Learner, student, speaker: Why it matters how we call those we teach.

Gert Biesta School of education University of Stirling

A learner is not a shedhand or barrower,

but a budding shearer who has not yet shorn 5,000 sheep (10,000 in Queensland). (Gunn 1965, p.35)

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LEARNER the rise of the new language of learning an emancipatory shift? the learner as not yet

weak construction of the learner strong construction of the learner

explanation: a means to reduce the situation of inequality where those who know nothing are in relation with those who know / to explain is to demonstrate an incapacity / the learner as the product of the explicative order
the learner as lifelong learner?
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STUDENT Is it possible to engage in education in such a way that it emancipates rather than stultifies? Is it possible to teach without explanation? Joseph Jacotot The ignorant schoolmaster

students learned without a master explicator, not without a master; teaching without communication: not: intelligence to intelligence, but: will to will emancipation takes place when an intelligence obeys only itself, even while the will obeys another will
emancipatory education: the act of revealing an intelligence to itself
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emancipation is not something given by scholars, by their explications at the level of the peoples intelligence emancipation is always emancipation seized The emancipatory teachers call forbids the supposed ignorant the satisfaction ... of admitting that one is incapable of knowing more.

option 1 critical pedagogy truth schoolmaster

option 2 Freire truth no schoolmaster

option 3 Ranciere no truth schoolmaster

The one who is the subject of education is summoned to study. A STUDENT

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SPEAKER not a psychology, not a theory of teaching and learning, not a form of constructivism or self-regulated learning, not a new pedagogy but a different route: that of liberty Who can speak? not the capacity of speech, but: who is allowed to speak noise education voice? does the teacher need to explain what the noises of the students mean? a distribution of the sensible in which some sound exist as noise and other sound exist as voice

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police or police order (la police, lordre policier) an order of the visible and the sayable that sees that a particular activity is visible and another is not, that this speech is understood as discourse and another as noise politics (la politique) A mode of expression that undoes the perceptible divisions of the police order by implementing a basically heterogeneous assumption, that of a part of those who have no part, an assumption that, at the end of the day, itself demonstrates the sheer contingency of the order [and] the equality of any speaking being with any other speaking being. an interruption of the existing order with reference to the idea of equality dissensus
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subjectification the production through a series of actions of a body and a capacity for enunciation not previously identifiable within a given field of experience, whose identification is thus part of the reconfiguration of the field of experience

subjectification, not identification subjectivity, not identity

subjectification: a supplement to the existing order

coming to speech [1] identification [2] subjectification

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DISCUSSION a learner cannot (yet) speak (noise education speech) a student can learn without explanation (will to will, not intelligence to intelligence) student a: studies the explanations of others student b: follows her own orbit a speaker is the one who already speaks Equality is not given, nor is it claimed; it is practised, it is verified. But it can only appear as an absurdity. equality and inequality are two axioms by which education operates The point is not to prove the equality of intelligence of all human beings, but seeing what can be done under that supposition.

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CODA the explicative order is both an educational logic and a social logic: progress [perhaps Rancieres writings are more a critique of the social logic than of the educational logic: The world is not a school]

There is no social emancipation, and no emancipatory school (only an individual can emancipate an individual)
the explicative order cannot be replaced by an emancipatory order

the suggestion to refer to our students as speakers therefore does not inaugurate a new pedagogy or a new system of schooling it provides a different starting point, not a different conclusion
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THANK YOU

gert.biesta@stir.ac.uk www.gertbiesta.com

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