Klaus Mollenhauer’s Hermeneutics

Posted on June 29, 2013 by friesenn

… and his refusal of descriptive phenomenology

[slideshare id=23613926&doc=mollenhauersrefusal-130628061753-phpapp02]

Audio/slides for a presentation I recently gave at a conference on education and phenomenology at the Humboldt University, Berliln.

Here’s the full text.

In this presentation, I undertake an informal reconstruction of Klaus Mollenhauer’s hermeneutics and also in a sense, of what could be called his “phenomenology.” This reconstruction is based on Mollenhauer’s late work and particularly on Forgotten Connections: On Culture and Upbringing. Especially in Forgotten Connections, Mollenhauer explicitly speaks of hermeneutics as it relates to the subject. He also enacts a kind of historical and cultural hermeneutics in this text. Through this working-out of hermeneutics as both subjectivity and method, Mollenhauer sketches out, often by what he does not say, a kind of refusal of descriptive phenomenology as the study of lived experience, particularly as it might relate to children. Mollenhauer points out the limits of intersubjective description and recognition by emphasizing the mutual exclusivity of subjectivity on the one hand, and intersubjective communication and description on the other.

Posted in Klaus Mollenhauer, Presentation, Writing | Leave a comment

Wandering Star: The Image of the Constellation in Benjamin, Giedion & McLuhan

Posted on June 2, 2013 by friesenn

Did Walter Benjamin’s powerful metaphor of the “constellation” wind up becoming the titular figure in Marshall McLuhan’s Gutenberg Galaxy? Benjamin and McLuhan actually have something in common besides a shared interest in recent material histories. This commonality is a personal relationship and great admiration for historian Sigfried Giedion, who coined the term “anonymous history,” who Benjamin met in Paris while working on his Arcades Project, and who McLuhan came to know early in his own career.

[slideshare id=22221125&doc=theconstellationautosaved1-130530190813-phpapp02]

EXCERPT: “The purpose of this presentation is to trace the metaphor of the constellation in the materialist modernism of Benjamin and Giedion to the more conservative theoretical constructions of McLuhan, viewing it as a kind of “travelling concept,” as Mieke Bal has described: an elastic idea or metaphor, offering “a site of debate, awareness and tentative exchange.” As Martin Jay points out, this metaphor of the constellation also travelled from Benjamin via Theodore Adorno to America and back to Europe, to re-emerge in Adorno’s postwar writings while at he was the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research. As Jay explains, in the context of this exchange, the term constellation signified “a juxtaposed rather than integrated cluster of changing elements that resist reduction to a common denominator, essential core, or generative first principle” (1984, pp. 14-15). These characteristics also generally apply to the term “constellation” as I consider it here. In the instance of travel that is my principle focus, Giedion serves as an indispensable conduit between Benjamin and McLuhan.”

UPDATED: A draft paper based on this talk is available here.

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Learning Analytics: Where's it been & where it's going

Posted on May 26, 2013 by friesenn

Been working on a paper on still-emerging field and technology of learning analytics. Although last year’s Horizon Report gave it a “time-to-adoption horizon” of 2-3 years, it still has a way to go before there are products and findings that are reviewed and available in practice.

Both actual and potential applications of learning analytics can be represented through the diagram below, which maps out both the roles and functions that could be involved.

This paper, available here (pdf), also warns that the modest gains that could actually be made from learning analytics can easily be undermined by overselling it as a panacea for persistent educational challenges. It will not result in systems automatically customizing instruction to individual learning profiles and styles (if such things exist); but it could make blended and distance strategies a bit more response and reliable.

BTW: I would love to see this paper undergo peer review, and –as appropriate– publication for a wider audience!

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Talking of "the Self" in Education and Ed. Psych – AERA 2013

Posted on April 30, 2013 by friesenn

I gave this presentation (audio recorded separately) to a packed room at AERA in San Francisco. The panel session was titled “Dewey and the Mind: Exploring Psychological and Neurological Implications of Dewey’s Work”

 Over the past century or more, the language associated with education and pedagogy has changed considerably. I sketch out an overview of these changes, focusing on the field of educational psychology, and beginning with the work of Dewey on the one hand, and Behaviourism on the other. I include the vocabulary of the ‘Learning Sciences’ which sees itself as being centrally informed by the neurosciences. I focus on the notion of ‘the self’ in educational psychology. The term Bildung is central to this psychology, particularly as it is articulated in Dewey’s early textbook titled simply “psychology.” Bildung has been variously translated as edification, formation or growth.

[slideshare id=20215782&doc=bildungeducationallanguage1-130429185659-phpapp01]

The presentation covers Dewey, Thorndike, Bandura and Klaus Mollenhauer. You can download the text of this presentation here: https://archive.org/download/BildungAERA/Bildung%20AERA.pdf

Posted in Bildung, History, Klaus Mollenhauer, The Self | Leave a comment

CFP: Special issue of Phenomenology & Practice on "Being Online"

Posted on April 13, 2013 by friesenn

Phenomenology & Practice announces a special issue devoted to the phenomenological description and exploration of the experience of being online in educational or pedagogical contexts. The intent of this special issue is to focus particularly on epistemology of practice, on practice as pathic knowledge and/or as tact, unfolding in online contexts. These aspects of practice may be revealed through relations of the self to oneself or to another, and as situated in both virtual and physical worlds –in terms of the existential experience of lived (and extended) body, lived time, lived space, and lived relation. Sensitivity to self and other, and to experience in all of its dimensions requires a shift from commonplace terminology to vocabularies more evocative of experiential nuance. In the case of the often jargon-riddled discourses of online technologies or “environments,” we believe that this is particularly important. Such a shift may even begin with the recognition that these online contexts are not so much “environments” (causal configurations of software, hardware and other factors) as they are “primordially linguistic” worlds: “To have a world means to have an orientation (Verhalten) toward it…. to have a world…is to have language. The concept of world is thus opposed to the concept of environment…” (Gadamer 2004, 440-441).

Developing written accounts of lived experiences in experiential worlds is an integral part of understanding the significance of such experiences. To that end, the editors of this special issue are soliciting scholar-writer-practitioners who wish engage rigorously in descriptive and interpretive phenomenological writing intended to illuminate themes of online pedagogical experience. Is this experience and are these themes similar to or different from those described in face-to-face classrooms (e.g., as described in Phenomenology & Practice 6[2])? How, for example, might one be “called” by the voiceless words of another online? How is appropriate receptivity, passivity or attuned pedagogical action manifest in the asynchronous world of words of the online class discussion? How might a glance of recognition of another be directed via a Webcam? Description and interpretation of these and related questions and experiential moments are strongly encouraged for this special issue.

At the same time, descriptive and reflective phenomenological writing of other orientations (transcendental, existential, experiential, linguistic, hermeneutic, semiotic, ethical) is also welcome. This descriptive inquiry can take as its subject, for example, the experience of “being online” as a teacher or a student, being simultaneously (or alternatingly) in the screen and embodied in a lab, classroom, café or elsewhere, being engaged with an interface in experiences ranging from flow to interruption, or the emergence of personal, formative knowledge online.

Submissions may be sent to Norm.Friesen@gmail.com and Stacey.Irwin@millersville.edu by August 30 2013.

 

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Special Issue of CJLT on Philosophy & Education

Posted on April 8, 2013 by friesenn

A special issue of the Canadian Journal of Learning and Technology / La revue canadienne de l’apprentissage et de la technologie co-edited by Erika Smith and myself, is out.

This issue has some great papers, including a short editorial by Andrew Feenberg, an excellent phenomenological study by Derek Tannis (on “Technology help giving and seeking”) and a paper on “Shape Shifting Smart Phones,” an actor-network analysis by Peggy Jubien.

Check out the whole issue here: http://cjlt.csj.ualberta.ca/index.php/cjlt/issue/view/81

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Text to Speech (and back again) – Media in Education

Posted on April 8, 2013 by friesenn

This paper explores some readings and questions I’ve been working on for quite awhile. What is the relation of present-day educational media and technologies to the most basic and fundamental media of communication: text and speech?

Unlike the forms that we usually associate with educational technology and educational media today, there is a wide-ranging history and mythology belonging to text and speech as forms of communication. The origin of Speech goes back to pre-history, and the beginnings of writing constitute a kind of vanishing point for the start of history itself. (Pictured to the right is the legendary, four-eyed minister Cangjie who is said to have invented writing in China –and whose name now designates a system of input used in Chinese computers and cell phones.)

This paper begins with a brief survey of the mythology behind text and speech; it goes on to explore two dominant traditions (referenced in an earlier posting here)  that connect these with more recent media innovation. These two traditions are the rationalist and the romantic.

I believe that of the two, the romantic is the most relevant today. Although it can be traced back to Rousseau’s privileging of the “natural” language and culture of the child, this tradition today connects childhood and early language learning with technological proficiency. This is illustrated in Prensky’s notion of “digital natives” (based on an analogy between technology and “unaccented, natural” childhood language learning). This tradition also includes the work of Papert and Shank, who insist that all learning should be like “learning to talk” –learning without explicitly being taught. It extends more broadly to those who believe that a type of  “natural,” informal learning (evident in early childhood) needs to be leveraged throughout education.

I think that writing, however, points to a different type of learning. This learning that follows the structure  and pedagogy implied in the written sign, rather than that of the spoken word. The written sign is artificial; it relates arbitrarily to the sounds of speech that (unlike text) we learn “naturally.” These written signs have to be recognized and manipulated as arbitrary pieces, not as entire units that are meaningful and useful in and of themselves. In short, they have to be taught; they imply a kind of learning that relies on artificial rewards and conditions. This is the kind of learning familiar to us from the traditional classroom, rather than one that occurs in infancy or early childhood.

Posted in History, Media Theory, Writing | Leave a comment

Curriculum, Instrumental Rationality and Tact

Posted on March 19, 2013 by friesenn

A presentation I’ve given in Leipzig at a conference on comparative curriculum and didactics. It outlines some of the basics of curriculum design and lesson planning in the North American context;

In this presentation, I will describe curriculum, lesson plans and instructional theory in Canada and the USA. Over the past 50 years, the theory associated with these terms has become increasingly specific and prescriptive (rather than necessarily more critical or reflective). This allows my presentation to follow a roughly chronological in order. At the same time it allows me to move from general to specific, or from the macro through meso to micro levels of planning.

[slideshare id=17380558&doc=lessonplanningandcurriculumincanadaonline-130319154353-phpapp01]

Read the full text of the presentation; download the handout/template.

Posted in History, Pädagogik, Presentation, Writing | Leave a comment

Reviews for Forgotten Connections & The Place of the Classroom

Posted on March 1, 2013 by friesenn

Two  reviews are in for a couple of my book projects:

The first is for The Place of the Classroom and the Space of the Screen (Peter Lang, 2011), which has just been reviewed by Robert Rosenberger at Georgia Tech for the journal Human Studies.

The second is an advance review for Forgotten Connections: On Culture and Upbringing (Routledge, forthcoming) by Tone Saevi of the Norwegian Academy in Bergen for the open, peer-reviewed journal, Phenomenology & Practice.

Here’s a quote from the first review:

Norm Friesen’s The Place of the Classroom and the Space of the Screen is an
excellent example of the practical value of phenomenology. Through careful
analysis of the experience of online and real-world education, Friesen draws out the
sometimes subtle and sometimes gaping differences between these two educational
contexts…  The [text] should be of interest both to those working on the topic of educational technologies specifically and those interested in the phenomenology of technology more generally. The book should be approachable to a wide range of readers, and not just those already versed in phenomenology.

(See: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10746-013-9266-0)

 

Here’s a passage from the second:

The upcoming translation of the book into English…includes a thorough, informative and well-written introduction by Norm Friesen. …readers will find that the book is as multi-layered and aporetic as it is provocative and different. These readers should read and reflect on the book twice or more. It has taken me more than 15 years to try to understand what Mollenhauer actually says and the implications for my thoughts and practice. He provokes and stirs me. His thoughts make me helpless and vulnerable, but at the same time also passionate and curious to understand more.
(See: http://www.phandpr.org/index.php/pandp/article/view/119)

Posted in Klaus Mollenhauer, Phenomenology, Writing | Leave a comment

The Disappearing Teacher –& Teaching

Posted on February 17, 2013 by friesenn

A new, special issue of the free, online journal, Phenomenology & Practice, is out.

The theme of this issue is “the call of teaching.”

One excellent article in the issue is by Gert Biesta. It looks at a question that has long been of key importance in educational technology and in “learning theory.” This is the disappearance of teaching and the teacher (or his or her replacement by technology, as pictured above). Biesta develops some excellent points that are also related to arguments that I’ve made elsewhere regarding “the animal method of learning” and the new “language of learning.” He writes of

the disappearance—or at least the erosion—of a certain understanding of teaching and the teacher, [and of] an understanding in which it can be acknowledged that teachers are there to teach… [This is due, in part to] the language of learning and with the wider ‘learnification’ (Biesta, 2010a) of educational discourse …that… makes it far more difficult, if not impossible, to ask the crucial educational questions about content, purpose and relationships. The language of learning is unable to capture these dimensions partly because learning denotes a process that, in itself, is empty with regard to content and direction; and partly because learning, at least in the English language, is an individualistic and individualising term….

The language of learning, Biesta says, locates the teacher “at the same level as a book, the internet or any other ‘learning resource’ in that when we learn from such resources we go to them with our questions in order to find (our) answers.”

Through a series of cogent arguments, Biesta concludes that “…rather than to think of the school as a place for learning… we should think of it as a place for teaching. One can, after all, learn anywhere, but  …teaching is only ‘available’ in a very small number of places and the school is definitely one of them.

School, for Biesta, and also IMHO, is a context where content of teaching, the purpose of education and the relationships involved (between teacher and students, and among students) are all brought together. That’s at least one reason why this “pre-industrial institution” is still around in a post-industrial world.

There’s also plenty of other excellent articles in this special issue (11 in total)!

Posted in Pädagogik, Phenomenology, Writing | Leave a comment