Pedagogical Tact

Knowing What to Do When You Don't Know What to Do

Max van Manen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781315422831
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Research & Methodology in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Pedagogical Tact describes how teacher-student relations possess an improvisational and ethical character. The daily realities of educators, parents, and childcare specialists are pedagogically conditioned by sensitive insights, active thoughtfulness, and the creative ability to act caringly and appropriately in the immediacy of the moment. Internationally known educator Max van Manen shows through recognizable examples and evocative stories how good teaching is driven by the phenomenology of pedagogy. His book-refocuses educators and others away from an emphasis on instrumental skills and technocratic programs toward the need for pedagogical tact;-describes how pedagogical actions have latent effects that will influence children throughout their lives;-shows how our actions with young people have pedagogically ethical and moral significance;-gives educators back their original vocational motivation and inspiration.

Chapter One
The Primacy of Pedagogy

Missed Moments of Pedagogical Tact?

At a pleasant social evening some friends are sitting around talking about a symphony orchestra that is playing in town. Edward, a retired businessman, expresses his admiration for the concertmaster. Some other people join in talking about the challenges of being a successful musician. Then Edward takes the floor again:

You know, this is a memory that has obsessed me my entire life. Until recently I have not been able to talk about it with anyone because it is so hurtful. Even as an adult, sharing it would have brought me to tears. When I was sixteen years old, after studying violin for a number of years, I realized that I could never really be good enough. I just lacked something. I could not really excel. So I decided to give it up. My father was very unhappy about my decision. He tried to change my mind. But I refused. I told him that I knew that I would never be able to play the instrument properly. Angrily, my father took the violin from my hands. He hung it on the wall of the living room and said, “From now on, whenever you look at this violin, you will know what a failure you are in my eyes.” I felt horrible. After several weeks my mother took the violin down from the wall. She felt sorry for me. But the empty spot could not be taken down. It haunted me: I was a failure in my father’s eyes. The memory of that moment has troubled me all my life. Therefore, I have always told my own kids that they should do whatever they feel is right for them and not what they may feel I expect from them. My father never took his words back about me being a failure, even though eventually I became the successful head of a large company. But now, at the age of eighty-two, I finally feel that I have dealt with my secret pain or, at least, that I can share it here with you.

Edward’s story shows how the latency of pedagogical moments can affect us for the rest of our lives, whether we are consciously aware of it or not. We can easily recognize the significance of the occurrence of negative pedagogical moments. At times we may still blame certain adults from our childhood for their neglect, their negative influences, or past harmful actions that still haunt us. These blames and accusations also constitute the pedagogical narratives of our lives. And they may determine our own pedagogies.

But hopefully each of us can also recognize what good pedagogy can do when we gratefully acknowledge the love and care we received from a mother, father, teacher, or some other significant adult who worried about us and was there for us when needed. This is especially clear when we reflect on the happiness, successes, and blessings we experienced in our families as children and in classrooms as students. We may recognize the consequences of pedagogy when we become aware of the latent, lasting, and lingering effects of the events that make up the innumerable often-forgotten experiences, foggily fragmented and half-remembered pedagogical happenings in our childhoods. The latent values of these events mean that they have formative—and yet often untraceable—consequences for our unfolding sense of self, personal identity, secret interiorities, and for who and what we (have) become.

How many of us are still longing for the father’s recognition or the mother’s appreciation that still somehow drives what we do and what we hope to make of ourselves? This powerful pedagogical theme of the latent significance of an adult’s approval in our lives is a poorly recognized and a little understood pedagogical phenomenon. Even those who have developed conflicts or messed up relationships with their parents may at times realize to their surprise (or even chagrin) how this father’s regard or this mother’s love is still a deep-seated object of desire that makes us do or achieve things that give positive meaning to our lives. We recognize these pedagogical latencies in the lives of famous authors such as Franz Kafka or Marcel Proust who suffered from dysfunctional relations with their fathers. But no doubt we can recognize the entanglements of recognition and (dis) approval in our own lives or in the lives of others close to us.

Theories of extrinsic and intrinsic motivation and reward are existentially simplistic mechanisms that fail to realize that the long-term latency of pedagogical events belongs to the silent secrets of the narrative themes of our lives. Some parents place high expectations on their child, expectations that the child may or may not be able to live up to. Other parents claim not to pose expectations, but the children experience them nevertheless and perhaps even more compellingly. Again, other parents may truly not entertain any expectations, or so it seems. But how do their children experience the lack of expectations? Only pedagogically-sensitive teachers may surmise the consequences of such potential entanglements of expectations when during a parent-teacher conference they encounter the parent in the child and the child in the parent.

We simply cannot predict in childhood how the latency of pedagogical influence is felt and realized throughout life, even when this particular child has meanwhile become an adult. Of course, the child also influences the adult. The pedagogical relation is complex, and in part it signifies also a process of self-development and self-understanding for the adult. The mother, father, grandparent, teacher, psychologist, nurse, counselor, pediatrician, and those others who care for children learn to understand themselves in new ways as they are prompted to reflect on themselves and their interactions with the children for whom they care.

A Pedagogical Moment

In a poem entitled the “Bearhug,” Michael Ondaatje (1979, p. 104) describes how his son had been calling him from the bedroom for a goodnight hug and kiss. Ondaatje is a loving father but he is busy with something and so he yells “okay” to his son—that he will be there in just a moment. Then, after finishing, he finally and absentmindedly walks into his son’s bedroom, and what does he see? His son is standing there, expectantly, with his arms outstretched and a huge smile on his face. He is ready for the ritualistic good-night bearhug. In the next stanza, Ondaatje gives a sensitive poetic description of the way a parent hugs a child. But then, almost as an afterthought, two short lines trail the end of his poem:

How long was he standing there
like that, before I came?

Between the calling of his young son and this lingering moment of reflecting, Michael Ondaatje experiences a pedagogical moment. A pedagogical moment that takes the form of personal responsiveness: the father acts (says “goodnight” to his son, though after letting him wait rather long), and he reflects (asks himself, “What was it like for my son to have to wait like that?” And by implication, perhaps, “Should I have been a bit more attentive?”). The goodnight kiss may seem a simple ritual, but in actually it can be filled with psychological and pedagogical significance, as, for example, the many references and studies about the goodnight kiss in Marcel Proust’s writings attest (1981)—in his staying awake while waiting for his mother to come and whose kiss would finally be able to put Marcel to sleep, his father’s disapproval of him, and the psychoanalytic entanglements.

Unlike Proust’s interpreters, Ondaatje does not seem to want to make a psychoanalytic issue out of this childhood incident. And yet Ondaatje alludes to the implied meanings of this common, significant childhood moment (the child cannot sleep and calls to the parent for a goodnight hug; Ondaatje dawdles, and dawdles some more, and then, finally, comes to the child’s bed). Ondaatje makes this moment into a pedagogical incident by wondering how long his son had been waiting for him. And he prompts us to reminisce what this moment may be like for the child. How many of us did not have childhood experiences like this—as parent or as child: waiting for the goodnight hug or kiss? Of course, one might hear the irritated adult refrain that parents should not always have to be at the beck-and-call of their children, that children should not be spoiled, that overprotectiveness may unwittingly create children who remain emotionally too dependent on their parents, and, of course, that children should learn that they sometimes have to wait for their parent to be available.

But it is quite clear from the poem that Ondaatje did not deliberately let his son wait for the goodnight hug (e.g., this kid is just too demanding—I don’t want to be too overprotective). But these considerations show the thoroughly ethical nature of pedagogy. Ondaatje’s poem has such a pointed pedagogical significance in that it shows how the reflexive turn of his afterthought is a pedagogical wondering: What was his child’s experience of waiting like? What calls in the calling of the child for his father? What kind of waiting was this? How does this waiting condition the child’s experience of the pleasure of the anticipated hug and kiss? How good is such goodnight bear hug? How is this waiting and the goodnight kiss experienced as a portal for sleep?

Pedagogical experiences occur in situations when and where adults stand in pedagogical relations with children or young people. These situations do not need to be uncommon. Usually pedagogical moments happen in ordinary situations when an adult is required to act pedagogically. It is a matter of acting pedagogically responsibly and appropriately in everyday situations. Sometimes, if not commonly, in our daily living with children we are required to act instantly, in the spur of the moment. As a rule, we do not have time to lean back in our chair and deliberatively decide what to do in the situation. And even when there is time to reflect on what alternative actions are available and what best approach one should take, in the pedagogical moment one must act immediately, even if that action may consist of holding back.

What Is Pedagogy?

So what, then, is pedagogy? Well, this is a question that does not really seem to need an academic answer. Anyone knows what pedagogy is who has received the attentive care and worries of a mother, a father, a teacher, a grandparent, or some other adult who, at various times, played a supportive and formative part in our young lives. Without the pedagogical support from these adults, we simply could not and would not be who we are, or, worse, we would not even be alive today.

So don’t we already know what pedagogy is? The answer is paradoxical: we do and we don’t. We do because parenting (and teaching) is the oldest profession in the world. Child rearing is as intrinsic to human life as is feeding, clothing, caring, sex, and sheltering. Pedagogy inheres and is rooted in our phenomenological response to the child’s natural vulnerability. In spite of the historical atrocities human beings have inflicted on their offspring, we recognize that there is a need to do right with the young child. (Call it instinct, sentimentality, culture, motherhood, or paternity—call it whatever you wish.) It is the poverty of social science that it fails to see an obvious given: the young child, by virtue of his or her very vulnerability, tends to bring out the best in grown-ups.

Yet, in a sense we don’t know what pedagogy is because the phenomenon of pedagogy is ultimately a mystery when we push for a more originary understanding of pedagogy. The primal meaning of pedagogy is beyond rational understanding. The child is born crying, and the parent experiences the cry as an appeal, as a transforming experience to do something: to hold the child, protect her, smile, and perhaps worry whether everything is all right. This first overwhelming sensual and sensitive sensibility that a new parent experiences is often this ability of a seemingly natural responsiveness: response-ability, the unfolding of our pedagogic nature. As new parents, before we have a chance to sit back and reflect on whether we can accept this child, the child has already made us act. And luckily for humankind, this spontaneous needfulness to do the right thing usually is the right thing. As we reach to hold the child (rather than turn away and let it perish), we have already acted pedagogically.

When living side by side with adults, children soon prompt increasingly reflective questions. In other words, as soon as we gain a lived sense of the pedagogic quality of parenting and teaching, we start to question and doubt ourselves. Pedagogy is this questioning, this doubting. We wonder: Did I do the right thing? Why do some people teach or bring their children up in such a different manner? We are shocked when we see or hear how children are physically or psychologically abused. We also may notice with distress how many children are more subtly ill treated or abused. We see this all around us in shopping places, in public transportation locations, in the neighborhood, in newspapers, and on the street.

From the history of child psychology and child studies we know that young children, who do not experience a minimum of proper care, tend to do poorly in life. Abandoned babies in crowded orphanages that lacked adequate nursing care have died from the simple deficiency of loving touch and affection—they perished from lack of contact. Children who must somehow grow up while surrounded by neglect or, worse, by suffering abuse and maltreatment may be doomed to be damaged for the remainder of their adult lives.

The simple point is this: it is pedagogy that makes the crucial difference in a child’s life. Pedagogy involves us in distinguishing actively and/ or reflectively what is good or right and what is life enhancing, just, and supportive from what is not good, wrong, unjust, or damaging in the ways we act, live, and deal with children. In this sense pedagogy is the experience of the good, the meaning of the good, of goodness. A positive pedagogy of parenting and teaching may promise a life with adequate doses of meaningfulness, happiness, and healthy and responsible relations with others. The good of pedagogy is not some social product or educational outcome but rather goodness itself: goodness of and for this or that child or these young people. This goodness must constantly be recognized, realized, and retrieved in particular actions in concrete and contingent situations and relations. In the words of Levinas: “Only goodness is good” (1995, p. 61).

Upon reflection the meaning of pedagogy in the adult-child relation is profoundly enigmatic. The inceptual phenomenon of the pedagogical relation is probably the most elemental dimension of human existence. So, in this book I use the term “pedagogy” to refer to this primordial adult-child relation that is biological and cultural, ancient and present, mundane and mysterious, sensuous and sensitive to the ethical demand as it is experienced in pedagogical relations, situations, and actions. As well, the relational affect for the child or young person is constitutive of the relational ethics between the adults who are caring for the child. This relational ethic intends fidelity, love, trust, mutual dependency, and the acceptance of caring responsibility of the adults for their child and for each other.

Chapter Two
Experiencing Pedagogy Vicariously

Such diverse authors as Martin Langeveld, Klaus Mollenhauer, Otto Boll-now, Hannah Arendt, and Bernard Stiegler see pedagogy rooted in the ethical sphere of the adult-child relation and the cultural contexts that shape the pedagogical relation. Pedagogy derives its impetus in the responsibility that adults carry for children or young people who cannot yet be charged with certain responsibilities themselves.

Pedagogical theorizing and practice differ from other social disciplines and practices in that they always orient to the child’s or young person’s lifeworld and growing up toward maturity. But the ethics of professional pedagogical theorizing and practice is not really possible without the support of empirical and theoretical insights from other disciplines: psychology, sociology, childhood studies, anthropological studies of children’s cultures, jurisprudential knowledge of children’s rights, the humanities, and other human and social science that are relevant to our understanding of children.

Pedagogy, as theoretical social science, studies the ethically sensitive realities and formative experiences of children: How are children to live and grow up at home, at school, and in other childrearing settings? How are personal and societal realities of children and childhood pedagogically perceived in everyday life, social theory, and media and technologies of communication? How do adults interact with children in pedagogically positive or negative ways? How are pedagogical responsibilities interpreted in parental, educational, legal, and medical environments? For example, we may ask: How are children regarded in newspapers, novels, or movies? How are children depicted in movies differently in culturally different cinema? What are the ethical implications and consequences of these perceptions?

Pedagogical seeing of children in movies differs from ordinary cinematographic watching in that “seeing movies pedagogically” is always an ethically engaged watching and watchfulness. Pedagogical seeing is sensitive to the ways that adults are involved in children’s lives (van Manen, 1979, 1982, 1984, 1990). As we observe the lives that adults live with children, we may study family, community, neighborhood, and school or classroom life from these various pedagogical perspectives. We may reflect on the nature of the pedagogical relation that exists between the adult(s) and the children. We may observe how the pedagogical relation becomes actualized in pedagogical situations. We may notice how the relation and the situation contribute to a pedagogical atmosphere. We may study the pedagogical actions for their ethical ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Dedication
• More Praise for Pedagogical Tact
• Preface
• About the Cover Image
• Acknowledgments
• 1. The Primacy of Pedagogy
• 2. Experiencing Pedagogy Vicariously
• 3. The Nature of Pedagogy
• 4. The Pedagogy of Reflective Practice
• 5. Thoughtful Observing with Pedagogical Eyes and Ears
• 6. Pedagogical Tact
• 7. Pedagogical Con-tact
• 8. Pedagogical Regard and Recognition
• 9. The Phenomenology of Student Experience
• 10. Cyber-Pedagogy
• 11. Pedagogical Knowing and Acting
• Appendix A Ethical-Pedagogical Perspectives
• Appendix B Historical Notes
• References
• Name Index
• Subject Index
• About the Author