Keywords

Introduction

When we ask ourselves what it is like to be uncertain, it may conjure up feelings of anxiety or worry. Uncertainty can imply a calling into question, or even an undoing, of something we were certain about. As such, it can be coupled with a sense of unsettledness or feeling lost. Thus, in everyday life, uncertainty is something we often want to avoid. Yet, in educational contexts, uncertainty can have educative value.

In this chapter, I show how John Dewey’s understanding of the educational meaning of existential uncertainty lies at the heart of his idea of democratic education. Specifically, I argue that Dewey’s theory of democratic education is grounded in a concept of transformative learning that necessarily involves experiences of existential uncertainty, and, in a concept of teaching that necessarily involves supporting learners’ opportunities to have educative experiences of existential uncertainty. In doing so, I aim to bring this democratic aspect of Dewey’s notion of teaching into sharper relief by showing how it offers a productive extension of the tradition of non-affirmative educational theory.

The lens of non-affirmative educational theory (Benner, 1987/2015, 1990, 2022) offers a way of differentiating “affirmative” from “non-affirmative” forms of teaching.Footnote 1 Accordingly, affirmative forms of teaching aim to educate the younger generation to affirm the existing order, or to affirm a future order as conceived of by the educators themselves. Non-affirmative forms of teaching aim to educate the younger generation towards the development of capacities to critically participate in an ongoing discussion of how the future should be shaped.

Taking this definition further from a Deweyan perspective, I add that, on my view, affirmative teaching predetermines individual and social problems for the next generation (notably, what Dewey criticised as “traditional education” has all the hallmarks of such affirmative teaching, as I show below). On the other hand, non-affirmative teaching supports the next generations’ critical, reflective capacities to co-determine what counts as a problem, individual or social, in the first place.

In section one, I discuss the notion of existential uncertainty and its relation to what Dewey called “the indeterminate situation” as a realm of learning that we find ourselves in prior to searching for and finding a problem, and thus logically prior to solving it. In this realm, the learner experiences a kind of existential uncertainty as the felt beginning of learning; it is where the learner’s genuine needs as a human being emerge. I discuss how this realm is essential for understanding how learners come to formulate their own problems, or what I call “learner-dependent” problems, as opposed to “learner-independent,” teacher-, textbook-, or system-defined problems. In section two, I discuss Dewey’s notion of teaching within the context of his broader theory of democratic education. I focus on how the teacher is vital for cultivating learners’ opportunities to make meaning from experiences of existential uncertainty. I underscore that the nature of this form of teaching is non-affirmative, by contrasting it to “traditional, transmissive” and, what I call, “reductive-progressive” forms of teaching. In the final section, I build on and move beyond Dewey to formulate a notion of the teacher as a listener. I argue that this understanding of the teacher is vitally relevant for the theory and practice of democratic education as non-affirmative education, and yet is in danger of being lost in the current measurement culture in education.

Before I continue, I would like to share my own history of coming to know non-affirmative educational theory as conceptualised by Dietrich Benner (the focus of this edited volume). I was first drawn to Benner’s work on the education system of the former German Democratic Republic (GDR). I had previously studied GDR and US history education and my finding was that both national education systems adopted indoctrinating modes of teaching history. At the time, without realising it, I was already making conceptual distinctions along the lines of affirmative versus non-affirmative educational theory. When I came to study at the Institute of Education (Institut für Erziehungswissenschaft) at Humboldt University Berlin, one of my first courses was on J. F. Herbart’s theory of education. This study of Herbart inspired me to pursue philosophy of education (Allgemeine Pädagogik) with an aim of understanding what constitutes non-authoritarian, non-oppressive education.

From this history of ideas, the fundamental educational question that has emerged for me is: How is it possible to educate non-affirmatively, that is, in a way that nurtures the learner’s capacity to learn and ensures that the integrity of the learner’s being and humanity remains unharmed? I am interested in how working across traditions of philosophy of education, rather than strictly within one, can foster a productive conversation that helps us (as educators, and as a society) to learn not only what is possible, but also what is desirable, in educating the next generation. This chapter should be read as continuing that conversation through the lens of non-affirmative educational theory by situating Dewey’s thinking firmly in the history of those non-affirmative education philosophical ideas that Benner discusses in his opening chapter (2022, this volume; see also Uljens & Ylimaki, 2017).

Uncertainty and the Beginning of Learning

While Dewey recognised problems as important in learning, he took issue with the idea that problems are the starting point of learning. This is at the heart of Dewey’s well-known critique of traditional education (e.g. Dewey, 1916/2008). He was critical of traditional education – or what today can be referred to as “transmissive teaching” – because of how it provided learners with “ready-made problems.” Ready-made problems are pre-defined problems, formulated independently of the learners within the given learning situation. These are problems defined by the teacher or textbook with equally ready-made answers for memorisation and recitation. Dewey’s interest lay in how we, as human beings, arrive at a problem in the first place. How we arrive at problems is meaningful if educators are to be able to refrain from imposing established problems onto learners as ones the learners should have, or worse, from presenting established problems as if they were the learners’ own. So the question for Dewey – and on my view, the critical question for understanding Deweyan non-affirmative teaching – was how do learners come to formulate their own problems? His answer reveals that learners’ experiences of existential uncertainty can be understood as a necessary part of inciting the thinking that occurs on the path to searching for and finding problems.

Predetermined, learner-independent, ready-made problems – the sort Dewey criticised – are part of a system of education that assumes that everything worthwhile is known, and thus a system that sees the job of the educator as passing on the known to learners. In this context, problems are what Dewey called problems for the learner as “a pupil,” that is, a student engaged in strategic forms of learning aimed at getting quickly to right answers, rather than for the learner “as a human being” (Dewey, 1916/2008, p. 163). On this model of education, what is posed as a problem by the teacher is actually a completed thought in the guise of a problem, which learners are meant to consume passively.

What Dewey pointed out in his critique of such forms of transmissive teaching is how they hinder the learner’s capacity to think. Dewey argued that the pre-packaged knowledge that is handed down from teacher to learner to be passively consumed can only be “reproduced in recitation” (Dewey, 1916/2008, pp. 160–163). Here, we can say that knowledge is the “food” that learners are meant to merely regurgitate. As such, the knowledge and ideas do not genuinely affect the learner. In other words, how the learner thinks, feels, judges, acts and makes meaning remains unchanged. On such an input-output model of education involving direct, transmissive teaching, the learner may be able to recite something told to him or her with accuracy, but we can say that nothing has been “digested.”

The fact that the learner as a person remains unaffected by the ideas being handed down is only one reason why Dewey considered this traditional, transmissive model problematic. There is also another reason, namely, that in transmissive teaching, the finished ideas passed down to the learner fail to be affected by the learner. In other words, the individual learner’s mind – her particular needs, questions, curiosities, prior experiences, ways of thinking, knowing and doing – has no impact on the ideas themselves: the learner, as a particular human being, does not matter to what is being learned.

As a way of summarising Dewey’s two-fold criticism, we can say that the learner has no generative power in transmissive “learning” situations: just as the learner does not grow, so too, the ideas, as meanings and connections that are part of socially communicated understandings, do not grow.Footnote 2 Another way of putting this is that on the traditional, transmissive approach, the teacher’s interactions with learners do not initiate learners’ reflective, transformative learning processes (English, 2013). That is, they do not initiate the kinds of experiences that cultivate what Dewey called “growth” (or using the German term, what we can refer to as Bildung), wherein self and world are in interplay, and both transform on account of such interplay (e.g. Dewey, 1916/2008, pp. 56–57; Benner, 2017; English, 2013; English & Doddington, 2019).

The central fallacy of this traditional, transmissive approach is its conception of the structure of learning: it places no educative value, in theory or practice, on the human experience of limitation as constitutive of learning processes (Benner 2003; Benner & English, 2004; English, 2013). Experiences of limitation refer to those moments in which we encounter something new and unexpected, such as a new idea or object, in a way that points to the fact that we do not yet know, do not yet understand or are not yet be able to do something. In other words, we experience a limit to our own established knowledge and ability.Footnote 3

In contrast to transmissive models, in his educational theory, Dewey placed vital significance on the human experience of limitation as constituting the beginning of learning (English, 2013). To understand experiences of limitation as part of the structure of human learning, it is helpful to look at one of Dewey’s recurring examples. Dewey described the case of an infant, who cannot yet crawl, but who is trying to reach an object that is out of reach of her outstretched arm, but within her visual field (Dewey, 1916/2008, p. 50). At the moment of trying to, and yet not being able to, grasp the object, the infant undergoes an experience of the limits of her existing knowledge or ability. In other words, she experiences what she cannot yet do.

These limit-experiences, as I will refer to them here, can make us question what we have, up to that point in time, taken-for-granted as true, known or part of what we are able to do. These moments are experienced as “discontinuities” in learning – breaks or interruptions in the smooth flow of experience – which inform how we understand ourselves and the world around us, and thus how we make meaning (English, 2013; English & Doddington, 2019). There are plenty of other examples of such limit-experiences that are more readily identifiable when observing young children freely exploring their surroundings. For example, when my daughter was just learning to stand, she saw a tablecloth corner hanging from the table, pulled herself up, tugged on the cloth corner, and then had a moment of hesitation as the plastic cups atop the table began to wobble. She watched the cups until they settled with a face of wonder and perplexity. As Dewey would tell us, encounters with the limits of one’s knowledge and ability are just as much a part of a child’s experience of free play as they are of a scientist’s new discoveries in a lab.

Significantly, Dewey pointed out how these experiences open up a realm of existential uncertainty that is educative. He delimited this realm of existential uncertainty using the term “indeterminate situation” (see e.g. Dewey, 1916/2008, p. 158; 1922/2008, p. 213; 1933/2008, p. 200; 1938/2008, pp. 109–12). Looking back at the above examples, we can say that in each of the cases, the learner had an experience of her own limitation that placed her into an indeterminate situation, where she (even for a split second) was not sure what happened, that is, not sure why the object could not be reached, or, not sure why the cups wobbled. Dewey highlighted the embodied existential feeling of such indeterminate situations. He wrote, the type of uncertainty we feel is “not cognitive,” rather it is pre-cognitive or pre-reflective, like when our “footing is unsure” (Dewey, 1942/2008, p. 40). These moments involve our whole being, and thus they can be difficult, even painful to endure; something is troublesome, but we do not know exactly what it is (Dewey, 1938/2008, pp. 109–10).

As Günther Buck has described, in indeterminate situations we are in a state of “disquietude” (Beunruhigung) (1969, p. 72). Similarly, Richard Bernstein explained that in such situations there is “an immediacy, an awareness of a difficulty” (1966, p. 105). But importantly, this is an embodied awareness, not a purely cognitive recognition. Along these lines, Harriet Cuffaro points us to the fact that in indeterminate situations there is only “a sensing and feeling of unsettlement,” but not yet a “problem, nor inquiry” (1995, p. 63).

Dewey also spoke of indeterminate situations as “disturbed situations,” because our ordinary flow of experience has been “disturbed,” in the sense of interrupted, by the unexpected response from the world (see e.g. 1933/2008, p. 200; 1938/2008, p.109). When we are disturbed, we are no longer capable of following our familiar patterns of thinking and activity. In an indeterminate situation, the learner is merely held in the muddy waters of experience, where things are not yet clear because she is not sure how she got into the situation, nor indeed how to get out of it. Here, the learner finds herself in what I have called an “in-between realm of learning” (English, 2013, 2016a).Footnote 4 In this “in-between,” our uncertainty is felt, we are disquieted, but we have not yet reflected and inquired into the source of our feeling of uncertainty. Drawing on Käte Meyer-Drawe, we can characterise this realm of being in-between within an indeterminate situation as a space in which the old “is no longer trusted” and, at the same time, the new “is not yet understood” (2005, p. 32, translation mine).

If common conceptions of learning tell us that learning is the “takeaway” of a process and not the process itself, then situations such as those described do not seem to be connected to learning at all, in fact, we might say they appear to be an absence of learning. Yet the state of existential uncertainty as a state of aporia that we find ourselves in within indeterminate situations has meaning for how we move forward. Thus, for Dewey, indeterminate situations, as those in which existential uncertainty emerges, are intimately tied to learning processes.

Indeterminate situations are educative because they make us aware of where we are within our own learning process at any given time by revealing what was, up to that point in time, in a certain sense hidden as merely a supposition in the form of a habit.Footnote 5 In other words, in indeterminate situations, we become aware of the gaps in our learning, that is, we become aware that there is something that we do not yet know, cannot yet understand, cannot yet emotionally process, or that we are not yet able to do. As such, indeterminate situations can be conceived of as openings within our experience that make way for us to begin questioning our taken-for-granted ideas and habitual ways of being.

Uncertainty, Thinking and Freedom

For Dewey, the educative import of being in an indeterminate situation is that the existential uncertainty – that embodied feeling of being disturbed – initiates thinking: it “arouses inquiry” and “incites reflection” on the situation at hand (1933/2008, p. 193). Dewey underscored that although indeterminate situations are precognitive, because in them we have not yet begun to reflect on what happened to us, importantly, “they are the necessary condition of cognitive operations or inquiry” (Dewey, 1938/2008, p. 111). For Dewey, the existential uncertainty within indeterminate situations arouses thinking as an expression of freedom: moments of existential uncertainty that emerge within indeterminate situations cultivate the learner’s “freedom,” because they provide space for the learner’s original response.

Freedom, for Dewey, is understood as the “individuality” of the learner’s thinking within, response to and perspective on, the troublesome, indeterminate situation that the learner finds herself in (Dewey, 1916/2008, pp. 310–15). The individuality of each human being – each learner – becomes evident in how the learner responds to the situation with her own unique “point of view,” “appeal of objects” or “mode of attack” (Dewey, 1916/2008, p. 312). This individuality is about the peculiarity of the “unforced” response to the given situation, what Dewey said is equivalent to “the originality of [the learner’s] attitude” and is not about the originality of the result or product (Dewey, 1916/2008, p. 312). Indeterminate situations are situations that are unique to the learning being who is in interplay with the world, that is to say, they are indeterminate from “the standpoint of the learner,” even if the teacher knows exactly what is going on (Dewey, 1916/2008, p. 312).

Looking back to Dewey’s example above, it is in that moment when the child wants to reach an object, but is not able to, that a question can arise in her mind as to why she cannot reach it. On that basis she can ask herself, what might I need in terms of resources – for example, other objects, like a stick to nudge the reached-for object towards me, or, another person, such as a parent, to help me. These needs are not trivial. They point to precisely what that child in that moment needs to learn; moreover, they point to an opening for the learner’s imagination beyond what is, towards what is possible.

Though arriving in an indeterminate situation, on its own, is not the whole of learning, it marks an initial phase of what Dewey describes as a “reflective experience,” which is his term for how educative, transformative learning experiences unfold as processes involving reflection on the connection between what we “do,” and what we “undergo” in consequence (1916/2008, pp. 150–58). Footnote 6 Such reflective inquiry turns our attention to examining the nature of our limit-experience – and the associated feelings of resistance and existential uncertainty – asking ourselves why we landed in the indeterminate situation and how we might get out. In this way, reflective thinking extends the meaning of the limit-experience for further thinking and action; although it begins in direct, urgent situations of indeterminacy, reflective thinking supports the growth of “social sympathies” by “widening our area of vision” to include “what lies beyond our direct interests” (Dewey, 1916, p. 155, emphasis in original; see also 1934, pp. 65–66). Thus, as the initial phase of learning, the indeterminate situation is critical as the source of freedom of thinking; it pushes the learner to “think for herself” – to think about her relation to the world and to imagine possibilities for alternative conditions that could come into play to change that relation.

As the source of freedom, the existential uncertainty emerging within the indeterminate situation is the source of a qualitatively different kind of problem than those “ready-made problems” handed down by a teacher in traditional schooling: existential uncertainty is the source of learner-dependent problems, which are problems for the learner as a human being. Such problems get formulated on the basis of learner’s reflection on her own limit-experience which arises from a particular kind of direct, lived interaction between self and world. This self-world interaction, as what Dewey calls growth, is not merely routine or mechanical, rather is experimental in so far as it has an element of the unexpected, new and different. Indeterminate situations suggest to the learner that there is a need to ask questions about the nature of her particular experience of self and world and their interconnection within that given moment in space and time. On the basis of such questioning, the need and desire to articulate a problem can emerge; the problems that are formulated in response to indeterminate situations are those that take account of, rather than ignore, the world and others with which we are engaged.

Uncertainty and Receptivity to Difference

With his description of the indeterminate situation and the associated human experience of existential uncertainty, Dewey points to the significance of receptivity to difference as part of what it means to be human. The difference, strangeness and newness that we encounter within our interactions with objects and other human beings can surprise us and make us wonder. To reflect on, and formulate, problems that take critical account for the difference we experience is to formulate a human problem, a problem for the learner as a human being. This act of reflection is an act of truly addressing our limitations; in this act, we are choosing to acknowledge our own incompleteness and our “plasticity,” that is, our human capacity to learn from the difference of the world and others.Footnote 7

When learners are given opportunities to formulate problems on the basis of their own encounters with difference and their own sense of existential uncertainty that emerges from such encounters, then they learn that the difference of the world and others matters to who they are and who they become. They learn that the world and others affect how they think, judge, act, feel and exist in the world; they become aware of themselves as relational beings. For Dewey, such situations are at the heart of what fosters open-mindedness and intellectual growth:

intellectual growth means constant expansion of horizons and consequent formation of new purposes and new responses. These are impossible without an active disposition to welcome points of view hitherto alien; an active desire to entertain considerations which modify existing purposes. Retention of capacity to grow is the reward of such intellectual hospitality. The worst thing about stubbornness of mind, about prejudices, is that they arrest development; they shut the mind off from new stimuli (Dewey, 1916/2008, p. 182).

Dewey’s idea of the indeterminate situation locates an educative space of human thinking as the exploration of newness, difference and otherness that arises via what I am calling a non-affirmative beginning of learning. Such a beginning is not imposed or forced onto the learner by a question with a predetermined answer from an external authority in the guise of “educator.” Rather, it is a beginning that is initiated within, and in light of, the learner’s particular way of interacting with the world and others – that is, within the learner’s process of growth or Bildung.

But this is not to say that the educator has no place in Dewey’s theory. In fact, the educator is given vital significance in supporting the learner’s transformative learning processes. For Dewey, the educator is not one who passes on pre-packaged knowledge for learners to unquestioningly consume, but one who provides the conditions for learners’ interactions with the world that expand their meaning horizons, as I discuss next.

Existential Uncertainty, Teaching and Democratic Education

Dewey’s insights help to identify that in traditional, transmissive education, a specific hierarchical relationship is implied between the older and younger generation: the older generation has done the hard work of thinking, problem-finding, problem-solving and learning, and has established “certainties” for the younger generation to unquestioningly accept, that is, to affirm as true. However, Dewey was also critical of forms of education that claimed to be “progressive,” yet understood learning to occur by “just doing,” and, in turn understood teaching as allowing learners’ activity for its own sake. Here, the learner is the sole determinant of the educational situation. Consequently, the teacher does not have the role of supporting the learner’s reflection on the existential uncertainty emerging from what was done and undergone. As such, this “reductive-progressive” mode of teaching (as I refer to it) is a release from pedagogical responsibility. As J.-J. Rousseau (1764/1979) and J. F. Herbart (1806/1887, 1806/1902) have pointed out in different ways, such reductive teaching does not avoid building a hierarchical relationship between generations, rather it only establishes a different one: namely, one wherein the younger generation rules over the older.

Looking at the above two models of education, we can say that each model fails to make existential uncertainty meaningful for the learner’s learning processes. On the transmissive model, it is not the role of the teacher to value the learner’s existential uncertainty and hence it is not taken up by the teacher: it is not made relevant as a reference point for learner-generated questions, ideas, problems or solutions. This does not mean that in transmissive classrooms, learners do not experience existential uncertainty when they arrive at the limits of their own knowledge or ability. Naturally they do. We can imagine, for example, a learner may feel deeply unsettled as the term “half” gets repeatedly used by the teacher and peers in a mathematics lesson, because she does not understand the meaning of the word and thus cannot follow the lesson. Or, a learner may feel a nausea-like unease of not knowing how to pronounce a particular word when trying to read aloud in front of the class. In contrast, in reductive-progressive models of teaching, the teacher may initiate learners’ direct interactions with objects and peers in the classroom learning environment that incite such unsettledness or unease. However, the teacher here does not see it as her role to support the learners’ reflection on their feelings of uncertainty. Thus, the teacher misses opportunities to support learners to draw meaning from the limit-experiences that were the source of such uncertainty. Neither of these models foster an environment that supports existential uncertainty as an opportunity for thinking and growth –that is, an environment that cultivates indeterminate situations as educative realms of learning. Thus, both “traditional-transmissive” and “reductive-progressive” classrooms leave it to chance as to whether the learner will face the discomfort, even fear, arising from existential uncertainty as a site for transformative learning, or whether the learner will instead decide to overlook or ignore uncertainty, retreating to situations of comfort without growth (English & Stengel, 2010; English, 2013).

Today, just as in Dewey’s time, both transmissive-traditional and reductive-progressive models of teaching pose critical threats to democratic education as a form of non-affirmative education. Dewey pointed out that at the heart of the problem with these models is that they each, in their own way, gravely misunderstand the principles of freedom and authority in education. In transmissive, affirmative teaching, the teacher falsely assumes that “an idea” can “be conveyed as an idea” directly from teacher to learner for learners to passively receive (Dewey, 1916/2008, p. 166). Thus, transmissive teaching has no need to cultivate experiential processes in which learners are in a struggle, “wrestling with the conditions of the problem at first hand” in ways that incite reflective, critical thinking (Dewey, 1916/2008, pp. 166–67); instead such experiences are to be considered counterproductive to learning. In other words, the transmissive teacher does not see it as her role to support learners’ “productive struggle,” as I refer to it elsewhere (e.g. English, 2013, 2016a). On such a transmissive model, the teacher’s assumed authority over knowledge is translated in practice as authority over persons: authority manifests as external control of learners’ movement, such that discipline (or what today we call classroom management) is considered an essential means for social control of learners. The classroom is thus designed to enforce control of bodies as a means of controlling minds: learners sit in rows of desks for passive listening and conform to “a single mold of method of study and recitation” (Dewey, 1916/2008, p. 312; see also Dewey, 1899/2008; Meyer, 2017).

Dewey’s considerations invite us to ask: What happens in such transmissive environments to thinking of the sort that is an expression of freedom, of individuality? His answer is that thinking it is not merely hindered, but “gradually destroyed”; the learner’s “confidence in his own quality of mental operation is undermined, and a docile subjection to the opinion of others is inculcated, or else ideas run wild” (Dewey, 1916/2008, p. 312). What is cultivated is a form of parasitic dependence of one mind on another, namely the learner’s dependence on the educators as representatives of the existing order. The result of such teacher-learner interaction is “intellectual servility,” the form of mental life antithetical to democracy (Dewey, 1916/2008, p. 315).

On the other hand, reductive-progressive forms of teaching understand “freedom” as a release from all external authority, leaving the learner at bay. This manifests in classrooms as merely freedom of movement. What is unattended to by the teacher is genuine freedom – the individuality of learners’ responses that needs to be supported by the teacher in order for lived experiences of uncertainty to become a source of active reflection and imagination of possibility. In failing to reflect on uncertainty, learners do not learn to detach themselves from their self-interested motivations for doing something in the world (e.g. grabbing an object).

Hence, in such reductive-progressive models, the learner does not learn to reflectively take in the response from the world; she does not learn receptivity to difference, taking differences in as valuable to further considerations of what can and should be done in the given situation. Instead, the learner may develop what is, as Dewey pointed out, a dangerous form of independence. Dewey warned that too strong a sense of personal independence “often makes an individual so insensitive in his relations to others as to develop an illusion of being really able to stand and act alone – an unnamed form of insanity which is responsible for a large part of the remedial suffering of the world” (Dewey, 1916/2008, p. 49; see also D’agnese, 2017). Such insanity, characterising the narcissism of dictators, is seen today in the leadership of countries that still claim to be democratic. As such, reductive-progressive teaching can also be categorized as “affirmative,” albeit in a different sense than traditional-transmissive teaching: rather than affirming an existing order or a future order conceived of by the educators alone, reductive-progressive teaching “affirms” the learner, treating the learner as if he or she were without any need for an educator (i.e. as an autopoietic system).Footnote 8

So, what does teaching look like that recognises and values freedom? One indispensable aspect of this that I argue is at the heart of Dewey’s unique contribution to the tradition of non-affirmative teaching, is that teaching must create opportunities for learners to land in indeterminate situations and experience existential uncertainty. Dewey was well aware that there is an inherent danger with any practice of teaching that proposes to initiate learner uncertainty, especially of the existential sort he described. There is a risk of overwhelming the learner, and thus leading her or him to disengage with the learning situation. In this vein, Dewey wrote, “not all difficulties call out thinking. Sometimes they overwhelm and submerge and discourage” (Dewey, 1916/2008, p. 163). Teachers must deeply understand in theory, and be able to assess in practice, the differences between the types of situations and existential experiences of limitation that are productive – leading learners to engage in a productive struggle with the materials at hand – and those that are destructive – leading to suffering of the sort that hinders thinking, participation, relationality, receptivity and transformative learning (English, 2013; Murdoch et al., 2021).

Teacher as Artist

To truly nourish the mind-body complex, teachers must offer opportunities for learners to think – thinking that is genuinely tied to learners’ limit-experiences and the existential uncertainty that emerges. To do this, a different notion of the teacher must be embraced: the teacher is an artist, who creates “the conditions” which “will enable” each learner to make his or her “own special contribution to a group interest” (Dewey, 1916/2008, p. 310; 1924/2008, p. 180; English & Doddington, 2019). This is a dramatically different vision of who the teacher is, than those of affirmative forms of education.

Dewey uses metaphors of food and nourishment to illustrate a contrast between the teacher as artist and the teacher as transmitter. In transmissive teaching, the teacher is merely a cook who implements other people’s recipes with the aim of mechanical precision (Dewey, 1924/2008, p. 186). Following Dewey’s metaphor, we might say that in reductive-progressive teaching, the teacher asks the child to cook, but without supporting the child’s thinking through established ways.

The teacher as artist, however, is like the chef who designs the recipes for the cookbook (Dewey, 1924/2008, pp. 186). As artists, we could say teachers are also able to take up the “food” –that is, the new ideas that arise from their lived experiences with learners in classrooms– to creatively modify the recipe according to what the learners bring to the educational situation. These new ideas, this new “food,” from learners is produced when learners are given opportunities to engage in situations in which they can demonstrate “intellectual initiative, independence in observation, judicious invention, foresight of consequences, and ingenuity of adaptation to them” (Dewey, 1916/2008, p. 312). In this way, they are given opportunities for freedom, for individuality – the personal contribution to their own learning (Dewey, 1916/2008, p. 312). Rather than leading to docile dependence or radical independence, such opportunities can lead to learners’ development of interdependence, “vibrating sympathetically with the attitudes and doings of those about them” (Dewey, 1916/2008, p. 48).

The teacher who is genuinely fostering such opportunities for learners is one who has the dispositions of “sensitivity” and “responsiveness” to learners’ expressed needs arising from their concrete interactions with new, unexpected and different objects and ideas (English & Doddington, 2019). As such, teaching is a reflective, educative process – rather than a mechanical, routine one or a mere observational one – by which the teacher also learns. Such teaching involves a skilled improvisational ability to be receptive to and responsive to the learners’ demands from the environment for the sake of aiding their continued development of, what Dewey calls, “reflective habits.” Reflective habits refer to the habit to reflect on one’s limit-experiences and the emerging uncertainty in the context of one’s ongoing search for meaning (Dewey, 1916/2008, p. 162; English, 2013; English & Doddington, 2019). For the teacher this means having flexibility, or what Herbart (1802/1896) called “pedagogical tact,” drawing on Aristotle’s concept of phronesis (Aristotle, 2000). Sensitive and responsive teachers are able to see and hear “something fresh, something not capable of being fully anticipated” in the way each learner approaches and responds the subject matter, objects and ideas of others; such teachers are able to see and hear each learner’s expression of freedom (Dewey, 1916/2008, p. 313).

If teachers are truly to be receptive to this freshness and newness that each learner brings, they must be prepared to experience their own discontinuities in teaching. That is, they must be prepared to arrive in indeterminate situations and experience existential uncertainty. These situations signal to teachers that they need to reflect – they need to stop and rethink their point of view on who the learner is and how best to support that learner. Dewey writes that in this way teachers become an “intellectual companion” to learners (Dewey, 1916/2008, p. 313). This role is one wherein the teacher has consciously chosen to be a co-creator in the making of the educational situation as a necessary condition for each learner to become a co-creator in its making. As a co-creator, the learner’s voice emerges, not as one that submits to existing learning situations, but as one that generates new learning situations based on vital experiences of indeterminacy that allow her to discover what she genuinely needs to learn and know.

Listening and Relationality: Towards Non-affirmative Democratic Education

Common understandings of teaching still rely on the idea that the teacher is someone who tells. Reading Dewey through the lens of the critical tradition of non-affirmative educational theory helps draw out what is implied by Dewey’s theory of democratic teaching, and yet goes beyond what Dewey himself articulated. Namely, this lens helps reframe the teacher as one who listens. On this view, non-affirmative teaching is fundamentally relational and receptive, though not passive. It is receptive to the experiences of learners, the genuine existential and reflective needs and questions that emerge from their limit-experiences, and the genuine, human problems that are generated by learners – not by teachers, textbooks or the system. As an intellectual companion, the teacher is one who actively creates opportunities to listen to learners’ ways of thinking, knowing and being so as to be able to support educational growth.

Transmissive, “affirmative” teaching as telling is still pervasive today, not just in schools, but also in tertiary education. Educational policies support this affirmative mode when they are grounded in views of high-quality education that equate quality with that which is quantitatively measurable, and in turn construct teacher accountability on the basis of student achievement on standardised tests (Apple, 2007; Au, 2010; Biesta, 2015; D’agnese, 2018; Stoltz & Webster, 2020). It is not merely that such policies do not account for what is educative about any given situation designed for learning and thinking, but rather it is that they actually suppress it. These policies serve to direct teachers’ attention away from students’ learning processes involving genuine individuality, and towards uniformity of thinking represented in standardised outcomes measured on assessments. They create environments in schools and communities where teachers are expected to close their eyes and shut their ears to learners’ expressions of uncertainty, confusion, doubt, frustration and the like. They foster deficit views of certain learners who do not conform, who cannot, or do not want to, reproduce predigested facts and figures, labelling them as those who do not “measure up.” While there has been important efforts in recent years to counter these teacher-centred, transmissive models, with educational reforms pushing for student inquiry, learning through talk, or “active learning,”Footnote 9 Dewey’s thinking reminds us of the need to ensure that these reforms are not in fact merely valuing reductive-progressive, and hence affirmative, teaching.

In affirmative education systems, it is not only the learner’s thinking, rather it is also the teacher’s thinking, that is shut down. The teacher is not supported to develop individuality, that is, originality of response that respects learners’ expressed needs. Neither the transmissive nor the reductive-progressive teacher is given the space and responsibility to think in ways that can foster creative support for learners to take up opportunities to inquire and cultivate new meaning on the basis of existential experiences of the world and others (Dewey, 1916/2008; 1923/2008, pp. 180–89).

One significant loss as a society that we endure through affirmative systems of education is the loss of the teacher as a listener – as one who listens deeply to and for the learner’s uncertainty and struggle, thinking, generative ideas, emotional needs, that is, one who listens to and for the learner’s whole being. Instead, we get either the transmissive teacher, who is a kind of mechanical listener, or the reductive-progressive teacher, who is a kind of pseudo-listener. As a mechanical listener, the teacher listens as if a machine programmed to listen evaluatively to whether students have right answers.Footnote 10 This kind of mechanical listening reinforces what Fritz Oser and Maria Spychiger (2005) call the “Bermuda Triangle” of classroom interaction, whereby the teacher asks a question, then one student gives a wrong answer, the teacher moves to the next student, who gives the correct answer, after which the teacher moves on. The authors note that in such interactions no one actually learns, because the student who knew still knows, and the one who did not know does not understand why her answer was wrong (Oser & Spychiger, 2005, p. 163). In these situations, the teacher does not learn about her students’ ways of thinking and being, she does not gather any new “food for thought” from students to take forward in new creative, educational situations. Detrimentally, the transmissive “teacher as teller” and “student as passive listener” mutually reinforce and perpetuate one another: the teacher does not listen openly, but rather filters out anything new and fresh, and the students do not speak unless they have the right answer, and thus do not make known what is new and fresh in their minds.

Equally detrimental is any reform claiming to be in the progressive tradition and yet attempting to put the student in the role of talker or “teller” with the assumption that the teacher will automatically be a “listener.” Without a strong sense of relational, democratic teaching, in a non-affirmative sense, what in fact can occur with said reforms is that the teacher becomes a kind of pseudo-listener, that is, one who fails to have the discernment involved in listening in ways that productively support learners to extend their meaning horizons; the teacher is released from the pedagogical responsibility to listen in educative ways.

It has been recognised that the lack of genuine, open listening is contributing to the crisis in democracy (Dobson, 2014; Maccarone, 2022).Footnote 11 To avert this crisis, teachers, scholars, and citizens that intend to foster non-affirmative, democratic education, must deeply consider how such listening is learned. I contend that when teachers genuinely listen to learners’ full experiences, including their uncertainty and struggle, learners learn to listen, however not as an act of obedience, but rather as an act of expressing the genuine desire to learn from their own uncertainty arising from that which they encounter as different and new.

Such pedagogical listening to and with learners is an intentional act of recognition of the learner as a human being in that it offers the learner the possibility to actualise the right to discover individuality, to discover freedom, to discover self and one’s needs, including the deep need for others (Hintz et al., 2018).Footnote 12 In other words, the learner is given the possibility to discover what it means to be human. Thus, teacher listening is essential to democratic education as non-affirmative education, that is, education which is not understood as inculturation and socialisation into citizenship of a democracy as a pre-formed learner-independent political system, but rather is understood as a means of fostering democracy “as a way of life” (Dewey, 1916/2008, p. 93). Democracy, understood as a way of life, is a disposition towards reflection and growth through exchanges with human beings who have the option of seeing the world otherwise (English, 2013). To engage in this difficult work of deep receptivity through listening, teachers need the entire education system and all its players, including policymakers, teacher educators, school leadership and parents, to support them.

Given the vital role of existential uncertainty in learning as inciting thinking and initiating the formulation of genuine learner-dependent problems, it cannot be left to chance whether learners have opportunities to have educative experiences of existential uncertainty. The experience of existential uncertainty is the moment where learners begin to feel “a sense of possibilities that are unrealized and that might be realized” (Dewey, 1934/2008, p. 349). By creating situations for indeterminacy and listening genuinely to learners’ needs that emerge – what they want and need to understand about self and other and the relation between the two – teachers can foster learners’ sense of possibilities and this can be a force for constructive social change:

These possibilities are, “when they are put in contrast with actual conditions, the most penetrating ‘criticism’ of the latter that can be made. It is by a sense of possibilities opening before us that we become aware of constrictions that hem us in and of burdens that oppress” (Dewey, 1934/2008, p. 349).

Many philosophers of education today, following Dewey and others in the critical pedagogy tradition, still envision classrooms as spaces where a sense of imagination and possibility can be cultivated. Classrooms can be spaces for cultivating what bell hooks refers to as “radical openness” (1994), or Maxine Greene calls “moral wide-awakeness” (1978), or what Leonard Waks (2010) calls “apophatic listening,” a deeply open, empathic listening. As we move further into the twenty-first century, it is urgent that we answer the call to rehumanise what have been dehumanising spaces of schools that have marginalised and silenced so many voices. To do this, I suggest that a critical question we need to ask is: How do teachers gain agency in systems that are telling them to view students as data points, as numbers, and not as human beings? Dewey’s insights, and more broadly the lens of critical non-affirmative educational theory, suggest that one starting point for teachers may be to identify just how, in the life of each classroom, the seed for situations of genuine indeterminacy can be planted and nourished.