Mollenhauer and Preservice Teacher Reflection: Curriculum, Relation, and Upbringing

• In Event: Roundtable Session 6
  In Roundtable Session: Culture and Upbringing: Introducing a 20th-Century Classic to Theory and Practice

Abstract

Teacher education in North America largely ignores the existential and relational aspects of "pedagogy" –a term understood here as designating interpersonal practices arising between teachers and children. Mollenhauer encourages us to return to the past, to connections now forgotten, in order to understand education anew in both its challenging complexity and "unspecialized" (Galvin & Todres, 2007) relationality. In this way, he hopes to also renew the tradition of "Bildung" or "formation:" the experience of shaping oneself, the world around one, and of being shaped by others –experiences central to growth in childhood, but also occurring throughout one’s life. In doing this, Mollenhauer raises many questions for teachers and parents concerning their responsibilities in the upbringing and education of children. Drawing on the third chapter in Mollenhauer's Forgotten Connections, "Representation: Selecting what to convey," this presentation considers Mollenhauer’s ideas in the light of two pre-service teachers’ reflections. These reflections initially underscore student-teachers' preoccupation with curriculum and the 'technical" aspects of teaching. These reflections further suggest that, through particularly pedagogical means of reflection, these students can become increasingly sensitive to the relational and inter-personal aspects of pedagogy.

Mollenhauer explains that since the Renaissance, Western education has confronted teachers and parents with the "fundamental historical problem of pedagogical 'representation.'" This refers to the education of children primarily via "a huge montage of images and representations which are not 'the things themselves' but that instead 'point out' things and phenomena" –processes in which children are learning only indirectly, through preselected and abstracted images and texts. How can we responsibly select and order these curricular elements? How can we relate to children to sustain their interest in this rigid and "inauthentic" world of representation?

Mollenhauer insists that planning and curriculum are, in themselves, not enough. Student-teachers may similarly question their reliance on this same "massive arsenal of educational contents, methods and aims;" and they can be encouraged to reflect on their relation to pupils and on the relational aspect of teaching itself. How can teacher training counteract the hegemony of the "instrumental" and "curricular" in education, and work to restore forgotten and unspecialized practices of upbringing and the values of Bildung?

Mollenhauer’s thought and biography both offer examples of pedagogically attuned ways for adults to be with children –not simply facilitating their achievement of pre-set goals, but instead helping "people, and above all youth, to find the path of their Bildung… [their] way of the self." Mollenhauer's intention was to create a pedagogic space allowing both students and student-teachers to "be and become themselves;" and he explains that this occurs "in the minutest but indispensable moments of all pedagogical relationships between teacher and student" –times and places clearly irreducible to rationalized means of delivery and measured academic outcomes that are today so dominant in teacher training and educational discourses.

References:

Galvin, K. & Todres, L. (2007). "The Creativity of 'Unspecialization:' A Contemplative Direction for Integrative Scholarly Practice." Phenomenology & Practice 1(1), 31-46.

Author

• Andrew Foran, St. Francis Xavier University