Exemplifying: An Experiential Case for a Unique Educational Practice

• In Event: 58.083 - Roundtable Session 26
  In Roundtable Session: 58.083-8 - Curricular Hacking and Other Suspensions as a (re)Turn to the Commons

Abstract

Objectives: The day to day practice of education is unthinkable without the use of examples. The adult generation sets an example for the new one, giving an example in order to illustrate an abstract insight or a general rule is a most common school routine, and drilling on these rules by repeating an exemplary case has proven to be a most reliable pedagogical procedure. As such, examples are very often regarded as mere didactical instruments. This is to say that they have no intrinsic meaning, and that they might be substituted with other means, might these turn out to be more effective. However, in my contribution to this panel, I would like to show that examples constitute what education is all about, i.e. that they are educationally relevant in and out of themselves (Mollenhauer, 1986).

Theoretical Framework: The framework I use is throughout philosophical. It draws from the work of Giorgio Agamben (2009). He argues that examples have a most peculiar ontological status, as they both belong and do not belong to the category of things they are supposed to exemplify. More exactly, they can only articulate the meaning of something (they belong to), by temporarily not operating as that something (and therefore they are no longer belonging to the exemplified). As such the operation of giving an example depends on the suspension of the normal use of the exemplified. Rather than just making a trivial observation here, the act of exemplifying allows for rendering the standard use of a subject matter inoperative, and to turn it into a properly educational concern, as well as into a matter of communal interest. More exactly, when we grasp what an example stands for, we have a strong experience of being-able in a subject matter, which brings about the impossibility to claim private ownership over the subject matter. Therefore we might also experience what it means to begin all over anew with the world (Agamben, 1999).

Methods: In this contribution I would like to stress the experiential and existential nature of the educational dimension of exemplifying. More exactly I will construct my presentation as 'an example of the example', i.e. not merely as a talk about a fascinating oddity, but as an experiential demonstration of the educational force which the act of exemplifying possesses. As such the way of presenting my ideas will put on display the proclaimed effects I claim exemplifying to have. I will do this by tinkering with traditional forms of presenting, which suspend an established regime of truth-telling by deconstructing (rather than destructing) this regime from the inside.

Results: My presentation makes clear that the use of examples in pedagogical contexts (or on academic forums for that matter) isn’t a mere theoretical curiosity, but (1) that it has an intrinsically educational significance and (2) that it is bound up with a particular art of presenting the logic of which can be exposed by an unconventional (‘tinkering’) way of presenting itself which makes exemplifying into its own subject.

Author

• Joris Vlieghe, Liverpool Hope University