When a Teacher’s Love for the World Gets Rejected. A Post-Critical Invitation to Become an Edifying Educator

Abstract

This article aims at dialoguing with the Arendtian 5th principle of the Manifesto for a Post-Critical Pedagogy: From education for citizenship to love for the world, where the authors state that this is the time “to acknowledge and to affirm that there is good in the world that is worth preserving” (Hodgson et al., 2017, p. 19), as a hopeful acknowledgment of the world. This particular dialogue is opened by means of an edifying philosophical theatre piece (based on a pedagogical reading of Alice Munro’s short story Comfort) that reflects on/with Rorty’s pragmatism. It is an attempt at advancing the post-critical approach to education via a twofold strategy that might best be described as edifyingly discomforting. First, by intentionally choosing an uncomforting story as the basis for a theatre piece depicting an unsettling pedagogical situation. Second by developing a post-critical educational artefact under the premise that if critical pedagogy had Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed, then a post-critical pedagogy may benefit as well from what I would like to call an “edifying theatre”.