Huebner’s Critical Encounter with the Philosophy of Heidegger in Being and Time: Learning, Understanding, and the Authentic Unfolding of History in the Curriculum

Abstract

This paper responds to the following question: “What are the issues concerned with potential educational reform that arise from Huebner’s critical encounter with Heidegger and the tradition in education and curriculum theory?” In attempting a rejoinder, I revisit Huebner’s groundbreaking essay, “Curriculum as Concern for Man’s Temporality,” which introduces the phenomenological method in education and curriculum studies, with the goal of examining in detail the underlying themes, issues, and concepts, which ground Huebner’s reconceptualization of curriculum reform, as they emerge from Heidegger’s philosophy. I show that Huebner’s understanding of Beingin-the-world in terms of the design of the educational environment, not only mirrors, but as well, embodies the flux, flow, and rhythmic dynamics of history’s “dialectic” unfolding as a temporal phenomenon, which for Heidegger represents our authentic “historizing” in the “moment of vision,” or Augenblick, and this for Heidegger is the definitive embodiment of Dasein’s authentic mode of existence as historical Being-in-the-world as Being-with Others.