Figuring Out Ineffable Education

Authors

  • Lynn Fendler Michigan State University

Keywords:

unspeakable, figurative language, rhetoric, ethics, intimacy, generosity

Abstract

Using devices from classical rhetoric, this essay draws a distinction between representational language and figurative language. That distinction is extended as an analogy for thinking about education, outlining the possibility that figurative education might be something other than representational education. Representational language and figurative language establish two different constellations of power relations between knowledge and people, and two different conceptual horizons for imagining what education might mean. Capitalizing on the epistemological fallout that occurs when representational language shifts to figurative language, this essay tries to come to terms with the differences between representational education and figurative education in order to imagine other ways of being educated. It concludes by gesturing toward ineffable values of ethics, intimacy, and generosity.

Author Biography

Lynn Fendler, Michigan State University

Lynn Fendler is Associate Professor of Teacher Education at Michigan State University.

Her internationally oriented research explores what it means to be educated in particular historical and political contexts. She examines critical and genealogical relations among knowledge, reason, discipline, and power. Her recent interests include historiography, rhetoric, and philosophy of food.

See: http://education.msu.edu/search/[email protected]

References

Aristotle. Rhetoric. Online version compiled by Lee Honeycutt. Available: http://rhetoric.eserver.org/aristotle/

Bingham, C. & Biesta, G.J-J. with Jacques Rancière (2010). Jacques Rancière: Education, truth, emancipation. London/New York: Continuum.

Foucault, M. (2011). The courage of truth: Lectures at the Collège De France, 1983-1984. G. Burchell (Trans.). New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Hawhee, D. (2002). Bodily pedagogies: Rhetoric, athletics, and the Sophists' three Rs. College English, 65(2), 142-162.

Perloff, M. (1996). Wittgenstein's ladder: Poetic language and the strangeness of the ordinary. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Rancière, J. (1991). The ignorant schoolmaster: Five lessons in intellectual emancipation. K. Ross (Trans.). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Rancière, J. (2006). The Politics of aesthetics. London: Continuum.

Wittgenstein, L. (1977). Vermischte Bemerkungen. Berlin: Suhrkamp.

Zembylas, M. & Fendler, L. (2007). Reframing emotion in education through lenses of parrhesia and care of the self. Studies in Philosophy and Education, 26(4), 319-333.

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Published

2012-10-12

Issue

Vol. 1 No. 1 (2012)

Section

Invited papers

License


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