I sit on the edge of the bed of my youngest daughter and read the fairy tale of the Three Billy Goats Gruff. My little four-year-old daughter has heard this story thousands of times and simply loves it. In my eagerness to create a good story and a good setting I add some personal description to the story. Then she who is thrilled with the story makes a strange face and corrects my telling: “No, mama, it is not like that. (...) You have to tell the truth”. Indo-Pacific Journal of Phenomenology , Volume 11, Edition 1 May 2011, 59-67. (shrink)

Educational practice is concerned in profound ways with what is pedagogically good and right for children, and as parents and teachers we intend to help each child to cultivate his or her personal and educational potential in a human fashion. In the spirit of ancient Aristotle and Plato, Continental pedagogues and philosophers have for centuries explored the meaning of pedagogical practice/praxis and of the pedagogical good, the quality of both being regarded not as a means to an educational end, but (...) as the end itself. But what, indeed, is the pedagogical good, and what is the significance of the pedagogical good for students? Somehow we know the good, and yet we know it not. We recognize the good experientially, but the real meaning of what we intuit eludes our grasp. So how do we explore this elusive pedagogical quality - and is it possible to explore it? Based on phenomenological interviews with both young students and adults recalling episodes from school, as well as artistic narratives, this paper aims to illuminate experiential aspects of the pedagogical good and to reflect on the significance of the good in terms of pedagogical relational practice. It is suggested that the pedagogical good is not a quality that we as teachers can possess, or do, or practise, but rather a relational force beyond our pedagogical practice that opens up the world to children and preconditions the pedagogical relation. (shrink)

Neoliberal assaults upon public education have been grounded upon the supposition that schools are failing to prepare students to respond to local and global economic needs and realities. The result has left the relational between pupils and teachers as a taken-for-granted practice. Lived experiences often can show and capture the unexpressed in taken for granted moments. This discussion presents teaching as relational moments, shared between beginning teachers and pupils. We employ a phenomenological sensitivity as we unravel the anecdotal evidence to (...) bring into language a “lived through” dimension of human relations. As teacher educators, we ask: what is experienced when relationality is the focus for beginning teachers? The importance of this question is due to the prevalence of neoliberal forces that now guide, and to large extent, control what it means to teach in schools across Canada. In an effort to understand this emerging view of teaching, we explore what four preservice teachers from Nova Scotia experienced in becoming teachers, as they completed their final Field Experience in Bergen, Norway. We share these anecdotal representations to help teachers see how the relational informs identity in becoming a teacher and allows teacher educators to deconstruct the “taken-for-granted-ness” of teaching stuck in the rational-technical model. (shrink)

Educational practice is concerned in profound ways with what is pedagogically good and right for children, and as parents and teachers we intend to help each child to cultivate his or her personal and educational potential in a human fashion. In the spirit of ancient Aristotle and Plato, Continental pedagogues and philosophers have for centuries explored the meaning of pedagogical practice/praxis and of the pedagogical good, the quality of both being regarded not as a means to an educational end, but (...) as the end itself. But what, indeed, is the pedagogical good, and what is the significance of the pedagogical good for students? Somehow we know the good, and yet we know it not. We recognize the good experientially, but the real meaning of what we intuit eludes our grasp. So how do we explore this elusive pedagogical quality – and is it possible to explore it? Based on phenomenological interviews with both young students and adults recalling episodes from school, as well as artistic narratives, this paper aims to illuminate experiential aspects of the pedagogical good and to reflect on the significance of the good in terms of pedagogical relational practice. It is suggested that the pedagogical good is not a quality that we as teachers can possess, or do, or practise, but rather a relational force beyond our pedagogical practice that opens up the world to children and preconditions the pedagogical relation. (shrink)