Research project Forward to the (Common) Roots of Education – Pedagogical Terminologies in Different Languages

There have been cross-national dialogues and mutual influences about education in the past. We see the need to renew cross-border ponderings and appreciation of values about common roots of educational terminology in order to move forward amidst contemporary challenges. The principal purpose of the workshop series is to investigate various cultural archives by scholars from different European countries - formal and informal, analogous and digital etc. - in order to map multiple, simultaneous and concurring claims of reality, experience, and meaning that form an idea of pedagogy. For this, different educational approaches (Bildung, learning/Didactics, educating/upbringing, educational practice and methodology on multiculturality, processes of enculturation and art) will be linked to social and cultural tasks, and knowledge formats of today. A particular value is attached to aesthetic approaches. The joint concern is to listen to the various complementary or conflicting claims of different epistemic communities proposing pedagogical terminology. We also focus on methodological and theoretical foundations for empirical studies that seek to map the different concepts of pedagogy. 

The workshop series on pedagogical terminologies in different languages, is based on Wilhelm von Humboldt’s thesis of Bildung as being determined by language and history - as further developed within Educational Anthropology, by putting the same right of all cultures to make statements about humans and education to the fore (Wulf 2003). In a time of increasing globalization, as well as politicization and instrumentalization of education, we work on an ethical and methodical vocabulary and terminology for pedagogy that takes different traditions, and language-bound discourses on education into account. The (non-exclusive) focus is on English, German, Swedish, Greek, and Latin (to represent the Roman languages). Language constitutes formats of professional pedagogical knowledge, which even models social and cultural tasks of today, here identified as Children's Perspectives, Digitalization, Multiculturality and Glocalisation, Interdependence and Sustainable Development, Reliability, Quality, Governance, Policy, and Leadership, Academic Freedom, Gender Perspective on Building Knowledge, Enculturation, Postcolonial Perspectives and the Art.

Bildung

According to the UNESCO sustainable development goals, adolescents face a future in which profound changes (e.g. world climate, reduction of important life resources such as the fossil energies and species, digitalized and automatized work market) are expected. For dealing with the challenges in a sustainable way, profound knowledge about the properties, the entanglements and the interdependencies of diverse cultures, values, and beings within ecosystems, as well as open and flexible thinking is needed. Not least, should the individual be enabled to react to difficult conditions and situations in a beneficial way? According to Wilhelm von Humboldt ([1793/94] 2000), to take responsibility in a world of challenge presupposes the most harmonious, and complete development of the individual’s forces. Humboldt (ibid.) grasps the ability and willingness to sustainably care for oneself, for others, and for the environment as Bildung. This, by regarding every human; "action is an attempt of the will to become free and independent in itself" (ibid., p. 58). Bildung (with no direct equivalent in English), e.g. in Swedish bildning, Latin formatio, Greek εκπαίδευση, etc. refers to the formation and realization of the self, in engagement with the world, and to the relation of the self with itself in depth and intricacy. We will question what can be learned from Wolfgang Klafki's sentence: "humanity can be realized only in an individual way" (2000, p.93) while a particular value is attached to aesthetic approaches.

Learning/Curriculum/Didactics

In essence, learning is about the challenge to handle challenges, thus in terms of potential obstacles (Greeno & Engeström 2014). The ability to think allows people to create all kinds of relationships, forming concepts, organizing their environment, and solving problems. In thinking, one relates to elementary comprehensive processes, e.g. social bonding, attention, motivation, perception, concept formation, memory, and problem-awareness. Thinking gives rise to all learning and all development of humans. How to approach this from the different languages? Different language contexts put the subject (Swedish att lära sig), or the process and its content (English learning, German lernen, Latin discentia or apprehensio) to the foreground, thereby providing different models for dealing with the elementary comprehensive processes. There are also different scholarly traditions: Within curriculum approaches, learning content is packaged (Tyler 1957) or related to the learner (Pinar 2012).  Within Didactics (formal learning), the content of learning is constructed by the teacher(s) and students together (Klafki 2000). The practice approach regards learning as coming to participate in practices that will influence the actors (Schatzki 2012), related to corporealities. Of special interest is how these traditions meet the Bologna-idea of a 'transparency of learning goals' (van Damme 2009).

Educating/Upbringing

Education, in the sense of upbringing, relates to a personal bonding for the sake of a child or student with a caring dimension, comparable to familial bonding. The child’s lifeworld and the pedagogical situation are in the foreground. The ultimate goal of educating and upbringing is the enactment of the (young) person to various everyday life and intellectual challenges, and hereby, "awaken and mediate the child’s own goals in relation to the subjects and tasks" (Kraus & Senkbeil 2021). Education and upbringing are ethical in nature. Ethical decisions in the pedagogy are personal, as well as of professional, and broader social concern. Pedagogy has a dignity of its own, outside any theory and evidence (Schleiermacher ([1826] 1957). Reliability and responsibility, integrity and leadership in the field of education refer to a special kind of awareness and artfulness. In this regard, the different discourses on education put either caring and parenting (English upbringing, Swedish barnfostran, Greek ανατροφή), leadership and formation (German Erziehung) or the processes and practices of learning (Latin educatio, English educating) to the fore.

Educational Practice

From the perspective of the 'non-essentialist feminist standpoint theory' (Haraway 1991), the traditional self-conception of the Social and Human Sciences are criticized for claiming for themselves to be able to determine what is real (within disciplinary boundaries). The idea of scientifically valid representation is replaced by a 'theory and practice of objectivity', dealing with the question of how objectivity is established. Pragmatic approaches, 'performativity', 'discursivity', 'emergence', etc. describe different forms of relating theory to practice and vice versa. We will decipher Schleiermacher's ([1826] 1957, p. 11; own transl.) sentence; "the dignity of [pedagogical] practice is independent of theory; practice only becomes more conscious with theory" with the feminist standpoint theory, i.e. by the forms of relating theory to practice. The scientific standpoint involves a withdrawal of the teachers "from their habitual actions [to] gain some distance so that the circumstances in which they live are available to reflection", in a way in which alternatives can be explored (Bollnow [1989] 2019, p. 11). Tacit knowledge (Polanyi 1966), reflective practioning (Schön 1983), pedagogical tact (Takt) (Herbart [1802] 1969), pedagogical tensions (Spannungsfelder) (Schleiermacher ([1826] 1957), 'pedagogical meetings and handling' (Aspelin & Persson 2011) are proposals for modelling educational practices. An outlook will be given to practices bound to virtual resource.

Links to Pedagogical View on 'Challenges of Today'.

Children's Perspectives

Children's Studies depart from little narratives of children and youngsters. In order to give the children a voice, a difference is made between 'trying to understand a child' (from the adult perspective) and 'taking the child's perspective'. The possibility to the latter is controversially discussed. According to Morrow & Richards (1996), social sciences are generally ruled by the orientation at an idealized manner of a special kind of communicating, assessing and orientating. By reducing communication to judgement and proof, other possible forms of expression and existence are faded out, e.g. those children prefer. Our focus is on the child as a subject in his or her own life-world; in other words, the child’s phenomenology. Corporeality is an important reference in responding to this desideratum. Furthermore, since the 1990s, the multidisciplinary Children's Studies acknowledge that childhood is not a universal thing. Childhood is socially constructed. In this regard, within Children's Studies it is investigated how structures and processes shape children's orientation and the cultures of a childhood. 

Digitalization, Multiculturality and Glocalisation

In times of ICT revolution and digital nomadism, transnational communities and increasing mobility through residential relocation and leisure mobility, 'multilocality' describes operating at more than one place. In local and global interweaving, geographies, transformation, etc. groups or persons gradually acquire the characteristics and norms of multicultural and glocal culture. The latter is in many parts designed by digital means. According to Geertz (1973), 'cultural performance' is a 'performance of community' in handling and interpreting verbalized and non-verbalized significant characters. Cultural performance comes into effect in the medium of physical expressivity, namely when symbols and their sensual presence appear together. In regard to glocalisation, multiculturality and digitalization, there are two main areas of interest:

1. The effects of technologies on glocalisation;
2. The strengthening of understanding theories, models, research, applications, best practices, and issues that are related to digital learning and teaching through a glocal perspective.

Interdependence and Sustainable Development

Today we live in a space of intense proximity; the economic, ecologic and human interdependence of the diverse nations and cultures becomes more and more obvious. In future, fast and profound changes and new chances are expected. A sustainable way of dealing with these challenges presupposes intercultural and ecological thinking, characterized by openness and flexibility and by the knowledge about the entanglements and the interdependences of diverse values, cultures and species transcending the national borders and continents. The individual should be able to react on difficult conditions and situations in a beneficial way. The insights into the different cultural and social contexts as well as the awareness of the significance and the utilisations of species and things, forms of living and actions can, thus, only be developed in the interaction with the phenomena at hand. In a pedagogical sense, the knowledge to be learnt is always related to the ability of connecting and applying it to challenges at hand, sustainably caring for oneself, for others and for the environment in the wider sense. Sustainable knowledge is connected to the experiences and understanding of one’s own position, capabilities and possibilities to act. Striking for this is the possibility to see the world as a meaningful and liveable organic whole, to follow up long-term aims and to build up solidary relations under a long-term perspective.

Reliability, Quality

Since the turn of the last century worldwide, the quality of institutionalized education and its assessment more and more came into the public’s focus. One approaches such quality foremost by metrical reliability. Thereby, another track of creating reliability is overshadowed, i.e. using the human sciences and their theories for historically tracing pedagogically effective ideas: "Man only recognizes himself in history. […] The significance of the human sciences and their theories resides in the fact that they help us to see what we have to do in the world, what we can do with ourselves, what we have to do with the world, and what the world can do with us." (Dilthey 1958, 279f.) This implies that an exclusive theoretical (or practical) perspective should be avoided, not least in modelling the quality of pedagogy. As education consists in a prism of observable aspects of learning and pedagogical practices, such as forms of showing and responsivity, explicative attention, mimesis, transformation and displacement, reliability and quality in pedagogical contexts is about grasping such 'phenomenologies'. Reliability and quality are mainly up to practitioners; pedagogues as well as students develop strategies and procedures in order to improve educational practices and processes.

Governance, Policy, and Leadership

Usually, educational leadership is an empirical phenomenon. The following ideas are historically and educationally grounded: The artes liberales are considered essential for a person in order to know how to take an active and responsible part in civic life. New forms of governance, policy and leadership unfold with their own dynamics that enforce or hinder from such participation. - The artes liberales depart from the "desire for a universal understanding" (Tubbs, 2014, p.1) in fostering methods of enquiry that are not directed to only one approach to a topic. Instead, the complexity of knowledge and skills necessary for a 'free' person in order to take a conscious and active part in professional, public, and political fields are considered. These embrace general knowledge, the variety of academic disciplines, different kinds of knowledge, various responsibilities, debate, cultivation of the mind, the study of human beings, etc. as pedagogical practices. All these coin forms of governance, policy and leadership. Seen from the artes liberales point of view, the latter are, in principle, responses. That is to say, governing or leading others is modelled as responding to claims by sympathetic attention, recognition, making sense of a matter, summarizing, grasping an intention, understanding, reflecting (cp. Waldenfels 2003).

Academic Freedom

Bildung and thoughtfulness can only be achieved and upheld through a State which holds back and at the same time would provide both freedom and the financial resources for the Bildung-culture. Humboldt who, together with the philosophers Johann G. Fichte and Friedrich E. D. Schleiermacher, initiated the establishment of the University of Berlin (today Humboldt University of Berlin) in 1809, conceptualized academic freedom, i.e. the freedom of scholars to teach or communicate knowledge, even if it is inconvenient to external political groups. Academic freedom is the right of the scholar to bind one’s teaching to one’s own research and to convey one’s recent scientific results without any curricular or other restrictions of content. Academic freedom not only enshrines freedom to do research, to teach, but also the freedom to learn as a Fundamental Human Right. Educational institutions have been and are seen apart from and even directed against political interests. Academic freedom is deeply connected to complex ethical issues; the focus of teaching and research are free from political domination with research as part of teaching. In different countries, academic freedom is at stake in different ways. 

Gender Perspective on Building Knowledge

Today, the idea of scientifically valid representation has its place also outside of the abstraction of the Western masculine as the norm for conceptualizing the individual and society. It is confronted by people’s various knowledges in a world of cultural diversity and diverse forms of self-representation. Feminist approaches regard a social context as formed by performative references to subjectivity and generality; dealing with the question of how objectivity is constructed, reasoned and fixed. From this, concepts of ‘diversity, gender and education’ and norm critique are modelled and operating in education and society.

Enculturation, Postcolonial Perspectives and the Art

On a global level, many events and processes occur simultaneously, more or less dependent on each other. Multiple interpretations occur in parallel, complementary, or contradictory ways. The question is how values, agency and critical thinking of individuals can be emphasized, individually and collectively, by deconstructing orders of power such as colonialism, imperialism, etc. and without overstressing rationalism, naturalism and empiricism, or faith. Not only practical pedagogy, also art is about relation rather than outcome. Art is about meeting and interpreting; and it can be a way to investigate the world and put things at stake. Academic research, education, and contemporary art today converge as ways of searching for knowledge, and function as methods to broaden the mind in terms of an enculturation. The aim is to, with a postcolonial perspective, derive methodical and methodological approaches for a better understanding of the different traditions and discourses on enculturation and education.

State of the Art (excerpt)

Historically, there have been broad cross-national, comparative dialogue on the traditions of Didactics and Curriculum Theory (e.g. Hamilton 1999, Kansanen 1999, Hudson & Meyer 2011, Westbury, Hopmann & Riquarts 2015, Deng 2020, Klette 2015, Wahlström et al. 2018, Werler & Tahirslay 2020). One can find some proposals for bridging these two traditions (e.g. by educational leadership Uljens & Ylimaki, 2017; Biesta 2020, Willbergh 2015). This is also directed at the different school subjects (Ongstad 2012). Besides that, there are several contributions to making the German term Bildung available to other language contexts (e.g. Danner 1994, Bornemark 2007, Heidt 2015, Alvares 2019, Friesen 2021, Tahirslay & Werler 2021, Kraus & Ylimaki in progress), and for modelling educational practices (Friesen & Saevi 2010, Herbert & Kraus 2012, English 2013, Breidenstein et al. 2017), and pedagogical professionality (Meyer 1991, Hummrich 2015), or bringing both, Bildung and educational practices, together by adopting a distinct scholarly perspective (for the Pedagogical Anthropology Wulf 2013). Indeed, we can find evidence of cross-national interest and influences during earlier times of challenge as evidenced in John Dewey’s (e.g. 1897; 1916; 1938) scholarship amidst world wars, increased immigration, and industrialization.

For the aims of this conference, the relatively new research area: transcultural studies on the history of reception of theories (e.g. Welsch 1999, Wieland 2014, Meyer & Rakhkochkine 2018), and proposals for a transcultural glossary (e.g. Friesen 2021) are of special interest. In developing a methodology for grasping multiculturality and processes of Enculturation, the approaches in the frame of art we foremost relate to, are taken into account: Geertz 1973, Gordon 1995, Lewis 2002, Bhabha 2011, Eisenstadt 2000, Dabashi 2015, Mattig 2017.

Project managers

Anja Kraus

Professor

Department of Teaching and Learning

08-120 768 79

anja.kraus@su.se

See profile page for Anja Kraus

Members

Agnes Pfrang

Professor

University of Erfurt

agnes.pfrang@uni-erfurt.de

Rose Ylimaki

Professor

Northern Arizona University

rose.ylimaki@nau.edu

About the workshop series

All education begins with an implicit image or ideal of the human. In principle, what this image of the human can be is open. In a democratic society, we believe that images of the human play a central role, when, by pedagogy, one is to be guided towards self-determination. It needs to be a matter of explicit public awareness and deliberation that the image of the human is dependent on different languages.

The workshop series is held in English, at the same time as it is open to all languages of the world and welcomes proposals for comparisons of pedagogical concepts and terms from different language areas in relation to much-cited historical researchers in the field of education (e.g. 'growth' with John Dewey and 'Bildung' with Wilhelm von Humboldt).

Our workshops take place twice a year in autumn and spring.

Spring 2024

6th workshop: Understanding 'Lehrplan' and 'Curriculum': A Comparative Analysis (166 Kb)

Autumn 2023

5th workshop: Christian and Islamic “Bildung” – Education, formation, knowledge or attitude? (107 Kb)

Spring 2023

4th workshop: “Recognition” (German: Anerkennung, Swedish: erkänsla) – in pedagogical relationships (162 Kb)

Autumn 2022

3rd workshop: The ‘Educational Journey’ and ‘Bildungsreise’ (149 Kb)

Spring 2022

2nd workshop: ‘Vernunft’ and ‘Diversity’ in Educational Policy (158 Kb)

Autumn 2021

1st workshop: ‘Bildung and Growth’ (162 Kb)