The Freedom To Be Bad: exploring teacher-student conflict and the possibility for education as subjectification
Haoyu Jin
University of Edingburgh
October 14th
12 – 1 pm UK Time
Zoom: https://bit.ly/3SuWAp6
This paper explores an incident of conflict that occurred between myself – as a teacher in a private tutoring agency – and a fourth-grade boy, Jie, who was under my supervision. In my reflections, I draw on a dialectical approach to the hermeneutics of practice – that is, I will try to give words to, and make sense of, educational situations and practices by offering competing interpretations of a single event.
During this incident, Jie uttered a physical threat towards me for “nagging” him about his disruptive behaviours. In response, I gave permission for Jie to carry out his threat of physical violence against me, but Jie refrained from doing so. After the incident, we developed a somewhat positive relationship with Jie showing significant improvement in conduct. I do not posit this incident as an example of “what to do in a situation like this”, but to explore the various possible interpretations of this event from a philosophical and educational point of view.
In this paper, I first discuss two key ideas associated with this incident – namely, freedom and “being bad” – in relation to each other – before providing a description of the incident itself. Afterwards, I present one interpretation of this incident that constitutes my initial understanding of “why my method worked”. I then problematize this initial interpretation and offer three alternatives and discuss their viability and limitations. My third interpretation, which is largely based both on Gert Biesta’s notion of education as subjectification and his interpretation of a similar incident relayed by Homer Lane, is where I settle in this paper.
To conclude, I draw some implications about how education could (or could not) take the freedom and subject-ness of the student seriously in the context of teacher-student conflicts.
New Grounds in Education Theory 