![Sample our Education journals, sign in here to start your access, latest two full volumes FREE to you for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5932/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Education.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
Human Science Pedagogy is ‘a strange case,’ as Jürgen Oelkers has recently noted: In the Anglophone world, where Gert Biesta has compellingly encouraged scholars to ‘reconsider education as a Geisteswissenschaft’ (a human science) its main themes and the contributions of its central figures remain unknown. For Germans, particularly in more ‘general’ or philosophical areas of educational scholarship (i.e. Allgemeine Pädagogik), this same pedagogy is recognized only insofar as it is critiqued and rejected. Taking this strange situation as its frame, this paper introduces Human Science Pedagogy to English-language readers, providing a cursory overview of its history and principal contributors, while suggesting the contemporary relevance of its themes and questions in both English- and German-language scholarship. This paper concludes with an appeal to readers on both sides of the Atlantic to new or renewed consideration of this pedagogy as a significant and influential source for educational thinking deserving further scholarly attention.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. I would like to thank the many people who provided feedback on early drafts of this paper, including Hanno Su, Annika Wilmers and Rose Ylimaki.
2. This quote is translated from the German by the author, as are all others from German-language sources.
3. Van Manen and Adams provide two paragraphs on the subject in their entry on ‘Phenomenological Pedagogy’ in the Encyclopaedia of Educational Theory and Philosophy (Phillips, Citation2014). Van Manen also provides a page of related names and dates in an appendix to his 2015 Pedagogical Tact (pp. 204–205). For a critical essay on Human Science Pedagogy from a Swiss perspective—focusing on its resonances with the work of author Thomas Mann and with Weimar-era culture—see Tröhler as cited above. Importantly, Christoph Wulf has published some summaries of Human Science Pedagogy in various articles and encyclopaedia entries (e.g. see: Phillips, Citation2014, pp. 271–272), the longest of which occupies over 20 pages largely unnoticed 2003 book on German Educational Science. Given that it is a relatively short excerpt and the original volume is out of print, I have made this Wulf’s account available here: http://www.normfriesen.info/hermeneuticpedagogies.pdf .
4. Currere here refers specifically to “a strategy for students … to study the relations between academic knowledge
and life history in the interests of self-understanding and social reconstruction” (Pinar, Citation2019, p. 24).
5. Anthropology here refers to the study (-pology) of what it means to be human (anthro-)—either from a philosophical or pedagogical perspective.
6. These sentences and the others below are taken from a translation of the introductory lecture in Schleiermacher’s Lectures on Education by Friesen and K. Kenklies that is currently in progress. The page numbers provided are from the German original provided in the references.
7. I use the term ‘humanist’ here loosely. More accurately, Nohl’s book traces precursors and recent developments in the development of an approach to education informed by Lebensphilosophie, an approach whose ‘principal insights were [later] taken up in a methodologically more rigorous and productive way in Husserlian phenomenology and Heidegger’s “philosophy of existence”’ (Lebensphilosophie, Citation1998).
8. See Bollnow’s 1989 Theory and Practice in Education, available at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/333295910_Bollnow_1988_Theory_and_Practice_in_Education.
9. Biesta references German-language texts such as Oelkers (Citation2004) and Wulf (Citation1978).
10. I have had the pleasure of engaging in such sustained dialogue with people including Jens Beljan (Jena), Malte Brinkmann (Berlin), Karsten Kenklies (Strathclyde), Anja Kraus (Stockholm) and Hanno Su (Münster), as well as with a group of American scholars whose collaboration I co-lead with Rose Ylimaki (North Carolina): Daniel Castner (Indiana), Todd Price (National Lewis) and Lemuel Watson (Indiana).
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Norm Friesen
Norm Friesen is Professor in the Department Educational Technology at the College of Education, Boise State University. Dr. Friesen has recently translated and edited Klaus Mollenhauer’s Forgotten Connections: On Culture and Upbringing (Routledge, 2014) as well as a book on Existentialism and Education in the thought of Otto Friedrich Bollnow (Palgrave, 2017). He has also published a monograph The Textbook and the Lecture: Education in the Age of new Media (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017).