An Evading Language of and for Education: producing discourse and crafting meaning as a shared practice

This paper discusses how can a language of education be in the present.
The sociopolitical situation provides a context that fuels language as informative and self-sufficient, education being no exception [4; 6; 7]. Its compression into an instrument at service of a predetermined aim [5; 8] defines its logic as an answer. What is education? It is learning [4]. The results are not innocuous: this language constitutes pedagogy as a service where knowledge is a product [4], dimming the emergence of commonalities during an educational process [2]. Nevertheless, there has been critical resistance to this instrumentalising of education, via language [3; 4; 8]. I accept Biesta’s [4] invitation to re- invent a language for education, proposing a different way to relate to one of the concepts presented as particular to educational relationships — transcendental violence. I notice a transitional logic in such arrangement, and I suggest a hesitation in violence. Rather than approaching learning as responding to a question [4], where an overcoming is entailed, I propose an insistent negation of a response as a radically active engagement with a question. Here, I draw from Blanchot’s «conception of the nothing (rien) that retains its insistent quality, insisting without the possibility of its own negation [...]» [1: p. 33]. Violence is kept, not transcended.

Methodological design:
This is a reading of the references provided, where I intend to establish bridges between different (living) thinkers so as to promote a conversation on the topic.

Expected conclusions/findings:
Maintaining the violence of thought alive is thus what retains ourselves in the present, now, here, together. The language of education, then, would not be one which would move towards, transcending some kind of condition; rather, it is ultimately non-intelligible, always-to-be-established. So, we hold sheer violence, concerned with learning as a non-response; a process of continuously being present, necessarily inviting different contemplations and other languages in/to the world.

Relevance to Nordic educational research:
A pedagogical shared experience of difference, linked to democratisation, is critical in discussions within the Nordic Context, particularly under neoliberal and authoritarian pressings. Moreover, I see that a radical commitment with the present, may also entail an important ethical discussion of pedagogy.