Changing Places and Heidegger

Title of Paper: Changing Places: Openness, pedagogy and Heidegger Authors’ Names (joint paper): Dr David Lines and Dr Chris Naughton Institutions and Addresses: Dr David Lines—University of Auckland c/o School of Music, Private Bag 92109, Auckland, New Zealand Email: d.lines@auckland.ac.nz Dr Chris Naughton—New Zealand Tertiary College Postal Address: NZ Tertiary College, Greenlane Campus, PO Box 17143, Greenlane 1546, Auckland. Email: chris.naughton@nztertiarycollege.ac.nz Changing Places: Openness, pedagogy and Heidegger Paper for Philosophy of Education Society Australasia conference, Hawaii, December, 2009. Dr David Lines, University of Auckland Dr Chris Naughton, New Zealand Tertiary College Abstract This paper describes the theoretical ideas behind a music education project in Auckland, New Zealand. The project, ‘Changing Places’, involves the exploration, sharing and working through of pedagogical differences between music and early years tertiary students in music learning situations involving children. Some key philosophical notions from Heidegger are employed in the project. In particular, Heidegger’s critique of modernist, calculative and aesthetic thinking is linked to the difficulties impacting on music education pedagogy, which is seen as limiting and ineffective. The Changing Places project employs Heideggerian strategies and concepts to unsettle predetermined notions of music pedagogy and encourage and foster a more open pedagogical style of thinking in the music education of young children. Introduction One of the interesting aspects of Heidegger’s philosophical writings is the way he renames or redefines key concepts in order to stimulate a different way of thinking. In this way Heidegger can be seen as employing a pedagogical style in his writing. One example of this is his treatment of the concept of ‘technology’ as a “way of revealing” (Heidegger, 1993, p.318). Whereas our everyday use of technology in modern society concurs with a way of thinking about machines and technical equipment, Heidegger’s renaming as a way of revealing points to a very different conceptual space and as an alternative notion of beings in existence. Technology as a “way of revealing” suggests a thinking beyond material or industrial things to the relational forces that unearth different kinds of technological revealing and understanding. The process of renaming promotes a deeper, more critical stance to be taken when facing technological processes in daily life—processes that are dominated in the main by everyday modernist conceptions of technological practice. This paper reports on the theoretical underpinnings of the authors’ educational project underway in Auckland, New Zealand, called ‘Changing Places’. The intention of the project is to stimulate openness in pedagogical practice in music and to foster the development of critical perspectives of children’s learning in music. The project involves two different groups of undergraduate tertiary students involved in learning music pedagogical practice: early childhood students and music students. The students involved in the project will share and exchange pedagogical insights and work together with young children in music teaching experiences. The project utilizes a ‘pedagogical’ strategy similar to that which Heidegger commonly employed as described in the opening paragraph. The intention is that by ‘changing places’—through using a Heideggerian strategy of reframing and renaming their thinking and understanding of music pedagogy—students involved in the project will begin to foster and develop pedagogical insights and perceptive capabilities that will challenge preconceptions they may hold about the music education of the young child. Music in an age of modernist education In his introduction to Heidegger, Education and Modernity (Peters, 2002, pp.7-8), Michael Peters summarises key Heideggerian points of critique related to the legacy of modernism and education. He notes two key themes that are closely connected with the condition of music education in the (post)modern environment. The first of these is the aesthetic purview of art, where art is considered primarily as “the object of mere subjective experience”. The modernist way of thinking about art affects music profoundly as it creates a frame where music performances and recordings are considered first and foremost as objective renditions of music pieces to be experienced subjectively in the individual inner world of the listener. Immersed in the environmental conditions of the aesthetic legacy the tertiary music student finds him or her self immersed in its pedagogical frame, within the teaching and learning conditions that support it. The trained musician today lives in a world that encompasses many different kinds of musical experiences. Having been trained in an environment that favours the thought processes of aesthetic modernism, it is no longer the case that the traditionally trained musician can remain in a protected world of musical indifference to other musical styles. With the coming of the mp3 player, dj computer software, clubbing and access to many musical styles though the Internet, music of every description has become easily accessible. This has led to changes in listening and association with different kinds of musical styles. Despite the breadth of the musical sound-scape in the general environment, the experience of music education in many conservatoires and university departments can limit the student’s experience of music. This creates an artificial division between music in the institution and music experienced in the world both individually and socially. The students see music as two worlds detached, disconnected and yet contemporaneous. Students may go clubbing on Saturday, improvise in the church band on Sunday and experience a variety of musical genres they have heard on their mp3 players in their own time. On Monday they return to their tertiary study to play their aesthetically directed Bach or Jazz with no sense that one experience or form can somehow be linked to the other. This division limits the opportunity for young musicians to re-evaluate their own musical being or indeed consider the musical education of a child, if teaching music becomes a further focus. The modernist conditions of art making are not only encountered by the music student. The dominance of the aesthetically conditioned world as critiqued by Heidegger is such that the early childhood student may also see limited opportunity for music in the early years centre—given the limitations of the children’s years or the perceived lack of adult musical sophistication that can be achieved. Young children may be accustomed to objective renditions of pieces through commercial music recordings and early years teachers may use these as background music or even as sing-along accompaniments for mat-time. In this kind of environment the young child becomes a passive listener of objectified music or at best a passive consumer of sing-along pieces requiring little active participation. What remains obscured are the other musical conditions that may come into being in the children’s play beyond the teacher’s gaze. The overwhelming dominance of the world of performative music in aesthetic modernism is such that alternative conceptions of the ‘musical child’—other than that of participant in aesthetic experiences—are often not given space for consideration or reflection. A second key theme coming out of modernism impacting on music education is what Heidegger terms “calculative thinking” (Peters, 2002, p 8). Peters cites the following elaboration of calculative thinking from Heidegger’s third volume on Nietzsche: “first, that man installs and secures himself as subjectum, as the nodal point for beings as a whole; and secondly, that the beingness of beings as a whole is grasped as the representedness of whatever can be produced and explained” (Heidegger, 1991, cited in Peters, 2002, p. 8). This form of thinking, like the aesthetic world-view in art, is centered on the objective considerations and deliberations of the individual subject. Whereas aesthetic deliberations control and objectify art objects within educational events, calculative thinking can dominate and control broader educational patterns of behaviour and established norms of pedagogical practice. Calculative thinking is characterised by hierarchical systems of curriculum design, technical ordering of learning, formations of social organization, and atomized strategies of assessment that combine to exert control over educational events. Problems occur when calculative thinking, in its scheduling and representations of order, begins to obscure or ignore possibilities of learning not deemed important in the predetermination of events. This issue means that wherever calculative thinking dominates educational practice it remains an important task to preserve open pedagogical styles and the perceptive capabilities of teachers so that emergent learning outside the frame of calculation can be affirmed. The legacy of calculative thinking in education brings dangers and concerns for the pedagogical learning of the music and the early childhood tertiary student. Faced with the task of learning high-level music pieces on instruments for performance outcomes, the music student may only learn to perceive their musical development in terms of the calculated technical capacities required for the physical and musical demands of a given work. Combined with the limited frame established through the tradition of aesthetic thinking in music, calculative thinking enforced by both their individual master-teachers and the schedules and demands of the music school curriculum can immerse a performance student in an extremely controlled and limiting pedagogical space. Within the institution the overwhelming pressure to conform to the printed score remains unchallenged, reinforcing the calculative power of a fixed ‘code’ to determine a musical outcome. This limiting of the student experience also removes the opportunity not only to explore other musical styles but any sense of play and invention in being a musician. The unspoken doctrine is that to improvise and ‘play’ is okay, but can hardly replace time spent on serious practice on an instrument. The rules appear monastic in their observance and those that deign to share views that question the doctrine are dismissed as ‘not taking art seriously.’ A recent paper given by David Salisbury from James Cook University in Queensland, Australia, looked into the experience of music students to see what they felt about the work they engaged in. It was revealing to see that it was not the one- to- one lesson that they enjoyed, so much as the informal gatherings where student led activity predominated plus the other aspects of being musician in the pre and post concert socializing. In the informal discussions that Salisbury had with music students that making and improvising on an idea occurred albeit in a covert and closet manner unseen by the institution. Salisbury’s experienced indicated there was much more to the student’s understanding and learning in music than what the institution had predetermined (Salisbury, 2009). The early years student teacher works in a different way to the music student. The influence of the practice in the community is omnipresent for the student so that work with the child demands ways of working that are quite different from the highly structured formal approach in a music school. The early years student teachers learn about children and their way of making and being that is by their nature elusive and spontaneous. Their practice is governed not by a rubric of standards and achievement benchmarks but by the level of engagement and participation by the children. Early childhood education in New Zealand is indebted to Te Whaariki. This document arose from the constructivist movement in New Zealand is centered around the following principles of learning: Empowerment—Whakamana, Holistic Development— Kotahitanga, Family and Community—Whānau tangata and Relationships—Ngā hononga. From these overarching principles there are five strands: Well-being—Mana Atua, Belonging—Mana Whenua,Contribution—Mana Tangata, Communication—Mana Reo and Exploration—Mana Aotūroa. The ethos of the early childhood curriculum is summed up in the statement: In early childhood, holistic, active learning and the total process of learning are emphasized. Knowledge, skills, and attitudes are closely linked. These three aspects combine together to form a child’s “working theory” and help the child develop dispositions that encourage learning. (Ministry of Education, 1996). The principle of creating the disposition to learning enshrines the approach that is co-constructive where the early years teacher will develop their work with the child. The challenge is that the student has to develop an acute sense of what may be of merit for the child on that day and in that place. The making process and the knowing about the development of the activity rely on the early childhood student’s own knowledge of what can be done. The emphasis in the early learning context is focused on the child and their potential for learning. Thus, Te Whaariki promotes the notion that the making and developing of ideas springs from the child. The evolution of ideas relies however on the teacher’s ability to read (understand) what has been produced by the child and can be opened up. New vistas for the imagination need to be fed by the teacher able to see the potential that lies in the students work. That attitudes have a place in the child’s approach to learning belies the sensitivity and flexibility inherent in the teaching methodology. Given this very responsive and pedagogically open curriculum document, one key challenge for the early years teacher is to actually put these ideas into practice and ensure that the pressures of calculative thinking influence pedagogical action in such a way as to nullify the positive elements of Te Whaariki. Music is one such area where performativity—the calculative drive to present music as a packaged performance—could potentially override music learning opportunities that are more child focused merely because of the perceived representative power of ‘music performance’ as a dominant expectation in media and educational events. Music, in this sense, becomes an add-on to the life of the early years centre rather than a medium of the children’s capacity to express their lives through art with a sense of collective identity. These pedagogical issues and restraints all impact on the challenges of teacher preparation within and on the periphery of formal education and within the contemporary demands of specific subjects of knowledge. The authors of this paper however, as early childhood and music teacher educators, remain concerned about the lack of attention directed at the problem of modernist pedagogies—of the intensification of aesthetic and technocratic and systematic conventions of teaching and learning—in professional practice training. Changing Places is an attempt to challenge these issues. Heidegger’s Concepts and the Changing Places Project The Changing Places project seeks to ‘unsettle’ established philosophies of practice and pedagogical norms held by the music and early childhood students through reframing and renaming pedagogical understandings (through discussion) and action (through working with young children on music projects). As stated earlier, Heidegger’s pedagogical strategy of renaming key concepts forms a basis for the unsettling of modernist ways of thinking that may have dominated the students’ preconceptions of what to expect in music education situations. The ideal of pedagogical ‘openness’ is key to ensure that the students are in a position where they might discover new possibilities and ways of thinking about what they might otherwise tend to conceive as ‘normal’ practice. In this sense it is hoped that the early years student who may be conditioned to look at the child as a key part of the pedagogical process, will go through the process of discussion and working with children through the eyes of the music students and thus begin to discover more ‘musical’ aspects to the children’s behaviour and learning. Similarly, it is hoped that the music student, through active engagement with the early years teacher, will begin to value child-like ways of connecting with music. Moreover, it is hoped that the action of going outside normal pedagogical thinking will stimulate fresh ways of perceiving the styles of teaching and learning the students themselves have become accustomed to over the years. Heidegger assists in providing potentially transformative concepts that may assist in the rediscovery of pedagogies beyond the modernist controls discussed above. These concepts are chosen to assist student preparation in the Changing Places project because they promote the openness necessary for children’s learning to be supported through positive means. In particular, the authors find that Heidegger’s concepts of poiesis, attunement, and ‘thingness’ offer conceptual signposts for the students in the project to develop their sense of empathy and critical awareness with learners so that pedagogical openness can be more realistically acquired. The ancient Greek concept of poiesis is commonly known to mean ‘making and creating art’. In his seminal essay A Question Concerning Technology Heidegger develops this further by quoting Plato on the meaning of poiesis: Every occasion for whatever passes beyond the non-present and goes forward into presencing is poiesis, bringing forth. (Plato, Symposium 205b, cited in Heidegger, 1993, p. 317). Poiesis, as taken and developed by Heidegger here, describes the temporal process of artistic beings coming forth into an event through the action and context of that event. The process of “coming forth into presencing” is important for the Changing Places project in that students are being encouraged to work more closely—and with a greater sense of acuity—with the musical modes of being coming forth from the young children’s actions in music learning situations. By attending to the notion of poiesis in music learning situations, the students will be able to shift away from predetermined pedagogical notions that they might be holding, and begin to affirm the more emergent understandings and expressions of musicality in the children. The notion of poiesis will help the students look outside their own inner-world perspective and begin to see the children they are working with for what they are. The second of Heidegger’s concepts that support the goal of working towards pedagogical openness is ‘attunement’ (Stimmung). Otherwise translated as ‘mood’, Heidegger’s idea of attunement is the connection or communicative sense that “rises from being-in-the-world itself as a mode of that being” (Heidegger, 1996, p. 129). Attunement relates to the fact that human beings are alive and attuned in some way or other to the relations of existence and the changing dispositions of people. Whereas rational or calculative thinking is ordered and sequentially developed, attunement follows a different path, in particular the changing empathy one might experience with a student or child in a teaching learning situation. Attunement is more than a passing emotional state; : it is bound up with the fluctuating and changing modes of being people are thrown into as a result of their changing world-experiences. The third and last of Heidegger’s concepts chosen here for further exploration in Changing Places is ‘thingness’ (Heidegger, 2001). Heidegger’s notion of the ‘thing’ contrasts with that of ‘object’ (as in detached, objectified thing), in that he affirms the idea of belonging and meaning that accompanies it. Dreyfus (2002, p. 99) likens this difference between the thing and the object by comparing the Japanese tea cup ceremony that pays homage to the cup itself and the tea ceremony reflecting the sense of belonging and place with a cup as a mere object. Dreyfus compares a styrofoam cup that merely serves a purpose that is unconditional in its perfunctory nature with a Japanese cup that things in the act of being filled with tea and things in its givingness. The styroform cup is perfunctory, unconditional, relating only to itself as removed and of no consequence. The styrofoam cup can then be seen as inauthentic or as an object as opposed to the tea cup as a thing that ‘things’—that possesses thingness in its place of making and usage. The notion of thingness assists the students in the Changing Places project in that it helps them realise the importance of looking for the contextual meaning or sense of belonging in a given emergent child’s response to music learning. The idea of thingness promotes a sense of understanding of a child-music action in relation to itself rather than to any calculative or aesthetic notion the student might hold of expect. Conclusion The Heideggerian ideas behind the Changing Places project are designed to help refocus and re-orientate pedagogical thinking to something more open and responsive to children as learners. Without any robust philosophical conception of teaching practice, teachers can enter into the dangerous world of obedience-under-control, and become what Marshall (1996) describes as “docile bodies”. Heidegger’s critique of modernist thinking provides us with a model of pedagogical practice that can help us move away from the inactive, unthinking states of educative being and into something more artistically responsive and emergent. Moreover, his notions of poiesis, attunement and thingness (among others) provide some guidance for the development of ways of thinking that may promote a great sense of pedagogical openness in music education. While we may hold to the hope that teachers and teacher trainees will seek to develop a sense of openness and inquiry in their teaching practice actions, what is commonly experienced in practice is all too often something quite different from that ideal. The discursive spaces impacting on teaching systems can override and manipulate the moments of sensitivity and nuance that would otherwise be harnessed with the learning moments of children. References Dreyfus, H. (2002) Heidegger on Gaining a Free Relation to Technology, in H. Dreyfus and M. Wrathall (eds.), Heidegger Reexamined, Vol. 3, Art, Poetry and Technology (New York, Routledge). Heidegger, M. (1993) Basic Writings, trans. D. Krell (trans.) (San Francisco, Harper Collins). Heidegger, M. (1991) Nietzsche, Vols. 1-4, David Farrell Krell (trans.) (San Francisco, Harper and Row). Heidegger, M. (1996) Being and Time, J. Stambaugh (trans.) (New York, State University of New York Press). Heidegger, M. (2001) The Thing, in Poetry, Language and Thought, A. Hofstadter (trans and introduction) (New York, HarperCollins). Marshall, J. (1996) Personal Autonomy and Liberal Education: A Foucaudian critique, in M. Peters, W. Hope, J. Marshall and S. Webster (eds.), Critical Theory, Poststructuralism, and the Social Context, (Palmerston North, N.Z., Dunmore). Ministry of Education (1996) Te Whaariki. He Whaariki Matauranga mo nga Mokopuna O Aoteroa. Early Childhood Education, (Wellington, N.Z., Learning Media). Peters, M. (ed.) (2002) Heidegger, Education and Modernity, (Oxford, Rowman and Littlefield). Salisbury, D. (2009) Goodbye Yellow Brick Road: The problems teachers face assessing a composing task when students no longer want to go down the path of notating their music, conference paper presented at the First MERC Research in Music Education Conference, Akaroa, New Zealand, July, 2009.