Martin Haberman & Martin Heidegger

Probably the most important idea of the 20^th century was Heidegger’s insight that truth is not “out there” waiting to be discovered by those who look for it hard or smart enough, or are divinely inspired. Instead, truth is constructed by individuals, in dialogs with Others (another person, a text, a work of art, etc).

Gadamer made Heidegger’s obscure notions accessible by using the “hermeneutic circle” to explain how truth/meaning is constructed. Conversants approach a dialog with going-in points-of-view determined by nature and nurture. In a genuine dialog – one in which new truth/meaning is constructed – dialog partners demonstrate open-ness and goodwill. They expose their going-in POVs to the Other … they risk their Selves. The process is not one of dukeing out whose POV will prevail; it is not meeting somewhere in the middle. Instead, each conversant’s POV/Self is expanded … in the direction of the Other.

The core of Haberman’s “good teaching” paradigm is informed by these Heideggerian insights.

Haberman “cannot emphasize enough” that classroom regimes designed around control are doomed to fail. The hermeneutic process of constructing meaning, as mentioned, is utterly dependent on the willingness of all parties to abandon their existing POVs and assume the risk of constructing a new Self. A model based on control is inimical to this requirement of genuine meaning-making.

“Whenever students are involved with human differences, good teaching is going on.” An important corollary of the process described above is that a turn around the hermeneutic circle with a dialog partner just like yourself isn’t going to result in the construction of much new meaning/truth/understanding. To move the needle requires that the Other being engaged is different. The degree of alterity determines the amount of meaning constructed. We hit the educational jackpot when we successfully engage the radically Other.

“Who is responsible for seeing that students derive meaning?” There’s plenty of blame that can be spread around for the failure of an educational system, i.e. for the failure to conduct genuine dialogs and thereby construct new meaning/truth/understanding: teachers, students, parents, administrations, communities. But teachers alone have the special opportunity to contrive lessons and classroom experiences that facilitate the hermeneutic-circle process and that allow their students to practice the “hermeneutic virtues” of goodwill and open-mindedness. Their reward is that, as a party to this process, their horizons, too, are expanded.

I believe this is the essence of what Haberman was talking about when he described “good teaching.”