Experiential shock and whispering voices
We learn, says Semetsky (drawing on Deleuze), when in life we encounter the unknown and still unthought.
It is an experiential shock to thought that makes us think and learn.
The encounter is first experienced as a powerful or unsettling affect, and the process of ‘thinking through affects brings elements of non-thought into a thought’[49]. Too much of what is called education is doomed to superficiality because it requires students to jump ‘upon a pre-reflective linear solution as a univocal answer’ [51]:
For Deleuze, education would begin not when the student arrives at a grasp of the material already known by the teacher, but when both of them together begin to experiment in practice with what they might make of themselves and the world. [50]
Learning from this kind of experiential encounter requires of the learner that he/she bring the
‘assemblage of the unconscious to the light of the day, to select the whispering voices …’ [Deleuze & Guattari 1987, quoted p 49-50].
At one level, this seems consistent with the approach of current teacher education programs. We ask students to go out on prac, to observe and do some supervised teaching, to experience the highs and lows, and then, drawing on what they’re learning in their teacher education units, to reflect on those experiences.
We require them, in other words, to find words which help alleviate the shock, which help them think the unthought, and in doing so to see the possibilities of more powerful action.
But I’m not so sure that this is what actually happens.
Too many of our students experience our course less as a shock from which to hear the whispering voices and more of an unpleasantness to endure.
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Semetsky, I. (2012). “Living, learning, loving: Constructing a new ethics of integration in education.” Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 33(1): 47-59