Responding to the Disappearance of the Teacher

In this article, Biesta (2016) argues that the current discourse shift within education that turns the teacher into facilitator of learning, student into learner, adult education into lifelong learning, renders the teacher invisible. Teaching and the teacher should be reclaimed, not from a conservative and authoritative approach, but from a, 1) purpose-driven place, that is, 2) informed by an ethos of students learning from teachers and with, 3) creating learning in the middle ground of resistance of the self and the world.

Firstly, Biesta (2016) argues that a purpose - telos - from the educator is crucial in order to determine what the wanted outcomes of the learning are; there is nothing in education itself that determines this. Secondly, teaching is not nothing, as the discourse shift highlighted above might allude to. Rather, students should learn from teachers, use them as a resource and be in control, whilst the teacher highly contributes. Thirdly, teaching is to bring something that is an 'other' to the student, and inbetween the two extreme responses to this; resistance to the self and resistance to the world, the learning takes place.

Reference: Biesta, G. J. (2016). Giving teaching back to education: Responding to the disappearance of the teacher. Pedagogía y Saberes, (44), 119-129.

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