Malcolm Thorburn/Steven Stolz - Merleau-Ponty on Child Psychology and Pedagogy
Channel: Allgemeine Erziehungswissenschaft an der HU Berlin
Date: 2022-12-12

Dr. Malcolm Thorburn (Edinburgh, GBR) /Dr. Steven Stolz (Adelaide, AUS)

Merleau-Ponty on Child Psychology and  Pedagogy: Reappraising Students Embodied and Intersubjective Experiential Realities in Contemporary Education

Keynote on September 16th, 2022 as part of the 6th International Symposium on Phenomenological Research in Education: Realities. Phenomenological and pedagogical perspectives.

Prof. Brinkmann's homepage: https://hu.berlin/aew_eng
Blog: http://paed.ophen.org/?lang=en
Symposion on Phenomenological Research in Education: https://hu.berlin/sym_phen_ed

Abstract:
This paper supports a reappraisal of educational aims and values given the complexities surrounding the global health pandemic and the changing nature of relationships between lived-body modes of experience, students’ social realities and wider life-worlds. In these new environments, school-based pedagogical aspirations need to engage with educational theorising about how students can more coherently reflect and report on their perception of reality and truth, especially in relation to their embodied and intersubjective experiences (Thorburn & Stolz, 2021). 
We propose that phenomenology can yield incisive insights on what is evident and what is real. We draw specifically on the contribution of Merleau-Ponty, as his work concentrates on an intersubjective interpretation of experience and reality. Such theorising constructively engages with a mix of the self and shared, particularly in relation to the cultural and environmental occurrences children share. We utilise the seldom explored content of Merleau-Ponty’s Sorbonne Lectures on Child Psychology and Pedagogy, where Merleau-Ponty variously highlights how the child’s proficiency is organised via their background experiences and visual connections with different objects and environments, as well as through their social interactions with others. This approach helps recognise that our earliest life is not wholly subjective, but is also intersubjective i.e., shared and social. Merleau-Ponty talks to experiences progressing to self-awareness, in ways which are characterised by a lack of distinction between the self and other, and a self and openness towards the world. Such transitivism highlights that a child cannot be limited to reviewing only their own life experiences. 
In later writings, Merleau-Ponty (1964/1968) developed his ontology of ‘the flesh’ (la chair) as a device for understanding better the sensation of experience and the connections between human beings. We argue that Merleau-Ponty’s ontological insights into the structure of being in a context where there is central emphasis on the subjective nature of experience, can aid students’ in exploring their experiences and realities in qualitatively meaningful and empirical ways. In such contexts, when reorganising and giving meaning to experiences, it ‘is not about reducing language to thought, but about introducing thought into language’ (Merleau-Ponty, 2010, p. 47). What appears necessary is that viable methodologies include the full range of matters which are part of our being-in-the-world (e.g., our fears as well as our hopes, our ambitions as well as those concerns which matter less to our overall sense of self). For as Merleau-Ponty (2010, p. 386) notes, ‘we must avoid the realist thought of the adult in order to understand the relationship between the psychological and sociological aspects of the child. The child is, simultaneously and without difficulty, in the social realm and his own body’.
We conclude by offering some pedagogical insights which highlight how embodied and intersubjective aspirations could be taken forward in contemporary school education. We argue that if effective, more eventful and at times optimistic pedagogical episodes could support whole school attempts to recover and explore new and enlivening educational opportunities could take place within revised pedagogical spaces. Specifically, we see such developments as apt in contexts where students discuss experiences in relation to embodiment and intersubjectivity; matters which we consider pivotal to the realisation of a more rounded and nuanced education of the mind and the body.