Bosse Bergstedt Anna Herbert Anja Kraus (Eds.) TING

European Studies on Educational Practices 2E

Bosse Bergstedt Anna Herbert

Anja Kraus (Eds.)

INITIATING

LEARNING

© Waxmann Verlag GmbH. For private use only.

European Studies on Educational Practices

Edited by

Bosse Bergstedt, Anna Herbert,

Anja Kraus

Volume 2

Waxmann 2012 Münster / New York / München / Berlin


Bosse Bergstedt, Anna Herbert, Anja Kraus (Eds.)

Initiating Learning

Waxmann 2012 Münster / New York / München / Berlin


Bibliographic information published by die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de.

European Studies on Educational Practices, Volume 2

ISSN 2193-7141 ISBN 978-3-8309-2650-4

Waxmann Verlag GmbH, 2012 Postfach 8603, 48046 Münster, Germany Waxmann Publishing Co. P. O. Box 1318, New York, NY 10028, U. S. A.

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Cover Design: Anne Breitenbach, Tübingen Cover Picture: “Children playing” by Ellen Kobe Print: Hubert & Co., Göttingen Printed on age-resistant paper, acid-free as per ISO 9706

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Content

Anja Kraus, Anna Herbert, Bosse Bergstedt Introduction.................................................................................................................. 7

Ellen Kobe ECHO! ........................................................................................................................ 11Intro duction

Pedagogical Approaches to Learning

Anna Herbert Pedagogy and the Gaze............................................................................................. 19

Jenny Steinnes Tacit Knowledge and Literacy – Writing in and between Letters............................ 35

Anja Kraus Learning as Transformation...................................................................................... 55

Joris Vlieghe Education and the Body in the Age of Digital Technologies A “Stieglerian” Perspective ...................................................................................... 73

Professional Education

Jean-Luc Patry Pedagogical Tact – Concretizing a Tacit Dimension in Pedagogy and Rendering it Measurable .................................................................................... 99

Maja S. Maier Teaching Professional Reflexivity – Learning (about) Hierarchies: (Counter-)Productive Effects on Students’ Reflection Competencies in Educational Settings ............................................................................................. 115

Katharina Rosenberger The Ability to Differentiate: A Teacher’s Prerequisite for Dealing with Heterogeneity........................................ 125 About the Authors..................................................................................................... 155



Anja Kraus, Anna Herbert, Bosse Bergstedt

Introduction

This publication grounds on a symposium held in Berlin on Tacit Dimensions of Pedagogy in March 2011. The common ground to start with was the following critique of current pedagogical theories and their diverse applications: here the explicit decisions concerning settings of teaching and learning processes obviously rule the field. These are e.g. the subjects, schedules, tasks and social settings of learning. Especially in the form of governmental or cybernetic theories the focus on explicit issues, factors and didactic models actually has a great impact on European education, its theories, its practices and its systems.

However, from a phenomenological perspective learning processes are never at hand or evident. Even though the result of our learning might be obvious, we actually do not know how we learn something. The learning process as such is inevitably hidden. Furthermore, a learning process is not only governed by its tasks and conscious motives, but also by implicit and unspoken attitudes and mindsets. It is stimulated by implicit meanings of spoken and written statements, by tacit expressions of bodily communication and inter-action, by aesthetical framings as e.g. iconic activities and objects and by the un-verbalized resources and limitations of commodities, tools and architectural environments etc.

When looking at learning only as an explicit process, the tacit influences easily get out of sight. The process of learning, so to say learning in a way becomes extinct. It is reduced to its effects and to its visible margin.

Working out hidden pedagogical effects has been discussed as a “hidden curriculum” in the 1970s and as a “systemic approach to teaching” in the 1990s. In recent discussions it appears e.g. under the label of ‘discourse analysis’. In these approaches the hidden dimensions of teaching are focused. We here focus on research that regards itself as a continuing contribution to this latter tradition. In phenomenological and post-structural analyses of educational processes the hiddenness of learning as such and its various tacit conditions are considered. We regard this as the basis for discussing the conditions of initiating learning as empowering or as hindering factors.


8 Kraus, Herbert, Bergstedt

There is no reason for denying that Bildung, respectively the ethical, political and emancipatory dimensions of education, can be described analogously to learning. The same is true for other central concepts in pedagogy.

In the first part of this volume concepts of learning, literacy, competence and attention are discussed. In the second part, based on empirical studies, theories on teacher education and on teaching are generated.

The development of methodical procedures appropriate to bring out pedagogically – in a wider sense anthropologically – effective factors that are normally invisible or hidden may correspond to certain artistic practices, or may also be inspired by them. Therefore, this volume starts with the description of a procedure developed by an artist dealing with the topic of resonance and responsivity. How do two horses react on unfamiliar city traffic sounds around them and how do they at the same time respond to each other? How do two 8-year-old boys deal with a fear-provoking science fiction film and how do they interact with each other while coping with the film? In Ellen Kobe’s art works “Raststätte” and “Echo”, set up by different media (video, video-stills and cuts, drawings, photos), it becomes obvious that the animals as well as the two boys coordinate their movements with each other according to the outer goings-on, and it is shown how they do it.

Anna Herbert’s aim is to work out why learning at school and creativity in pedagogical situations can be fun and what the conditions are for this kind of learning and creativity. She does it by referring, beside others, to Schiller, Freud and Lacan. Especially Lacan’s concept of the gaze opens up a possibility to analyze the relationship between “connaissance” (conscious knowledge) and the “savoir” (unconscious knowledge), the main actors in learning and in creativity as well. Referring to Jacques Derrida Jenny Steinnes presents an alternative model of literacy as a culturally “embedded” and hence highly variable set of theories and practices of communication. Here she takes Shakespeare’s Hamlet, respectively Ophelia’s testimony as a reference to such questions of literacy that are closely linked to our understanding of language. She especially points out the pedagogical challenges in graphocentric cultures through tacit learning and teaching. Anja Kraus deepens the phenomenological interpretation of learning as transformation by sketching some of its empirical basics, referring to a means of instruction, the “Sensitive Threshold”. Especially digital media make it possible to juxtapose films, images, texts, audio-media already at hand, to combine them and to proceed with them. Here, information is not only mediated multimodally, respectively through different sensory channels, they can also be recalled


Introduction 9

multimodally, by movements and even in a tactile way. In his contribution, Joris Vlieghe analyses the impact of digital information and communication technologies on education, respectively on catching attention as an important educational task. Starting from the argument that all education is preconditioned by a certain materiality and that it is corporally embedded, he discusses Stiegler’s hypothesis that in new media the “deep attention” is replaced by new forms of attention, viz. constant alertness and vigilance that hinder critical thinking. Based on an empirical study Jean-Luc Patry deals with the question how the “pedagogical tact” (Herbart, Muth et al.) is structured and how it can be assessed. At first, theoretical accounts of tact as a multiplicity of goals and theories and its problems are confirmed. Then, consequences for research on the theory-practice relationship oriented at the concept of pedagogical tact are presented in order to achieve an improvement of educational practices and with a proposal for an adequate assessment method. The contribution of Maja S. Maier discusses the tacit dimensions of educational settings in which professional reflexivity is taught to undergraduate, graduate and postgraduate students of pedagogy. Two different cases (Germany and Ukraine) are described in order to show how the hierarchical structure which is constitutive for educational settings generates individual and collective strategies with counterproductive effects on the reflection competences of the students. The study presented by Katharina Rosenberger refers to the concept that coping with pedagogical-practical challenges (e.g. heterogeneity) requires conceptualized knowledge (acquired through formal training) as well as embodied practical knowledge (acquired by doing). Donald Schön conceptualised the latter as reflection-in-action and reflection-on-action. To clarify his concept of reflection in an empirical study the pedagogical knowledge of experts and that of novices is explored by Rosenberger through picture und text vignettes.

Ludwigsburg in March 2012,

Anja Kraus, Anna Herbert, Bosse Bergstedt



Ellen Kobe ECHO!

Video 2007, 11 min.

The relation between seeing and hearing was already important for my perfor-mance and installation work called RASTSTÄTTE (“rest stopp” or “service area”).

Figure 1: Raststätte, Videostill (Performance/Video), Dresden 2002

In the test arrangement of RASTSTÄTTE I have placed two horses on a lawn in the city centre of Dresden. This lawn was part of a temporary garden called TIEFENGARTEN (“deep garden”), a project I had realised during the two years before.

Figure 2: Raststätte, Videostill (Performance/Video), Dresden 2002


12 Ellen Kobe

Horses have a highly sensitive sense of hearing, whereas their eyes are less effective. The idea was to test and film the reactions of these animals at a location in the city, which is dominated by cars, busses and street cars, traffic which fills the centre of the city with strong noises. (At this time there was a football match in the city!)

Figure 3-5: Raststätte, Videostill (Performance/Video), Dresden 2002

I have regarded the two horses as a couple of human beings with a strong connection between each other (they listen to each other!) and I asked: What will happen in a strange situation, how will they move in a limited space; a small turf, a transplanted “nature” into the centre of the city.

I have used the following installation: two cameras observed their move-ments; one near by, the other in a vast distance from the birds view from the town hall tower.

Later on, in a gallery, I projected the videos and I drew with two pencils synchronously, directly into the projection, so that the real situation was transformed in a traditional “nature study”, a drawing on paper. This process was mediated through performance, video and drawing.


ECHO! 13

Figure 6: Raststätte, drawing (23x32cm), 2003

Later I saw my son Aron (eight years old at that time) playing with figures derived from “Star Wars” at home and transforming his room into a battlefield – basically through sounds of fighting.

Figure 7: ECHO!, Videostill, 2007


14 Ellen Kobe

The imitation seemed perfect to my ears and particularly when he played together with his friend Fritz, the noise level reached a degree which made me feel like being in the middle of a real war zone.

I wanted to find out, how the children adopted this film-world. Is there a true echo in the mimic expression of the children, while they watch Star Wars, and how does this echo change, when the children mirror and repeat what they have seen, by re-enacting certain parts of the story?


When I reflected the material for the video I decided to integrate both films into one screen to enhance the echo-effect. The result has an elliptic structure: a longer passage shows the boys watching TV, followed by a shorter passage of an interview-situation (I asked the children, what Star Wars is about and asked them to play back the film with their figures) and so on. Sound and video-picture are overlapping or running in opposite directions, so that I can evoke a continuity of seeing (reception) and talking/playing (action).


ECHO! 15


The elliptic structure does not allow any linear narration. In the first interview-situation Aron gives a summary of the film and Fritz comments on it. Little by little the children translate the film into their own experiences. They answer to questions concerning the morals, the limits of the universe, good and evil of the film-figures, using their own models of thinking.


They point to the figures on the table, and as they comment on their positions in the film, they start to play with them and take on the film-roles themselves. We can observe an increasing infiltration of the film-story into the childrens’ body language.


16 Ellen Kobe




Documents

Bosse Bergstedt Anna Herbert Anja Kraus (Eds.) TING