Written collaboratively by two undergraduate students and one professor, this article explores what it would mean to teach existentialism ''existentially.'' We conducted a survey of how Existentialism is currently taught in universities across North America, concluding that, while existentialism courses tend to resemble other undergraduate philosophy courses, existentialist texts challenge us to rethink conventional teaching practices. Looking to thinkers like Kierkegaard, Beauvoir and Arendt for insights into the nature of pedagogy, as well as recent work by Gert Biesta, we lay out the four qualities that we propose characterize ''existentialist'' teaching practices: an emphasis on teaching over learning and on the ''how'' over the what; the cultivation of newness as well as capacities for resistance. Reflecting on the significance of existentialism for classroom dynamics, we conclude by examining the tensions between existentialist commitments to freedom and prevailing trends in higher education. This essay raises questions about the emancipatory potential of existentialist philosophies, especially in the context of undergraduate classrooms.
This essay examines the definitions of the key words of the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL)—scholarship, teaching, and learning—in order to identify the hopes that animate SoTL research and examine these hopes in light of recent critical thinking about the corporatization of higher education. Arguing that Biesta’s (2013b) distinction between “learning from” and “being taught by” offers an important corrective to the prevailing definitions of SoTL, the essay reflects on the tensions between scholarly teaching, as understood by SoTL, and teaching as a contingent and unpredictable event. Cet essai examine la définition des mots-clés de l’avancement des connaissances en enseignement et en apprentissage (ACEA) – avancement des connaissances, enseignement, apprentissage – afin d’identifier les espoirs qui inspirent la recherche en ACEA et d’examiner ces espoirs à la lumière des pensées critiques récentes qui portent sur la tendance de l’enseignement supérieur à fonctionner comme une entreprise. Cet essai présente l’argument selon lequel la distinction faite par Biesta (2013b) entre « apprendre de quelqu’un » et « être enseigné par quelqu’un » constitue une correction importante aux définitions actuelles de l’ACEA. L’essai propose une réflexion sur les tensions qui existent entre l’enseignement intellectuel, tel que compris par l’ACEA, et l’enseignement en tant qu’événement contingent et imprévisible.
The mode for nondestructive secularization is translation" -Jürgen Habermas Whereas I doubt that anyone would approach me today in this way, many years ago, a classmate asked me in casual tones if I was "religious." I had just begun my graduate studies and left behind a close-knit community in order to study philosophy, and this unexpected question was both startling and vaguely vexing. Despite my awareness of the perception of others that I was indeed "religious," at the time I did not, and actually would not have wanted to, identify in those terms. Were I pressed to self-identify, it would have been in the terms of belonging to specific communities -in my case, the Anabaptist peace-church tradition and the somewhat ethnically based community of Dutch Canadian neo-Calvinists, or, more generally, Christianity.At that time, the term "religious" struck me in some ways as a secular identification, reflecting an outsider's overly imprecise perspective on my subjective sense of religious participation. In other words, I resisted the label "religious" because it seemed to reduce complex confessional affiliations to an uncomfortably external vantage point. Moreover, to cede ground to the outsider suggested the acceptance of an implicit judgment of Christianitynamely as marking the nonsensical or at least highly problematic co-existence of religious faith with the scientific context of graduate school. As a member of a religious community, I had a highly attuned awareness of the boundaries of community, including not only a robust understanding of precisely who else belonged to the fold but also a sense of how differently these boundaries might appear to an outsider. Anthropologists identify this tension between a participant's self-understanding and an observer's perspective as the indeterminate relationship between emic and etic analyses; and this indeterminacy plays an important role in current debates about the nature of the religious, the secular, and the fraught relations between the two. I recall this anecdote in order to reflect on the ambiguity of the term "religious," especially in terms of its meaning for religious participants and its relationship to its companion term "secular." In what follows, I describe Habermas' normative program for the successful and mutually beneficial co-existence of the religious and the non-religious, looking especially at his reliance upon a particular reading of Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard himself wrote as a self-described Christian, or at least as someone invested in the possibilities of Christian existence, and so it is instructive to examine how Habermas, an admittedly non-religious thinker, renders Kierkegaard's project. As I argue below, the specific ways in which Habermas employs Kierkegaard's thought demonstrates what Habermas himself advocates for others: an appreciative respect for religious insights and simultaneous self-reflection on the limitations of both secular and philosophical thinking.Especially in his recent writings, Habermas expresses a great degree of empathy w...
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