Engaging and Experiencing Conflict in Public Pedagogy

• In Event: 46.023 - Becoming Public: A Symposium on Research on Public Pedagogy, Representation, and the Public Sphere

Abstract

What is considered ‘difficult knowledge,’ a term highlighting the problems of individuals negotiating learning from and about massive violence and social breakdown suggests that “there is a kernel of trauma in the very capacity to know” (Pitt & Britzman, 2003, p. 756). Often blocking this capacity is the engagement or encounter with trauma individuals may or may not experience. In writing about public pedagogy as an “aesthetic experience,” Dewey (1934) suggests it is the “art of living” that enlivens our political and imaginative understandings. But also at play is “aesthetic conflict,” which focuses on the push and pull between life and loss (Britzman, 2006 Metzer & Williams, 2008). To understand the aesthetic dimensions of public pedagogy, these terms aid in the articulation of the significance
In seeking to understand the tension between the experience and the conflict, I present the encounters a group of pre-service social studies teachers and I had at a mid-western Holocaust Memorial museum. I utilize psychoanalytic understandings of learning and pedagogy (e.g. Britzman, 2009; Taubman, 2012) to realize how any pedagogical encounter is at once personal and social and rife with intention (from the institution and the individual) and accident. Data sources gathered from small group visits to the Holocaust museum included interview transcripts of conversations held before, during, and after the visits. While at the museum, I completed observational notes as participants toured the exhibitions and listened to a presentation by a Holocaust survivor. This pedagogical encounter produced conflicting and sometimes surprising affective dimensions: excitement, disappointment, sadness, anger, intimacy, and even boredom. I argue that pedagogy ought to account for these affective domains as it informs practice in formal education contexts. The participants demonstrated features of “aesthetic experience” and “aesthetic conflict” as they attempted to account for those predicted and surprising thoughts they had to this difficult exhibition. As such, this research provides an example of how particular aesthetic terms allow us to make sense of encounters in ways that center relational meaning as opposed to knowledge exchange, a crucially important reconsideration needed in order to infuse a renewed sense of possibility in formal educational contexts.

Author

• H. James Garrett, University of Georgia