Poetic thinking and teaching

ABSTRACT

This paper discusses the relation between the poetic and teaching. Drawing on Heidegger’s question of Being and his turn to poetry as the site through which Being is brought forth through an interplay between revealing and concealing, I address the intricacies of poetic thinking in teaching. I argue that thinking ‘about’ teaching needs to go beyond the calculative frames of reflection, prevalent in practices of teaching today. I refer to three poems to explain the deeper modes of thinking that emerge from poetry and how these can inform teaching in a manner that releases students’ openness to learn and teachers’ meditation on what confers their being in teaching. I conceive teachers’ work as poesis, pointing to their responsibility to attend to the call of thinking as beings who ‘occasion’ relations with/in the world in the advents of being and becoming.

KEYWORDS:

• Poetic thinking
• reflective practice
• teaching
• being
• Heidegger

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 In Maltese, the language of this poem, ‘pensieri’ has two meanings – pansies and thoughts.

2 The difference between Being and being can be better understood through metaphysical thinking of Being as a being; an entity which can be defined and grasped in an ultimate form. It is understandable that we cannot conceive Being as an entity, mostly because it has the capacity to determine entities as well as the possibility of revealing Being which is not an entity. As Gandellini (2018) explains, however ‘Being can differentiate itself from beings, it can diverge from beings only if it stands in between being an entity and not-being an entity, that is only if it is both an entity (as a member of the distinction) and not an entity (as infinitely different from beings)’ (p. 151).

3 Heidegger’s phenomenological attention to what is given to us in direct experience diverges from Husserl’s irrefutable foundation of human consciousness directed at objects in the world. Heidegger’s understanding of Husserl’s ‘to the things themselves’ focuses on the consciousness of Being arising out of an intimate practical immersion with the world.

4 Sheehan (2001) objects to the use the translation of Dasein being there. Instead, he refers to Being as ‘openness’ to stress that the event of Being is its primordial opened-ness (p. 194).

5 Hölderlin poetry refers to Being as which gleams the prior to what is said at times referring to it as that which is golden. In Borg’s poem, Being actually takes the form of an entity that disappears and difficult to grasp.

6 I take the poetic character of Plato’s teaching through conversations here rather than his metaphorical rendition of the teacher in the Parable of the Cave. Heidegger’s ‘Conversation on a Country Path about Thinking’ (1966) enacts the poesis of teaching and gives the teacher in dialogue with the scholar and the scientist, the task of bringing forth with others.