from a set of epistemological truths about a certain part of the world, a certain area of knowledge or a certain subject-matter in order for someone to see things more clearly and to speak about them with rigor. Instead, curiosity lets the attentive subject enter uncharted waters as a stranger with the potential to develop a genuine interest. The curiosity therefore has the potential to transform into inquiry. It is the teacher’s task to constantly demand to the students to speak about what they are seeing, thinking and doing. This can fuel their inquiries and enable them to speak with more and more rigour about their experiences of a certain part of the world, a certain area of knowledge or a certain subject-matter. However, if the emancipative spectatorship is the result of an aesthetical event that is made possible through the "power of curiosity" and a possible suspension of reason, what responsibility has the teacher for this event?
Teaching is the showing/pointing towards the world (through the expression of ideas, the presentation of objects and the performance of actions) in ways that make it accessible for someone else to study through the work of attention. The paper intends to delve further into the relation between emancipative teaching and curiosity by exploring this educative intervention as a certain form of attention formation.
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
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