Reconceptualizing Study in Educational Discourse and Practice

Claudia W. Ruitenberg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317312390
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Curricula

Addressing studying as a distinct educational concept and phenomenon in its own right, the essays in this volume consider study and studying from a range of perspectives. Countering dominant educational discourses, which place a heavy emphasis on learning and instruction, the contributors explore questions such as: What does it mean to study something? How is studying something different from being taught about it, or learning something about it? What does the difficulty demanded by study mean for the one who studies and for the teacher? What mode of existence does study induce? The book highlights the significance of study not only, or even primarily, for its educational outcome, but as a human activity.

1 Introduction

Retrieving and Recognizing Study

Claudia W. Ruitenberg

Evidence

Since the late 1990s, there has been a push to understand and manage education as a practice that ought to be based on evidence of its effectiveness (e.g., Hargreaves, 1996; 1997). The problem with a lack of evidence, explains evidence-based practice proponent Philip Davies (1999), is that “it is often unclear whether … developments in educational thinking and practice are better, or worse, than the regimes they replace” (p. 109). Such developments include changes in curricular and pedagogical practice at the classroom level as well as policy changes such as the publication of league tables. In order to know whether changes in educational thinking and practice actually improve education, Davies argues that “evidence from worldwide research and literature on education and associated subjects” ought to be put to better use, and “where existing evidence is lacking or of a questionable, uncertain, or weak nature,” new evidence should be established (p. 109).

One of the difficulties with the conception of education as a practice that ought to be based on evidence of its effectiveness is that, as Gert Biesta (2007) explains, “the model of professional action implied in evidence-based practice—that is, the idea of education as a treatment or intervention that is a causal means to bring about particular, preestablished ends—is not appropriate for the field of education” (p. 10). Understanding education as such an intervention leads to a reductive understanding of education as one-way instruction in clearly demarcated areas of knowledge and sets of skills; the student is merely the recipient of such instruction, and the interpretive character of education is ignored. Understanding education as a practice that ought to be based on evidence of its effectiveness also ignores that the ends or “effects” of education are normative—that is, that they involve decisions about what is desirable—and that the pedagogical means that are used to bring about educational effects cannot be separated from those ends as they themselves entail value-laden decisions about desirability (pp. 9–10).

A further difficulty with the conception of education as a practice that ought to be based on evidence of its effectiveness is that the concept of evidence suggests that the effects of the practice ought to be available to the senses(and preferably available in the foreseeable future so that they can be captured reliably by assessment and research). Holmes, Murray, Perron, and Rail (2006) write, “It is not insignificant that the word ‘evidence’ contains the Latin root videre, which means ‘to see’. The etymology of the term itself suggests a visual bias that still holds sway in the ‘enlightened’ empirical sciences today” (p. 182). Evidence-based education, put simply, is education of which we can see that it produces the effects we want it to produce. Moreover, in evidence-based practice, we need see not only that the intervention works but also how it works. In a randomized controlled pharmaceutical trial, for instance, we want to see not only that the group of patients who were given the drug fared significantly better than the group of patients given the placebo; we also want to have insight into how the drug interacted with the patients’ biochemistry.

Evidence-based education relies on the conception of evidence that Ian Hacking (1975/2006) calls “inductive evidence” (p. 32) and which entered philosophy relatively late, in the seventeenth century. The crux of inductive evidence is that “it consists in one thing pointing beyond itself” (p. 34). By this Hacking means that inductive evidence is, by definition, evidence of something else, in the way that a physician making a diagnosis uses a combination of symptoms and test results as evidence of the presence of a disease (pp. 36–37). Educational evidence, on this reading, would be evidence not of education taking place but rather of something outside of education, such as demarcated areas of knowledge and sets of skills that can be considered “learning outcomes.”

The conception of education as a practice that ought to be based on evidence is not friendly to educational forms that do not produce evidence. This book addresses one such educational form: study. Study does not measure up to the demands of evidence that it make either its effectiveness or its process visible. While study certainly has effects, these effects are not predetermined, and so study’s effectiveness cannot be assessed. As Biesta (2007) reminds us, “effective interventions are those in which there is a secure relation between the intervention (as cause) and its outcomes or results (as effects)” (p. 7, emphasis added). Moreover, the central activities of study are invisible and occur inside the studier’s mind—where I should note that “mind” is not limited to the locus of the brain. When I study a text, I may be seen walking to another shelf in the library, typing on my laptop, writing in a notebook, or crossing out what I have written, but the storm of ideas, questions, and associations that rages in my head when I study, or, at other times, the focused tranquility of absorption in the text, remain invisible.

As several authors in this volume observe, the field of educational practice and scholarship has been subject to what Biesta (2009) has called “learnification” (p. 36)—that is to say, the replacement of educational discourse by a discourse of learning. A direct and instrumental relation is assumed—and desired—between what is taught and what is learned (see also Biesta, 2004). As William Pinar (2005) puts it,

the academic field of education is so very reluctant to abandon social engineering. If only we can find the right technique, the right modification of classroom organization (small groups, collaborative learning, dialogue), if only we teach according to “best practices,” if only we have students self-reflect or if only we develop “standards” or conduct “scientific” research, then students will learn what we teach them.

(p. 67)

The problem is not only that it is not possible to “close the gap” between what is taught and what is learned but also that, from the perspective of education, it is not desirable to do so. Education cannot be reduced to social engineering, and if the gap between what is taught and what is learned is closed, there may be effective instruction, but the space for education has been lost.

In 1971, Robert McClintock argued forcefully that not teaching, nor learning, but study ought to be considered the central educational concept. The activity of studying and the role of the student operate precisely in the gap between what is taught and what may, in the end, be learned or assessed. As McClintock points out, when we study, we are not simply striving to acquire certain knowledge or skills, or to achieve certain learning outcomes; we are involved in an activity of self-formation. By studying something, we gain a deeper understanding of our object of study, but also become someone different in the process. This further explains study’s difficult relationship to the demands of evidence—namely, that evidence must point “beyond itself.” Study, which centrally involves a relationship of attention between a studier and an object of study, primarily points to itself, in the sense that the result of study is a transformed relationship between the studier and the object of study. Perhaps because of this, and in spite of McClintock’s admonition, “study” has remained a concept less used and, indeed, less studied in educational scholarship than other educational concepts and phenomena such as pedagogy, curriculum, and assessment.

This Book

In more recent years, several educational scholars have once again begun examining study, often from new theoretical angles. The current volume brings twelve of these authors together, picks up the conversation about study, and addresses study as a distinctive educational form in its many aspects. The authors in this volume work both in philosophy of education and in curriculum studies—fields that often draw from the same literature, but that typically operate in distinct conferences and journals. As Pinar and Grumet (1981/2012) point out, it is significant that “unlike educational psychology, philosophy of education and sociology of education, the field of curriculum did not originate as an extension or application of an extant discipline. Rather, the field is usually said to have begun in Denver in the 1920s as the result of [an] administrative need” declared by a school superintendent (p. 20). While philosophy of education can never afford to be unaware of its relation to the discipline of philosophy—no matter how critical that relation becomes—curriculum studies must remain, first and foremost, aware of its relation to educational practice—no matter how critical that relation becomes. The dialogue between the chapters in this volume is thus also a dialogue between those who see themselves primarily as curriculum scholars, those who see themselves primarily as philosophers of education, and those who straddle these fields or who see themselves as “educationalists” (Biesta, 2012).

The authors in this volume work in Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, Belgium, and Spain, and have further ties to Ireland, the Netherlands, and Chile. While Asian and African perspectives on study are missing from the volume, as are Indigenous authors from the Americas, the international conversation in this book—which includes some critical perspectives on the gender, race, and class privilege of study and studiers—is intended to serve as its own object of study as well as an addressee for responses that expand the understandings of study presented here. As this brief overview will show, the chapters in this volume encompass a wide range of theoretical perspectives and traditions, including (but not limited to) the work of Giorgio Agamben, Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, William James, Michael Oakeshott, Plato, and the Talmudic tradition.

In Chapter 2, Tyson E. Lewis extends his previous work on study (e.g., Lewis, 2013) by discussing the significance of study for educational “potentialism”—that is, a view of education in which the desire for the actualization of the student’s potential is suspended. Anne M. Phelan, in Chapter 3, traces study to medieval Ireland and the hermeneutic tradition of florilegia and marginalia. She offers a relation between this tradition of monastic study and Hannah Arendt’s dialogical conception of thinking and her call for learning from and in response to tradition. Jan Masschelein, in Chapter 4, addresses study not as individual and private activity, but as a collective and public one. He argues that the university ought to remain, or be reinstated as, a place of collective public study. In Chapter 5, Stephanie Mackler addresses one particular form of collective study in the university—namely, in the American liberal arts college. While she acknowledges that liberal study affects students’ actions, Mackler also offers an unabashed defense of useless study.

Gert J. J. Biesta, in Chapter 6, examines how the discourse and practice of study affects our understanding of teachers and teaching. Based on Gary Fenstermacher’s notion of “studenting,” he proposes that study calls our attention to how the student is affected by the teacher in a broader sense, and away from what the student learns from the teacher. In Chapter 7, Alan A. Block takes us to the Talmudic tradition of teaching and study to teach us that both prayer and study are inspired by awe and wonder. Like prayer, study is an openness to being affected, whether by the worldly or the divine, and as such is a preparation for the Messiah. William F. Pinar returns, in Chapter 8, to McClintock’s emphasis on study as self-formation and discusses subjectivity as the site of study, drawing from psychoanalytic perspectives on the self and affirming the centrality of relationship in self-formation. He argues for study as a form of “intransigence” against the instrumentalization of education.

Chapter 9 takes us to a more foundational consideration of study and its relation to thought and consciousness. Samuel D. Rocha and Daniel J. Clegg introduce further distinctions, such as between “erotic study” and “false study,” in order to hone in more precisely on the functions of the human mind in different modes of thought and study. In Chapter 10, Florelle D’Hoest examines apprenticeship as a form of study and reminds us of the virtue of “good work” in the development of craftsmanship. If apprenticeship is initiation into an ethos, then study, more generally, can also be considered a form of apprenticeship. In Chapter 11, I take up this perspective when I ask whether study can be taught. Proposing the maître à étudier or “master of studying,” there are clear parallels to the master-novice relation in apprenticeship, including in the masculine bias in the concept. In Chapter 12, David Romero also employs a critical lens to examine the assumptions and exclusions of study. By considering the particular cases of Latin American studier-traveler flâneurs of the beginning of the nineteenth century, he calls attention to the gender, racial, colonial, and other unequal relations that limit access to studying.

Black Study

Let me conclude with a recent provocative discussion of study by Stefano Harney and Fred Moten (2013). They are perhaps unlikely co-authors—Harney is a professor of strategic management education at Singapore Management University; Moten is a professor in the Department of English at the University of California, Riverside—but they share a critical perspective on the conditions of academic labor and possibilities for resistance within, or rather on the margins of, the university. Harney and Moten propose study and, in particular studying together, as an educational form that resists the capitalist accumulation of student debts and academic credits that dominates university education:

The student has no interests. The student’s interests must be identified, declared, pursued, assessed, counseled, and credited. Debt produces interests. The student will be indebted. The student will be interested. Interest the students! The student can be calculated by her debts, can calculate her debts with her interests. She is in sight of credit, in sight of graduation, in sight of being a creditor, of being invested in education, a citizen … . But not all of them. Some still stay, committed to black study in the university’s undercommon rooms. They study without an end, plan without a pause, rebel without a policy, conserve without a patrimony. They study in the university and the university forces them under, relegates them to the state of those without interests, without credit, without debt that bears interest, that earns credits. They never graduate. They just ain’t ready. They’re building something in there, something down there. Mutual debt, debt unpayable, debt unbounded, debt unconsolidated, debt to each other in a study group, to others in a nurses’ room, to others in a barber shop, to others in a squat, a dump, a woods, a bed, an embrace.

(pp. 67–68)

Harney and Moten do not mention “brown study” or posit “black study” as a deliberate politicized incarnation of “brown study,” but I see a strong connection between the two. Lewis (2013) writes, “Originally associated with deep, melancholic brooding, brown study later became associated with absorbed thoughtfulness and contemplation. Brown study is a kind of withdrawal into shadows only to discover a strange illumination” (p. 62). Black study does not seek illumination, but it is a form of thoughtful withdrawal from a system of racking up debt and credits. Black study today is a form of resistance within educational structures so saturated by capitalism and its contemporary cousin, neoliberalism, as to exclude forms of education that do not perform on an input-output model. The chapters in this volume all address resistance in one way or another: to learnification and the instrumentalization of education, to the tendency to substitute knowing for thinking and drive out studiousness by stressing curiosity, to the exclusivity of study and studying, and to individualized conceptions of education that lose sight of relationship. The—perhaps messianic—hope is that study continues in libraries, workshops, monasteries, bean fields, and universities, “in a squat, a dump, a woods, a bed, an embrace.”

References

Biesta, G. J. J. (2004). “Mind the gap!” Communication and the educational relation. In C. Bingham &am...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: Retrieving and Recognizing Study
• 2 Study: An Example of Potentialism
• 3 Unlearning With Hannah: Study as a Curriculum of Second Thoughts
• 4 Some Notes on the University as Studium: A Place of Collective Public Study
• 5 Study: The “Interval” of Liberal Learning
• 6 The Passion of Education: On Study, Studenting, Doing, and Affection
• 7 Study as Sacred
• 8 Study: Concerning Relationship in Educational Experience
• 9 Thought and Study: The Rigor of Having an Idea
• 10 Apprenticeship Under Study: Toward an Educational Dimension of Apprenticeship
• 11 Teaching Through the Performance of Study: The Maître à Étudier
• 12 Studying as Privilege: Latin American Travelers, the German Painter, and the Flâneur
• Index