Placing myself within the context of ‘educating’ others I am constantly evaluating and re-defining my role. Based on my experiences as a student and a teacher I find it necessary to understand the complexity of my identity as a potential educator / facilitator / critic / learner / sharer / lover of knowledge. I am challenged on a regular basis to place myself with educational frameworks that encourage the type of learning I value; learning that considers subjective experiences within the specificity of time and place as a means to engage sensory experience and critical reflection. Honestly, I find it difficult to create learning environments that foster such experiences to the level that I imagine and to which I strive. Time, place, and the subjective body (the three concepts that are imperative to my current curiosities about learning) are extremely complex in their relationship to effective education, public discourse, and empowerment. This complexity is worth investigating and is the focus of this written reflection of education and my role as an educator.
For current discussions about the body and how it connects to learning, I draw from Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Edmond Husserl’s explorations of perception and phenomenological negotiations of the world. While there are differences in the theorists’ explorations of phenomenology and the lived experience, both Merleau-Ponty and Edmond Husserl investigate the body’s inherent relationship to perceptual experience and thus the understanding of the world as it is lived (Carman, p. 205). These ideas are imperative to recognizing and understanding the implications of the common (and often mis-guided) practice of separating mind/perception from body/experience. This binary notion of how people learn has inevitably affected the way that many view education and how information should be disseminated. As a practicing educator I am interested in theoretical and applied instances that disrupt notions which place the mind over the body in perceiving the world.
Moving beyond concepts of the body and how they affect the way in which people learn, it is also imperative to consider time and place in relation to how one subjectively experiences the world. In authentic learning, which is discussed by Elizabeth Ellsworth (2005), the body is connected to the time and place in which the learner is situated and works to challenge “long-held beliefs about how and where learning takes place, or should take place” (p. 371). This connection between the body, time and place stands counter to the ways in which traditional education functions, especially if one considers how most public schools disrupt student’s relationship with their actual existence. Information presented in traditional schooling, which is based in memorization and regurgitation, is arguably not relevant to student’s contemporary lived experience in the world. It instead places information in the context of the past and the future. Education should be appropriate and meaningful to those who partake, and it should serve individual needs rather than corporate / administrative needs (p. 371).
In order to confront the short-comings of formal education, people that are invested in sharing knowledge must look outside the structures of traditional education in order to re-create environments for authentic exchange of knowledge. That is not to say that authentic learning cannot take place within schools, however it becomes necessary for those involved in educational processes to look into the public realm to see how and where learning is taking place. Within the domain of public discourse the body is not separated from time and place, but rather is engaged with the social and temporal context of the experience and thus the understanding of the world.
Carmen, Taylor. "The Body in Husserl and Merleau-Ponty." Philisophical Topics. Vol. 7, 1999. 205-226.
Schultz, Baricovich, McSurley. (2010). "Beyond these tired walls: Social action curriculum induction as public pedagogy," In J. Sandlin, B. Schultz, & J. Burdick (Eds.), Handbook of public pedagogy: Education and learning beyond schooling (1-5). New York: Routledge
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