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Hello everyone, I am Bianca Atualier, professor of theory
of education at the Autonomous University of Madrid
and today I am here at Uned Radio with Professor Joris
Blige of the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium.
and we are going to have a conversation about a series
of works that have been developed since 2016-2017
under the label of post-critical pedagogy.
I also wanted to thank Professor Juan García, professor of
the Department of Theory and History of Education at the UNED,
who is the one who has made it possible
for us to be here today with all of you.
The conversation will be in English, so
I will now switch to this other language.
So, Joris, welcome. Thank you for being here
and for agreeing to have this conversation
that will be recorded and available for
more people to listen to, hopefully.
So, the topic that we will talk about
is, of course, post-critical pedagogy.
and maybe we could start by the beginning, so kind of
how you came up, you, Piotr Zamoski and Naomi Hudson,
so like the intrastory of how this came
to fruition and became a manifesto.
I always start by saying that the three authors you
mentioned are not the inventors of post-critical pedagogy.
It's more like something was going on in
the world of pedagogy or education studies.
Many people had a profound discontent with a dominant
paradigm, which we identified as a critical paradigm,
hence a plea for a post-critical pedagogy.
I know that this term has caused a lot of confusion because
it seems like we are completely opposed to critical pedagogy.
That's not at the heart of what post-critical pedagogy is all about.
The idea is to do something differently from what
was and still is mainstream in educational studies.
Another name we sometimes use is affirmative pedagogy,
so as to try and indicate that it is something
that exists next to critical pedagogy.
without denying the great value of the critical paradigm.
How did it happen? I want to know because this I don't know.
How did you come to actually write it down, like the manifesto?
Were you having a coffee and you came up with the idea?
Did you write it online? Were you in the same room?
How, you know, like the intra inner
story of the production of the manifesto?
Well, by happenstance the three authors
were working at the same university,
so Liverpool Hope University, and you're
working there as philosophers of education.
And that is quite seldom that you have three
philosophers of education working at the same university.
And in the conversation with the head of department,
it came up that we could somehow have a look what binds us together.
Is there something typical of these
three people working at the same place?
And yeah, we had a brainstorm about it.
I don't remember whether it was over coffee or a beer,
so unfortunately those details I don't remember them,
but I believe it was Peter who a few years before that wrote a paper
in which he coined the term of post-critical pedagogy.
And we came to the conclusion that this would
actually be a very good term to describe
what was at the heart of our own ideas about education.
In other occasions you refer to this
kind of general malaise that would be,
that you've perceived there was in some educational researchers.
What do you think causes this kind of malaise
out of the mainstream critical paradigm?
So why is it unsatisfactory at some point
and why is it kind of run out of steam?
So what do you think?
Well, you refer to the famous expression by Bruno Latour,
the critical paradigm has run out of steam.
It actually dovetails with the analysis that
the broader cultural analysis that Latour
makes of western intellectual history.
As from modern times, let's say 17th century on,
thinking in the west is dominated by a logic of mistrust or distrust.
We never take things at face value,
especially if they are well-meant initiatives.
The serious business of academic studies is
going beyond the surface to debunk things
and look for what is behind.
And so that's a kind of general way of
thinking that you can pursue and keep pursuing,
but it's not really productive in the sense
that it is not adding something to reality.
It's stripping something from reality by laying
bare some kind of structural or symbolic violence
behind our educational systems and practices.
Could you explain also, like before we delve
into the actual principles of the manifesto,
you point and recognize Hannah Arendt as your
champion philosopher to present this proposal.
So can you please explain what aspects of her thinking
have been of more use for you to develop the manifesto?
I think that Arendt would agree with what I just
said about a logic of mistrust being dominant
in western thought and western educational thought.
But more to the point, she would probably make or
add to this analysis that this critical paradigm
is actually a political project.
And central in Arendt's thinking is the neat opposition,
the separation between the sphere of
education and the sphere of politics.
They are two different things.
What happens in the critical paradigm is that
education is understood as having a political goal.
Existing, to put it very shortly, the existing
educational provisions have to be debunked
as serving the wrong political goals.
And so we have to constantly reform education in
order to realize the political goal of more equality,
less violence and so on and so forth.
So the manifesto itself has five principles.
I don't know if you want to go through all of them or
maybe there is some kind of way of like point to the.
common brand that make them come together.
So what is the proposal about?
What is the post-critical pedagogy propose?
So maybe I can start with the second principle,
which has to do with pedagogical hermeneutics.
So one of the things that is dominating the discourse
today is the conviction that we all perceive the world
in a different way due to the position we have.
You're a woman, therefore you see the world
differently than I do because I'm male.
That's an obvious truth and I'm not going to deny it.
But the problem is that once you start playing this
hermeneutical game, you can add perspective upon perspective
and you end up with the idea that everybody
has a different view of the world.
And if you then make education subservient
to the political goal of justice,
then the only goal we can have in mind is make sure that everybody
can express his or her or their most private account of the world.
To make it very concrete, in an art class, you just look at the
work of art and everybody says what he or she or they thinks.
You no longer study the painting or the sculpture
or whatever it is that is the object of study.
The challenge of post-critical pedagogy, the very
Arendtian challenge of post-critical pedagogy
is to ensure that our attention is brought
back to a thing that we can have in common.
In this case, the painting or the sculpture.
The basic gesture of the educator, Arendt, is look, this is our world.
So the idea is that in spite of the fact that
obviously everyone has a different view of the world,
the goal of teaching is to make sure that in spite of all these
differences, we can become attentive for one and the same world.
So the problem with this hermeneutical temptation
is that it is actually world destroying,
in the sense that everybody is locked
up in his or her or their private world.
The challenge of post-critical education, so to speak, is
to ensure that we actually live in one and the same world.
That there's a possibility to live in one and the same world.
And further to that, Arendt says the essence of
education, in her text, The Crisis of Education,
she speaks about the essence of education, for her
the essence of education is love for the world.
So the way in which the attention of our
students can be focused on one and the same world
happens when a teacher is able to convey love for
the world, love for a particular subject matter,
in this case love for works of art, painting and so on.
Because you refer here, going through the example you
made, how would it be to study something post-critically,
or how would be a teaching situation presented in a
post-critical way, you know, like think-centered study practices.
But if we go to research practices, if we take research practices
as on another area where post-criticality has something to do,
how would it look like? So let's take, I don't
know, for example, playground observation.
An ethnographic study, someone goes to the
playground to conduct an ethnographic study,
how the children play or whatever is happening there.
So what a typical, I know we are maybe
making a little bit of caricature of both,
but in order for understanding easily,
what a typical critical researcher would do
and what a typical, or potential typical,
post-critical researcher would do in the same,
given the same researcher field.
Well, probably critical perspective would start from
the assumption that whatever happens on the playground.
will be somehow, or will testify somehow to
forms of structural and symbolic violence.
And obviously, I'm not critiquing critique here,
that can be a valid way of looking at things.
But the problem is that you will probably come
up with seeing what you already knew, right?
What is, so a very famous school of thought within
what we call the critical paradigm is of course
the work of Bourdieu and Passeron, which
shows that things that we take for granted,
like the way in which we speak, the way in which we behave,
also children vis-a-vis one another on the playground,
is linked to social stratification, but we don't realize it.
And therefore, we have to show it, we have to
unearth it, in the hope that when we realize that,
we will be able to create a society, or in this
case, a school and a playground in the school,
in which there will be more equality.
This was thought of in the 70s.
Numerous reforms have been introduced since then,
only to come again and again to the same
observation that there is always inequality.
So again, I'm not holding a plea here against this type of research.
The only thing is that it's probably not the most productive.
A post-critical way of looking at what happens at the
playground is probably taking the things that happen there
at face value.
So when children play together at the playground, the
first reflex is not to think about what's behind it.
We do not take them seriously.
What they say is not correct.
No, we really assume that when they say that, so that
the meanings that they ascribe to
what's happening there actually matters.
So it's not starting from a kind of suspicious
attitude, but from an affirmative attitude.
And then maybe we can see things that we didn't see before.
I can give actually a nice example, because we once
collaborated with the Peace Institute in Flanders.
There was a project about violence in vocational schools.
And of course the Peace Institute was very concerned about this.
So we were involved in this project and students
from my university did interviews with the pupils.
who indeed behaved in a sense rather violently
on the playground and in the halls in the school.
But out of these interviews it appeared that these
pupils were very well aware of the fact that.
their form of life was quite violent, that sometimes
they went too far and that sometimes led to problems.
But at the same time they were very well aware of this.
So it was not that somebody had to
tell them that they were too violent.
And this violent behavior vis-a-vis one
another also had a meaning for them.
So they could talk about it in ways that,
yeah okay, it's not, so again with Bourdieu,
this is not my habitus because I didn't study vocational education.
From my perspective violence is by definition a
problem, but out of these interviews it appeared that
violence was for them a way of living and behaving to one another,
which they didn't find problematic themselves to a certain extent.
Okay, when these interviews were then sent
to the Peace Institute, they were horrified
because we hadn't done what they wanted
us to do, namely to identify the problem.
And in the end, you might believe it or not, we ended
up by having a big discussion with Peace Institute.
So, it was not, the collaboration with
the Peace Institute ended not peacefully.
Yeah, it didn't end very well because you didn't
confirm their views on how, yeah, how violence,
like this particular example. Thank you for sharing that.
This camp also, and probably what happened
to you in this, with the Research Institute,
reinforces the problem of keeping political and educational educative,
like this strong difference between different camps.
And it is interesting because in a way this
has been, this is very central to the proposal,
very nuclear, I find, very enlightening in many ways.
But it is also the main critique, it's also
the main issue that people raise, like,
well, actually all educational is political, how
can you be proposing like we depolitize education
as a way of making, you know, if you are
invested in making the world a better place,
how can you not try, make a difference through education?
So, how do you address this, which I think
is like the main kind of critique you get?
You and everybody doing research under this
paradigm, of course, paradigm or framework.
Yes, I might start by saying that education is unavoidably political,
as if, just as that everything is political, doesn't add anything,
this is just stating the obvious, it's a tautology, right?
I find it much more interesting to look for
what sets education and politics apart, right?
And one of the things that Jotra and I developed in later work,
post-critical work on teaching, is that the
sphere of politics and the sphere of education
have their own logics, and these logics shouldn't be confused.
So, obviously politics can take over the sphere of education,
but then it prevents education from running according to its own logics.
So, the logic of education is, as I already
mentioned, sharing love for the world, love for things in the world.
You cannot teach what you don't love.
If you hate something, you can still, for instance, informatics,
but you're not particularly interested in it,
you can still instruct someone to work with software,
but we don't call this educating or teaching, right?
So, teaching always has to do with being in
love with a particular thing in the world,
mathematics, cooking, music, history, you name it,
and trying to show to the new generation
that these things are important, and why they are important.
So, it's a pure affirmative relation to the world,
which stands opposed to the sphere of politics,
which runs according to logic of hate for the world.
Hate for the world, meaning that there is something wrong in the world,
very much wrong in the world, and we have to put all our effort and
attention in solving this problem.
As long as this problem isn't solved, we cannot do anything else.
So, these are two different things.
So, hate is a relation to the world which is narrowing down,
and which has to do with setting straight
something that we find problematic in the world.
Whereas, love for the world is an opening up to the world,
potentially at infinitum, and it has to
do with being attentive for something,
caring for something, and therefore wanting to study it,
to know everything about it, to discover that
there is always more to know about it, and so on.
And, of course, if you put study at work to reach a political goal,
study is no longer pure, it's no longer out of love for things.
- Yes, thank you.
We are nearly out of time, but I want to bring a last question,
considering we are in the National Open University.
So, if we go back to what a post-critical teaching practice would be,
and would mean for the world, and how relevant
it is to show your love for the world,
do you think it's possible to practice that,
to do that from a university like this one,
where there are constraints, you know, very logistical ones,
the fact that you don't see your students,
but maybe you create radio programs like this one,
or materials, or videos, or you write something to them, I don't know.
And also the idea that it's distance education, so it's not just digital.
Digital is one of the means they can use, but
it's more the idea of distance education being...
So, I don't know, like, what do you think about that?
Because I know your ideas about the
difficulties of doing that by digital means,
but is it possible to still show and point to
things when conditions are like the ones we're in,
like there are no students, there
will be maybe some listening to this?
- Of course, who am I to say that it would be impossible
under digital conditions of distance learning?
The things that Piotr and I developed
in our post-critical book on teaching.
were based on phenomenological study of what happens in
face-to-face meetings in physical, in material schools.
We have painted the portrait of a teacher,
and if we put it next to what we saw happening in the corona pandemic,
it was clear that at least Zoom education,
which tries to replace real classroom
teaching with a digital equivalent,
that this kind of digitalization of education makes it very
difficult to share love for the world with your students.
Because you don't, as a student, you don't really
see the important gestures which all
come down to, "Look, this is our world.".
For instance, you don't see what care a
teacher puts away a book in his or her bag.
Does he or she or they do it with care or without care?
To give a very simple example.
Of course, I don't know exactly how the open university works,
but I can imagine that people are inventive enough also
to think of practices that are based on this conviction
that education is at heart about sharing love for the world.
But that would probably entail that teachers are heavily involved
in thinking about the technologies we use in order to teach.
So maybe the main lesson to take is that you should not leave
the development of the technology of the open university
to experts in communication and then just ask teachers to work with it.
You will have to, and probably that is the case, involve
the teachers themselves in thinking about the technology,
and then I'm convinced, and hopefully many with me, that
just using Zoom technology is not a good way of teaching.
Okay, thank you. So I think we need to close it here.
Thank you, Joris.
Thank you.
And we'll keep the conversation another day. Thank you.
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