Symposium Introduction: A Cross-National Dialogue about Education and Pedagogy

Abstract

This symposium features papers from scholars engaged in a cross-national study and dialogue about education and pedagogy. In a time of increasing politicization and instrumentalization of education, as well as increasing diversity and digitalization, we seek to go forward with education theorizing and practice by (re)considering education's scholarly, theoretical, and practical roots. The scholars in this symposium have engaged in hermeneutic readings of US education and curriculum theorizing in relation to Continental thinkers who directly and indirectly influenced their approach to education. By reading historical texts in the contemporary moment, we seek to emphasize the role of education theory in reconceiving pedagogy. The need for this task has been expressed in recent publications including Miranda Jefferson and Michael Anderson's Transforming Education, Bill Green and Per-Olof Erixon's Rethinking Education in a Global Era, among many others.¹ The main objective of this symposium is to bring breadth and depth to a study of education theorizing by drawing from the hermeneutic study of classic texts in the context of cross-national dialogue. We begin this introduction with a brief exploration of education studies in the US context, and then turn our attention to the German perspective on education studies. The last two sections explain our methodology and introduce the papers in this issue.

In the United States, educational theory and practice has been understood as a practical, applied field influenced by a wide range of disciplinary perspectives including sociology, anthropology, and psychology as well as politics. In the case of politics, preparation for work serves as a primary educational goal, and education more broadly is modeled in relation to particular social-normative rules that narrow its scope (for example, so-called “parents' rights”). As a consequence, we can observe a denigration of educational theory as well as a lack of respect for the pedagogical profession and scholarly discipline. One possibility for countering these trends, we believe, is to return to classical texts and authors who focused on fundamentals of educational theory in the early formation of the discipline.

The most prominent US education philosopher who worked on this neglect of education theorizing in a US context was John Dewey. Dewey's ideas were influenced by German thinkers who preceded him, and this dialectical engagement pervaded his philosophy. At the same time, his writings were also shaped by his pragmatic commitment to considering the usefulness of philosophy for addressing practical problems of society. Yet to some extent the focus on his pragmatism has obscured the Continental roots of Dewey's philosophy.

Several generations later in the field of curriculum studies, Ian Westbury and Stephan Hopmann organized an important series of meetings on curriculum and Didaktik in order to capture the core of the tradition of Didaktik and its relevance to English-language curricularists and teacher educators.² Leading curriculum theorists have argued that Dewey's ghost pervades the field³ while rival interest groups with disparate utopian visions have historically competed to control the curriculum in the United States.⁴ In this sense, Dewey's theory of education is frequently reduced to either instrumental or political interpretations of educational experience.⁵ While the instrumental interpretations tend to reduce Dewey's pedagogical vision to “effective” hands-on teaching and learning strategies, the political interpretations tend to reduce Dewey's commitments to democracy as an aspirational way of life toward a definite goal, as opposed to a process of continuous experimentation and inquiry.

Through our hermeneutic study and cross-national dialogue, we have come to understand that in addition to politics, an American proclivity to pragmatism is partly responsible for the contemporary situation in which education theory does not have a discipline of its own. A generative approach to education theorizing can be advanced by means of an intergenerational and comparative international dialogue that features hermeneutic readings of classic texts and considers the work of Dewey and other US educational theorists in relation to its Continental roots.

Studying the classics also helps break contemporary taboos and enables distancing from the current status of an academic discipline; these works force a consideration of alternatives and can help reshape the “thinking style” and the “cognitive habitus of the academic discipline.”⁷

Thus, we use hermeneutics as a methodology for our project and cross-national study as “a return to the essential generativity of human life, a sense of life in which there is always something left to say, with all the difficulty, risk, and ambiguity that such generativity entails.”¹⁰ As a research approach, hermeneutics offers possibilities of renewal as well as a generative approach to educational study and practice that is responsive to the multifaceted crises confronting contemporary education. Likewise, it opens up the discipline to the voices of other strands of thought, other cultures, and other ways of viewing the world, and seeks to do them justice in both understanding and in practice. In keeping with Hans-Georg Gadamer, we draw on hermeneutics in our “understanding[s] of something written … not [as] a repetition of something past but the sharing of a present meaning.” Our task has thus been (and remains) one of close reading, comparison, and actualization, of realizing the “contemporaneity with the present” of works that might be remote in time or place.¹¹

The contributors to this symposium have met in person in the United States and in Berlin, as well as in regular meetings and workshops via Zoom technology. Each of the first three papers in this symposium has been coauthored by one German and one US scholar, and the final paper in this collection further explains the German educational sciences. Through hermeneutic study and a cross-national dialogue, we have found that the Continental roots of US educational philosophy can be illuminated by returning to the “Hegelian deposit” and the Herbartian idea of “pedagogical tact” — the inspirations for Dewey's early philosophy of education. We have also found that the distinct vocabulary of education in other languages, especially German, provides a useful way of reframing certain US debates and educational reforms.

The first paper, Agnes Pfrang and Daniel Castner's “Rediscovery of Forgotten Dimensions of Pedagogical Practice from a Continental Perspective,” identifies a dearth in contemporary scholarship regarding the importance of educational theories for empirical educational research and elaborates some of the forgotten dimensions of pedagogy with regard to educational sciences. In contrast to psychological programs of test- or evidence-based and output-oriented educational research, their aim is to identify the “forgotten dimensions of pedagogical practice.” According to Dietrich Benner and Anja Kraus, science, politics, and quality assurance in education should not be satisfied with the regular measurement of the effects of control measures, performance comparisons, or the assignment of rankings.¹² In summary, the aim of this paper is to focus on the specificity of pedagogical relationships and learning atmospheres that are often ignored in the currently dominant models of empirical research in educational science, which seek to achieve validity, reliability, and objectivity through standardization.

The second article, Anja Kraus and Rose Ylimaki's “A Historical Introduction to Continental Pedagogics from a North American Perspective,” introduces the European Continental tradition of pedagogics.¹³ It begins with an overview of the Continental tradition and its main figures. Here, we find a philosophical and thus language-sensitive attitude toward the human, the child, as well as a specific pedagogical terminology, i.e., descriptions and interpretations about the reality of education, such as educational practices, goals, norms, and the organizational forms of educational institutions. John Dewey's educational theories exemplify the North American perspective on Continental pedagogics and its focus on the fundamental nature of knowledge, reality, and existence. Dewey's writings diverge notably from this tradition, as he integrated American pragmatism and an interest in the scientific method into his work — an interest that continues today to play a role in policy trends in the United States and elsewhere. Then again, Dewey took a critical stand toward instrumentalizing pedagogics for political aims. On this point, the German-born political philosopher Hannah Arendt agreed with him. Arendt can be seen as an example of a Continental perspective on philosophy that includes a strong warning to keep politics and education separate, and she relates to Dewey's argument against instrumentalization. The overall intention is to contribute to a renewal of a language for pedagogics by delineating a historical-philosophical perspective on this specific field of professional practice.

The third article, “Transformations of Choice and Diversity in Education: Bildung from Wilhelm von Humboldt through John Stuart Mill to Milton Friedman,” by Todd Alan Price and Ruprecht Mattig, highlights connections between Wilhelm Humboldt and John Stuart Mill with policy debates in the contemporary period. The authors suggest that examining the relationship between philosophy and education enlarges the conversation concerning who education is for, and what students should learn. We must ask ourselves what “diversity” and “choice in education” meant in the past and what they mean in the present. To do so, Price and Mattig first consider education in all of its diversity and ask what is foundational to education and its fundamental questions. Questions that educators are still struggling with were once examined in rich detail, as the authors point out; they wonder how educators might reorient our ideas (and ourselves) in current debates by reexamining the past. When we reconceptualize these terms, they contend, our language becomes less about political spectacle and virtue signaling, and more about education.

The symposium concludes with Cristoph Wulf's essay “Human Beings and Their Education from an Anthropological Perspective: Current Discourses in the Field of Educational Science in the German-Speaking World,” which examines some basic concepts of pedagogy and educational science in the German-speaking world, looking at education and socialization from the perspective of educational anthropology. The complex German concept of Bildung, in particular, can only be fully understood by means of a historical and philosophical analysis. Bildung emphasizes the active, individual, and subjective side of human learning and development. It encompasses the education or shaping of the body, the senses, and the emotions; it also involves ethical, social, and societal tasks. In the context of education for sustainable development and global citizenship education, it takes on new significance today because the learning processes it denotes address the issues of human complexity and interdependence.