Hermeneutics and Education: Understanding, Control, and Agency

Leaving home behind: learning to negotiate borderlands in the classroom

“…It is a resistance borne not out of the perceived irrelevance of school knowledge to students' lived concerns (Willis, 1977) but out of students' emotional and intellectual investment in the knowledge traditions in which they are situated. Where students are simply immersed in border experiences and exposed to con¯icting perspectives without the aid of cognitive and affective supports, what they encounter is apt to be so alien as to be incomprehensible, a condition that can leave them feeling exposed and vulnerable (Kerdeman, 1998). In such situations, the desire to re-establish control by retreating into the comfort and security of our previous understandings can be particularly strong, and entrenchment rather than growth is the likely result.…”

OPENNESS AND COMMITMENT: Hans‐Georg Gadamer and the Teaching of Jewish Texts

“…5 Gallagher, 1992 offers a four-fold taxonomy of hermeneutical approaches, including (i) conservative, (ii) moderate, (iii) radical, and (iv) critical. For a critical review of Gallagher, see Kerdeman, 1998. This kind of claim has the potential to be misunderstood. It should be clear that there are important differences between various contexts of interpretation; in fact, understanding those differences is essential if we are to understand the interpretive processes at work.…”

Curriculum mapping as deliberation – examining the alignment of subject learning outcomes and course curricula

“…Ideally, curriculum mapping could undergo 'a process of weighing the many possible resolutions to problems and the many matters that vie for attention, affect the curriculum, and otherwise shape teachers' decisions about what to teach in order to act in their students' best interest' (McCutcheon 2002, 3). In particular, if we accept the hermeneutic conception that any understanding is necessarily a process mediated by individual dispositions and preconceptions, then such understanding cannot be entirely 'objective' (Kerdeman 1998;Gadamer 2004). Consequently, we can see that discussions on the various curriculum elements, particularly the learning outcomes, provide a wide scope for misunderstanding, as individuals discuss unexamined concepts that they believe to be 'readily understandable' by others.…”

“…The participative deliberation process is particularly valuable if one adopts a hermeneutic conception of understanding (Kerdeman 1998;Gadamer 2004). In the hermeneutic tradition, the meanings of words are seen as changeable rather than set in stone.…”