Through writings of Simone Weil and Michel Foucault, the article explores the notion of education as the formation of the attending and attentive subjects. Both writers have in different ways acknowledged the important relation between attention and the self. While Weil develops a spiritual form of attention, an attention which can be trained in any form of serious studying, aiming at dissolving the illusion of the self, Foucault understands attention as an important aspect in the Greek notion of the care of the self, which was developed outside of and due to the limitations of pedagogy aiming at a self-attentive self-formation. Both non-egotistic notions of attention address ethical and educational dimensions of human subjectivity. Foucault's notion is anti-institutional and Weil's notion is non-formative. As such, both perspectives inform educational thinking and practice by highlighting attention as a crucial aspect of both the active and the contemplative subject.

European higher education has been highly influenced by the Bologna-process, entailing coordination and standardisation from policy to teaching practices. This led to increased demands on university teachers. Courses in university pedagogy are required as part of competence development and have become decisive for employment. Constructive Alignment has become a popular model, being in line with Bologna-process ideals. Emerging is an instrumental view of higher education that risks excavating university pedagogy of its pedagogical dimensions and reducing the autonomy of the university teachers with focus on standardisation and emphasis on effective output. This paper proposes a Didaktik-approach to university pedagogy. We argue that Didaktik can help revive relational and emancipatory elements of higher education. By viewing the relationship between teachers and students as a gathering around common interests, we maintain that Didaktik emphasises teachers' reflections regarding the subject, the students, and other educational dimensions.

No abstract

In this article, mentors' perceptions of paired practicum in initial teacher education in Sweden are studied. Taking the mentors' perspective, we describe the potentials and the pitfalls of paired practicum. The pros and cons of the model are analyzed from a perspective of learning the vocation of teaching as a two-sided endeavor. Inspired by a modified Aristotelian perspective, we use the terms participant knowledge and spectator knowledge to conceptualize the learning of two different forms of knowledge. Qualitative data were gathered through interviews with five mentors and analyzed using an abductive process. The analysis reveals that paired practicum facilitates a potential for learning mainly a distanced and propositional spectator knowledge while the learning of a contextual and practical participant knowledge seems to be obstructed. For instance, paired practicum seems to prolong the peripheral position of the students and their opportunities to gain participatory knowledge. Results also show that there is a discrepancy between the pedagogical intentions of paired practicum and the concrete possibilities for realizing these in practice. The limitations of the paired practicum model, and how these can be overcome, both at individual and organizational level, are highlighted.

No abstract