Session Information
13 SES 10, Long Paper Session
Long Paper Session
Contribution
With this paper we want to discuss "Bologna's Turn”, which supposedly refocused the process of teaching and learning in student's work and was expected to bring about a pedagogical reform. Such an apparently paidocentric (?) revolution should be aimed to promote an alternative to a somehow obsolete transmissive machinery. However the aftermath of these "great expectations" is now perceptible –whispered by schools' corridors- as pedagogical deception, shallow efficiency assessment, hollow standardization, increasing bureaucracy and above all funding cuttings. Overall it sounds like new advances on "performativity", the current mainstreaming that precisely philosophy of education should not surrender to (Smeyers, 2010), if we want to save the "useless" meaningful things our spirits long for.
"Bologna's Process" is very much falling into the explanation's machine paradigm that Rancière (2003) acutely criticized, and through which the learner is reduced to a functional dimension. Anything beyond this dimension is obliterated and thus spirit can only appear as a spectrum ignored by the machine that at the same time reacts as if haunted by some strange nature. We found here a homology with the Cartesian dualistic relationship between body and soul – “res extensa” and “res cogitans” – in which spirit appears as something that doesn’t belong to the machine, but only assumes a transitory relationship with it, since both natures are taken as ontologically different (Koestler, 1967).
Within the referred undergoing pedagogical paradigm, we must clarify how the spirit could be incorporated by the machine. Such operation could only be attained if the machine opens itself to this different kind of reality, overcoming the substantial dualism assigned to spirits, which the machine has been in fact unable to truly welcome. Only then will these spirits stop wandering the dark corridors of the machine, as well as haunting it with their mere existence of substantially different realities and so finally become rescued from a life of alienation.
Ultimately such an issue puts forward the problem of inclusion of differences, or in other words, the very inclusion of difference of conditions that a subject could embody. Regarding the subject (teacher/student), commonly the machine doesn’t goes beyond the recognition of an agent or at best an actor’s role, but never the one of being an author (Pourtois & Desmet, 1997). The machine only accepts, at best, an adaptation that forces the subject to the operative context, where he becomes a functionary, meaning this being nothing more than a system’s gear-wheel. It is this core tendency that wipes out any space for inclusion of differences, such as interests, motivations, appetites, skills, rhythms and dissident speeches, among other things.
We have now many reasons to believe that the "Bologna’s Process" doesn’t represents a methodological turn indeed aiming beyond the mechanist paradigm. That is why we must start looking for a way to surpass its intrinsic “performative” obsession. Meaning this we have to look for a path that could propitiate the machine’s recognition of the spirit. Could this be one of those “happy failures” –Melville (2009) so well describes– by which we learn to be more concerned with the invention of happiness than anything else?
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
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