The 20th century became not just a time of the “anthropological turn” in philosophy, but also an era of an “anthropological catastrophe” (M. K. Mamardashvili), the “death of man” (M. Foucault). The domination of instrumental rationality (J. Habermas) and formation of a society based on information that tries to be indifferent to fates and experience of those who hold it, made a lot of scholars of the second half of the 20th century start talking about a need to humanise education and help students generate and realise meanings in the framework of an educational process. We consider that such needs can hardly be implemented without thinking over a specific nature of human existence connected with the phenomena of meaning. So, the aim of our study is to explicate the heuristic potential of the phenomenological categories of «intentionality», «lifeworld» and «being-in-the-world» through our reflection on pedagogical practice.
First of all, we suppose that the Husserlian concept of intentionality is extremely important for understanding education as a “universe of meanings”. This concept allows us to focus not only on the subject itself, but on acts of consciousness in which this subject is constituted. Moreover, the intentional relation itself is the act of giving meaning to the subject. In this regard, if we take the principle of the intentionality of consciousness as a starting point, then it requires the pedagogical analysis be attentive not only on a certain object itself (for example, education or training and any other phenomena linked with these processes), but on the meaning things have in subject’s conscious experience. It this case the Husserlian slogan “Back to the things themselves!” can be read as a call for the description of those meanings that are constituted or posited in acts of consciousness itself, as such and such a meaning-for-consciousness (teachers’, students’, parents’ consciousness), and provided with this or that ontological status and that are vital for them. The phenomenological pedagogy is concerned with the essential structures of cognitive acts and their essential correlation to the objects apprehended by those acts. In the light of the above, one more phenomenological category is acquiring particular importance for the pedagogy - the «lifeworld».
The life-world is the set of the values and meanings that people attach to the things and that guide people in their thinking and behavior. The lifeworld is the world of our interests and purposeful activities and habitualities. But it is noteworthy that Husserl likens the life of consciousness to stream [6: 94]. It even seems as if the process of meaning constitution is so rapid, that the source of the meaning constituting activity remains “behind consciousness’ back”. In this regard, the lifeworld acts in its carriers implicitly, in the manner of habits, automatism of consciousness, certain algorithms of understanding and behavior. Human beings are normally completely absorbed in the world so as to be “captivated” or “ensnared” by it. Because they always live within the taken-for-granted life-world they rarely make it explicit. In general, the intentional life of consciousness and the life-world are concepts that set off one of the most persistent illusions of human existence, namely: it seems to a person that he detachedly and neutrally watches the world as a play unfolding before him. This situation is particularly clearly revealed in the field of intersubjective relations and, in particular, pedagogical interaction. So, Terje, a school teacher, refers to an incident which happened to him when he was eight or nine years old. He recalls that at school he was daily bullied in the schoolyard, especially by a boy who was older and stronger than he was. One day the teacher shamed the offender and advised Terje to hit back next time. But his advice turned out to be useless for Terje, since he was convinced that Jesus had never defended himself, neither should he [12: 55]. In this tutorial the natural and customary rule to “stand up for yourself” is precisely the element of the life-world, the spontaneous meaning that seize the teacher’s consciousness and close the teacher off from his student. This, in turn, brings us to another important Husserl’s imperative: “Learn to see!” The methodological imperative, implying the need for reflection as the thematization of the anonymous, fleeting life of consciousness, the need for awareness of those naive, self-evident meanings that our consciousness flood the world with. A pedagogical interaction can be a barrier to the accomplishment of this imperative whenever it gets in the teacher’s mind the meaning of a two-element structure consisting, on the one hand, of learned pedagogical theories and concepts and, on the other, of experience, which must necessarily be put “ into a Procrustean bed” of these concepts, be fully consistent with them. In this regard, the phenomenological perception is intended to encourage the development of pedagogical sensitivity through the tact and responsive attitude of an adult to the child’s lifeworld [10]. Husserl’s idea of the lifeworld was being developed further in the phenomenology of Heidegger, in his doctrine of the being-in-the-world. As we have seen, unlike Husserl, Heidegger tries to get beyond the intentional relation, stating that primordial mode of human being is not a contemplative, “theoretical” relation to an entity, which from the very beginning treats the world as totality of things, but Dasein as that which he called “presence”, that entity which in every case has Being-in-the-world as the way in which it is, where the world appears as a totality of tools or equipment, such an entity that affects Dasein in its care [4: 67-68] .
Starting from the category of Being-in-the-world, let us pay attention to such educational space as a school classroom. Every day teachers come to the classroom, the area in which a significant portion of their life is enacted. If we turn to the perception experience of the classroom by teachers and students, then we can assume that their experiences are varied indeed. But even people from the same social or professional group e. g. teachers experience the same events in various ways and the same issues have a different vital importance for them. The difference in the perception of classroom space by a young and an experienced teacher is rather revealing in itself. This is how novice experiences the classroom space for the first time as a teacher, “I walked into the room and looked at the desks, and at my desk, and didn’t know if I should touch it. I hung up stuff—took it down, moved desks, looked at them, then moved them back – and kept doing it throughout the year” [11: 173]. The described situation can be considered an illustrative example. Many first year teachers, having come at school attempting to make a classroom in which they have to spend much of the time their own, a space where they would feel confident and completely safe, “feel right at home”. But as can be seen from the example we have cited, this is not immediately possible. Let’s look at the situation phenomenologically. On the one hand, the young teacher returns to the familiar territory. He is homecomer expecting to find the classroom be the familiar, comfortable space that he experienced as a student. However, he is returning here no longer as a student, but as a teacher. The difficulty lies in the fact that, being at first glance in a seemingly familiar environment, yesterday’s student is forced to make the transition from one mode of being to a new one: being as a teacher rather than a student. The novice is unprepared for the foreignness of his position in this “familiar territory”. His main task now is to become part of the classroom space. A first-year teacher seeks to solve this problem by equipping a classroom: rearranging desks, decorating walls with visual materials, etc. But all these efforts fail. Why? From the phenomenological point of view, the point is that in order to begin to dwell as a teacher and thus build the room for learning, a first-year teacher needs to become familiar with experience of dwelling as a teacher. The following situation from school life will help to understand the suggested idea.
The head of the teaching practice came with her teacher student to school. This is how she described her experiences when she entered the classroom where the student had to do an internship. “I didn’t notice where the teacher’s desk was. What impressed me when I entered the room was the neat, informal arrangement of small round tables. Chairs were carefully upturned on the tables, resting their legs for the busy day tomorrow. On each chair seat was a pair of neatly placed running shoes waiting patiently for their owner to return the following day, standing guard and marking silently the place to which each child would return. As my eyes focused, riveted on the tables, I could see the small shoe-owners returning in the morning, taking down chairs, putting on shoes, and greeting classmates with eager anticipation of what the day had to offer. I saw flexibility, integration, individual interests being met at those tables. The room was warm with caring” [11: 174]. In this regard it is noteworthy that when the head of the teaching practice described what she saw to her student teacher, she was astonished and remained distrustful of what she had heard. She saw the room empty. In our view, the given example perfectly illustrates the phenomenological truth, namely: space is not just a receptacle of various kinds of objects (desks, chairs, books, a board, etc.) that which exist abstractly and independently of a person and have certain characteristics, but the sphere of things “present-at-hand” (Vorhanden), as M. Heidegger called it. The space of the class where the teacher “feels at home” is the space of the things “ready-to-hand” (Zuhanden). Tables, chairs, blackboard, technical devices and other educational materials are perceived not as isolated, contemplated things, but as bundle of references or assignments incorporated in the teacher's being-ready-to-hand world. The teacher’s perception of things is mediated by his presupposition, his acquaintance with the world, his mood, his current goals and interests, that is, his whole “lifeworld” before the comprehension. In this regard, to unfold oneself as a teacher’s being means learning to perceive things in the logic of being-ready-to-hand rather than being-present-at-hand. But it is noteworthy that first-year teacher without having seen schoolchildren in the class and drawing attention to classroom’s sort of bare takes it as entirely empty space. This fact has been seen in a negative light by the novice. However, phenomenologically emptiness is considered as a productive factor. “Often enough it appears to be a deficiency. Emptiness is held then to be a failure to fill up a cavity or gap presumably of place, and therefore no failure, but a bringing-forth... Emptiness – continues philosopher, – is not nothing. It is also no deficiency ... emptiness plays in the manner of a seeking-projecting instituting of places” [5: 315]. The same applies to the context of human existence. It should be noted that the first-year teacher himself can and must give shape to the emptiness that sometimes overwhelms him and goes beyond. The teacher can and should become the sculptor of the emptiness opened to him, by building “a cosmos out of chaos”. Otherwise the classroom space will remain “alien”. But this is not all. We would like to draw attention to one more point. Heidegger’s distinction between the ontology of being-present-at-hand and being-ready-to-hand has required the revision of the traditional understanding of the essence of a thing. The foregoing philosophy described thing’s essence in it’s whatness (“what” of the thing) or, in the words of Plato, in its meaningful aspect, eidos, essence and being-ness as idea. While the essence itself was define as the form that plays the role of unifying unity. For example, the essence of a tree lies in the idea of “treeness”, which makes many single objects – oak, birch, pine, etc. – one thing. Heidegger refuses to interpret an essence as a form, considering it unsuitable, first of all, because ontologically the first determination of a thing, according to thinker, is not its “what” (essentia), but its “in-order-to”. Using the example of a hammer, Heidegger convincingly illustrates that a thing as ready-to-hand is never isolated, the one, identical to itself. So, they deal with a hammer when hammering nails, with the latter, in turn, when fixing the material, and with the material during the construction of a weatherproof cover. In this context the essence of an entity is not an internal form of the thing that turns a ‘heap’ of elements into a whole, but а variety of references and assignments [2: 289-290] .
The young teachers’ statements illustrate their difficulties in mastering such vision of essence of a thing. “I walked into the room looked at the desks, and at my desk, and didn’t know if I should touch it. I felt incapable of making any concrete decisions. I didn’t know what to do” [11:178]. Or, “You have to run around looking for things that nobody wants. You have to be resourceful. I went and looked. Hunted around and when I found something I wanted I dragged it back to my room… I was so afraid to give anything up. I remember thinking that this moveable room divider would be so handy. I should really think of something to do with it. Finally, around the middle of the year, I got rid of it” [11:179]. Such statements are an indication that the first-year teachers’ basic intention to feel comfortable in the classroom by decorating it, finding a right place for teacher’s desk, trying to stock up on different type of visuals and handouts as well as many other “useful” things lacks skills of perception that allow the beginning teacher to see things in their interaction, that is, as a totality of involvements, as Heidegger puts it. Alternatively, in the absence of such skill, we are dealing with the so called “deficient mode of concern”, raised in the situations of unserviceability, i. e. lack of tools, when one fails to find something on its place, when ready-at-hand is only present as an entity. At last, there is the issue that should be taken into account. On the one hand, the classroom is traditionally the place where educational activities are carried out. But, on the other hand, phenomenology states, that our identity is inextricably bound to one another, pointing that the last ones are co-produced as people come to identify with where they live and what they do. It means, probably, in this context, that human being is not in external relations with space like material things [1: 285-330]. An outer space that which refers to the external environment seems like becoming an extension of an inner space as the various modes of personal meaningful activities and relations are being unfold and strengthened. It means that educational space doesn’t have to be identical to physical space of the classroom. In addition, it is important to pay attention to how the established habit of identifying educational space and the space of classroom turns out to be a psychological obstacle to pedagogical activity. The following are the thoughts of the teacher about the lesson outside the school. “I wanted to be outside with, them, but was this really the best place for us? ... Sometimes I feel as if the classroom smothers us. I know I came alive outside, in some way… What I want to know is why I feel so displaced when I take them out here...” [3: 186]. It can be seen in this example that it is safe to assume that the expansion of the educational space will challenge accustomed pedagogical strategies of teaching and confront teachers with an acute question of the meaning of education and how can this new opening space become an area of personal development rather than alienation. It is important to emphasize that when it comes to expanding an educational space, it’s not just psychological preparedness (or unpreparedness) of the teacher is discussed, but the specificity of human being, ensuring the necessity for a man to “reach-beyond-himself”, to transcend the limits of his own identity. The relevance of these observations is not confined only to the teacher. Let’s consider the student through the lens of phenomenology. School, as any other institutional space affects the individual, determining his thinking and his behavior. The classroom space in this sense is given to student first of all as disciplinary space. Occasionally students have to hear that “school is not the place to…”. This means, the very fact of person’s entering the school or classroom space requires a certain mode of existence. Actually, from the elementary school the individual is mastering embodied knowledge through a continuous process of requirement interiorization: “stand in the row”, “stay in line”, “raise your hands to have a chance to answer”, “stay where you are”, “get up and down on teachers’ demand” etc [7]. Focus on the disciplinary aspect of space misses the point – the being-in-the-world in its phenomenological interpretation. First of all, it should be noted that the world is not identical with reality as a set of objects. If reality is a region of controllable and predictable, then the world, on the contrary, is the dimension of the unexpected and spontaneous. In the light of such an understanding of the world, it is important to turn to the Langeveld’s phenomenological description of the secret place in the life of the child [8, 9] . Langeveld is the representative of the Utrecht school of phenomenological pedagogy. He believes a “secret place” must be in the life of every child, since it is rooted in the very existence of man, and is the fundamental condition of his (man’s) presence (positivity) in the world. In fact, a secret place is a place of deepening into oneself, a place of presence in harmony, not disagreement with oneself, which is actually emphasized in the phenomenological concept of the world. In addition, the experience of being in a “secret place” is the first child’s experience of meeting the entity as ready-to-hand. Langeveld gives an amusing illustration that conveys the specifics of a secret place using an example of an attic. When Langeveld speaks about the things the attic is crammed with he speaks about the entity ready-to-hand as distinguished from the present-at-hand, about equipment (Zeug) as distinguished from the thing-object (of perception, knowledge, etc.). Thus the things in the attic are things-ready-to-hand, in that a man without any delay can use them in order to climb, to crawl and hide. Attic in this sense is a whole world where there are huts and havens, places of refuge, retreats, sanctuaries, dens, caves, holes, and narrow passes to travel through. Every object in the attic assumes a meaning which best fits it and makes it a part of this landscape. Thus a chair or a table in the living room would always be a chair or a table and nothing else, but now that as it has been discarded this piece of furniture takes on an unending array of identities in the free and undisturbed world of the attic. For example, a stove that turned out to be in the attic is not only a useless item of household appliances. For a child in his concernful dealings with the familiar world of his lived in daily activities the stove is also a ship's gun, and a robot, etc. Each thing as equipment in a “secret place” is a bundle of references or assignments having the character in-order-to and refers to another object, carrier, user, etc. And yet, the completeness of definition of equipment in its “in-order-to” can not be achieved, because the variety of references seems to be open as a matter of principle: assignment refers to a new assignment. The particular value of Langefeld’s considerations lies not only in further reminders of that the being-ready-to-hand is ontologically the first or primordial determination of the things, but also in that they hint that the world is not entirely “fulfilled by us”. There is something vague and indefinable that seems to force itself upon us demanding that we make an effort to define it. However, it should be noted that a child’s being in the world that reveals itself as a horizon of possibilities could be restrained, blocked by the official, institutional space, as the following example seems to suggest.
Thus the principal asked the teacher to meet parents of a pupil with the explanation that the family would be moving to our area in a couple of months and the boy would be entering the teacher’s kindergarten classroom. His mother told of her son’s special needs. She explained that her son did not enjoy books, did not know alphabet and he was behind in skills that other children in his kindergarten class had acquired. When Jason came into his new classroom accompanied by his new teacher he did indeed appear to have very limited vocabulary and few if any reading, writing, or math skills. The more the teacher watched and listened, the more it appeared that Jason was indeed out of place in this classroom. But when the teacher saw Jason on the school playground, it was a completely different child. She saw a boy went all the way around on the swing singing “The Alphabet Song” freely, fluently, and at the top of his lungs. She stopped, amazed [3: 196] . Apparently, the playground was for Jason the “secret place” where he could not take into account the pressure of the adult world, imposing established ways of life experience and the worldview. In this context, it is important to see the role of extra-curricular space. At one time, H. Arendt, starting from Heidegger's thought about the specifics of human existence as “being-in-the-world” remarked that school is not a world, and should not pretend to be one. A school is an institution that makes the transition from private home environments into the public space possible. And in this regard, the pedagogical interaction that explicates itself outside the class is considered productive because it can help to see the gap between the understanding of the world and the world itself. In addition, if one of the characteristics of pedagogical activity is to assist a person in the way to knowing the world without outside officious interference, then it would be reasonable to maintain and expand a degree of students’ freedom, which implies going outside school and classroom space. Phenomenologically the expanding of the frontiers of the class as well as acquiring a research experience by students studying the natural world or history turns out a valuable experience. It allows to feel the specific of human existence, which is the need for a person to “be-in-out-himself” transcending the limits of one's own identity, and also initiates a meeting with the world as a place of uncertainty and open possibilities.
Let’s summarize that that was said above. The first thing phenomenology draws teachers’ attention to is the specific nature of human being. Whether we interpret this specificity in the spirit of Husserl as “the intentional life of consciousness” or as presence (Dasein) in the sense of Heidegger, we go beyond naturalism which is a characteristic of the natural attitude of consciousness, we also question the natural positing the student and the teacher to one another. In fact what positivity is meant we can be judged by the words of a novice teacher, “I thought that there are going to be 20-odd children who are going to be constantly attentive and never fiddle about in their seats and they’re going to be with me constantly on whatever I do” [11: 180].
The teacher is the subject that forms the student as an object. This is the very givenness behind what has been said above. Such attitude meets the spirit of the natural scientific experimental knowledge - to “endure” the nature (in this case, the pupil’s) to the state and type required by the theoretical scenario (educational standard). The searches for technologies to ensure the effective knowledge transfer is based on the assumption of continuity and homogeneity of the space where these technologies will be implemented. Meanwhile, human being is not a thing, and if to assume, as phenomenology does, the fact that the specific way of human existence lies in its “lifeworld” (or “being-in-the-world”), we’ll have to admit that the teacher and the student can be shielded from each other by space and time of their own, while the “spatiality” of the pedagogical interaction itself is discrete. Thus, pedagogical interaction will become an encounter between the students and the teacher only if it based on a tacit fund of shared meanings and values that is the core of the students’ life-world, their way of being-in-the-world.
The Husserl’s metaphor of consciousness as a flow forces one to focus attention on one more important aspect. So long as the intentional depth of consciousness is inexhaustible, then any vision, understanding of the world is limited, incomplete. In this regard, the being-in-the-world is possible only as being-with-others, as the experience of complementary views, perspectives. This in turn means that only the dialogical forms of learning are most appropriate to the nature of human existence and must become a priority issue for the educational policy.
Список литературы
REFERENCES
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