Page 93 - Looking_after_school

3. Touchstones: pedagogical articulations

allow the coming generation to become a new generation. For this rea-
son, the question is not just whether we allow the next generation to go
to school, but also whether and how we allow the world to go to school.

The teacher as seen from within the school

Much can be said about the teacher when starting from scholastic
learning. However, we confine ourselves here to what is typical about
‘school talk’, and how it has – together with a set of pedagogic arrange-
ments – the transformative power to enact the conditions of freedom,
equality, and formation. To understand this power of ‘school talk’, it
might be helpful to refer to what Latour (2010) says about love-talk.
He shows how a sentence such as ‘I love you’ is anything but origi-
nal (when looking at it as a statement which transmits information)
but how, when truly said in a concrete situation, it has the power to
affect or transform both the listener and the speaker, to modify time
and space. We can now say something similar about school talk. It is
a distinctive way of truth telling, a specific kind of speech, including a
particular vocabulary, but foremost a distinctive mode of expression
and tonality, and a typical way to link people, things, and words. Truly
scholastic speech is also affecting space, time, and matter, and creates
the conditions to become a school student and a school teacher, and
to confront the world. This transformative force of school talk can be
captured in variations of a single paradigmatic expression: ‘try’. The
expression ‘try’, first, generates a particular experience of freedom; sec-
ond, the variation ‘try again’, allows the student to experience equality;
and third, ‘try this’ generates a student that experiences the world.

Try

There are perhaps few other phrases that are used so frequently in a
classroom. It is an order, yet at the same time an expression of concern;
it expresses authority, but also contains an invitation. The phrase clearly
assumes that someone is not yet able to, but it foremost appeals to a
becoming able. The expression assumes an ability, or (perhaps more
strongly, and when it actually commits the listener) it creates the experi-
ence of being able. One could say that someone is turned into a student

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