Reclaiming Agency and Appreciating Limits in Teacher Education: Existential, Ethical, and Psychoanalytical Readings

Phelan, Anne M.; Hansen, Dion Rüsselbæk

doi:10.7202/1056286ar

Cited by 4 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…These questions are both political and educational. What we must not forget is that the formation of self is always influenced by a range of historical (a priori) conditions, for example 'outer matters' (structures, discourses and ideologies) as well as 'inner matters' (desires, emotions and needs) (Phelan and Ru¨sselbaek Hansen, 2018). So what does it mean if these influences are understood only in scientific instrumental terms and by means of symbolic numbers?…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Taste for democracy: A critique of the mechanical paradigm in education

Hansen¹,

Phelan

2019

Research in Education

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In this article we argue for the need to rethink the crisis of democracy both within and beyond education (Toft and Rüsselbaek Hansen, 2017). This crisis can be explained variously, depending on how it is understood and on what basis. From our point of view, and with inspiration from thinkers as Nietzsche, Arendt, Agamben and Rancière, we argue that the crisis of democracy in today's schools is related in part to the weak form of authority ascribed to certain individual and collective aesthetic experiences. The scientific experience has been assigned a strong form of 'evidenced based authority'. As a result of a powerful belief that not all forms of experiences, for instance the aesthetical ones, which are not based on a mechanical logic, are worth paying attention to and are of value, scientific experience has gained hegemonic status. Illustrated by several examples, which stem from both Danish and Canadian educational contexts, we show how aesthetic experiences have the potential to revitalize democratic practices and undermine tyrannical regimes of technocracy in education. We recommend that the concept of Bildung (self-cultivation), which is orientated towards vertical (Apollonian) as well as horizontal (Dionysian) transcending processes, must be given renewed attention. Opportunities for students to play with and suspend the social order, even temporarily, are important if students are to experience themselves, others and the world in new ways. By engaging students' aesthetic sensibilities in multiple ways, playful schools both produce and provoke the dominant social order thereby fostering students' taste for democracy.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%