21st Century Learners

Relationship educates

As they put to sea at the beginning of a new academic year, here’s a maxim that educators everywhere might like to hold tight to: relationship educates.

Relationship educates. Thanks for the truism! Relationship educates? What does that even mean? I came across the phrase while reading Kenneth Kramer’s ‘Learning through Dialogue’ in which he reflects on the relevance of Martin Buber’s teachings to modern education. Buber, an Austrian-Jewish scholar of the early to mid-twentieth century best known for his work ‘I and Thou’, believed that it is not the teacher alone, but the lived relationship between the teacher, the student and the text (the material to be studied) that educates.

In this short series of posts, I want to explore what dialogic pedagogy is, why it might be valuable and how a classroom teacher or school might get started with it. It’s written in part to help me to clarify my own thinking (or at least to keep me thinking!) during the lockdown, though I do hope others will find it interesting and useful too. Any feedback would be most welcome.

In a postmodern view, ‘truth‘ can be thought of as an event that disrupts our thinking; if we are open to it it can lead us into a better future (Caputo, 2013).  Such events are happening all the time in the world of education; the challenge is to remain open to them, to avoid identifying too strongly with one paradigm – not to become a card-carrying ‘traditionalist’ or ‘progressive’, for example.

The work of Gert Biesta can support this ‘openness’.  Biesta helps us to a wider view of education by focusing on the question of purpose – putting the ‘why’ of education before the ‘how’.  He suggests three broad domains of educational purpose which are represented in the Venn Diagram below: (more…)