The pedagogical relation past and present: experience, subjectivity and failure

Abstract

The pedagogical relation, the idea of a special relationship between teacher and child, has long been a central theme or ‘problem’ in interpretive studies of education, with the term having been established in English some 25 years ago by Max van Manen. Speaking more broadly, themes of ‘student-teacher relations’ and ‘pedagogies of relation’ are common in both empirical and theoretical literature. The German educationist Herman Nohl (1879–1960) was the first to give the phrase ‘pedagogical relation’ explicit description and definition, and as I show, a steady stream of educationists have followed in his wake. Nohl’s notion has subsequently been revised and criticized by prominent continental scholars, and much from these continental conceptions—particularly the exclusive focus on the child’s experience—has been retained or strengthened in English by van Manen and others. However, in the light of ongoing adult and teacher fallibility this paper argues that the weakness, hesitation and subjectivity of the educator must also be accounted for in any understanding of the pedagogical relation. In tracing the 90-year trajectory of this notion, the paper consequently concludes that moments of ‘interruption’ and ‘hesitation’ must be seen as integral, not accidental, to pedagogy and its relations.

Keywords:

• Student–teacher relationships
• reflective teaching
• philosophy of education
• Herman Nohl
• Max van Manen

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Dr Max van Manen for his understanding, feedback and assistance with an earlier version of this paper. I would also like to acknowledge the influence of the vocabulary of teacher and student ‘subjectivity’ introduced by Dr Gert Biesta in his own English-language interpretations of the German and continental pedagogical traditions.

Notes

1. Zögling is translated here consistently as ‘educand.’ Zögling is a combination of a declension of the verb ‘ziehen’ (meaning to draw up or out), which is central to the verb Erziehen (to educate), together with the diminutive suffix ‘–ling.’ Zögling is thus the one educated, the one whose character and potential is drawn up or out by another, by an educator (Erzieher). The term can refer children or youth who are being educated, to pupils as well as students—but can carry broader connotations as well. For example, Robert Musil’s novel of adolescent boarding school students, Die Verwirrungen des Zöglings Törleß, is simply translated as ‘The Confusions of Young Törless.’

2. This same text, ‘The Pedagogical Relation and the Community of Bildung’ reappears as a section in Nohl’s later book The Pedagogical Movement in Germany and its Theory (1935; a book which in later editions includes a postscript by Nohl integrating ‘the pedagogical movement’ into National Socialist ideology).

3. This term is also consistent with the key word-choice in Hopmann (2007).

4. Nohl sees the pedagogical relation, despite its singularity, as manifest in a group of children, a Bildungsgemeinschaft; in other words in a ‘pedagogical’ and formative community of cultivation and education.

5. Of course, these include the questions raised by Nohl’s later alignment of his work with National Socialist ideology. The details of this alignment are beyond the scope of this paper, and are covered at length in Ortmeyer (2008).

6. Bollnow here is citing a collection of Buber’s lectures on education, parts of which have translated into English: Buber, M. (1953). Reden über Erziehung. Heidelberg: Quelle and Meyer (see Buber, 2002). Here Buber describes the relation between educator and educand as one of ‘existential communication between a being who is with one who is capable of becoming’ (1953, p. 273; emphases added).

7. Nohl does not explicitly describe the ‘oriented quality’ of the pedagogical relation, but can be seen as broadly suggesting it in both of his accounts.

8. Langeveld’s 1945 book, Introduction to Theoretical Pedagogy, (Beknopte theoretische Pedagogiek), published also in German (1962), was used as primer in Dutch teacher training into the 1980s, where it was encountered the now-Canadian phenomenologist Max van Manen. As Bas Levering explains, for Langeveld, ‘the essence of the relationship’ between educator and educand ‘is that it is a relationship of authority’ (Levering, 2002, p. 137). ‘True obedience,’ as Langeveld himself says, ‘consists in following the authority that is recognized’ by the child (1962, p. 26). Like Nohl, Langeveld adds that it is love that binds educator and educand together, and that allows both to ‘find the courage to risk this trust and to exercise and follow authority.’ Langeveld continues: ‘In this love the child, who in his natural [state of] helplessness gives his trust, and which in its absolute spotlessness lifts the educator and grants him spirit for his task and trust in himself’ (1962, p. 55).

Notably unlike Nohl, Langeveld here draws attention to the child’s ‘helplessness’—a term that at once implies the vulnerability of the child within the pedagogical relation, as well as his or her dependency on the adult. This can be seen as an additional point of direct influence between Langeveld and van Manen: Both emphasize the adult is called upon to be responsible and take charge in such a relation, particularly insofar as the child has little or no choice to participate in (or exit from) it (e.g. see van Manen, 2015, p. 19).

9. Bollnow and others were inclined to see the pedagogical relation as a kind of existentiale, an existential constant that, like ‘encounter’ or ‘crisis,’ is an unavoidable part of contemporary experience.