Abstract
Michel De Certeau’s scholars have rarely explored the pedagogical potential of the French thinker’s thought. This paper aims at reconstructing the question of the teaching practice in De Certeau’s works and, building on such reconstruction, it proposes a possible ‘heterological’ comprehension of teaching. Moving from an early writing dealing specifically with the teacher’s identity, the paper shows how the famous dyad of strategies and tactics exposed in The practice of everyday life can be usefully applied to teaching and studying and helps further elaborate the question of teaching. From this analysis, the teacher will emerge as the owner of a strategic knowledge that, if he wants to teach, needs to be altered by the uncanny and tactical presence of the student. Teaching will finally be shown as the practice of alteration of knowledge operated by the other of such knowledge, namely, the student. In such alteration of knowledge lies the potential of a heterological comprehension of teaching.
Highlights
In these times of progressive standardization of teaching and of continuous attempts at making teaching a simple reproduction of the existing social values, the conscience of the need for a ‘rediscovery of teaching’ seems to grow among scholars (Biesta 2016)
Starting from an early article published in the book L’étranger ou l’union dans la difference (2010) and describing the teacher’s act of ‘giving voice’ to the student, I try to elaborate the reciprocal positions of the teacher and the student using the conceptual tools of strategy and tactics, proposed by De Certeau in The practice of everyday life (1988)
I have started with the article Giving the speech, where De Certeau describes the experience of the teacher in front of a child as uncanny, because of the emergence of the ungraspable subjectivity of the child that eludes the rules of language
Summary
In these times of progressive standardization of teaching and of continuous attempts at making teaching a simple reproduction of the existing social values, the conscience of the need for a ‘rediscovery of teaching’ seems to grow among scholars (Biesta 2016). Starting from an early article published in the book L’étranger ou l’union dans la difference (2010) and describing the teacher’s act of ‘giving voice’ to the student, I try to elaborate the reciprocal positions of the teacher and the student using the conceptual tools of strategy and tactics, proposed by De Certeau in The practice of everyday life (1988). From such reconstruction, the student emerges as the other of teaching, some point of ungraspable exteriority to which teaching itself is directed, and which constantly alters the teacher’s knowledge. Those words are incomprehensible, a collection of sounds that do not make any sense for the adult listener: the adult has tried to teach the baby some words, but the response s/he
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