Abstract
This paper considers concepts of expectation and responsibility, and how these drive dialogic interactions between tutor and student in an age of marketised Higher Education. In thinking about such interactions in terms of different forms of exchange, the paper considers the philosophy of Martin Buber and Emmanuel Levinas on dialogic intersubjectivity, and an ethics of responsibility. This enables a richer understanding of the tutorial dialogue in particular, as both teaching and encounter. This has significant implications for education and for the idea of the tutorial as a space for encounter with the other through language. The paper argues that the university tutorial, rather than being considered a place only for the meeting of expectations, might be envisioned as a space for encounter with the unexpected. In considering the nature of the educational encounter in relation to an example from the film adaptation of Alan Bennett’s ‘The History Boys’, the paper concludes that the tutorial opens up the possibility for a mutual encounter with otherness. This positions the tutorial as a space of educational otherness—a Foucauldian heterotopia which rejects the expectation-bound economy of exchange, and which offers instead the possibility of an education marked by an economy of excess.
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Notes
Academy schools are state-funded schools in England that are directly funded by central government and are independent of direct control by local government.
The Manchester Enterprise Academy, for example, sponsored by Manchester Airport, promises to enrich its curriculum by including the study of business, travel and tourism, and the Academy’s teachers have attended the airport’s management development programme. See [online]. Available at: http://www.manchesterairport.co.uk/manweb.nsf/Content/manchsterenterpriseacademy, Accessed January 3rd 2014.
Understood very broadly as the 1:1 discussions between tutor and student. For other understandings of the ‘tutorial’, see Ashwin (2005).
In his postscript to the 1957 edition of I and Thou, Buber wrote of the ‘normative limitation’ of mutuality in human relations in the presence of a specific task or role, and conversely, the possibility of the fullness of mutuality in the absence of such tasks and roles. His postscript considers, amongst others, the learning relation between teacher and student, and how the relation between student and teacher might be conceived.
Levinas often uses the capitalised ‘Other’ to translate the French l’autrui, indicating an absolute relationship to another person; he uses ‘other’ for l’autre, though both usages are not entirely consistent.
Levinas used the term ‘substitution’ to describe how the self is hostage to the other (1981: 127).
A development of the now common review sites for products and services is found (for education) on internet sites such as ‘http://rateyourlecturer.co.uk/’.
There is a distinction here between ‘con-versation’ and ‘dis-cussion’ that the etymology highlights. The Latin roots indicate that in ‘con-versation’, we ‘turn’ (vertere) ‘with’ (cum) others. There is a sense of accord—and settlement—here that is entirely absent from conversation’s common synonym, ‘discussion’ with its roots in the Latin discutere meaning ‘to strike asunder’ and from dis (apart) and quartere (to shake).
The film’s action is set in the fictional Cutlers’ Grammar School in Sheffield in the early 1980s. A group of high achieving boys are completing an additional year to prepare for the Oxford or Cambridge entrance examinations and interview. Under the supervision of the ambitious Headmaster, the boys are taught by Hector for General Studies and Irwin, a contract teacher, who works alongside Dorothy Linott, the Deputy Head, to prepare them in History.
From the Greek heteros (other/different), and topos (place). See Foucault, M., (1986), ‘Of Other Spaces’, Diacritics 16, pp., 22–27.
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Fulford, A. Education: Expectation and the Unexpected. Stud Philos Educ 35, 415–425 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-015-9495-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-015-9495-y