ART IN RELATIONAL PEDAGOGY
(Contemporary confirmation of otherness in education)
If our self is like an unfinished novel, learning is like ink that dries slowly and is erased frequently; but even when it is erased, you can trace gentle prints of forgotten letters, words, and thoughts...
One of the most common insights of psychology, sociology, and anthropology is the idea that individual and collective identities develop in relation to each other as different, and in this process, the otherness is always subjected to the attempts of cultivation/domestication. For the purpose of this article I would like to start with Foucault’s thesis, that European culture restored its relationship to the problem of otherness according to its belief about the universal nature of a human’s rationality, and the so called normative sciences produced several modes of exclusion of all people that were marked as different in their lifestyle, way of thinking, and acting. According to Focault, the central point of this process was in the acceptance of Descarte’s faith in the universal rational method that was viewed as a starting point of the development of modern sciences (Foucault 1973; see also Kroflič 2007). Foucault’s other strong idea in his famous work Madness & Civilization. A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (1973) is the concept that art represents plenty of critical insights into those processes that enable us to recognize forms of practices of exclusion, but that also make us sensitive tothe ethical problems of those practices. Literature, theatre, visual arts, and later film and photography, are media that can be successfully used as educational tools in the field of identity development and moral education. In this article I want to present some new pedagogical ideas that confirm the readiness of the contemporary theory of education to rethink its classical relationship to otherness and its domestication as a central goal of education as socialization, and to show some structural characteristics of the art experience that confirm its crucial role in post-modern humanistic education.
Rupture in pedagogical tradition concerning relationship to otherness
According to many theorists of education, classical pedagogy defined the basic goal of education as a transmission of cultural patterns of knowledge and values (Kelly 1989). Education was defined as the practice of cultural transmission, or as the conformation of the pupil into the existing body of knowledge and beliefs, so the starting point of any pedagogy (or other normative sciences) was a definition of criteria of “normality”, and its decision on how to treat deviations from this basic criterion. As we can read in Foucault’s research on madness (Foucault 1973) or discipline and punishment (Foucault 1991), European cultural tradition developed several modes of exclusion of groups of people that could not accept this basic cultural criteria[1]. Of course we can recognize in European cultural tradition some exceptions to this trend – mostly in the field of art[2] and religion[3] – but it seems that humanistic sciences as our most rationalized form of discourse at their inception in the nineteenth century completely followed this trend of exclusion of all deviances from common rationality. From these cases we can draw a conclusion that in classical normative sciences otherness was recognized as a problem, and not as a fact of diversity of every individual, or even more so – as an advantage of individual identity development and plural democratic and inclusive communities.
Because art (especially literature and music) was from antiquity and for centuries recognized as a core of humanistic education (septem artes liberales), its “pedagogical role” was usually reduced to the media of transmitting existing cultural patterns and ideological standpoints, or to say this in another way – a utilitarian criteria. Already Plato had demanded a selection of myths/stories for different bodies of society, when the message of an art object was not appropriate for the wider public. We can trace the same intention in Christian schools, and the same criteria was central in the period of growth of interest for the public, where an author’s fairy-tales were an important pedagogical tool (Charles Perrault and brothers Grimm from the seventeenth to the eighteenth century). From this historical insight we can accept a second hypothesis that the acceptance of aesthetics criteria of quality art in the field of their educational impacts on the development of humanity, demands a substantial change of view to humanistic educational goals concerning morality and identity development.
The turning point from classical pedagogy to a contemporary one coincides with the turn from modern to post-modern thought. The most important conceptual turn can be, according to Lyotard (1988), described as an incredulity of great narratives that also means the birth of the particularity and otherness of the rational subject as a cultural value. In my opinion this value orientation can be found “under” almost all categories, for contemporary pedagogy involves important humanistic concepts like moral approaches and ethical theories, societal values and concepts of a just community, and of course, aesthetics approaches.
In the field of developmental psychology searching for principles of moral development, we can find two new trends: from Piaget, Kohlberg, and Selman’s defining of the universal principles of development of moral standards or social roles, that depends on the development of a child’s mind, to Vigotsky’s notion on the social dimension of language and thought, that confirms the importance of the quality of social relations of a child with its parents, other adults, and also peers and texts (Vigotsky 1978); and from the concept of a child as infantile and egocentric to a morally competent child, who builds his social competences through concrete interrelations in social space (Marjanovič-Umek and Zupančič 2001; Kroflič 2003).
The second field that is important for the philosophy of education is that of political theories and ethics. As a central turning point in this field we have to mention J. Rawls corrections of the ethical and political concept of justice, that confirms the duty of society to give “each person an opportunity to have an equal right to the most extensive scheme of equal basic liberties compatible with similar schemes of liberties for others” (Rawls 1999, p. 53 and 266), but in spite of the principle of the equality of all members of the just society, morality pre-supposes the primacy of the benefits of the weakest individual (The second principle: “Social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are /.../ to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged, consistent with the just savings principle…; ibid., p. 266).
Rawls theory of justice provoked several attempts to rethink different factors of moral development and societal ethics, that all have in common describing the importance of sensitivity for social context and openness to individual and cultural differences, of moral subjectivity, and a societal context of justice and solidarity. We have to mention communitarian critics of the liberal concept of justice that emphasizes the importance of the concept of common good (MacIntyre 1981) and the notion on the social nature of a human’s identity development (ibid., see also Bauman 2001 and Kroflič 2006). The other wave of critics that had an important influence on educational theories is the so called ‘ethics of care’. Its representatives first stressed the importance of gender and cultural differences on moral reasoning and acting (Gilligan 2001), and secondly, they showed the importance of care relations between a child and others – where the other can also be a value derived from artistic cultural representations (Noddings 1992). The third wave represents philosophers that were searching for the criteria of ideal discourse (Habermas) that confirmed the fact of differences among people who were involved in a common language; ethics demanded that every voice should be heard (Callan 1998), and the notion of searching for a kind of “ethical pidgin” (not extensive but a strong enough common language) and a hermeneutic understanding of others in discourse (Strike 1989).
If described theoretical investigations are searching for patterns of rational agreement in every conflict situation (or as this trend was described by the Slovenian theorist of education Z. Medveš, “searching for rational sufferableness of cohabitation”; Medveš 1991), we can find another theoretical stream on the breaking of the millennia, that grows from a supposition about radical otherness of the Other that can never be completely recognized, so we have to find a kind of “pre-ethical responsibility” toward the dignity of every human person.
We have to admit that even in traditional religions we can find a kind of double protection of morality, in a well known golden ethical rule on one side and a separate principle of dignity of human beings on the other side (see Declaration Toward a Global Ethics 1993). A similar double protection of morality can also be traced in two formulations of Kant’s categorical imperative (Kroflič 2007 a). What is new in some ethical theories on the rupture with modernity, especially in Levinas’ ethics, is a supposition that respect toward another’s face is both pre-discursive and pre-ethical. Ethics pre-supposes a theoretical argumentation of morality, while respectful relationships toward the face of the Other does not; Levinas claims even more, that only this personal attitude of a moral subject enables ethical consciousness: “...the reciprocity of this respect is not an indifferent relationship, such as serene contemplation, and is not the result, but condition of ethics. It is language, that is, responsibility. Respect attaches the just man to his associates in justice before attaching him to the man who demands justice.” (Levinas, The I and the totality, 1954; quoted from Levinas 2006, p. 30).
On this area of theoretical investigations, we can already find some pedagogical solutions. First, I would like to mention the new concept of responsibility as the ultimate goal of moral education that primarily does not mean a person’s attitude toward the social norm or ethical principle, but “...sensitive andrespectfulresponse to an existential call of associate, a personal commitment to respectful being and acting,and care for our life mission and consistent identity.” (Kroflič 2007 a, p. 61)This turning point in comprehension of responsibility demands a radical change of the method of moral education. Instead of subordinating a child to a set of social rules, we are first supporting social conditions for growth of the most authentic social relations (like love and friendship; see Haji and Cuypers 2005), and secondly, helping children to develop a relational response-ability and normative agency for pro-social activities, and later a sense of respect toward concrete persons (their faces) or activities (work, artistic expressions etc.), and the last step of moral education is to become aware of ethical principles and humanistic demands, concerning especially human rights and ecological values, and to learn how to use them as a basis for democratic negotiation in cases of interpersonal conflicts (Kroflič 2007 a). It is worth mentioning that similar conclusions can be found in H. Gardner’s new book Five minds for the future (2007), where in the field of morality he describes the need for the development of two separate minds – respectful and ethical – as one of the most important tasks for future education.
A second interesting pedagogical investigation is G. Biesta’s investigation of the basic principles of education for living in an inclusive society. He describes his ethical credo in further words: “Difference requires a different attitude toward plurality and otherness, one in which the idea of responsibility is more appropriate than the idea of knowledge, one in which ethics is more important than epistemology.” (Biesta 2006, p. 103); and concludes: “...to see the question of humanity of the human being as a radically open question, as something that has to be ‘achieved’ again and again, can help us to stay alert, particularly in the face of attempts to restrict what it means to be human and to lead the human life... Democracy itself is, after all, a commitment to a world of plurality and difference, a commitment to a world where freedom can appear.” (Ibid., p. 151)
Behind described notions on a respectful attitude in an inclusive environment, where art could form an important part of humanistic education, we can find the influence of the Russian thinker M. Bakhtin in relation to the development of social constructivism and relational pedagogy (see Bingham and Sidorkin 2004). This interesting connection will open a fruitful opportunity to defend a thesis about the importance of the aesthetical experience for human development in post-modernity.
According to A. Sidorkin (2002), despite the fact that Bakhtin never mentioned a word about postmodernism, he succeeded in developing epistemological and ontological backgrounds of the basic idea of post-modernity – the idea of otherness – that can be directly used as a theoretical background in contemporary pedagogy. The core of Bakhtin’s philosophy is the idea of polyphonic truth that is not just derived from the fact of existent different discourses (like in Lyotard’s vision), but it means that a diversity of voices exists in every individual consciousness, in every singular discourse, in every conception of truth, and also in every fruitful dialog among people. From this theoretical stand, he concludes: “The different is not an obstacle, but a condition of understanding, because /.../ to understand something means to embrace two or more incongruous views on the subject.” (Ibid., p. 92) Bakhtin developed his theory of polyphony in his famous study on the Dostoevsky novel Brothers Karamasov (1967), where he first criticizes the mono-logical concept of the modern philosophy and novel, and then builds a thesis on writing a polyphonic novel by creating protagonists that start to live a kind of autonomous life in the frame of a story, and from their different voices the writer (and later readers) can construct much more appropriate existential truths than in the “modern concept of the mono-logical message”.
If we transfer this idea to the field of pedagogy, we get some interesting insights. First is the importance of an engaged dialogue as the most basic form of education: “...education is only possible as dialogue, where different voices intensely interact, change, but never merge. A teacher /.../ task is neither to reduce diversity, nor to stand still watching diversity grow. Students obviously do not discover their diverse identities on their own... An Asian student, for instance, cannot figure out what it means to be an Asian in America without her or his White, Black, and Hispanic teachers. The point is not to know about someone else’s culture, but to help construct an individual understanding of it... If she or he does not discuss that identity at school, the identity does not exist at school. When teachers only listen and not talk back on the issues of identity /.../, they deny the student an important part of their identity. Diversity makes sense when it involves engagement.” (Sidorkin 2002, pp. 96-97)
The second important idea considers the role of otherness in educational dialog. As C. Chalier develops Levinas’ thesis on the Other as absolute difference, she warns us that Kantian moral subjects are likely to commit the error of seeing the other as their alter ego, therefore “… the other deserves my respect because of his or her rationality, his or her capability of being an autonomous person like myself,” and not because of “the otherness of the other” (Chalier 2002, p. 68). S. Todd finally claims that the Other is “infinitely unknowable”, but anyway susceptibility to absolute difference defines how we relate to each other; even more so, learning from the unknowable Other tells us who we really are (Todd 2003, p. 3 and 34). Or, as a Slovenian psychiatrist, and himself a person with special needs, has poetically expressed the same idea:“…there is no true otherness, because practically everybody is different in one way or another… Handicap and death are two conditions that disillusion dictators and keep the philosophers and ideologists of all kinds busy. Yes, they bring the elites of humankind down to earth, to at least one conclusion: that we are all in the same boat, and therefore equal – irreversibly equal in our differences.(Felc 1995, p. 95-96). From this theoretical frame we can make a pedagogical conclusion, that “...the best way to become aware of our otherness is, as Levinas would put it:Meeting the face of the Other as different, in the real world or in the expressive images of art!” (Kroflič 2007, in print).
This kind of theoretical stance toward education and the otherness has already found a place in the pedagogical paradigm, called relational pedagogy. From the manifesto of protagonists of relational pedagogy we can see a definite turn from the Enlightenment anthropological tradition in understanding self and otherness that also opens opportunities for a new understanding of art as pedagogical tool:
“- A relation is more real than the things it brings together. Human beings and non-human things (like art objects of performances; note by R. K.) acquire reality only in relation to other beings and things.
- The self is a knot in the web of multiple intersecting relations; pull relations out of the web, and find no self. We do not have relations; relations have us.
- Authority and knowledge are not something one has, but relations, which require others to enact.
- Human relations exist in and through shared practices.
- Relations are complex; they may not be described in single utterances. To describe a relation is to produce a multi-voiced text.