Learning and teaching
If learning is bringing out something of the learner, it implies that all knowledge is already somehow inside the student. This might work with regards to skills that are physical or practical like cycling or even a clinical skill like drawing blood. Surely if you are learning a more academic subject like physics or chemistry or even maths there is no way to ‘draw this out’ of the learner, since the knowledge has never been a part of them.
Teaching and learning are different things, according to Biesta (Biesta 2012). Where learning is more focussed around the learner and more individual with the teacher as a bystander or resource, on the side line. Learning is explained as an individual process, where the learner decides what and how to learn something new. In consequence, the teacher in this scenario is downgraded to a facilitator, someone who is present but doesn’t necessarily have an active role in the process unless needed by the learner.
Teaching on the other hand is the process the teacher has to navigate different aims in teaching as well as the means to teach. The aims are described as the “domains of educational purpose”: the qualification, socialisation and subjectification of education, but whichever aims the teacher is engaged in, there is always the hidden curriculum; that which is being taught without intent. The teacher then has to walk a tight rope between these aims by using their own judgement as to which educational aim should be considered (most) and in consequence, which one is not. Whilst keeping this in mind, the teacher also has to choose which means are being used to accomplish the teaching in the specific environment with the students at the time. If all this can be accomplished, teaching can take place if the teacher can introduce something radically new to the student, rather than drawing something out that is already there, Biesta calls this “The gift of teaching”. (Biesta 2012) This can only work if both the student and the teacher are in the right place at the right time and these circumstances can be created when teaching takes place as described above.
The next part of Biesta’s paper is closely related to the critical posthumanism which Bayne uses as the basis for her article (Bayne 2015). It is the idea that teaching is an interaction between the student and the teacher or the self and the other. When new knowledge comes to us, we have three options, according to Biesta; we can try to resist it, we can embrace it and in the process loose ourselves or we can try to find the “frustrating” middle ground where we have an ongoing conversation with the ‘other’ whether human or non-human This middle ground is where education takes place and this is why we need teachers, not facilitators. (Biesta 2012)
Although I think Biesta makes some good points about the importance of education versus learning, his description of education taking place is on par with a baby being born: a miracle. If the teacher has to bring all these elements together, with 25 children in a class at once, it is unlikely that much teaching takes place.
Sian Bayne (2015) What’s the matter with ‘technology-enhanced learning’? Learning, Media and Technology, 40:1, 5-20, DOI: 10.1080/17439884.2014.915851
Biesta, G. (2012). Giving teaching back to education: responding to the disappearance of the teacher. Phenomenology & Practice, 6(2), pp. 35-49.
Good point on the definition of learning – puts Socrates and his notion of learning as recollecting back in his barrel!
This is a good summary of the implications of Biesta’s position on teaching. I would wonder whether the balance between the different purposes of education is consciously pursued by the teacher? Socialisation and subjectification may be often unconsciously pursued – part of that hidden curriculum. There will be instances where the teacher is actively working at socialisation and subjectification but perhaps is more often particularly focused on the qualification purpose?
This distinction between learning and education is not easy or particularly clear. Could it be that when loosing yourself to new knowledge, the pupil is not learning (beyond memorising) and so may be attaining the qualification purpose and, to a degree, the socialisation but failing to enhance their subjectification. While frustrating middle involves constructing knowledge (so learning in a constructivist sense) and in so-doing enhancing their socialisation and subjectification?
This is a well-crafted and well-argued post.