Rethinking teaching: alternative ontologies of educational praxis and thought

This special issue seeks to breathe new life into the act of teaching and re-open fundamental questions about what it means to teach. It is an invitation to move beyond technocratic questions of what constitutes a good teacher, exploring instead ontologies of being and becoming a teacher that emerge in the complex relations between teaching and thinking. These ontological questions contrast the neoliberal preoccupation with standardised competencies of the good teacher in terms of highly efficient, and increasingly datafied, acts of teaching geared towards the effective achievements of measurable learning outcomes and standards. The special edition therefore calls for rethinking teaching with reference to ontologies of being and becoming with a world in process, rather than acquiring and transmitting knowledge about the world as preformed. The edition aligns with the recent ‘ontological turn’ in educational research, a movement that is re-opening ontological questions that challenge the Western philosophical foundations of teaching and learning (Barnett, 2004; Dall’Alba & Barnacle, 2007; Rosiek & Gleason, 2017; St. Pierre, Jackson & Mazzei, 2016; St. Pierre, 2019; Zembylas, 2017). However, the special issue also attempts to redress what could be seen as a neglect of the practical activity of teaching in recent philosophical ‘re-turns’ to ontology and metaphysics in educational research.

It is thus appropriate that the special issue reassesses the philosophical traditions of thinking itself as an activist practice, along with the physical and metaphysical manifestations of thinking in/as teaching. In various ways, the papers collected here explore, experiment and inspire alternative ontologies of teaching that resist the Cartesian split between thinking and doing, in line with the plea for a philosophical rediscovery of teaching that challenges the widespread systemisation of learning outcomes and performance indicators (Biesta, 2015, p. 2017; Biesta & Stengel, 2016). By attending to teaching as a practice of thinking-with the world, at no remove from life’s immediacy (Massumi, 2011), each paper explores the liminal emergence of teaching as an act that breathes life into educational concepts, encounters, and events.

The thinking that animates this special issue is drawn from many places, and it travels through many genealogical pathways that encompass teaching as both a living practice and a site of study. The Rethinking Teaching Symposium at the University of Malta in November 2018 was the initial confluence for this thinking. The symposium brought together seven international philosophers and theorists of education, at varying career stages, to address the problem of how to reconceptualise teaching through alternative and/or emerging ontologies of educational praxis and thought. The pre-pandemic conditions for this symposium were, in retrospect, a rare occasion for intensive and sustained immersion in the critical and creative dimensions of a shared problem. Housed at a relatively remote monastery in the inland region of the island of Malta, the symposium invited us and our fellow contributors to sense, share, hone, and critically challenge one another’s theoretical and methodological approaches to rethinking teaching. Our days circulated according to the aesthetic rhythms of the monastery’s curfews and mealtimes, with intense discussions punctuated by extended durations of quietude and visits to Malta’s extraordinary walled cities and coastal walkways.

It was fitting, in this respect, that many of our philosophical discussions revolved around the monastic and process traditions of Western thought, with the works of Spinoza, Heidegger, Whitehead, and Deleuze all making continuous and sustained appearances. Added to this mix were more contemporary permutations of educational thought, including trajectories of thinking in post-phenomenology, critical posthumanism, science and technologies studies, affect theory, relational aesthetics, and feminist new materialisms. And yet, as the intervening pandemic years have taken place, what we may recall most of those days are not the philosophies we discussed but the aesthetic feeling of an atmosphere through which thinking can be freely shared. Whitehead once referred to this atmospheric cultivation of aesthetic feeling as an ‘art of life’, through which ‘the habits of aesthetic apprehension’ (1932, p. 248) become the aim and practice of education as both a mode of thought and a style of life.

After four days of scholarly immersion, adventure, and exchange within the aesthetic atmospheres and rhythms of the monastary, we presented our respective papers on ‘rethinking teaching’ at a public program attended by an audience from across the philosophy, literature, education, and social science departments at the University of Malta. The shared questions explored by these initial papers, as well as the expanded collection gathered here, came to revolve around multiple and open explorations of teaching and/as thinking:

How does teaching think? How does thinking teach? What practices open toward a wider and deeper sense of teaching as thinking-with the world, of teaching as thinking-with (human and nonhuman) others?

Re-thinking teaching beyond logistical optimisation

Our experience at the Rethinking Teaching Symposium offers a vivid contrast with current fixations on the standardisation and datafication of teaching practice according to neoliberal logics of efficiency and optimisation. These logics do not figure teaching as an act of thinking, but rather one of service delivery and implementation according to logistical standards, values, and ideals of ‘what works’. Within this increasingly globalised discursive regime, accounts of the relationship between teaching and thinking have largely relied on discourses of reflexivity which rarely go beyond a fixation on personal reflection, increasingly yoked to the measurable enhancement or ‘optimisation’ of a teacher’s practice. Similarly, questions of educational ‘equity’ and ‘empowerment’ with respect to marginalised communities are couched in terms of optimised outcomes against individualised standards, rather than being invested in the shared powers and potentials of social thought and collective imagining.

Writing in the radical tradition of Black scholarship, activism, and social aesthetics, Harney and Moten (2013) link the logisticality of optimisation under late capitalism to the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and its invention of a State-form of thought which relegated human bodies to cargo under a system of credit and debt. Harney and Moten’s radical alter-educational project is orientated toward an abolition of this State-form of thought, rather than its redemption or empowerment under neoliberal terms.

While acknowledging the necessary political and ethical commitment of teaching to democratic values of equity and empowerment, many of the papers collected within this special issue seek refuge within abolitionist socialities rather than conventional understandings of emancipatory or liberatory teaching praxis. Even critical discourses and practices of educational empowerment are considered victims of a metaphysical pull towards an inert political ontology of teaching, incapable of registering the radical specificity, informality, indeterminacy, and wildness of social life as a continuously improvised set of material, embodied, and affective encounters with the world.

Creating concepts of and for sharing the world

What kinds of thinking can help us resist the call to order of teaching as a State-form of thought? Each of the contributions to this edited collection approach this problematic differently, and yet they do so through a differentially shared process of concept creation which places philosophy at no remove from our encounters with the world. The creation of concepts is at the heart of what it means to practice philosophy, a practice which O’Donnell (this issue) argues is never separate from the creation of affects (feelings) and percepts (images). Thinking in the tradition of Spinoza, O’Donnell is concerned with now concepts feel as well as with how they mobilise new images and imaginaries of social life. Concepts are not stable or transcendent forms, but bodily ways of inclining, orientating, and giving (or refusing) awareness to different qualities of encounter with the world. This gestures toward a pedagogy of the concept (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994), which in O’Donnell’s expanded sense elaborates how concepts-images-affects function as linked ways of thinking, sensing, teaching and learning to share the world, in all its teeming plurality. This runs counter to the normative ‘call to order’ of teaching as a practice of breaking the world up into abstract categories and static representations.

O’Donnell enters into conversation with Antillean poet and philosopher Eduard Glissant in elaborating how different constellations of concepts-affects-images can orientate us toward sharing the world. As O’Donnell points out, the bare fact that we share the world with other beings is the precondition for existence, identity, subjectivity, politics, sociality, and learning. Without sharing the world we do not exist. And yet the ways in which we come to share the world is always modulated by particular constellations of concepts-images-affects that condition our encounters with the world. O’Donnell turns to Glissant’s ethics and poetics of ‘opacity’ in search of a pluralist orientation toward sharing the world which is irreducible to identitarian categories of personhood and the imperial grasp for transparent knowledge of the other. This has powerful implications for education to the extent that it refuses the commonly accepted neoliberal premise of mutual recognition, identification, and understanding as the basis for inclusion and social justice.

As O’Donnell argues (this issue), “education must come to better accept that often we don’t and can’t understand others or even ourselves, and yet we can co-exist in relation and share the world”. She proposes the concept of “archipelagic pedagogies” as an orientation that cultivates and values moments when, in Glissant’s terms, “one consents not to be a single being”. This is to consent to what Denise Ferreira Da Silva (2016) terms “difference without separability”, as a “being of relation” that is both incalculable and unknowable (Manning, 2020, p. 12). Rather than teaching us only how to add 1 + 1 (knowable subjects, objects, territories, categories), an archipelagic pedagogy teaches us how to share the world across relational fragments and intermixtures of being, across strings of islands and oceanic depths, across pluralist imaginaries and gaping abysses. Here the relationship between thinking and teaching becomes dissociated from the territorial grasp for transparency, only to be realised more fully in the opacity of Relation as “an open totality evolving upon itself” (Glissant, 1997, p. 192).

From militant humility to the pedagogical war machine

One of the benefits of a collection of essays that arises from “archipelagic” conversations acroos thinkers in different part of the world is that there are often interesting calls and responses between them. In this case, we see O’Donnell’s incitement to create concepts for sharing the world being answered, in a number of divergent ways, by authors across the collection of papers. This responsiveness is particularly evident in Carl Anders Säfström’s concept of ‘militant humility’, devised precisely to counter the aggression and violence (both tacit and explicit) of neoliberal schooling. As a counter-pedagogical concept, Säfström's call for teaching militant humility seeks to short circuit the aggressive focus on self-interest, competition, and comparison under the pervasive regimes of neoliberal education systems and practices. Militant humility can be understood as an activist strategy for teaching and learning to share the world both with and for others, countering the neoliberal tautology which always places self-interest before others.

The contribution from David Rousell and Kelly Kai-Lee Chan also takes up counter-pedagogical concepts as activist tools and even ‘weapons’, in this case exploring the radical deformalisation of educational life under conditions of environmental, social, and political unrest. Student-led activist movements in Hong Kong and community responses to social housing lockdowns in Melbourne serve as poignant examples of alter-educational platforms untethered from formal schooling, governance, and the State-form of thought. And yet, these social movements are in many cases appropriating the territories and infrastructures of schools and universities as temporary refuges and tactical bases for mobilising activist pedagogies in public spaces across the city. Rousell and Chan bring Harney and Moten’s concepts of undercommons study and fugitive planning into approximation with Deleuze and Guattari’s nomadic ‘war machine’, in an attempt to follow the micropolitical pedagogies currently arising from contemporary activist movements. They suggest that contemporary activist pedagogies are increasingly linked by the expression of a ‘general antagonism’ (Harney & Moten, 2013) that opens new worlds of study wherever the State-form of thought is resisted.

Toward a speculative aesthetics and poetics of teaching

Alongside the above contributions charting political counter-mobilisations of pedagogical concepts, the special issue also features articles that are sensitively attuned to the aesthetic and poetic relationships between thinking and teaching. Simone Galea’s paper initiates an inquiry into the poetics of teaching as an antidote to the ‘calculative thinking’ which has come to dominate the profession. She turns to Heidegger’s discussions of poetry as an expression of Dasein, or ‘Being in the world’, and explores what a poetic orientation might bring to the craft of teaching as a creative practice. Poetry, Galea argues, is concerned both with revealing and concealing Being. It does not have any prescribed function or utility other than an open-ended orientation toward an ontological existence which brings things and ideas into the world, while also obscuring or hiding their essence. As Galea writes, “poetic thinking points to Being as lying in a liminal swaying dance of concealment and unconcealment, between what is said and unsaid”. This has powerful implications for rethinking teaching because it invites us to consider how “the wandering butterfly” of poetic thought smudges the terms of relation between teacher and learner, presence and absence. Through a Heidegerrian poetics of Being, Galea shows how teaching can become a practice of “letting learn” when we accept the call to think and allow ourselves to be transformed by what arises from thinking.

Moving from poetics to the aesthetics of gesture and touch, Sharon Todd’s contribution to the special issue works to rethink teaching as a form of bodily enactment and inclination. Her interest is in the ways that certain formations, postures, movements, and positionalities are encoded into the act of teaching and its proliferation through images and other media. The dominant figure of the teacher as someone who 'points' offers an entry point for Todd’s initial discussion, which draws on Bourriard’s relational aesthetics to situate this formation of a “teacher who points” within a mobile set of relations, rather than a static image. While attending to the inherent ambiguity of the teacher’s pointing as a relational formation, Todd also notes how this gesture effectively erases its own movement, such that the object pointed to displaces the corporeality of the gesture. In a bid to restore a visceral sense of touch and movement to the gestures of teaching, Todd enters into conversation with Erin Manning’s process-relational philosophy in the second part of the essay. Both movement and touch are rendered as aesthetic constituents of the teaching body, but also take on a political formation through the engendering (or closing down) of ‘relationscapes’ of co-becoming.

Dennis Aktinson also proposes alternative pedagogical strategies for an aesthetics of teaching, specifically through a speculative re-casting of ‘inheritance’ and ‘disobedience’ in practices of contemporary art and children’s drawing. Atkinson is concerned, for instance, with how the irruptive potentials of a child’s drawing can be ‘inherited’ through a pedagogic practice which does not presuppose any particular set of abstract categories or ideal criteria. The pedagogical challenge, as Aktinson describes it, is “to try to engage with how a learning encounter matters for a learner in his or her situated specificity of learning and how this mattering becomes inherited by the teacher”. Acts of disobedience are therefore significant within Atkinson’s approach because they rupture predetermined criteria, both for ‘what matters’ and how to make sense of this mattering in teaching. What emerges from these points of rupture are ‘speculative pedagogies’ which avoid and refuse the ‘homogenisation of the interpretation of experience’. Aligned with Deleuze’s notion of encounters as ‘shocks to thought’, speculative pedagogies move beyond accounts of culturally situated knowledges to plumb the intensive depths of affects and relationalities ‘that arrive prior to knowledge’. Atkinson’s speculative pedagogies are not oriented toward a known world but a world to come, and therefore require an acute sensitivity toward the speculative movements of thought that might become necessary for such a world to come into being.

Language, culture, and the possibilities of a neohumanist ideal

The final three papers in the collection turn from aesthetics toward the materiality of discursive arrangements and the political embodiment of thought in the acts of teaching. Each of the final three contributions also seeks to make an intervention in the discursive arrangements of specific fields of study, with differing emphases and investments in how the functions of language, culture, and philosophical thought are being configured in response to critical educational concerns. Anna Koppanou questions the relative absence of engagement with teachers and teaching in recent turns to posthumanist and new materialist theories in education, which she diagnoses as a ramification of the decentralisation of the human subject within such work. She argues that the onset of the Anthropocene enables a rethinking of humanism which necessarily salvages some aspects of human agency in order to effectively transform understandings of teaching and learning in more-than-human terms. Koppanou’s analysis turns to Heidegger’s critique of humanism as the basis for the development of a ‘neohumanist’ trajectory proposed as complimentary to posthumanist and new materialist approaches to educational thought. This neohumanist orientation pivots on concepts of childness (as the state of being a child) and nearness (as the ontological disclosure of being) through an orientation toward teaching which is not representational or logocentric, but proceeds through experiments with the hermeneutic interpretation of existence as proximity with/in the world.

A different problematic is explored by Sarah Evans, Michaela Harrison, and David Rousell in their article titled ‘Teaching in the Afterward’. Their concern is with the ambivalent relationship between materiality and language in the turn to posthumanist theories and methods in education, and the specific implications for rethinking the educational order-words of ‘pedagogy’, ‘curriculum’, and ‘assessment’ following the dissolution of the humanist subject. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s revaluation of language in A Thousand Plateaus, they work to assemble a transversal language of teaching which acknowledges the processual play of language as both material and incorporeal, majoritarian and minor, viscerally embodied and speculatively ideal. This analysis of the transversal role of language in teaching is then put to work through examples from a Masters course in teacher education and professional learning. Each example demonstrates how the order-words of pedagogy, curriculum, and assessment can be transformed into ‘passwords’ which open alternative horizons of educational praxis and thought. In each case, the regimes of signs that give normative order and meaning to the act of teaching are cracked open, multiplied, and shared out. Personal pedagogies associated with professional identities are transitioned into a pedagogy of incorporeal concepts; State curriculum mandates are transformed into a visceral curriculum of sense-events; and the assessment of standardised outcomes shifts toward assessment as cartography, where encounters with signs become points of singularity within a processual continuum of teaching and learning.

The final contribution to the collection is from Anna Hickey-Moody and Christine Horn, focusing on the cultivation of culturally responsive, decolonial pedagogies in ethnically diverse school communities. In many ways this article speaks back to the other contributions to this special issue through the privileging of student and parent voices from Muslim communities in Australia. Responding to accounts of racialised abuse and discrimination narrated through interviews with Muslim parents and students attending Australian schools, Hickey-Moody and Horn argue that the act of teaching “needs to be rethought in order to include the work of challenging racism and the reproduction of racist knowledge structures”. Their deep and extensive empirical work with children, parents, and teachers in Australian schools provides a counter-approach to the conceptual, poetic, aesthetic, and analytic work undertaken across the other submissions to this collection. The often-horrifying stories told by participants offer living parables which teach in their own ways and through their own contexts, rather than through academic interpretive schemes which centre certain voices of intellectual privilege. For Hickey-Moody and Horn, listening carefully to family stories of racism and colonial violence is essential for cultivating more inclusive and culturally responsive practices of teaching. However, as the authors mention, this equally requires a sensitivity to the daily rhythms, values, and affective refrains of everyday life within diversly situated communities of learners. While cultural inclusion is often reduced to questions of representation in education, Hickey-Moody and Horn suggest that the affective life of community stories, sensibilities, identities, and values may hold the most transformative potentials for a decolonial praxis of teaching.