Conference Agenda

There can be little doubt that examples and exemplarity are key aspects of any educational practice. Either in the use of examples in teaching, or in the fact that teachers themselves function as exemplars (good or bad ones) while teaching. Yet exemplarity does not seem to feature very prominently in research and theorising on education. Occasioned by the publication of Retuning Education. Bildung and exemplarity beyond the logic of progress (Korsgaard, 2024) this symposium aims to rethink the role of exemplarity in education in order to escape some of the functionalist and conservative tendencies that have been associated with thinking about exemplarity in education. These have been prominent in ideas about a certain canon of examples in for example literature and science and in the emerging ideas around exemplarist ethics and education where a reductive admiration-emulation model is pervasive (see Zagzebski, 2013). These ideas tend to understand the use of examples in functionalist terms with a clear aim or objective in view which subsumes the particular example under a simplistic transactional function, with a specific outcome in mind. What we wish to explore is whether we can think of the function of examples and exemplars in education in a way that escapes such reductive logics (see also Harvey, 2002); a way that keeps the outcome of educational processes radically open, keeping to the Arendtian credo of not determining in advance how students should relate to subject matter, i.e., the examples they are presented with in education (Arendt, 2006). We will focus our attention mainly on the use of examples in teaching, or in the vocabulary of the abovementioned book, didactical exemplarity. Roughly speaking this concerns moments when something functions as an example in education. This is contrasted with educational exemplarity when someone takes up an exemplary function in education (Korsgaard, 2019; 2024). Didactical exemplarity concerns what is to be placed on the table in education and how this is to be presented to the students. One aspect concerns the content [inhalt] of education and the other the substance [gehalt] of education (Klafki, 2007). Choosing the right example or experiment to present the law of gravity to students (e.g. an apple falling from a tree) to students is not enough. It must be arranged and presented in a way that can capture the attention of the students (see Wagenschein 1956; 1977). In this symposium, we wish to explore this pivotal aspect of education in ways that reflect the multifaceted and complex process that lies behind any presentation of subject matter, while attempting to escape the usual reductive and outcome-oriented approaches to these challenges.

The three papers and the response circle the issue from different starting points yet attempt to outline new ways to think about the use of examples in education and, given the centrality of this aspect, education itself.

Education is a field that concerns the commonness of the world and teaching can be viewed as a gift given to the young generation. However, the world tackles difficult matters, where injustice and conflicts are present in different ways, in schools and outside it. War, poverty, atrocities and inequality are a part of our common world. In my contribution to the symposium on Korsgaard’s book Retuning education (2024), I will give a response to when that which is put on the table, the example, consists of sentimental narratives of injustice or conflicts (cf. Hållander 2020, Zembylas 2023). I will do so by doing an emotional reading. We all use examples, within philosophy, teaching and in daily life telling stories that exemplify what is presented. Examples constitute a didactic and ontological singularity, which speaks for itself (Agamben 2009, Hållander 2024). To give an example (in teaching) is a complex act, since “what the example shows is its belonging to a class, but for this very reason the example steps out of its class in the moment it exhibits and delimits it” (Agamben, 2009, s. 18). An example, stands for itself, speaks of itself, but in this singularity, it is also related to that which stands alongside it. This relatedness of the example allows for the possibility to create a knowability (Agamben 2009, Hållander 2024). Education is a matter of placing objects, and ideas in front of the students, so “that they are invited to touch, taste, smell, listen to, think about. Put simply, they are invited to study them” (Korsgaard 2024, p. 5). Teaching examples therefore concerns and creates understandings and knowability. Sometimes this understanding and knowability is emotional. Scholars in various fields of the humanities and the social sciences have explored the significance of affects and emotions in different educational settings (cf. Zembylas 2023). For example, sentimental narratives are used to invoke empathetic feelings, and create not only feelings but also shape identities and formations of ‘us and them’ (Ahmed 2006). Through emotions we react, and act. Dealing with students’ emotions is a part of teachers’ work, and different examples can evoke different emotions (Zembylas 2023, Hållander 2020). In my contribution to the symposium, I will argue how emotions and affective logics of examples of injustice and atrocities can be addressed pedagogically in critical rather than sentimental ways.

Agamben, Giorgio. (2009) The signature of all things: On method. Zone Books. Ahmed, Sarah. (2004) The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press. Hållander, Marie. (2024) Exemplets didaktik: singularitet och subjektivitet i religionsundervisning. Speki. Nordic Philosophy and Education Review. Hållander, Marie. (2020) The Pedagogical Possibilities of Witnessing and Testimonies Through the Lens of Agamben. Palgrave Macmillan,. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55525-2_5 Korsgaard, Morten. (2024) Retuning Education: Bildung and Exemplarity Beyond the Logic of Progress. Routledge. Zembylas, Michalinos. (2023) Challenging sentimental narratives of ‘victims’ and ‘perpetrators’ in postcolonial settings: thinking with and through affective justice in comparative education, Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education, 53:7,1152-1169, DOI: 10.1080/03057925.2021.2017766

To discuss Korsgaard's (2024) argument, we want to rethink the ideas of Martin Wagenschein (2010) in view of Hannah Arendt’s (1961) conceptualisation of education as the introduction of newcomers to the old world. Wagenschein frames his ideas as didactical and introduces the notion of entry point or Einstieg to criticize the widely acknowledged principle of the learning ladder. We argue that his idea of Einstieg as the starting point into a domain of knowledge is not only fundamental for teaching, but also revolutionary for educational theory as such. The Einstieg serves as an example, but a particular one – we would argue – i.e., it is the thing that a teacher invites her pupils to study together. Therefore, as Wagenschein reminds us, it has to be complex enough to contain a mystery of some kind, an aspect that is unknown, concealed, and therefore, interesting, attractive, if not seductive. The reason for a teacher and her pupils to study this thing is not to acquire some predetermined knowledge, competence, or skills. What is at stake is what is opened by this entry point. This thing is the path through which pupils enter a particular domain of our common world. Studying it allows them to look around and find other interesting matters to study. Perhaps – with time – they will find this domain (mathematics, chemistry, history, poetry, woodcraft, etc.) their habitat. Teaching focused on the thing studied together with pupils requires therefore to lose time and to lose oneself in it: to “grow roots” and “linger” in a thing. This goes counter to the rush that characterizes curriculum-centred teaching focused on ticking the boxes of subsequent themes being delivered. This also goes counter to the neoliberal personalised learning strategies focused on the most efficient way to install new functionalities in the cognitive apparatus of an individual child. In addition, it differs from the liberal student-centred pedagogies focused on children’s needs and talents. Hence, we will present Wagenschein's exemplarist proposal as a clear case of a thing-centred pedagogy. Our analysis is fully in line with Arendt, for whom education is essentially about responding to the condition of natality, meaning that it concerns the meeting of an old and a new generation. Wagenschein adds to this that teaching also always starts with a thing, and orients itself around the thing, i.e., the entry point to our common world.

Arendt, H. (1961). The Crisis in Education. In Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought. The Viking Press: New York Korsgaard, Morten. (2024) Retuning Education: Bildung and Exemplarity Beyond the Logic of Progress. Routledge. Wagenschein, M. (2010) ‘Teaching to Understand: On the Concept of the Exemplary in Teaching’ in Westbury, I., Hopmann, S. & Riquarts, K. eds. Teaching as a Reflective Practice: The German Didaktik Tradition. Mahwah-London: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Publishers, pp. 161-175

The middle voice denotes a grammatical construction that is virtually absent from English not least because our “somewhat stubborn ordering of subject-verb-object” (Standish 2018, 10) leads to a binary presumption of agency: we act or are acted upon; we are agents or patients; active or passive (Lewin 2011). This grammatical bind forces English thinking and discourse down rather narrow channels. For instance, in the philosophy of technology we schizophrenically leap from asserting our agency (it is up to us how we use machines) to lamenting our impotence before almighty autonomous technology (Lewin 2006). We struggle to express, or even conceive, of a more nuanced interplay between human agency and the ‘agency’ (or as Heidegger put it, ‘das Geschick’) of technology (Heidegger 1977). Similarly, philosophers of religion have tended to assert that an experience of ‘God’ is either a projection of the human subject (in which case false), or a revelation in which the subject is rendered passive - consider William James’ classic definition of religious experience (James 1902). We struggle to conceptualise a harmonisation between the speculations of the religious subject, and the revelations that may thereby occur (Dupré 1998). There is, in short, an insensitivity concerning how experience, thought and language operate in a space between ‘subject’ and ‘object’, between thought and being. That insensitivity risks occluding insights about the nature of technology, religion, or, as I will focus on here, education. Korsgaard’s book (2024) is sensitised to the possible constructions of thought that language brings forth, to inhabit a middle register: education is described here in terms of (re)tuning and resonance through exemplarity. Resonance isn’t something that an agent does, nor do they only undergo resonance. It is active and passive: naming something that takes place between person and world. For Korsgaard resonance is at the heart of the educational relation precisely because education is relational. Building on this argument, I will show how the concept of attention, also key to education and exemplarity, is not something that agents simply control (either by demanding or paying attention). Rather ‘attention’ names something that takes place in a middle realm (Lewin 2014). Through the evocation of the archaic term ‘behold’ I will show how the relations between the three corners of the educational triangle, educator, student and world (Friesen and Kenklies 2022) are brought to life through a trialectic of beholding in which examplarity plays a key role.

Dupré, L. (1998) Religious Mystery and Rational Reflection. Eerdmans. Friesen, N and Kenklies, K. (2022) Continental pedagogy & curriculum. In Tierney, Rob and Rizvi, Fazal and Ercikan, Kadriye, eds. International Encyclopedia of Education. Elsevier, Amsterdam, pp. 245-255. Heidegger, M. (1977) The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. Harper and Row. James, W. (1902) The Varieties of Religious Experience. Longmans, Green and Co. Korsgaard, M. (2024) Retuning Education: Bildung and Exemplarity Beyond the Logic of Progress. Routledge. Lewin, D. (2006) Freedom and Destiny in the Philosophy of Technology. New Blackfriars, 87(1011), 515–533. Lewin, D. (2011) The middle voice in Eckhart and modern continental philosophy. Medieval Mystical Theology, 20 (1). pp. 28-46. Lewin, D. (2014) Behold: silence and attention in education. Journal of Philosophy of Education, 48 (3). pp. 355-369. Standish, P. (2018) Language, translation, and the hegemony of English. Tetsugaku. International Journal of the Philosophical Association of Japan, 2 pp. 1-12.