In times such as these, it is difficult to ignore the prevailing practice of attempting to measure the success of (formal) educational endeavours using all manner of qualitative and quantitative instruments. These measurements, in turn, intend to inform research into effective delivery for certain desired outcomes. This mechanised, instrumental, view of education leaves little room for any humanity and, importantly for this piece, unpredictability.

Enter Gert Biesta, whose 2013 book The Beautiful Risk of Education provides some of the inspiration for this piece (not least the title). He called for more of a recognition that education, if it truly means to facilitate the formation of the student as a free subject, must embrace its inherent unpredictability. That he chooses to frame this unpredictability as a ‘risk’ is an obvious indictment against the trend for quantifying the educational endeavour such that it becomes a simple measurement of output from input. Yet the connotation of ‘risk’ may suggest a situation in which the stakes are so high that those involved may hesitate to gamble with them, no matter how beautiful the potential result. Little wonder, then, that teachers, faced with such a ‘risk’ often opt for the perceived safety of the pre-defined learning outcome.

I happen to agree with Biesta that education is inherently unpredictable, and that it is a folly to think otherwise. However, I do think there may be value to reimagine the beautiful ‘risk’ of education as a ‘twist’ (in the theatrical sense of the word), in which educators can be seen as the architects of surprise more so than one so foolhardy to allow hope to steer the boat (Kierkegaard, 1987). To make a brief case, I will set out two major necessary elements in the twist – foreshadowing and misdirection – linking these back to education while referencing a few examples in popular culture where the machinations of the twist are expertly employed.

Theatrical and Educational Foreshadowing and Misdirection

Just as that of educator and student, the relation between the writer/creator and their audience is predicated on the conjunction of syuzhet and fabula (terms from Russian Formalism). That is to say, the creator/educator takes responsibility for the syuzhet as it refers to the (re)presentation of content to the student/viewer. The student/viewer constructs the fabula, or interpretation, contemporaneously as the (re)presentation unfolds, but also retrospectively when it ends (Lavik, 2006). The syuzhet can thus attempt to direct the fabula using certain techniques, which is essentially another way of suggesting that the educator can direct the student using many established techniques. For the purposes of this short piece, I will concentrate only on foreshadowing and misdirection.

Foreshadowing refers to the idea that certain things, people, or dialogue are introduced to the narrative to draw attention to the suggestion of what may be about to come. For example, Norman Bates in Hitchcock’s Psycho refers to his mother as being as harmless as a taxidermy bird (we find out later that he killed and stuffed her in such a manner). Foreshadowing can be either be intensely apparent, as in Chekhov’s gun principle that a loaded gun in Act One should always be fired by Act Four (Reid, 2022), or, to create the most surprising twist, very subtle. Drawing attention toward something can certainly be thought to be a foundational task of an educator, with the significance of what is being pointed out not necessarily made immediately obvious to the student.

When subtle foreshadowing intends to send the observer down a more convoluted path to the twist this is what can be considered a misdirection. Misdirection also draws attention, but this time away from the expected plot. Rod Serling’s ‘The Twilight Zone’ and Shearsmith and Pemberton’s anthology series ‘Inside No. 9’ uses this to great effect as, even though the audience comes to expect a twist in every episode, it is rarely predictable even after several series. In education, misdirection could also be used effectively to change a student’s relation to something while engaging them in something else. Consider how a student may discern a notion of love by reading stories about ‘love’, without necessarily having the intention that they are reading these stories for any reason other than the teacher says they must in preparation for an exam.  

In recognition of education as the creation of opportunities for the student to come into subjectivity à la Biesta, then perhaps we can say that prescribed learning outcomes are the great misdirection, and the beautiful twist in education is that it foreshadows the arising of subjectivity even within the regimented mundanity of formal educational structures.  

References

Biesta, G. (2013). The Beautiful Risk of Education. Routledge.

Kierkegaard, S. (1987). Either/Or, Part I. (H.V. Hong & E.H Hong Trans.). Princeton University Press.

Lavik, E. (2006). Narrative Structure in The Sixth Sense: A New Twist in “Twist Movies”? The Velvet Light Trap, 58(Fall), pp. 55-64.

Reid, A.J. (2022). A Philosophy of Gun Violence. Palgrave Macmillan.