Pedagogy along the way. It's the title Carolien Hermans gave to the book that was released March 2023, which she – as she told us – wrote almost in one breath. It's a collection of essays on the pedagogical surroundings, the dialogical process, and education as an intermediate space . But it touches on more, in an existential and formative way.
The illustrations in the book are by Tonke Koppelaar.
ISBN: 9789044139174 Price: €18 Publisher: Garant. Available for order at https://www.youbedo.com/boeken/pedagogiek-van-het-onderweg-zijn-9789044139174
Hereunder you find the epilogue
In my book, I have outlined a number of ideas about education and pedagogy. After careful consideration, as titling is not my strongest suit, I have chosen to name this book “Pedagogy along the way.” After all, education is always on the move. Similar to walking, the path unfolds during the journey. To the rhythm of footsteps, the world opens up, and the attention of the self flows outward, connecting with what it encounters. Education is thus a form of “e-ducere,” leading outwards into the world (Masschelein, 2010).
In this book, I conceive education as the breaking open of existing inner spheres – as Peter Sloterdijk describes – as a propellant for transformation that takes the subject-in-becoming rather than the definite subject as its starting point. The subject loses or releases itself as the central giver of meaning and becomes part of a broader sensemaking structure.
Good education, from this perspective, is a collection of “various successful penetrations, formative invasions, and enriching intruders” (Sloterdijk, 2003, p. 77) that expands the inner sphere and stretches it in all directions. The teacher's task is to bring the external inward, and this is done not on a personal basis but “in the name of the outside” (Pols, 2016, p. 151). What was once excluded, and thus did not belong to the inner sphere, penetrates inside. This can only happen if the shell of subjectivity is permeable and porous.
Michel Serres sees the teacher as a guide, a tour leader. According to him, learning is akin to traveling, meaning constantly (creatively) adapting to the environment. This, in my opinion, is precisely the difference between a journey and a vacation. While traveling exposes the traveler to “the strange” and “the other,” a vacation never truly departs. Something of oneself remains at home, or conversely, one carries their home along while on the move. The vacationer does not have much desire for the external (for the strange and the other): they wish to change environments without letting that environment penetrate them. There is nothing wrong with this per se, but the flip side is that the vacationer largely leaves the surroundings untouched, whereas the traveler can have a radical (and sometimes irreversible and disastrous) impact on their surroundings.
Earlier, I described how contemporary citizens have become tourists. A tourist is somewhat different from a vacationer, but since I am not writing a travel brochure here, I will leave the difference for what it is. However, I would like to note here that, unlike the traveler, the tourist is primarily focused on consuming experiences. The tourist does not truly want to be affected by the strange or the other; they want to bring the other inside as a trophy (although the traveler also has that tendency), to appropriate and possess it, only to discard it once used and consumed. However, the strange (the worldly) fares poorly in fixed, possessive form: once solidified, life quickly drains away from it.
Therefore, it is important to be somewhat cautious with the metaphor of traveling and being on the road. Education would do well not to turn itself into a living amusement park: I think, for example, of educational entertainment, flashy PowerPoint presentations, TED talks, quizzes, and Kahoots as attempts to hold onto attention that is becoming ever more fleeting. We don't need to present key subjects like mathematics, arithmetic, and language as the big three to students: it seems clear to me that all subjects matter, and unilateral focus on language and mathematics can also lead to cultural poverty. Moreover, teachers don't need to pull out all the stops, introduce one activating teaching method after another, or entertain the audience like stand-up comedians.
Education may be a journey, but it is usually one undertaken on foot, preferring narrow, winding paths above highways. Education is wandering. The path is full of obstacles, unevenness, bumps, blockages, and contradictions. Thus, education always involves resistance, as I demonstrate in this book, because the strange (the worldly) does precisely what it is supposed to do: it is alien to the body, foreign, it penetrates inside and triggers defense mechanisms. The role of the teacher is to make this alien aspect known to the student. They do this by putting the student in situations and circumstances where something is amiss, something that does not bend with the subject. The teacher does not remove the obstruction, nor neutralize it. The student must overcome the obstacle themselves: that is, the student must be willing to navigate towards the center.
Education is about sense and direction. In this book, I have attempted to show that education is a sense-making process where meaning refers to the senses, the sensual (pleasure), desire, direction, and longing – a desire that is embodied and existential. I make a distinction between giving meaning and giving direction: giving meaning is the process in which experience is reduced to symbolic representations, to constructs of knowledge in the mind. Giving direction is the process in which living experience itself gives sense and direction. Giving direction means letting things, the world, the other but also “the self” be present, giving them presence and focusing attention on them. Giving direction means being touched by events in the world.
Good education is education that takes the affective, the embodied, and the sensory as the starting point for knowing (continuously and repeatedly). I do not exclusively place knowledge in the mind, nor entirely in the body. Knowledge is something that forms between the world and the (becoming) subject, in the space in-between, which Michel Serres also calls “the taught third.” Knowledge, as I argue, is a surface phenomenon that prefers fluidity over rigidity. The contemporary Western education system is built on the (unwarranted) notion that knowledge is solid and stable, and thus we have stored knowledge (in the form of books and writings) in specially designed establishments (such as libraries and universities, see also Serres 2014).However, due to the technological revolution, knowledge has returned to its primary state of fluidity, and the result is that knowledge is rapidly flowing out of the old establishments. Something fluid always finds a way out, even if it's through the sewers or the drain.
Not clinging but letting go and moving with the turbulent undercurrents of knowledge is what we need to focus on in the coming period. The Netherlands, a country where one-third is below sea level, knows the struggle with the fluid (the water) all too well. An interesting fact is that in the past, the Netherlands mainly reacted defensively to rising water (with mounds, dikes, draining and taming the Zuiderzee, and the Delta Plan), while nowadays, water policy is primarily facilitating: rivers are given more space, polders are flooded again, and building in the floodplains is discouraged.
With all the news about global water shortages, it is becoming clear that in the coming years, we must learn to relate to water, and thus the liquid, in a different way. This is not only a matter of having more healthy drinking water, but above all, it requires a different way of thinking about the liquid. In our Western thinking, the rigid still dominates: gaseous (the air) and liquid (the water) thinking are completely subordinate – despite life itself being so dependent on them. Education is the ideal place to practice this liquid and gaseous thinking and further develop it.
Although in this book, I broadly focus on education, there are also chapters where I make a foray into art and specifically music education. Art is my companion, my steady mate, my partner-in-crime. In this book, I delve into the following topics: creativity, craftsmanship, routine, minimal deviation, and letting go as a form of control. In my view, there is still uncharted territory here for which I have not yet found the right words.
There are themes that I have not touched upon in this book but would like to explore in a follow-up, such as the role of imagination and embodied narratives in education (how do we tell and share stories from the physical and sensory), how does movement lead to experience, how can resistance be used as a force in education, how can we let the material (from which the world is made) speak more in education, and how can we shape our education from the perspective of sustainability and ecological awareness?
So, there are plenty of questions for which I have no answers yet, and precisely that, not knowing yet, is what makes being on the road so enjoyable.