Column by Fernando Murillo: "Crisis and curriculum: rethinking education from the human perspective"

January 8, 2021

Fernando Murillo

The word crisis is rarely associated with the pedagogical, at least in traditional educational discourse. However, crisis and education may be much more interrelated than it may seem at first sight. In this brief reflection, I explore one of the possible relationships that can be established between the crisis experience (the disruption of the usual that causes suffering) and education, highlighting the potential that this relationship offers us today to rethink education from a humanist and curricular perspective. person centered.

To do this, I want to start by considering the words of Otto Friedrich Bollnow, an influential German educator who developed the foundations of an existential and hermeneutical pedagogy. For him, “human life not only develops in a merely organic process of growth; in reality, it is only through the passage through crisis that life assumes its genuine being” (1987, p. 5). With this, Bollnow is showing that education itself (advancing in the authenticity of being) is far from being an orderly, linear, progressive, planable process and oriented towards predictable results, as education is imagined in the predominant traditional discourse. It is actually a process fundamentally mediated by the experience of crisis, change, disruption of what was planned. The same author emphasizes it as follows: “The human being develops his authentic existence only in crisis and only through the experience of crisis. Critical moments are the only moments that really count in human life. To exist means to be in crisis” (p.5).

This “existing while in crisis” reveals two important aspects for this discussion. The first is that the phenomenon of education is seen, fundamentally, as one of an existential nature: an experience that challenges the human being to develop in a certain way towards an existence that expresses its authenticity. The second is that the crisis is not synonymous with an external and necessarily devastating disruption: it is a specifically human experience, experienced internally, and which calls for an ethical response. Thus, the crisis can be the condition for favorable experiences: decision-making, reconciliation, gratitude, among others, if you work in the right way. After all, in its Greek origin, crisis literally means "purification." This is why, for Bollnow, the existential essence of education is not only about anguish and discomfort, but also includes hope and love.

In the context of the health tragedy that we are going through at a global level, and that of a discontent expressed violently at a local level, the question arises: How can this relationship between crisis and education help us to rethink education for a later context?

The crisis experience is lived existentially, it inflicts discomfort and suffering, disrupts what is expected, alters what is planned, exposes our vulnerabilities and puts us in a position of having to reread the plane of the known, reorient ourselves and project ourselves to the plane of the possible. The crisis, as an essential element of the human and its learning, as Bollnow shows us, reveals that what is educational is essentially contingent, so it cannot be resolved by didactic specificities or repertoires of "good practices". Hence the insufficiency of the current approaches to be organic and meaningful for those who experience them, which the pandemic revealed.

On the contrary, the contingency of educational reality requires, in the first place, that educators have theoretical categories and cultural contents to read and interpret what is happening. over there, with those people. The ability to improve the practice is at stake in having as a reference a repertoire of fundamental theoretical knowledge that allows questioning and adjusting the practice, in harmony with those who are being educated. Hand in hand with this, the ability (and the will) is required to look at the pedagogical process from its human substrate. There its significance is at stake.

Bollnow is part of a long line of educators and thinkers (starting with Hegel, and continuing with W. Dilthey, H. Nohl, among others), who have referred to education in more transcendent and existentially tuned terms. This approach is grouped into a current that in Germany is known as Geisteswissenschaften Pädagogik, or a pedagogy of the human sciences.

Largely influenced by this line of work is that the current field of curricular studies (in particular, its reconceptualist current), takes as a central focus of attention the understanding of the educational experience as it is lived by the subject. In response to the canonical resume question “Which knowledge is of greatest value?”, curriculum studies inspired by work such as Bollnow's, are more interested in what is taught and what is learned, instead of more instrumental questions linked to the “how".

What we are witnessing today is a crisis of meaning. On the one hand, we have a school apparatus that continues to try to impose itself through more methodological tricks, technological distractions and political justifications. On the other, we have the subject, who needs to know recognized as such in its singularity, mirrored in a relationship pedagogical with one another, and whose study process is meaningful, that is, deepen your own sense of humanity by being able to unite academic content with your biographical experience, and transcend the limits of that experience, along with the promise of expand his ability to name the world and act on it.

Various studies have shown that educational policies and practices have, in general, been promoting cognitive and technical-practical skills more than socio-emotional development (Olivera, 2003; Reimers & Chung, 2016). But such an approach fails to summon the subject. Thinking of an education that challenges the subject in its entirety means being able to resonate with it in the cultural, socio-emotional, bodily and spiritual dimensions. For this, educators not only need to be experts in their disciplines and in teaching techniques: they fundamentally need to be humanized subjects, that is, morally developed, equipped with a strong cultural base, with aesthetic sensitivity and temperance of character. For this, literature, philosophy, theology and art provide an education for the formator that is much more robust than that only focused on practical tasks, also providing a more adequate language and imaginaries to interpret and resonate with the subjective experiences experienced both by themselves and by themselves. Same as for the student.

Thus, Today the possibility of rethinking the educational precisely from the conjunction between the crisis experience and the need to educate and educate himself: it is there where the subject is found in all his humanity.

Re-conceptualizing education as a humanization practice allows us to distinguish where the center of gravity of our pedagogical practice is: is it only in the instruction (focused on teaching and learning), or on the initial and continuous of a subject (focused on the self-sustaining practice of the study), capable of assuming autonomy and responsibility for himself?

This return to the humanizing essence of education today also represents a potential antidote to the practices of standardization and technologization of education.

The question that naturally arises is about the ways in which we can continue advancing in this reconceptualization of the formative practice. To do this, it is convenient to consider the diversity of work that has been done in the field of educational theory and curricular studies. Just to name a few examples of this, we have the development of jobs from the self study (Russell, Fuentealba, Hirmas, 2016); biographical studies in education (Pinar 2019); literary studies as educational research (Pinar, 2016; Murillo, in press); phenomenological studies, such as the phenomenon of touch in the pedagogical field (Murillo, 2019); education as a humanistic discipline (Friesen, 2020); the erotic essence of Queer pedagogy and pedagogy (Kenklies, K. 2019; 2016); graphic phenomenon studies on conceptions of trainers (Montenegro, 2020); personalism, from the cross between theology and philosophy in education (Rocha, 2019), among many others.

In practical terms, and in order to visualize whether our educational efforts are effectively connecting with the subject in its different dimensions (beyond the cognitive-behavioral), the distinction made by Gert Biesta (2009) regarding the three functions that It is a truly educational experience. Biesta distinguishes a first function, which is the most visible and known by all, which he calls "qualification". The qualification function corresponds to all efforts aimed at teaching and certifying content, knowledge and skills. A second dimension (sometimes less visible) is that of "socialization", which refers to the modeling of behavior patterns and common senses necessary to inhabit a certain social group (how one lives and acts at school, how one thinks and works in a profession x, what are the cultural guidelines for living in a certain country or region). Socialization patterns are always operating, although rarely consciously and intentionally. Lastly, the most important but perhaps less visible is the function of "subjectivation", which refers to the experiences and spaces that allow each subject to form in his or her singularity. In other words, that each subject becomes who he is in his individuality, in his ability to live, to be and to be independent of the institutional and the dictates of the collective.

It is my hope that, by considering the human and subjective dimension that gives meaning to education, we can begin to venture out, be brave and take the risks of disengaging from a logic of means to an end (doing X to make Y happen). , and start an education whose end in itself is the subjective reconstruction of the person.

May this crisis be the instance that drives us to re-understand education as the vocation to be more.

Fernando Murillo

fmmurillo@uc.cl

References

Biesta, G. (2009) Good Education in an Age of Measurement: On the Need to Reconnect with the Question of Purpose in Education. Educational Assessment, Evaluation and Accountability. DOI: 10.1007/s11092-008-9064-9
Bollnow, O.F. (1987) Crisis and New Beginning: Contributions to a Pedagogical Anthropology. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press.
Friesen, N. (2020) Education as a Geisteswissenchaft: an introduction to human science pedagogy. Journal of Curriculum Studies DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/00220272.2019.1705917
Kenklies, K., Waldmann, M. (2016) Queer Pädagogik: Annherungen an ein Forschungsfeld. Klinkhardt.
Kenklies, K. (2019) The Struggle to Love: Pedagogical Eros and the Gift of Transformation. Journal of Philosophy of Education. 53(3).
Montenegro, H. (2020) Teacher educator's conceptions of modeling: a phenomenographic study. Teaching and teacher education 94 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tate.2020.103097
Murillo, F. (in press) The Curriculum of the Plague. Prospects: Comparative Journal of Curriculum, Learning, and Assessment - UNESCO
Olivera, D. (2003) Reflections on the Chilean educational reform. Electronic magazine Educational Dialogues. Year 3, No. 5
Pinar, W. (2019) Moving Images of Eternity: George Grant's Critique of Time, Teaching, and Technology. University of Ottawa Press
Reimer, F., Chung, C. (2016) Teaching and Learning for the Twenty-First Century: Educational Goals, Policies, and Curricula from Six Nations. Harvard Education Press
Rocha, S. (2019) Be More: the Personalism of Paulo Freire. Philosophy of Education Society Yearbook.
Russell, T., Fuentealba, R., Hirmas, C. (2016) Trainers of trainers: discovering one's own voice through self-study. IEO