‘Being With’ as an Ethical Gestalt in Teaching
Professor David T. Hansen (Teachers College, Columbia University)

3:30 – 5pm BST (join online or in person)

To attend, please register on Eventbrite.

Abstract

In schools, the question of the relationship between teachers and students remains ever alive, both for the individual teacher who confronts the question every day, and for the profession itself. There has been considerable work on this issue in philosophy of education, showing why the very idea of ‘relationship’ in the context of teaching is many-sided and complicated. Colleagues have focused on concepts such as teachers’ moral perception, situational appreciation, tactful coping, attunement, ‘presence’, and more, to help illuminate the ways in which teachers regard and treat students in the course of their everyday work. In this presentation, I put forward ‘being with’ as a concept that can help us think about the ethical center and circumference of the practice. Ethics in this analysis constitutes a comprehensive concept encompassing aesthetic, moral, and intellectual considerations. I will draw upon both extant research and extensive fieldwork I’ve undertaken inside schools and classrooms. Along the way I will touch on Jean-Luc Nancy’s ontological conceptualization of being with (être-avec) which provides a helpful if indirect perspective on the discussion. I conclude with remarks on why being with as conceived here adds nothing new for the dedicated teacher to do (it does not fall within a ‘production function’). Rather it constitutes, among other things, a generative provocation to teachers to take their own and one another’s measure as persons with an invaluable, time-honored role in culture.

David T. Hansen is the Weinberg Professor in the Historical and Philosophical Foundations of Education at Teachers College, Columbia University. His teaching and research focus on the practice of teaching, questions about what it is to become and to be a teacher, the relationship between education, cosmopolitanism, and democracy, the history of philosophy of education, and general questions about educational values and aims.

Organised by: Dr Aline Nardo (University of Edinburgh, aline.nardo@ed.ac.uk)

This event is sponsored by the PESGB Edinburgh Branch, the Philosophy of Education Research Group (PERG) and the Teacher Education, Curriculum and Pedagogy Research Hub at the Moray House School of Education, University of Edinburgh.