From Cognition to Being

Front matter

ter 2

Prolegomena for Teachers

THE MENTOR SERIES

Part Ii: Ontology

Heidegger suggests that the realm of relation, of being-with, arises in our “naming” a world. In this realm of sharing naming, where an original mutuality sources his gesture and word, a teacher, as artist, cultivates moments of encounter when he can share, invent, and bring forth with his students. And in our dialogue, in the faculty meeting or the teachers’ lounge, we are not describing facts about students or school. We are inventing our world, the context for our common experience.

We have now re-invented language as languaging, on our way to re-inventing the wheel of Saying. For one further shift before we attain that place, though, we turn to Martin Buber. If Heidegger is the prophet of languaging, and of Being as being-with, Buber is the prophet of I-You, of relation. He re-invents

TABLE OF CONTENTS ix languaging as sharing. As I speak with others, listening for a world, not merely to the world, we assume together the responsibility of Adam.

7 HERMENEUTIC CIRCLING AND

In this chapter we will begin to construct, in the vocabulary of Saying, a set of techniques for conducting schoolwork as being together and inventing. What if teachers and students, every day or week, could see themselves as having brought into being some possibility they had invented in their own speaking, and then realized, brought to completion? Provides extended examples from eleventh-grade English classes, including both a model for discussions of literature and an activity adapted from Outward Bound.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

As the teacher who introduced me to Saussure and Wittgenstein, Austin Quigley stands at one inception of this book. I have longed ever since for more of his guidance. But before I could secure it for my first draft, years ago, he had begun his own family project. I hope the present draft may renew our acquaintance.

My first written attempts were shepherded by Vic Gioscia of the Alon Foundation. I have borrowed from him not only phrases but attitudes and stages of thought. I trust he prefers the being of a shepherd to the role of gray eminence, but I'm afraid he must bear both burdens.

At three stages during the composition, Richard Rorty generously responded to my thinking and writing. I told him once that my project might be at its best the contrary of his. He smiled and said, "Well, we'll see." I hope I may have provoked his continued guidance as well.

I encountered the philosophy of Heidegger in courses given by an organization now called Landmark Education Corporation. As I continue to study his philosophy, I find myself returning often to the conversations we generated there.

To Tom Estes, Eric Bredo, Patti Driskill, and Susie Neuhauser; to my students in the Upward Bound program and my crewmates at Outward Bound; and to the Philosophy of Education Society, I am grateful for ever renewed chances to practise my commitment and improvise my material.

And of course, to my father and mother, my children, and my wife— we who have most intimately parented each other—I owe every blessing.