Who Needs Sensory Education?

Abstract

Customarily, reflections on the need to educate sensory and bodily enactments with the world, take for granted that it is the child who must be educated. However, the educational passage of becoming 'rational' and 'grown up' often leaves the adult divorced from her own embodied self. As part of my engagement with childism (conf. Wall in Ethics in light of childhood, Georgetown University Press, Washington, 2010; The child as natural phenomenologist. Primal and primary experience in Merleau-Ponty’s psychology, Northwestern University Press, Evanston, 2013; Child Geogr, 2019, https://doi.org/10.1080/14733285.2019.1668912) in this article, I ask: Who needs sensory education? In response, I propose that it is adults who need sensory education more than their temporal others (Beauvais, in: Spyrou S, Rosen R, Cook DT (eds) Reimagining childhood studies, Bloomsbury Academic, London, pp 57–74 2018) i.e. children. As Merleau-Ponty has shown, the richness of embodied perception that children experience, is relatively distant for adults (Bahler in Child Philos 11:203–221, 2015; Welsh in The child as natural phenomenologist. Primal and primary experience in Merleau-Ponty’s psychology, Northwestern University Press, Evanston, 2013). The particular lived-experience I reflect on is the sense of temporality. Accompanied by two distinct, yet interconnected examples of encounters with Baby Ole and Captain Duke, I suggest that being-with-children can enable philosophical clearings for adults to re-cognise plural temporalities, as opposed to a singular clock-time perception of Time. (The preposition with is used in the sense of the Norwegian hos or German bei, whereby an adult intentionally positions herself as a guest in a child's world.)

What takes ‘us’ so long? The philosophical poverty of childhood studies and education

“…Elsewhere, I explain how pluralist logic helped me suspend clock-time and tune into Captain Duke’s temporality. Conjunctly, my spatial sense transformed and took me into ‘a lava land where we flew cars, and at the same time stayed in a kitchen (Biswas, 2021)’. One need not necessarily adopt a seven-fold Jaina logic to do that.…”

”Titta blåsippor!”

“…Planering av undervisning hör alltså hemma i chronos-tiden, då man formulerar en kronologi för vad som skall ske och när det ska ske. På ett övergripande plan är chronostidens effektivitetslogik djupt förbunden med utbildningsväsendets idé om framåtskridande progression och nyttotänkande (Biswas, 2021). Men för eleverna förefaller mycket värdefullt ske i kairos-tiden, under plötsliga händelser och skeenden där uppmärksamma pedagoger kan välja att knyta an och utveckla -så länge inte en "tydlig och avgränsad" undervisningsplanering alltså försvårar detta.…”

“…Det medför också att det finns exklusiva möjligheter för eleven att faktiskt bli sedd av en lyhörd och uppmärksam lärare. Läraren kan i sin tur få en inblick i elevens "temporala rytm" och kanske tillåta sig själv att se ögonblicken så som eleven ser ögonblicken, uppmärksamma tingen och odla sin nyfikenhet på ett sätt som vi vuxna kanske börjat lära oss av med (jfr Biswas, 2021). Sådana upplevelser skulle kunna utgöra viktiga kvaliteter för alla som arbetar i fritidshem, och kanske även för de som arbetar i andra skolformer.…”

Thinking and doing with childism in children's literature studies

“…Clémentine Beauvais (2015) speaks of the ‘mighty child’ to stress how the future potential of the child may defy adults' hopes for preserving the current status quo. Tanu Biswas (2021) stresses how Beauvais's notion of ‘temporal otherness’ (2018) reveals an asymmetry between children and adults in which the former have a future (and, therefore, Time, which in modern history has been inseparably coupled with Money), while the latter (only) have a past that they can access. How to read, thus, the power asymmetries in these shifting relationships?…”