In earlier work (Lovat and Smith 2003; Lovat et al. 2005), it was proposed that the Habermasian theory of knowing could be used to analyse different moments
in the teacher–learner relationship, and the power thereof, so to clarify and sometimes contest the assumptions that sit behind certain curriculum approaches and forms of pedagogy. Empirical–analytic knowing leads naturally to a relationship where the teacher is the ‘expert’, the learner the novice; the teacher is there to teach and the learner to learn in top-down linear fashion; all power is with the teacher, little to none with the learner. It offers an epistemic justifi cation for a high order didactic approach to pedagogy. Granted the task at hand, such pedagogy might be seen as appropriate but for other kinds of learning, it might be inadequate and even obstructive. For instance, for a learning task that is centred on a skill that the teacher clearly possesses and the learner does not, didactic pedagogy is likely the most effi cient way to close the gap, whereas learning focused on historical or sociological understandings and interpretations could render such pedagogy inhibitive in drawing on the learner’s interpretive development. Of course, if the learning exercise is encased in a mandatory testing regime wherein it is considered there is only one licit interpretation, then the issue becomes one not so much about the appropriateness of the pedagogy as the ethics of the entire teaching and learning exercise.
Historical–hermeneutic knowing tends more obviously to a conception of the teacher–learner relationship as one of partnership, communicating about mean- ings and negotiating about understandings; power is shared to an extent. This would impel naturally a more democratic pedagogy, one that allows and indeed encourages a measure of free thought and speech, and to ‘make mistakes’ (specu- late beyond the evidence) along the way. Such pedagogy would seem more appropriate to interpretive learning about meanings and understandings in the humanities and social sciences. The rider on shared power is that the teacher will normally retain some responsibility to guide the learner around interpretations that are better founded in the tradition, better evidenced in the research, etc. Like most phenomena in a democracy, it is not ‘anything goes’.
When dealing with knowing of critical/self-refl ectivity, impelled by the cognitive interest in being free to think one’s own thoughts, so to engage in praxis, the relationship between teacher and learner has the potential to attain that measure of symmetry, even power sharing, beyond that which is obtained through historical–hermeneutic knowing. Herein, there is a relegation of power by the teacher to the learner as the learner is endowed with the confi dence and the power of being in control of their own knowing. This can even result in roles being reversed, with the teacher, in a sense, sitting at the feet of the structural learner in the role of the veritable learner, or ‘listener’. If the listener wishes to know what the learner has learned, and even more so if the listener wants to ‘know’ what the learner now knows, then she/he will be dependent upon the learner sharing what is known.
The challenge here for any traditional modes of teaching/learning relates to the fairly obvious truth that learners may often ‘know’ in ways that are outside the knowing of the teacher. In the epistemic world that sits behind empirical– analytic knowing and the resultant didactic pedagogy, it would be intolerable that
the learner might be said to know more than the teacher. In the epistemic world of historical–hermeneutic knowing, this is tolerable and able to be negotiated, although not necessarily to be expected. In dealing with critical–self-refl ective knowing, however, it is to be expected and indeed celebrated that new knowing, quite beyond the fi rst-hand knowledge of the teacher, has evolved.
Van Manen (1977) may well capture the relationship between the teacher and the learner that is being proffered here when he says the following of the type of learning he sees ensuing from critical–self-refl ective knowing:
The norm is a distortion-free model of a communication situation . . . (where) there exists no repressive dominance, no asymmetry or inequality among the participants of the educational process.
(p. 227) For Van Manen, like Habermas, it is at this point alone that education becomes distinctively ethical, characterized by a sense of justice, equality and the freedom of individuals to follow their instincts of knowing wherever they might lead. It is also the way of knowing which, it is said, is a necessary precursor to the stretching of the boundaries of knowledge, to genuinely new knowing taking place. If one were to take Van Manen’s ‘no asymmetry’ thesis seriously, one would surmise that the only form of testing and measuring that could do justice to, or perhaps even detect, evolving knowledge of this type would be one which was conducted largely in self-refl ective mode.
In other earlier work (Lovat et al. 2008), this thinking was applied to an analysis of doctoral examination reports and it was noted that there were few instances where reports went beyond the didactic pedagogical mode of correction and little evidence of examiners acknowledging the level of ‘original contribution’ (supposedly the benchmark criterion for doctoral success), even though the vast majority of the theses in question were successful. It was therefore speculated on whether this indicated that the expectations placed on the doctorate were in fact not being met or whether it was indicative of the incapacity of the university teachers, serving as examiners, to break out of didactic pedagogy and the empirical–analytic assumptions sitting behind it, even when dealing with learners at the alleged zenith point of learning.
Of the 2121 examiner reports under analysis, there was only one that seemed clearly to reveal text indicative of an examiner functioning in critical–self-refl ective mode. It began with the words, ‘There are those pleasant occasions when one is asked to review a paper or examine a thesis and you wish that you had written it. I believe that this is one of those experiences’ (Lovat et al. 2008, 71). This comment re-positioned the examiner’s relationship with the student away from one of expertise-to-subject, or even of shared negotiability. The relationship established was at least symmetrical and could even be argued to have turned the traditional relationship on its head to become one of awe on the part of the examiner towards the student’s ‘original contribution’, one which the examiner
admitted that she/he had not themselves made. In that sense, the student had exceeded the expertise of the examiner and, in a rare display, this examiner was prepared to admit it. The teacher had become the learner.
In this example, the Habermasian theory of knowing allowed for critical gaze to be applied to an area of educational research with potential to assist in unravelling the learning assumptions that sat behind an arguably unhelpful pedagogy, or one at least demanding critical analysis and review, and so to re-conceive how a particular educational regime might function better. In this case, the fi ndings received wide dissemination and have been cited in a variety of academic and policy sites at the international level (cf. Park 2007; Carter and Whittaker 2009). Moreover, the ramifi cations of such appraisal have potential to go beyond the particular regime being targeted. A wider concern about rigidity of pedagogy was present in the observation that if those responsible for assessment at the PhD level are locked into ‘gate-keeping’ pedagogy, then what hope for more ‘authentic’ pedagogy when applied to undergraduate and school levels of learning?